ALJ301 reactions, thoughts and musings

I’ve mentioned the Brisbane Times before in a rather positive light. But lately, as I’ve visited the site more frequently, I’ve noticed some major flaws that I’d like to point out.

Firstly, a lot of the stories are just lightly rewritten press releases, stories lifted straight from the AAP wire or worse, rewritten stories from other news organisations. Where’s the journalism?

Secondly, the style is rather racy and tabloid-inspired - not to my liking, especially when it comes to headline writing (take, for example, two stories on the site today: Penis is schoolbag: kiddie porn or just child’s play? and Man’s ‘genitals set alight before he was shot’).

But the biggest problem, for me, is the lack of local content. For a website that bills itself as Brisbane-based, there is often precious little local content on the site – especially compared to the rival Courier Mail website.

In addition, the Courier Mail often beats the Brisbane Times by hours when reporting on breaking news. I know which site is my first port of call.

Maybe I’m biased. The Courier Mail is News Limited and so am I! But I’d like to see some current circulation figures to see if others have noticed the flaws.

STOMP and OhmyNews aren’t the only leaders in the forward-thinking “now media” market.

The Philippines’ inquirer.net, led by editor-in-chief JV Rufino, has a strong multimedia mindset. Journos are given mobile phones and digital cameras and can file news from on the run, beating Manila’s traffic jams.

The Brisbane Times is the only totally online newsroom in Australia and it beat competitors’ website traffic within four months of launching.

Food for thought.

This week’s piece (PDF – head to chapter six) described the South Korean OhmyNews phenomenon.

Creator Oh Yeon-ho goes by the motto “every citizen is a reporter“. But, unlike blogs, contributors must conform to a strict code of ethics. I reckon this is a smarter way of tapping into the blogging world, a way of overcoming the Wikipedia-type problem of not being credible while still building that all-important sense of community.

Even more ingeniously, writers are paid according to the story’s popularity. So unlike many other news forums (apart from their few token attempts), it’s the readers who decide what the top news story is, not editors.

The format is clearly working: the site has been profitable since 2003 and makes 70 per cent of its revenue from advertising. It seems to me the concept worked because it moved a step ahead of other mediums stuck doing things the old way.

So what’s to stop the journalism world from heading this way in the future, especially if the advertising model is working?

In launching wholly online, OhmyNews also saved a heck of a lot of money. Makes me wonder if Fairfax Media had something similar in mind when it launched the Brisbane Times last year…

– Koren