After a three-month hiatus, a reformatted Online Journalism Review — or OJR — has returned to full operation in cooperation with the Knight Digital Media Center, USC Annenberg's School of Journalism director Geneva Overholser announced.
OJR, formally housed solely under USC Annenberg, is now overseen by the Knight Digital Media Center, which is a partnership between USC Annenberg and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
"We hope — here at Annenberg, and here at OJR in its new Knight Digital Media Center home — to help figure out what it is about journalism that is most important to carry forward," Overholser said. "And, we hope to do what we can to ensure that it does indeed get carried forward.
OJR proposes four main areas of discussion:
- Reporting and writing in a conversational environment. How can, and should, we report the news when publications are now a two-way conversation, instead of a single-direction monologue?
- Investigative reporting in the Internet era. How can news organizations, and individual journalists, harness the power of modern computing and networking (including crowdsourcing) to investigate public data?
- Entrepreneurial journalism. The old business model for news is broken. How do we prepare journalists to develop new ones?
- "Guerilla-marketing" the news. This builds from topics 1 and 3, and addresses how journalists ought to be thinking about making their content "viral," optimizing for search engines and using promotional techniques to draw audience to their content, at minimal financial expense.
Overholser said it will be a priority to ensure that USC Annenberg faculty, friends and students play an important role in the conversation.
"What remains the same (at the new OJR) is that Robert Niles — called by The Guardian "one of America's top media academics," and we quite agree — will be around," Overholser said. "We also will eagerly continue to accept comments and suggestions from readers. And the archives will remain in place."
OJR plans to publish twice a week, on Wednesdays and on Fridays. It will also publish fresh posts on other topics other days of the week on the KDMC web site.
"I am so glad to be able to continue the important work of OJR, and I’m especially grateful to (Knight Digital Media Center director) Vikki Porter and Robert Niles for their work in making this happen," Overholser said. "We at USC Annenberg's School of Journalism are eager to help enrich the important discussions now taking place about information in the public interest. And we know too that those discussions will help us shape our own work here at Annenberg. We look forward to hearing from people everywhere who are engaged in shaping the future of journalism in these remarkable times."
Said Porter: "I'm very excited that we were able to add OJR to our team of KDMC blogs. Its voice and its mission mesh perfectly with ours: ensuring that good journalism and good journalists survive and thrive in the digital now. Now we need the conversation to begin and for our guiding themes to be explored by the best of today's — and tomorrow's — digital thinkers."
"OJR has been an important asset for the industry, and for USC, and bringing it to KDMC will allow us all to better serve reporters and publishers who are trying to make a business of better informing the public online," Niles said. "I'm happy to remain involved with that effort through KDMC."
