There’s a lot to get through, but a good place to start is the introduction to Journalism and Web 2.0 by Francis Pisani. It begins with a summary of the always-controversial discussion of what “2.0″ actually means, and then admonishes journalists to take note of these developments even if they can’t see the immediate relevance to their craft as it is traditionally understood:

Change starts at the edges. That’s where people—our readers and viewers—probe new practices. That’s also where their emerging culture is forming, a culture in which they look at media from a different perspective. And so journalists’ new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow’s potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center. 

In remarkably few words, Pisani runs through the effect on traditional media being caused by the ideas underlying Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Digg, Newsvine, and news mashups like ChicagoCrime.org. Blogging, citizen journalism and RSS are covered, too. It’s an invaluable crash-course introduction.

The cover story of November’s issue of the German journalists’ trade magazine Medium has a lengthy set of stories about the relaunch of Focus Online, which is expected to happen this month.

Since his appointment last January, the Focus Online’s editor, Jochen Wegner, has been tasked with helping the companion site for newsweekly Focus catch up with its rival Der Spiegel.

The site will end its partnership with MSN that has seen focus.de redirect to focus.msn.de, and implement a clutter-free redesign.

Interactivity and personalisation are central to the “community” elements that Wegner describes as one of “three pillars” to his stategy.

The first pillar is use of  “classical journalism” — virtually the entire print newsroom is now filing for Focus Online and there is growing cooperation with Focus TV for new multimedia offerings. Focus Online has hired eight additional editoral staffers of its own.

Wegner’s second pillar is usability — the new site will include more better use of its archives and aims to make everything on the site accessible within three clicks. Tagging will play a major role in this.

Finally, the community elements of the new site will include two major features. One is Focus Online LIVE. A trial version of this Flickr-like photo- and video-sharing site went live during the World Cup this summer.

The second is “Mein Focus”, which will allow users to create personalised start pages, including RSS feeds from other publications — even Spiegel Online will be included, Wegner insists.

The next step, he says, is to let users add tags to stories within their personal space on the site.

Wegner told Medium that “Web 2.0″ is a buzzword which will barely have registered with most of his readers. Only a tiny proportion of his audience will know what a tag cloud is or how tagging works. But this doesn’t stop him from using them, he says.

Wegner will have to peer over his shoulder a bit, because Welt Online has a 30-strong staff under Christoph Keese which also plans a relauch from the Welt group’s new integrated newsroom within the first quarter of this year.
Spiegel Online leads the German online news market with 314 million page impressions in October 2006, according to Medium. FAZ.net and Sueddeutsche.de had 60m each, with Welt Online trailing at 30m.