For anyone who likes good photography…

You’ve gotta check out Boston.com‘s The Big Picture. As a journalist, I should play around more with photography than I do, and I’ve always been envious of great photographers.

Right away, this site hits you with powerful images, living up to the name, as they’re huge and in your face. If I could take a single photo as good as one of these, I’d be happy, let alone if I could produce these kinds of results on a regular basis.

The Drudgington Post Report!

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the magnitude of Drudge Report and that what he’s done as a journalist in many ways helped blogging and online journalism get where it is today, but I don’t necessarily have to like the site. As some of you may have noticed, I’m a little left-leaning, and Drudge isn’t exactly subtle with his right-leaning headlines. Essentially, Drudge is a collection of links to stories typically written but more traditional journalists, with his own snarky headlines as links.

The Huffington Post, which I’m a little more inclined to peruse more often because of the more liberal take on things, at least has some more original content. Sure, it links out to a lot of other established news organizations, but it also has blog commentary to match.

I have a hard time calling either of these really journalism, per se, as they tend to link out to content produced by others (Drudge more so than Huffington). And, let’s be honest, if I want a list of headlines I’d be more inclined to go to a site that’s just going to list them with their original headers than an unorganized mess like Drudge.

Which brings me to the main point I just don’t bother with these sites that often: They’re unorganized, difficult to manage, and I just can’t stand a messy website. Huffington is that way on the top but is a little more manageable as you scroll down, but Drudge greets you with a large ad and then a pile of black-text links strewn wherever they fit. Sorry guys, I’d rather spend my time reading the content than picking through poorly designed websites.

Of interest to my classmates

I thought some of my classmates would be interested in these for our Writing for the Web class.

First, when it comes to finding exactly where the lines of reality blur in the election campaign, there’s FactCheck.org. This is an unaffiliated website, part of the Annenberg Foundation, that fact-checks just about everything involving the political landscape, from campaign ads to the latest rumours about McCain or Obama in your inbox. From their website:

“There’s slime in your inbox, attack ads on TV and falsehoods on the radio. Welcome to election season.”

Want to know if Obama really voted for killing unborn babies, or if McCain supported loan guarantees for the auto industry? Check it out.

 

Second is Rocketboom. I know this one’s been around a while, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s one of the most popular and successful vlogs (video blogs) on the net. It blends news with absurdity, opinion, and fluff, and sometimes the stretches they make to be clever and trendy test my patience, but with an anchor that looks like that I’ll forgive some lolcats references.

The reason I’ll most likely get an MBA or law degree:

Definitely feeling this quote from the 2008 Webbies website:

“Honor. Prestige. Wealth. These are some of the things that a Bloggie won’t bring you.”

Let’s be honest; writing today is not the same as it was twenty years ago, or even a year ago. Print journalism is on its way out, and more and more people depend on the Internet for their news. This has, of course, brought up a whole debate on the reliability, credibility, and integrity of Average Joe and his keyboard. But that’s for another blog post, or even another blog, because it’s been done many, many times.