• Talk to the Newsroom: Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman, at NYTimes.com.
• No Casual Operation: Inside a Citizen Journalism Newsroom, by Geoff Dougherty, Editor of Chi-Town Daily News, at Poynter Online.

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.

In the conference, online news production is not the hottest topic, but there are several relevant papers you may want to download from the conference website (only available if you are attending).

The most exciting trend is that quasi-ethnographic methods are being applied to research the phenomenon of citizen journalism. David Domingo will be chairing a session (Friday 23 at 13:30) about the challenges of studying audience participation in online media, where Alfred Hermida and Zvi Reich will contribute their experiences interviewing online editors and citizen reporters respectively.

The “Digital news” session (Saturday 24 at 15:00) offers papers based in content and structural analysis of websites: comparing blogs and professional news sites agendas, assessing interactive features…

The papers you may want to read:

• Citizen Journalism: Access to Writers Versus Access to Sources?, by Zvi Reich. Based on reconstructions of routines through narrations by citizen reporters.
• Professional Imagination in Newspaper Newsrooms, by Risto Kunelius and Laura Ruusunoksa. Based on interviews regarding attitudes towards innovation.
• The Choice Gap: The Softening of News and the Divergent Preferences of Journalists and Consumers, by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Limor Peer. Based on content and website stats analysis.

Amazon sold out the first bunch of copies of Making Online News in few hours and is now offering it with a 33% discount. Not sure how this market dynamics work, but hopefully you have been able to get the book! We look forward to your feeback both at the Amazon reviews’ central and in this website.