Where Blogs and Public Journalism Meet
Very interesting piece by Dan Froomkin at the Online Journalism Review entitled Ideas for Online Publications: Lessons From Blogs, Other Signposts.
See the intersection of blogs and public journalism in this excerpt:
Consider if you were starting a “newspaper” today. Wouldn’t you want to facilitate exchanges with readers? Wouldn’t you want to encourage your readers to find out more than what you can publish? Wouldn’t you want to make it easier for them to take action? Wouldn’t you want to define and create a community? Wouldn’t you want to make your readers feel important?
Blog tools give you all that — not to mention the ability to easily and quickly post something you just found out about. (What could be more journalistic?)
Froomkin also talks about geocoding stories so that every audience member gets the stories that play closest to his or her own home. He writes:
Imagine knowing readers’ locations and then being able to then show them the news stories, big and small, taking place around them and offer them information about schools, crime, restaurants, activities, homes for rent or sale, sales at stores, zoning decisions, swim meets and volunteer activities all near them — and much more. Depending on how deep your data is, you could create a virtual representation of every street in your circulation area.
