Innovative online journalism

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Matthew Buckland at Poynter highlights a great example of "how effectively blogging and online multimedia can be used to report on an event on almost zero budget."

To quote:

"At the recent launch of Creative Commons South Africa, attended by none other than the father of Creative Commons himself, Lawrence Lessig, a group of Rhodes University (South Africa) new-media journalism students blogged the conference in real time, on their laptops and with their mobile phones and video cameras. The site was continually accessed by delegates in real time via wi-fi as the presentations happened.

"The innovative students even built their own content management system for the conference. They note on their website, "... One of the features we identified quite early is the use of mobile phones to post images directly from the event to the website. This is done by conference delegates by posting pictures from their camera phones via MMS-to-Email. Our server checks the POP mail account for new images and publishes them on the site. This type of innovative journalism is a small part of our broader approach to change journalistic practice in Africa." "