Customer Reviews

Online Journalism: Reporting, Writing, and Editing for New Media (with InfoTrac)

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Online Journalism: Reporting, Writing and Editing for New Media is an informative book that explains the difference in writing for traditional media/press and the Web. The book does a great job of explaining why writing is so different on the Web and it illustrates the types of things that one must do in order to get a job in this new and growing profession. Although the comparisons are very effective in showing this difference in the beginning chapters, it become very monotonous to explain these differences throughout the book. A few of the chapters become long and over analytical because of such comparisons - specifically the chapters on interviewing and searching for information. I think it would have been more effective to have one chapter that gives a background on traditional media and then move on instead of badgering the point that the two are different. However, that is not to say that I didn't learn a lot from this book about writing, because I did.

It is obvious by the way that the author writes that he has an extensive background in this field and really cares about sharing this information with others. This helps the book in many ways to get the important point across.

I am currently a graduate student in a writing program, and my background is in journalism. While my goal is to write for travel magazines, I certainly need to have a good understanding of web writing, more knowledge about creating and keeping up a web page (especially for a future publication), and some idea of how my writing must look on that page when it's published.

I found this book to be quite useful for online journalism practices, and I appreciated the many real world applications that the author used. The author, Dr. Richard Craig, has much experience in journalism himself, and he enforces the common practices of good writing that all journalism students should keep in mind. He is very thorough, but go on and stick with him until the end of this book.

Dr. Craig's book may be outdated in a matter of years or less, but overall, this is still a very helpful and timely textbook. Read it, even if you don't have to for a class!