Paul Bradshaw, on E-Media Tidbits, focuses on Lowrey and Latta’s chapter about blogging production routines, and points out that the trend they detect -the more influential bloggers become, the more their routines resemble journalism- is “dissapointing”, because he would have liked bloggers to be more innovative. “This is one of the few studies I’ve seen that examines the work practices of bloggers (…) We need more research like this”, underlines Bradshaw.

Ryan Thornburg did a survey of online journalists in North Carolina (USA), and found the book inspiring, as ethnographic evidence in its chapters confirmed his results that journalists working for the web are rather conservative regarding the exploration of Internet features, and value more traditional journalistic principles than technological skills.

Tom Van Hout reviews Making Online News among other books, and argues they are “proof that the inter/transdisciplinary study of news production and news discourse is en vogue”. We also hope that!

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.

• 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.

Alfred Hermida, former editor of the BBC News website and now at British Columbia University, interviewed David in Montréal. One of the issues risen in the interview is the sacralization of immediacy in online media, a trend that -along with the lack of resources- may have prevented online newsrooms from developing more creative products. The book offers a good summary of the constraints of online newsrooms and, hopefully, a good knowledge base to overcome them.

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.

The book will be in stores in May, but you can already pre-order it at Amazon. There is a 5% discount on the final price ($32.95) if you pre-order before it becomes available at this online bookstore.

The authors based their research on qualitative interviews with a wide range of journalistic positions in the two analyzed newsrooms and a brief two-day observation of the working routines, including news meetings. Researchers approached their object of study with the aim of avoiding “oversimplifying the analysis”. They tried to overcome linear models such as the one by Dailey et al. (2005) or research implying that newsroom convergence is a mere “effect” of technological change (see Garrison and Dupagne, 2006).

The rich description of routines and the evolution of the projects, coupled with the interpretations by the protagonists themselves offer a very detailed explanation of two different approaches to convergence, what the authors label as “integrated model” and “cross-media model”. The authors identify the attitude of the managers and their ability to engage the newsrooms in the process as the key for success. Training and defining the boundaries between collaboration and competition seem the main practical challenges.

Garcí­a Avilés, J.A. and Carvajal, M. (2008) Integrated and Cross-Media Newsroom Convergence: Two Models of Multimedia News Production –The Cases of Novotécnica and La Verdad Multimedia in Spain. Convergence, 14(2), 221-239

See also the review at Infotendencias (in Spanish)

In different countries, from Germany to the US, from China to Argentina, different researchers started to investigate the trends. And we ended up getting to know each other in conferences and through papers. What we had in common was the willingness to understand how media dealt with innovation, with new languages and logics. And each of us was convinced that the better way to explore this was to step into the online newsrooms and live with the journalists, their expectations and their worries.

Chris Paterson had the idea of putting together a book based on this ethnographic research of online newsrooms back in 2003, as a spin off of the Media Production Analysis group at IAMCR. In the last four years we have invited pioneers and new scholars interested in online newsroom research to summarize their findings to generate the first collective exploration of online journalism from the inside, a critical look at the routines and values of the new frontier of news production.

And as the book becomes a reality (will be published by Peter Lang in May 2008), we would like it to be a starting point: An invitation for much-needed ethnographic research in the newsrooms of converging media in a moment of profound transformations. This website wants to turn the book into the core of a network of researchers that will share their experiences through this blog. You are invited to join the conversation in the comments section below each story or sending an email to info [at] makingonlinenews.net.