US and UK journalism compared June 5, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, NYTimes, News, Newspapers, Online, USA , 1 comment so farI’ve picked up on a few articles comparing journalism in the USA and UK — partly because of talks I’m giving to journalism students from US universities this summer.
“Superiority Complex — Why the Brits think they’re better” is the headline on an article in the current Columbia Journalism Review. It reiterates claims that interviewers from the UK have the edge in broadcast news, and discusses the appeal of UK newspapers’ websites and BBC World to readers and viewers in the States.
When it comes to newspapers, is the boot on the other foot? It does for sourcing, balance, overall reliability and investigations, suggests Susan Hansen’s CJR piece, quoting Alan Rusbridger (The Guardian), Bill Hagerty (British Journalism Review), and Tom Fenton (CBS).
Martin Moore contrasts the approach of stories in the Daily Telegraph and New York Times, highlighting the greater length, more neutral tone, larger number of sources and quotes etc in the latter. It also risks being heavier, more boring and less engaging, he notes.
There may be less space for longer stories in the New York Times after it changes format. Executive editor Bill Keller says, according to Gawker:
Our stories are too often too long… The 1200 word stories could be 800 or 900. There are editors at a Page 1 meeting boasting that a story is only 1400 words.
Also worth noting is Keller’s frank statement about the NY Times’ online strategy for developing revenue from its web contact: “There’s a phrase they use in drug and alcohol rehab—’fake it til you make it.’ That’s basically what we’re doing.”
Finally, still at the NY Times, Investigations Editor Matthew Purdy says they have “12 permanent reporters and editors” plus “many more Times reporters engaged in investigative or in-depth reporting”. Another US-UK difference to add to the list, then.
deli.cio.us meets education: social bookmarking for educators June 4, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Academic, Education, Research, SoTL, Social networking , add a commentEdtags caught my eye: a sector-specific deli.cio.us. And education has plenty of web-using professionals to make it worth trying. It says it has more than 17,000 bookmarks so far, and unsurprisingly much of the content and many of the users appear to be based in North America. The developers have made it compatible with deli.cio.us, which seems sensible.
Still early days, which perhaps is why nothing came up when I searched for “peer assessment”. However, 63 hits for “assessment” — and even 13 for “journalism”.
This is from the Edtags blurb about the project, which seems to have evolved out of an initiative at Harvard (the splendidly named Edtags Sociosemantic Networking Project):
Edtags.org is a website for educators (e.g., teachers, education graduate students, professors, librarians, etc.) to connect with people sharing similar interests, discover relevant materials that may have “eluded” the traditional card catalogue search, and store and categorize your favorite bookmarks.
One to come back to when I have more time to explore more thoroughly. Meanwhile, it’s, erm, bookmarked.
Re-read for accuracy, grammar and spelling June 4, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Headlines, Journalism, News, Newspapers, Online, Typos , 1 comment so farIt’s tempting to think the Evening Standard was aiming at irony with this billboard. But that would be too subtle a strategy to succeed, I suspect — and a limited readership (although perhaps under-targeted…)
The same error in The Times Online was corrected — but only after it had been published on the site and started to show in news feeds, as Adrian Monck noted. It did appear online in that form on The Times Online, as Google’s cache showed for a while:
The corrected headline then appears to have replaced the previous version in Google’s cache, too — although a reference to it lives on in one of the ‘Have your say’ comments from a reader, referring to the uncorrected headline:
“Tory resigns after grammer school row” — such a headline in the Times is a case against comprehensives.
Dagmar Alpen, Cologne, Germany
Confusing the readers: divergent stories from the same source June 1, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, Newspapers, Readership, Teaching resources , 2comments
Confusing if they see the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, that is. Choose between “Is the house price boom over?” and “House prices still soaring” respectively.
These are going in my file of possible examples to look at with students — at first glance, the stories look contradictory. On closer inspection, it’s a matter of emphasis, both using Land Registry figures in different ways: the Mail story concentrates on those for the month of April, while the Express piece looks at the annual increase.
Both angles were fairly clear in the Land Registry source document (PDF here), although the annual 9.1% increase was flagged up more prominently.
One aspect of stories that students sometimes find tricky to pick up, at least to start with, is how a chosen angle might play with readers. Here it’s “welcome news for homeowners” (Express) or “end of the 11-year property boom [...] alarm bells sounded [...] bubble appears to be bursting [...] situation now is likely to be even worse” (Mail).
Learning gets personal — but always has been? June 1, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : HE, Personalised learning environments (PLE), elearning, learning, student experience , 1 comment so farGo easy on the hype about personalised learning environments (PLEs) as something new, advises elearning expert Chris Yapp. His hypothesis is that learning always has been personal(ised) and always will be.
It’s the organisation of education that hasn’t been so personal, he suggested at a lecture last week.
He put his finger on something here. I suspect that student satisfaction is determined partly by the level of individual attention they receive from lecturers, tutors, support staff and the rest. How much is hard to say… as, too, is how much that level of individual attention in turn affects students’ learning.
Yapp, former head of public sector innovation with Microsoft, focused more on economic scaleability — and the hope that technology could make personalised learning (more) possible on a larger scale. He reckons it would take 30 years for elearning to transform the experience of education in this way, in a widespread and ‘embedded’ fashion. If so, I might be around to see it happen…
One example of research on PLEs (sometimes characterised as another step on from VLEs, virtual learning environments) is the PLE project at Bolton University.