What killed the Online Journalism Review

When OJR suspended publication last month, the move ended a ten-year run in which the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications was a high-profile player in the emerging world of online reporting. Mark Glaser of PBS' MediaShift devotes his latest column to what went wrong. Excerpt:

The short answer is that the Annenberg School is going through a major transition, with a new dean, Ernest Wilson, and a new director of the journalism school (which lives within the overall school of communications), Geneva Overholser. They are reconsidering many programs, and want to rethink the way that OJR operates at the school.

“We reached a point where that initial enthusiasm [for OJR] has drifted away,” Wilson told me....

But there’s a larger story behind the rise and fall (and possible rebirth) of OJR, relating to academia and its own struggles putting online journalism into curriculum in a meaningful way. Plus, I have first-hand experience working as a freelance columnist for OJR from 2001 to 2005, having had three different editors in that time, while noticing the deteriorating backing from the Annenberg School administration.

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“I got the sense that they almost killed [OJR] when I got there,” [former editor Robert] Niles told me.

There's talk of having Niles blog for a scaled-down version of OJR housed at Annenberg's Knight Digital Media Center.