Bob Stepno’s Red Liner

Briefs of longer items in that “other journalism” weblog…

• A New York Times exec says his visit to Bloggercon helped shape the new “Times on the Trail” page, but explains why he doesn’t call it a blog…
• A former U.S. president is blogging from Africa…

• World editors begin to blog, examining the future of journalism at editorsweblog.org…
• Speaking of “world editors,”  Rebecca MacKinnon, Tokyo bureau chief for CNN,
  has joined the Harvard weblog list while on campus as a fellow of the
  Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Like a lot of us, she is looking for ways the Internet can change journalism for the better.

More New Bloggers …

College information offices are beginning to offer RSS feeds, according to an article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. The full text may be available only to subscribers, but it mentions RSS projects at Carleton College, Pacific University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, and the University of Nevada at Reno.

Rochester uses RSS to offer campus news feeds to students’ personal pages on the school’s Web portal. Carleton students can get campus event and movie listings by RSS. TAMU’s Texas Agricultural Experiment Station puts out news releases and reports on everything from cattle research to crop-seed varieties.

The article (Vol 50, No. 23, Page A23) doesn’t mention Harvard or the RSS 2.0 “Really Simple Syndication” standard that Dave Winer transferred to the university’s Berkman Center last year.

Sources of RSS software and information suggested in the article:
http://www.prweb.com/rss.php
http://www.2rss.com/software.php

http://syndication.iop.org/about/software.cfm

Related: My last scribbling about RSS.

PM Update: J has added a detailed critique of the Chronicle article.

RSS on Campus: From Movie Schedules to Cattle Research …

Chris Lydon’s Bopnews (Blogging of the President) has made it to the “Regulars” listing at the New York Times’ bloglike Times on the Trail page, presumably by more than one popular request.

Meanwhile, Chris also appears to have blogged his way back into a morning public radio incarnation again, as at least temporary host for Midmorning, a live call-in show from Minnesotta Public Radio — which broadcast his “Blogging of the President” special last month.
For folks who primarily know Chris via his Berkman blog, that “back again” reference concerns the WBUR program The Connection, where he had a national audience for years… In fact, that was probably where he connected with blogging, for a May 2000 broadcast that’s still in the archives.

    The Project for Excellence in Journalism says top professional news
organizations  didn’t
break much ground with online coverage of the first Democratic primaries. The report,  How Online Campaign Coverage Has Changed in Four Years,
is a study of 10 “brand name” news sites. It found more
comparisons of candidates’ positions on issues this time, but less
original reporting and less use of interactivity than four years
ago… 

    I’ve just browsed the 31-page report and didn’t see
much
mention of weblogs or other Internet features of this year’s
campaign… but when I get back to read it all, I’ll add more about it
and links to “media reform” sites at my more
verbose “Other Journalism” blog… and/or the new Berkman Thursday Wiki page…

Out of the morgue: Online journalism meets e-politics …

Three good things about the new Times on the Trail page that I didn’t notice or mention last week:

• A prominently-displayed “Write to us” button at the top right corner.
  (And it works.)
• The link to Campaign 2004, from LexisNexis.
• The link to Wonkette — in fact, the page’s whole “Regulars” collection is worth a look.

Getting some mail back from the Times inspired a longer “what if” note about newspaper culture, blog culture and “about this page” features I’d like to see…

More from Times on the Trail …