Innovative online magazines

Few minutes ago, I read an interesting article about innovative online magazines. It seems that indeed this kind of magazines are making more use of the possibilities of online features than do (traditional) digital newspapers. Take a close look at the examples, they are very nice and show what really is possible online.

Immersive videos

I wonder if online journalists are investigating the possibilities of this kind of innovative videos. These videos make it possible to pan across the 360° view. Not only useful for sports coverage, but in my opnion for almost every story that deserves a video. Until today, the multimedia features of the online news stay rather traditional. If online news want to be really innovative, they can start using this feature. Wonder which online news medium will be the first to use this kind of videos and how long it will take.

Ps. the picture is the camera used for the immersive videos. Looks expensive to me!

JOSTA: Journalism Studies Antwerp

Few days ago, we opened the JOSTA research platform at the Lessius University College. JOSTA, which stands for JOurnalism STudies Antwerp, is the research group of the Master in Journalism. One of the interesting things at JOSTA is the JOSTA-lab which makes it possible to study and analyse the production and reception of traditional and online news media. I'm looking forward to use this lab for all kinds of studies..

Visited the Netherlands

Three weeks ago, I visited the Netherlands for three days. On the first day, I gave three guest courses at the University of Leiden in the bachelor and master of the department of linguistics (option: journalism and new media). One of the three was a seminar about my Ph.D., more precisely about how we should consider and study the internet. It was a pleasure for me visiting this university and giving these three lectures, especially because the students seemed to be very interested and kept on asking questions afterwords. I don't want to speak in stereotypes, but this experience learned me that students in the Netherlands are totally different (read: more assertive) from those in Flanders. I also want to thank the collegues for giving me a pleasant stay. Funny detail: I slept in this hotel, which is the same hotel where Mark Deuze stays when visiting Leiden for his courses.

The day after, I travelled to Groningen where I gave two parallel workshops about CAR (Computer Assisted reporting) at the VVOJ Conference. The subject of my workshop was 'finding people with the use of social media' (download powerpoint here). Both workshops where 'sold out' which made it extra pleasant. The day after, I sat for about 8 hours on a train from Groningen to Antwerp, which wasn't pleasant at all ;-)