The editors and some of the authors of Making Online News will be attending the IAMCR 2008 conference in Stockholm. With Peter Lang, the publisher of the book we have set up a book launch wine reception on Tuesday, July 22.
The reception will be held in the Spelbomskan room at the main Aula Magna conference hall, 7th floor, at Stockholm University, at 7pm. Some of the researchers who have been involved with the book will be there, and we will ask them to provide some brief comments and updates on their ethnographies –if they can be persuaded.
The gathering will be small, but if you are interested in news production ethnography or in online journalism, please come along! Just let us know at info@makingonlinenews.net.
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Two recent journalistic articles offer a nice amount of data on the internal functioning of online newsrooms and are a good background to make the case for ethnographic observation:
The first piece is a conversation of readers with the top editor of the online newsroom of the New York Times. His answers shed some light on the relationships between the print and online operations, news production routines for the web or the redefinition of newsworthiness based on audience stats.
The second story is a report on the working routines of a citizen media operation in Chicago. The editor explains how they recruit, coordinate and motivate over thirty citizen reporters, how software for customer-relationship management helped build a virtual newsroom and what expectations they have about the role of participatory journalism.
Both articles are first-person accounts of the new routines and challenges of Internet journalism. They are extraordinarily valuable but, at the same time, lack what an ethnographer could offer observing these newsrooms herself: the thoroughness and fairness of an independent observer; the analytical ability to trace factors and constraints of current practices and to compare cases; or the systematic nature of research guided by powerful theoretical tools.
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