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About OJR.org

Welcome to the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. As part of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and funded by USC's Annenberg Center for Education, our mission is the development and continuing education of professional online journalists.

We do this through a variety of projects. Since our March 1, 1998, launch, we have devoted most of our resources to evaluating the emerging field of online journalism, providing readers commentary, features and resources. Our purpose is to be useful both to journalists working online and to online writers who've not previously had anything more to do with journalism than reading or watching the news.

In March 2006, we began offering offline conferences for online journalists who publish their own news sites online. These gatherings provide entrepreneurial journalists the chance to meet one another in person and to discuss in a collaborative group setting the issues, challenges and opportunities that confront independent online journalists.

Getting involved

The USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review welcomes features and commentary for its readers. Please contact OJR's editor via the address below.

OJR.org holds offline conferences, at USC's campus in Los Angeles and at other journalism schools across the country, throughout the year. Subscribe to our discussion list, for details about upcoming events.

Staff

Robert Niles is the editor of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. A long-time math and computer geek, Robert turned to journalism after graduating from Northwestern's Honors Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and deciding that he, unlike his classmates, had no passion for management consulting. But the lure of marathon coding sessions proved too strong. Robert soon quit his job writing editorials for a red-state newspaper, and he began making websites instead.

The Online News Association honored Robert's ThemeParkInsider.com in 2001 with an Online Journalism Award for Service Journalism, the first instance of a "citizen journalism" initiative winning a major journalism award. In addition, Robert has served as editor for the Rocky Mountain News' website and worked on the staff of latimes.com.

Robert Niles
Editor, USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review
Annenberg School of Journalism
3502 Watt Way
Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA

Phone: 213-740-0948
E-mail: rniles@usc.edu