At a time when Rupert Murdoch and the Financial Times' editor, Lionel Barber, are furiously trying to put the free content genie back in the bottle, comes a move from Reuters that goes in completely the opposite direction.
Columbia Journalism Review has reported on Reuters putting its entire Handbook of Journalism online for free. The one that they give all new recruits and all 500 pages of it.
According to CJR, "it's perhaps the single most comprehensive document related to journalistic stye, standards and values available online free of charge." It instantly makes Reuters' journalism standards available for more amateur, citizen journalists to follow, and arguably helps raise the skills level of the sector as a whole.
Statement of the obvious, by giving away something substantial for (ostensibly) nothing, Reuters also puts a marker in the ground that the guidelines it sets are the ones others follow. Hence the messaging goes - its reporting is of a correspondingly high standard.
For example, in its guidelines to bloggers, Reuters exhorts its blogger journalists to:
- Be interesting.
- Be conversational: raise questions, invite contributions, discuss what's happening on other blogs, leave some loose ends, and respond to comments made by readers.
- Link to external sites with relevant information
- Monitor other bloggers in the same space and attempt to build reciprocal links with them.
- Tag posts so that they are easy for search engines to find.
- Inject some personality into their posts and include observation and anecdote.
- Make use of multimedia whenever possible and think about a post's layout.
- Credit the original source of all content embedded in posts.
- Make sure posts are seen by a second pair of eyes before publication.
- Ask desks to place a link to their blog/post on relevant stories. (you could substitute company / agency website here)
Good advice, and overall Reuters' guide is a useful guide to have in the background, to dip into as needed.
- Online newspaper publishers want to charge. But what about the TV elephant in the room? (thisisherd.com)
- Columbia Journalism Review: Identity crisis at the Wall Street Journal? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
- Journalism Online, would-be newspaper savior, gathers steam (dailyfinance.com)
- FT.com: WSJ to introduce micropayments (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
- The media and the financial crisis: Journalism failed (dailyfinance.com)
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