As Robin Hamman points out, there are all sorts of personal connections between the journalists named in Press Gazette’s UK journalism blogroll feature today.
Because many of the bloggers named in the piece also use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, it is even possible to visualise these connections using the amazing (and addictive) Del.icio.us Network Explorer social network analysis tool.
The dark nodes in the network above are people named in connection with the Press Gazette piece. I’m the green dot in the middle (only because I started exporling the network with my own user name), and Robin Hamman is the orange one.
Jem Stone is the large node at the top with links to many of the others. The author of the Press Gazette feature, Graham Holliday is to Robin’s 10 o’clock position, and Richard Sambrook is at Robin’s 3 o’clock.
Further exploration of the network reveals some other important nodes in the network, whose involvment in the jounralism blogger community is largely centred on their del.icio.us use: Sun communities editor Ilana Fox and Trinity Mirror’s director of regional digital media, David Black. You should really be subscribing to their del.icio.us links’ RSS feeds.
Update: Ditto Alan Connor, Alistair Brown, and Bruce Combe.
A lot of people have been linking to the new issue of Nieman Reports, a special issue titled “Goodbye Gutenberg” and about the transformations happening in newspaper journalism and the rush to digital.
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.