Category: media

Journalism 2.0: a social network experiment

Despite the challenges “old media” face from the new world of social networking, these appear to be exciting times for journalists who are willing to embrace the new reality — or to at least experiment with it.

A new weblog, Beat Blogging, is one such experiment. The idea behind Beat Blogging is to connect reporters via a social network — a blog, in this case — to help them improve their beat reporting.

The group of 13 journalists — one each from various news organizations — includes a couple of journalist-bloggers whom I try to read occasionally:

  • Eric Berger, who blogs as SciGuy for the Houston Chronicle. Berger says he joined the network because he hopes “to raise the level of debate on my existing blog by adding considerably more commentary from practicing scientists, and giving scientists a non-threatening place to interact with the general public.”
  • Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Listening Post blog. His editor, Evan Hansen, says, “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that blogging offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering, and with this project we hope to tap even deeper into that phenomenon.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s news blog. The Chronicle is one of the 13 news organizations to take part in the experiment and has assigned Brad Wolverton, who covers the business of college sports, to Beat Blogging.

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Brand. Coolest brand.

james-bond.jpgUK’s The Independent has released a list of the coolest brands in the UK (thanks, Mashable, for the heads up), and the winner is …

Really, now. Should anyone be surprised that the Ashton Martin is the coolest brand in the UK? I mean, it’s the car James Bond made famous.

Several tech brands are in the top 10, though, including the usual suspects (iPod, Google, YouTube and Apple). But what, precisely, makes a brand cool? According to Stephen Cheliotis, chair of the CoolBrands Council, which picked tht top brands with the help of online voters, it’s a split between technology and luxury, the practical and the aspirational.

On the one hand, things can become cool by virtue of their necessity or prevalence in your life, like Google, or Amazon. On the other, the things you really want, but may know you’ll never get – like a Rolex or a Ferrari – are considered just as cool. There seems to be a real divergence between aspiration and practicality but both are deemed cool – which goes to show how the needs and desires of consumers are developing.

So, where do higher ed brands rank? None were in the top 20. Not even Oxford.