Monday, March 22, 2010

Cyberjournalist.net was created by Jonathan Dube in 2000. The site was created to highlight different types of converged media and covers everything from "online journalism, citizen’s media, digital storytelling, converged news operations and using the Internet as a reporting tool" (Dube 2010). The whole point of the site is basically a critique of different types of online writing.
At first glance the site looks pretty well put together. After looking around for a few minutes it becomes clear that it is mostly clutter. The domain is paid for by Google advertising and the site runs wild with it. Once you do make your way through what is advertisement and get to what is actual content, there are some pretty interesting pieces. The search tool is your only hope for narrowing down or finding any specific topics though. There are links to different sub-topics but they don't really have much direction once you get there. There are buttons for "great work," "future of media," "innovation," "social media," and so on. Each topic has an abundance of articles and some are harder to navigate than others.
There are other links that seem a bit more promising. I haven't read many of the books offered from the site's "bookstore" (Kovach and Rosenstiel have top billing) but it's nice to know they are available. There is also a link to make submissions regarding convergence, media, internet reporting and the like. Of course, the site wouldn't be complete without the obligatory facebook and twitter links.
Overall, I found this site to be very cumbersome and hard to navigate with any real focus. I understand what he is trying to do with the site but, personally, I don't think the structure works. To follow suit, I give this site a 2 out of 5 based solely on the effort.

1 comment:

  1. This site is a bit amatuer, in a sense, to be a journalistic site. It is important for Web sites to have advertising, but as you said, the structure and appearance of the site just takes away from the mission of the site. The site doesn't make it easy for anyone who is actually looking for information or instruction for better online writing to access the content. If I were to stumble across this site, I would immediately get off. The mission of the site is very important, but the transfer of information doesn't work. I agree with the rating.

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