Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Jake Batsell, an assistant professor in journalism at Southern Methodist University and faculty adviser to the Daily Mustang. You can read more from Jake on his blog and follow him on Twitter at @jbatsell.

By Jake Batsell

Few of us have experienced the one-of-a-kind wonders of the Galápagos Islands. But if you’re curious and have a half-hour to kill, Pat Davison’s students can take you there.

Once you start exploring, you’ll have a hard time clicking away from “Living Galápagos,” a documentary multimedia project produced last summer by a group of Davison’s photojournalism students at the University of North Carolina.

In my three semesters teaching digital journalism at Southern Methodist University, no multimedia project has inspired more awe and admiration from my students.

As you absorb the site’s vivid images, technical polish and sophisticated storytelling, you can’t help but get fired up about how this new generation of journalists can harness the Web to deliver compelling journalism.

Before departing for the islands, Davison and the students met several times with a coach from a local Web design firm to storyboard the ambitious project, which examines the “battle for balance between man and nature” through dozens of videos, audio slideshows, and panoramic 360-degree photos enhanced with natural sound and interviews.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Pierce Presley, self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Pierce Presley Web Empire,” and a newspaper guy frantically trying to learn new media skills. You can follow him on Twitter at @piercepresley.

By Pierce Presley

I’m in the final semester of my masters program, and I’m working on a capstone professional project that will create a website to give traditionally trained journalists new media skills, so forgive me if I get a little “meta” on you and talk about journalism training. Derek Willis talked in a relatively recent blog post about the future of training offered by Investigative Reporters and Editors, a great organization that he and I recommend journalists join even if their job description doesn’t mention “investigate.” He relates how many people paid their own way to the IRE Conference last year—a sign of how much members value the organization surely, but worrisome because that’s a well that’ll run dry rather quickly—plus how antiquated the several arms of IRE’s training output are, and suggests using video, screencasts, podcasts, YouTube and even the nascent Google Wave as successors. (I think he misses a rather obvious way to update the tipsheet method of spreading knowledge: wikis.)

And while I agree that we should bring to bear any and all of these technologies when they are appropriate to the knowledge being shared, there’s another boat that IRE, the Society of Professional Journalists, and probably most other journalism organizations are missing: virtual conferences.

Anybody who’s been anywhere near the planning and preparation end of a conference knows they’re hell to put on. Between lining up the venue, corralling the speakers, finding food and drink, etc. ad naseum, these things are a testament to the dedication of those who put them on. And all that is for naught if people can’t afford either the time or the money to attend.

But what if there was free or low-cost ways to beam speakers to far-flung attendees, complete with audio, video, PowerPoint and document sharing, and record a copy of the presentation for those who couldn’t “attend” in person? Wouldn’t it be worth the time and the effort to learn the new tech, to find people to present in this new way and to make good journalism training available online?

There is, and of course it would. I’ve attended webinars held by the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and they have been excellent (I learned a lot of useful things, even if I’m not entirely sold on being a business journalist nor a journalistic entrepreneur). Setting up a dozen or two of these wouldn’t be 12 or 24 times harder than doing just the one, and the payoff would be immense.

The thing is, journalism organizations and schools need to start working on this now. Because the longer they wait to offer good, modern content, the more journalists are going to turn away from them and their overpriced, under-rewarding meetings in meatspace. And that will likely mean erosion of the membership rolls, too. That those who can attend will have a definite new-media feather in their cap for the resume (and so will the presenters and organizers) is just a bonus.

IRE, SPJ, everybody trying to teach journalists how to do their job better: start now. Don’t let yourself or anyone tell you that you or the technology aren’t ready yet. As Seth Godin said in Tribes, the enemy of progress isn’t “no.” It’s “not yet.”

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist based in London. You can read more from Adam on his blog, adamwestbrook.wordpress.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamWestbrook.

By Adam Westbrook

Why doesn’t the average consumer pay for news online? We know all the obvious answers: the fact news is free elsewhere; the fact journalists don’t ‘own’ information anymore; and the fact we’re just not prepared to get our credit cards out for micropayments just yet.

But over the last few months I’ve come to a different conclusion: I don’t think we’re happy to pay for news on websites … because it doesn’t look very good.

Think about it: no matter what the story, subject, country, language or website a news story on a web page follows a visual formula. Usually a thin (400-700 pixel wide) central column with two or three thinner columns either side; a headline in big bold letters; the rest of the text in size 10 or 12; the odd sub heading if you’re lucky; and video or photographs squeezed inside the narrow column.

It’s almost always black text on a white background, the images are no more than 200×200 pixels.

When you think about it, it’s quite amazing that after more than five years of web 2.0, when the power of the webpage has grown dramatically,that news organisations are piping out web stories as if it was 1999.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s Guest writer is Alexander Hotz, a multimedia journalist based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @NYCtechnology.

By Alexander Hotz

Blame it on the holiday season or the industry’s own shortcomings, but last week the American press missed a major announcement concerning what could become the future of investigative journalism.

WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that specializes in the publication of classified or restricted information, announced that it’s pursuing an unprecedented avenue to sustain itself. Late last year the whistleblower organization began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform that nation of 300,000 into a beacon of global free expression.

According to WikiLeaks’ reps, the new laws would be modeled on offshore financial centers or tax havens. The British Virgin Islands, for example, attracts the rich with a set of lenient/shady tax laws unavailable in most countries. Iceland, under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

“So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … we could take the First Amendment from the United States, (and) we could take Belgium protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ spokesman Daniel Schmitt at last week’s Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Rick Martin, a Tokyo-based freelance writer. Read more from Rick at www.1rick.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at @1rick.

I’m not a programmer. But these days I’m starting to see how some programming skills can really make a big difference to my productivity as a writer. As I pretty much live inside my RSS readers, I find myself bouncing around between different websites copying and pasting feed links far more than I should. For example, if I want to create RSS feeds for the keyword ‘obama’, I don’t want to have to go to Google News, Yahoo News, Delicious, Flickr, Bing, Youtube and all those other services to retrieve those feeds. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any web service that would produce feeds for a given search term across multiple social media services and news sites.

This was a problem.

Solution: I decided to try to program such a tool on my own. Again I’m not a programmer, but I started with ‘Hello World’ and just researched other snippets of PHP code that I thought would do the job. I’d like to walk you through the process because if you’re new to programming this is a good way to get your feet wet.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Hilary Fosdal, who is the Interactive Content Manager for Barrington Broadcasting in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. You can read her blog at http://hilaryfosdal.com and follow her @hilaryfosdal.

By Hilary Fosdal

Many people are still trying to figure out what to do with Google Wave technology. Not the folks at the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye. Every weekday at 10:30am CST, the RedEye blog dedicates 30 minutes to a live public Wave on trendy news topics.

On December 28, 2009 the topic of the Daily Wave was RedEye’s Pop Person of the Year, Lady Gaga. Scott Kleinberg (aka Scottkleinberg72@googlewave.com) posted a public wave message at 9:51 a.m. that included the topic of discussion and a link to the RedEye’s story ‘Oh My Gaga’ as well as a link back to the RedEye’s ‘The runners-up’ .

The Chicago RedEye Twitter account (@redeyechicago), administered by Scott, also encourages readers to enter the online discussion by sending out a tweet or two announcing the Daily Wave topic.

Scott sets a conversational tone at the outset of this particular Daily Wave by writing “Sorry for my slowness – I’m eating a cookie.” Google Wave participants begin entering the wave and discussing Lady Gaga even before the clock officially hits the half hour, but no one seems to mind.
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Editor’s note: Matt Neznanski (right) is today’s guest writer. You can read more about – and from – Matt on his site.

By Matt Neznanski

How many reporter’s meetings have you attended where every suggestion to use new technology or different ways to tell stories is met with resistance based on gut feelings about what readers want?

If you’re honest, a lot. Most, even.

That kind of decision-making isn’t very effective and can stifle new ideas since it’s hard to argue with common sense and long-held newsroom ideas about what people want or need from their local news.

But while newspapers have always had to resort to best guesses using subscription or single-copy sales numbers (or make decisions based on the squeaky wheels in the letters to the editor), online readers make their presence known by being counted and tracked whenever they land on your site.

So why not make data a bigger part of news meetings to base decisions on what we see readers actually doing?

Most news organizations don’t do much with available data. Sure, we track page views, bounce rates, time on site and pages per visit numbers, mostly as a tool to sell advertising. But those numbers don’t always tell a tale that newsrooms can use. A few tweaks to Web data reports, however, could help return a lot better data and inform more effective online news coverage.

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In case you haven’t heard (because I forgot to tell you), my new book came out last month and I’m very pleased with the outcome. The book was published by CQPress and I remain impressed with the organization’s management and execution of the project.

Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing is available on Amazon.com or at the CQPress website. If you are interested in a review copy or bulk orders for classrooms, contact CQPress directly. (Note: unless it’s a bulk order, get the book through Amazon because the shipping is cheaper.)

In fact, I was so happy to work with CQPress, I’ve signed on for another project: Bootstrapping the News: The new business models for news and how to go from journalist to entrepreneur. This project is just getting going; it’s uncertain whether that will be the book’s title in the end or when it will publish. But I promise to keep you posted here and at my new blogging home, LostRemote.com.

I love the New Year season. The chance to look back on accomplishments from the previous 12 months and look ahead to opportunities for the next 12 is always an exciting time. To coincide with the change in years – and decades – I have a couple of exciting announcements for you, the readers of this blog.

1. I will be turning over the blogging on Journalism 2.0 to a group of guest writers who have some new ideas and fresh perspectives to offer on the intersection of journalism and technology. I will continue to run the blog as editor.

2. I will be taking my blogging to Lost Remote, one of the most venerable local media blogs on the web. Started in 1999 by Cory Bergman, Lost Remote was relaunched today with a new focus on the “search for the future of local media” and with a new editor Steve Safran. I’m honored to be part of the LR team.

As always, drop me a line with any questions or comments. And thanks for reading.

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m wishing you the most Happiest of New Years in 2010. And Happy New Decade, too.

(Oh, and don’t forget to update the year in the footer on your websites.)