Online Journalism

Onlinejournalismblog.com made predicitions about the nature of journalism in the next 25 years.

-Oddly enough the blog predicts people will “still be prediciting the death of newspapers.

               Because print media is becoming less and less profitable a popular belief is it will eventually disapear. The blog writer ” Influence and status are hard to buy. As long as newspapers offer either, there will be proprietors willing to make a loss on the balance sheet, for benefits elsewhere.”

Another interesting prediction is the comparison between journalists and musicians The blog predicits that because journalists, nowadays, do not need college degrees to write, the importance of growing a fanbase is increased. In 25 years journalists will get jobs based on the following they can build, not the education they receive.

Summary: The San Mateo-based SEO firm BrightEdge released an audit of 1,000 companies and found that 25 percent of them back-link to sites that put them at risk of corrective actions by search engine companies.

Image provided by www.bloggingjunkie.com

In a TechCrunch article released today, results of a two-week audit by SEO firm BrightEdge show that approximately 25 percent of companies have backlinks to link-farming sites, Web sites who offer little content and serve to sell link space to companies seeking to raise their search results rank.

The results gives credence to JC Penny’s story that it and many other firms who contract SEO  companies to designed their online marketing strategy were unaware of the practice. Read the JC Penny story here.

In today’s globalized age, many business partners are working together on projects that cannot be completed without some sort of visual collaboration. However, constantly playing email tag and attaching documents constantly can be tedious and unsuccessful.

With these issues in mind, Mindmeister.com came up with a creative solution. By allowing users to create “mind maps” in which they visually map out ideas and charts to organize projects, this gives others involved in the project the ability to not only view the project, but also make changes, add notes and other collaborative elements. To view an example of my very own mind map, click here.

Photoshop has been a widely-used program in the media realm for quite awhile. However, now that nearly all images are digitally captured and edited, a concrete understanding of the program is necessary to be successful in the business today.

That being said, my experience in the STAR lab Photoshop workshop was extremely useful and informative. While I knew how to use basic tools such a cropping and resizing an image, that was about the extent of it. The workshop focused on the basics of image editing, with an emphasis on a few techniques:

• The healing brush and clone stamp tool
• The pen tool and path creation
• The eyedropper tool
• The zoom tool

By having a basic understanding of how one can edit digital images, it gives the user an advantage in the new media age. Additionally, by having a complete understanding of how images can be altered, it makes one consider the validity of images and the ethics involved with changing images for publication.

Summary: A new iPod touch/ iPhone/ iPad application and accompanying microphone released today by IK Multimedia will allow you to become a mobile audio journalist.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read the TechCrunch review here.