I wrote scores of columns and articles for the once high-flying independent new media journal, the Online Journalism Review, a publication of USC’s Annenberg School, from 1998 to 2005. For the past several years, the quality had tapered off as funds for free-lance articles were dramatically cut (which is why I left). Still, it was always a worthy read, with Robert Niles, a former staffer at the LA Times, taking up the role of editor-in-chief in 2004.
So it was with sadness that I read Robert’s announcement last month about the closing of OJR. The offerings of the Knight Digital Media Center are, alas, no substitute.
At PBS’s MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser (a fellow former columnist at OJR) takes a look at the life and death of OJR: Who Killed the Online Journalism Review and Will It Live Again? Excerpt:
“I got the sense that they almost killed [OJR] when I got there,” Niles
told me. “There used to be a big suite of offices on the first floor,
and then when I came in they moved me to one little office in the
basement. Then they moved me off-campus and into a smaller office this
past year. They kept moving me farther and farther away…The budget for OJR got
cut every year. There’s less and less money to pay for writers, to the
point of which this last year there was nothing beyond my own salary
and a grad student research assistant, which is basically a
scholarship. I used to have two but they cut it down to one.” …
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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