Instant Encore and San Francisco Classical Voice are both Web sites for classical music but the latter takes a conventional route as a publisher of news and events, while the former exploits the Web's interactive features more fully to engage its audience.
But rather than mimic one or the other, I would combine features from both sites in any online venture of my own, probably introducing the features in increments.
Bill Moyers' suggestion to use a Noah's ark analogy when writing about climate change for a Christian audience is a brilliant example of speaking to readers in a new way. I interviewed my friend Joseph about surfing and what he likes about it.
Clerk in a pet supply store.
The specialized-journalism faculty and the assigned readings tell us that journalists will be increasingly responsible for their "brands," which may be independent of their employer.
While that would leave us less bound to a particular news outlet (like a free agent in pro sports), doesn't that limit us in what we can cover and the extent we can collaborate?
For example, if I brand myself as a specialist in smart-phone news, then that limits my career to that narrow, albeit tangible and easily understood, field.
Prof. Robert Hernandez disagrees. For example, a journalist can write a blog that caters to a smaller niche and write for a newspaper with a more general audience, he told me.
"There is room for two worlds," he said.
But what about this: if I brand myself as the ultimate go-to guy for smart-phone news coverage, then sharing bylines or trading notes with other journalists diminishes my brand.
If a reporter is always sharing bylines, then that would hurt, said Hernandez, who worked for the The Seattle Times from 2002 to 2009, most recently as director of development.
But journalists can complement one another's work rather than feeling like they have to match each other story for story, he said. Linking to someone else's breaking-news story can give you more time to report on your enterprise story on the same topic, he told me.
I too expect that journalists will have to maintain their specialized brands. I just wonder about the flip side of that new system.
If the telegraph changed the way reporters wrote more than 150 years ago, could Twitter do the same today? OMG!
The telegraph imposed a terse writing style when the device was first used as a journalistic tool, said Prof. Andrew Lih, who recently wrote a book about the history of Wikipedia.
During the Mexican-American War, correspondents took 15-mintue turns telegraphing the latest accounts to their respective papers, Lih told specialized-journalism students Tuesday. And even with an abbreviated writing style, not everyone got a chance to dot and dash their copy back to the States.
I asked Lih: now that Twitter and its 140-character tweets are gaining popularity among journalists (and their audiences), will "TTYL" and "LOL" become accepted style in news writing?
Probably not, he said.
But what he does see as a more influential Twitter feature is the hashtag. It appears in a tweet and starts with a pound sign followed by words or an abbreviation that categorizes a Twitter conversation. For example, "#TCOT" is the hashtag for Top Conservative on Twitter.
Without any direction from Twitter management, users have improvised all kinds of hashtags on their own and somehow have agreed on which ones to use for different categories, he told me.
"People are crafting a new vocabulary right before your eyes," Lih said.
As a tool to sort through tweets, hashtags can bring people with a common interest into an online conversation. But, I asked, don't Internet chatrooms already do that today?
Yes, but you still have to find the right web site that hosts the chatroom, he pointed out. Whereas everyone is already on Twitter, which has become a "default commons," he said.
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