North Atlantic Radio episode 10

North Atlantic Radio

What’s the difference between reporting and journalism?

You lucky lucky people, you have an extra long episode for those long winter evenings over Christmas and New Year. A veritable cornucopia of topics awaits, including Google’s latest software, HTML 5-based games, web site pay walls, the differences between reporting and journalism, and, bizarrely, mid-nineteenth century British politics.

Google’s recent releases

First, SPDY, an upgrade for the HTTP protocol. It looks good, even though we don’t think it’s likely to make an impact. And why would the search giant release Google DNS? To speed up page loading time, or for some as-yet-unknown reason related to Google Chrome OS and Android? Finally, we talk about the new labs feature of Google’s webmaster tools, the site speed checker.

HTML 5 games

HTML 5 is still only a draft but we’re seeing some real innovation here. From only a few months ago when games written in HTML 5 were just a twinkle in our eye, we now have two real-world games, Pie Guy and Some Adventure Guy, you can play right now. We talk about these games along with some of the problems that have yet to be overcome.

Pay walls

Pay walls can only work if just about everyone promises to implement one. How are the companies that want pay walls going to manage to get everyone to agree? What about free options like the BBC News website? Are pay wall advocates just doing what the music industry did ten years ago, and fighting against the inevitable? Should they not be looking into new and sustainable business methods?

Reporting versus journalism

Reporting is something social media can be good at (although there are still problems with trust and authenticity), but journalism is different. Journalism takes time, effort, and more than 140 characters. Can newspapers survive by admitting they’ll never win at the former, but can do the latter better than anyone?

Heroes

Books