:Journalistopia

Have you been searching the blogosfera for a Spanish-language guide to Internet terminology? Look no further than the Diccionario de Internet [Dictionary of the Internet].

The guide, put together by online marketer Jorge Ontalba, is available as a free PDF download (NOTE: it needs to be extracted using a tool like 7-Zip). The dictionary covers a wide variety of Internet terms mostly in English with Spanish definitions, though there are more than a few Spanish-specific terms.

The next time you’re in Spain or Latin America, make sure to peruse the Diccionario de Internet and make sure you’ve learned all of your palabras clave.

[Diccionario de Internet PDF download]

[Tip o’ the hat to CiberPrensa]

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Just announced: 2008’s Webby Award winners! The Webby Awards picks through the best of the Web and grants awards in more categories than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve pored through the list and extracted the winners from news-related categories, as well as news organizations that won in other categories, such as science or best practices. Here’s the Journalistopia-edited list. Apologies in advance if I missed anyone:

Best Copy/Writing
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com
(Also nominated: HowStuffWorks, Design Observer, NYTimes.com and Slate)

Best Use of Photography
Your Shot - National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.com/yourshot

Blog - Business
FT.com Alphaville
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/

Blog - Political
The Huffington Post
http://huffingtonpost.com

Broadband
ABC.com Full Episode Player
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streami…

Magazine
National Geographic Magazine Online
http://ngm.com
(Also nominated: Dwell.com, Makezine, NYMag, Yoga Journal Yoga Journal)

Music
BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
http://agencyrepublic.net/awards/…

News
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: BBC News, Wired, CNN and Discovery News)

Newspaper
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: The Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal and Variety)

Radio
BBC World Service channel site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

Science
nature.com
http://www.nature.com

Sports
Yahoo! Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/
(Also nominated: ESPN.com, Nike Skateboarding, Spyker F1 Magazine, Sweet Spots)

Television
HBO Voyeur
http://www.hbovoyeur.com

VIDEO CATEGORIES

Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics
The New York Times/T: The New York TImes Style Magazine “Circle Squared”
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/20…

Best Writing
Onion News Network
http://tv.theonion.com

Documentary: Individual Episode
Coney Island: An Uncertain Future
Getty Images
http://www.rickgershon.com/gettyi…

News and Politics: Individual Episode
Finding the Way Home
MediaStorm
http://mediastorm.org/0017.htm

Travel (video)
Frugal Traveler: American Road Trip - NYTimes.com/Video
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_s…

MOBILE

Entertainment (mobile)
Cosmo Mobile: 100 Hot Cities, Fake Calls, Dude Decoder & Cocktails!
http://m.cosmopolitan.com

Listing and Updates (mobile)
The New York Times Mobile Real Estate Listings
http://m.nytimes.com/re

News (mobile)
Mobile NYTimes
http://mobile.nytimes.com

Sports (mobile)
ESPN.com (Wireless)
http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wire…

ALSO: Shoutouts to NYTimes.com for their best practices and best visual design/function nominations, Mama Trib’s Swamp blog for best political blog nomination, National Geographic for their best home page People’s Voice award, Consumer Reports for their Guides/Ratings/Review People’s Voice award, the Guardian and Onion for their podcasts nominations, NPR for their politics nomination, NPR and the BBC for their religion and spirituality nominations, Frontline World for their Documentary: Series and Documentray: Individual nominations, U.S. News and World Report for their Best Writing (video) nomination, the New Yorker’s animated cartoons for their animation nomination, CBS for their sports (video) nomination and many more.

Yep, no news site nominees in the navigation and structure categories. We’ll have to work on that…

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Have a little time to spend discovering hot Web sites? Sign up to vote in this year’s Webby Awards.

With more categories than you can shake a stick tree at (that’d be 119 — oy), you’re bound to discover some interesting new designs and examples of sites pushing the envelope.

[Webby Awards 2008]

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I’ve got to give big credit to Kiyoshi Martinez for giving psychological relief to an entire industry. Not only has the AngryJournalist.com gripe board taken off, but now Martinez is selling some of the most hilarious journo shirts ever made.

But of course, most of the shirts are reminiscent of Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more” rant in ‘Network’.

Angry ink-stained wretch shirts here.

[Tip ‘o the hat to Gannett Blog.]

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Nielsen released its February newspaper site audience ratings on E&P:

The hot list: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (up more than 100%), Philly.com (up 77%) and Newsday (up 91%). The downers: The Houston Chronicle (down 18%), and the San Diego Union-Tribune and Miami Herald (both down about 7%).

More at E&P.

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Journalistopians, I have a small request: I’m looking for interesting blogs about online journalism and/or design written in Spanish, and I could use your help.

If you know of any blogs that fit the bill, please drop a comment with a link, or message me at dansanufATyahoo.com. Thanks!

***

(Perdóname si mi español no está perfecto…)

Journalistopianos, tengo una petición pequeña: Estoy buscando blogs interesante sobre el periodismo y diseño electrónico, y necesito su ayuda.

Si usted conoce algunos blogs, por favor déjame un comentario o envíeme un correo electrónico a dansanufATyahoo.com. ¡Gracias!

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More great cartoons at XKCD.

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Photo by Constantelevitation

Do you ever get upset at the long hours, low pay, public contempt, pinheaded editors or any other tomfoolery that goes on in the newsroom? Well, now you can finally let it all out guilt-free (that is, unless you’re already one of those anonymous Poynter message boarders) at AngryJournalist.com.

There, you’ll find such gems as the following posting:

[Exchange with a newsroom recruiter]
Me: “I just want to be a newspaper man.”
Recruiter: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Me: “What?”
Recruiter: “When you say newspapers people think dinosaur. Let’s not even call it a newspaper, let’s call it a data center .. You know we have a TV studio in our newsroom.”

Go f*** yourself…

Or concise gripes such as these:

bosses sans grammar

And the postings from the students are quite a gas too:

I had to do a story on the janitorial staff in my school and it was a profile. At first they were okay with it, and then they weren’t. I don’t understand why it was so complicated for one thing. JEEZ

Young’un, you don’t know the half of it. Check out AngryJournalist.com for more entertaining rants.

[Hat tip to Will Sullivan]

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I’d attempt to put an online journalism spin on this, but well … whatever. This is just an awesome service.

Google has a free and well-done 411 service that lets you browse their listings via voice. For iPhone-less and Blackberry-less peons such as yours truly, this is truly rockin. Just dial up 1-800-GOOG-411. With absolutely no problem, I just found my favorite Mexican restaurant (I intentionally gave an imprecise city) and a local vegan cafe that have given me trouble on regular 411 and 1-800-Free411.

So cool.

More info: http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html

Now back to your irregularly scheduled Journalistopia…

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ComScore released its 2007 Internet Year in Review report and reports that Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia and AT&T have reaped some of the biggest benefits. Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS) and WorldNow seem to be the only news-oriented properties in the top 20 for audience gains

ComScore reports the following categories as experiencing the most growth from 2006 to 2007:

Politics up 35% (no surprise with the election)
Community - Women up 35% (an area where Gannett has invested significantly)
Entertainment - News up 32%
Classifieds up 32%
Career - Training and Education up 31%
Gay/Lesbian up 28%
Retail - Consumer Goods up 25%
Finance - News/Research up 20%
Teens up 20%
Religion up 20%

View ComScore’s 2007 year in review release here.

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New Tribune boss Sam Zell rolled into Hartford yesterday to dish about the future of Tribune. From the Hartford Courant:

Tribune must find ways to more aggressively pursue sales and “attack the Internet area much better, in a much more sophisticated fashion than what we’ve done to date.”

Referring to Tribune’s companywide website platform, he said, “It sucks.”

More from Sam here.

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January is the time for resolutions and goal-setting, so this might be a good time to take stock of your skills and get started on getting better at what you do.

I came across a post today on Melissa Worden’s blog in which she advocates putting the methods of online production into more hands. She poignantly writes:

I think one way (which is what HeraldTribune.com is doing now), is to put the tools, resources, and the ability to actually post the content via CMS in the hands of the reporters and editors.

Gulp.

Wait a minute. That’s MY job as a multimedia producer.

Gulp, indeed. So it’s time to ask yourself a few hard questions:

Do I have a training plan in place so I can regularly learn the latest multimedia skills?

(Remove yourself from the context of 40-somethings in the newsroom.) Do I really possess uncommon multimedia skills such as audio editing, photo editing, video, programming or others? Are my multimedia skills the equivalent of those possessed by the average tech savvy 16-year-old?

Do I spend most of my time cutting and pasting into a content-management system while exercising limited news judgment? Do I know only the most basic HTML? Am I really doing that much editorial decision-making?

The barrier to entry in the online news world will be rapidly widened as more folks get trained, more youngsters graduate and the tools of production become even easier to use. What are you doing to improve yourself?

As I write this post, there’s an instructor here at Valencia Community College walking around helping other students get their Java compilers working. I’m diving into object-oriented programming so I can get comfortable with from-scratch web development. I don’t want to be dependent on a content-management system or a ready-made set of tools such as Caspio or Zoho. At best, I’ll learn how to build my own if I want. At worst, I’ll have a better understanding of how it all works so I can better manage expectations, make stronger hiring decisions and have a broader understanding of what the online medium is capable of.

So take stock of your skills, and think about whether your job will be around in the next five years. Learn some CSS, do some for-real news editing, cut your own audio clips, write your own web application or learn how to get under the hood and tweak your blog yourself.

The alternative is to fall behind, and that’s something the new media market won’t tolerate for long.

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