Ashin Metacara posted an article yesteday, *2008 voting has closed; view the Winners!, reporting on OEN and his blog, for their respective categories, coming in at third place in the bloggerschoice awards. In the comments, a number of OEN editors discussed how they prefer to see OEN referred to as a news site. I replied:
HYBRID!!
by Rob Kall (811 articles, 3935 quicklinks, 334 diaries, 1727 comments) on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 3:05:23 PM
When I describe OEN, I say it is a hybrid news site AND blog community.
Diaries are blogs. Articles are... articles worthy of a news site.
I'm pleased we came in among the top three sites on bloggerschoice. I'm pleased that technorati, ranks us, among over 100 million blogs, as anywhere from 550 to 725 on any given day.
I'm glad we're ranked among the top 3510 out of ALL websites by quantcast.com
The thing we need to do is work at making the site a better and better, more trustworthy, respected source of information, whatever we are labeled.
The discussion went on and I decided to write a bit more. It started as a comment and I decided to turn it into a conversation.
There's a new job category that is showing up in panels, in resume's. It's called "New Media." It refers to bloging, twittering, use of text messaging-- all the new technologies.
I think OEN is right in the middle of it. Unlike most blogs, we've built a unique technological platform that supports both vetted, moderated articles that go through a queue AND blog diaires that are unmoderated. We do it with a unique team of incredibly well qualified volunteer editors who evaluate the articles that are submitted to the queue.
Our new Popularity navigation software enables readers to depend upon the editorial team's headlining decisions or to go with the bottom up approach and look at the articles and diaries and polls which are most viewed, most commented upon, most forwarded, or which receive the highest ratings.
Readers can also view the most popular content for every tag on the site, so, it is possible, for different time ranges-- the last day, week or month, for example, to see the most popular articles on the bailout, Sarah Palin, Obama or Iraq.
While instant messaging with Ashin, I told him that when I think of the Mainstream media, I usually think of them with contempt. They've, for the most part, failed to do their jobs. Then, we look at how major news dailies are failing, laying off reporters, hemorrhaging loss of advertising revenues and merging or being acquired, with resultant loss of local coverage and diversity. The old news media are rapidly going extinct. The future of news coverage is... what we do at OpEdNews-- a blend of professional writing, bottom up, anyone-who-can-write is eligible citizen journalism AND unmoderated diary blogging. And we'll soon be adding our own version of twitter for very short observations and commentaries. Also, OpEdNews is on twitter, where new articles are posted to followers of OpEdNews on twitter, just as people can follow CNN and the BBC.
The new media concept is the future. The challenge is to ride the cultural and technological wave while maintaining integrity, quality, trustworthiness and the guts to stay open to cover as wide a range of subjects as possible. I'm proud of the job the OEN community is doing. We've made enemies. We have critics. But in recent months we've been mentioned in Editor and Publisher, the Wall Street Journal and we've played a major role though our coverage and interviews in affecting congressional legislators and major legislation.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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