I recently took part in a fascinating ‘unconference‘ in Seattle aimed at information professionals of various stripes — librarians, information architects, interaction designers and the like. It’s called InfoCamp, and it seems like a natural venue for online journalists too — though there were few in attendance.

The sessions covered such familiar topics as information visualization and user-created content, but from a broader perspective than we journalists usually look. This got me thinking: Why should there such a gap between the information gatherers (us) and the information organizers (them)?

Why don’t we look at our content the way librarians do? It begs for classification, cross-linking, mapping and contextualizing. Lees verder.

De Amerikaanse journalist Eric Ulken bereist dit jaar de wereld op zoek naar trends en ontwikkelingen in de online journalistiek. In zijn derde bijdrage voor De Nieuwe Reporter schrijft hij over de vormgeving van Spiegel Online, de website van het tijdschrift waar hij momenteel tijdelijk werkt.

Continuing with the theme of redesigns (last week I wrote about the Los Angeles Times’ new look), here’s another major relaunch that took place last month on this side of the Atlantic: Spiegel Online, Germany’s largest news site, introduced a facelift and new features on 18 August. (Disclosure: I am working at Spiegel’s English-language website on a two-month fellowship.)
Lees verder.

Eric Ulken bereist dit jaar de wereld op zoek naar trends en ontwikkelingen in de online journalistiek. In zijn tweede bijdrage voor De Nieuwe Reporter schrijft hij over de nieuwe lay-out voor de site van zijn voormalige werkgever, de Los Angeles Times (klik hier voor de oude lay-out).

People hate change. In my experience, when websites launch major redesigns, user feedback tends to run about two-to-one against. Sometimes worse. Just think back to Facebook’s last relaunch in March, when a poll famously reported that 94% of respondents hated the change. (The negative sentiment is unmistakable, even if the statistical validity of the poll is debatable.)
Lees verder.

This is my first post for De Nieuwe Reporter. I am an American journalist and the former editor for interactive technology at the Los Angeles Times. I’ve been spending this year traveling and studying trends and practices in online journalism around the world. I will be writing here occasionally, and I also blog (infrequently) on my own site.

If the future of online news is paid (and that’s an admittedly big if), what might that future look like?

On a trip to Japan a few weeks ago I sought some answers from the gurus at InfoCom Research, a think tank run by NTT DoCoMo, the country’s largest mobile provider. I was looking for lessons on mobile content distribution from a country with a track record for innovation and early adoption in the wireless sphere, where customers often are more willing to pay for content. Lees verder.