The Evolving Newsroom

Copyright, findability and other ideas from #ndf

I was at the National Digital Forum conference in Wellington earlier this week mingling with people involved in digitising and curating New Zealand’s cultural heritage material – people from museums, galleries, archives, libraries. I was struck by a few commonalities between the cultural heritage sector (known as GLAM – Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the digital [...]

Got any stories to sell over the silly season?

I’m launching an online marketplace shortly where you can sell and buy news features, profiles, reviews and other stories. It’s called All About The Story and the idea is to use the web to make it easier for writers to sell their stories, test the market for new kinds of storytelling, and to make it easy [...]

Bring it on: wireless electricity

Maps show how transport shrinks the world

New Scientist has published some beautiful maps exploring which are the remotest places on earth – given how much international transport we have available to us. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The [...]

300 blogposts in 30 seconds… and counting

This is nice way to lose a few minutes. It’s an embeddable widget that calculates current social media usage – the brainchild of a former BBC staffer Gary Hayes, who is now “director of LAMP in Sydney, Australia, CCO of MUVEDesign (a virtual world & game development company) and Consultant in Social & Transmedia [...]

Isaac Mao, China, 40 million blogs and counting

I was very interested to hear from Chinese blogger and social media juggernaut Isaac Mao (@isaac) earlier today. Mao is in NZ for a few days thanks to support from the Asia NZ Foundation. He’s doing a flying tour of journalism schools, press interviews and meet and greets. It was great to be able to host [...]

Woman charged with ‘neglecting blog’

Nah, not really. I’ve been neglecting it with impunity. Why I can’t seem to whip up four presentations for four different audiences, write teaching content for 17 classes -  face to face and online  -  organise speaking events, speak at speaking events, attend meetings, maintain a blog, develop blogging ideas/sites for others, write stories, stay abreast [...]

History of the Internet video parade

The fruits of, ahem, quality research time spent on YouTube. From 1981: “Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.” “It takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, [...]

Journalists ’should be interviewed once a year’

I like this post by John Longhurst on the Canadian Journalism Project. He says journalists should be interviewed themselves from time to time, so they know what it’s like. And that the interview should be published, so they know what it’s like to have a stranger’s account of themselves on public display. I agree. I’ve been interviewed [...]

The ups and downs of Fieldays Exhibitor 2009

So the Fieldays Exhibitor is done and dusted for another year. Phew. Here are the front pages: You can see some of the stories at our new website, mediarts.net.nz, which aims to showcase the work of students of Wintec’s School of Media Arts along with school events and some of the inspiring work our staff exhibit (more [...]