@documentcloud is Turning Documents Into Data

November 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Ted Han, DocumentCloud, in a video by Jon Vidar.

From the Knight Foundation Blog, Nov. 17. 2011

“Above, Ted Han describes how DocumentCloud, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, is developing a new feature allowing newsrooms to invite public participation in annotating and commenting on source documents.

The tool will help newsrooms involve their readers in the news and improve DocumentCloud as a journalistic tool and investigative reporting resource. The site recently merged with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

As a two-time Knight News Challenge winner (it won also in 2009 to launch), DocumentCloud already helps journalists analyze, annotate and publish original source documents. The site is used by more than 200 newsrooms nationwide.”

Read the full post on Knight Blog

 

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Students Could Win Scholarship Through First Amendment Contest

November 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The 1 For All website is hosting a Free To Tweet contest for students on Dec. 15. The idea is to get as many students talking about and exercising their First Amendment rights. Students who participate in tweeting about the First Amendment using the hashtag #FreeToTweet will have a chance to win a $5,000 scholarship.

Their website has this to say about the contest:

“Beginning at midnight on Dec. 15, students ages 14 to 22 can tweet their support for the First Amendment with the hash tag #freetotweet, which will enter them in the “Free to Tweet” scholarship competition. Students are encouraged to freely express themselves in their entries, which can be posted on any publicly viewable social media platform, including blogs.

The Free to Tweet contest takes place throughout the day, Dec. 15, 2011, on National Bill of Rights day.”

Read more on the 1 For All website.

 

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Mobile content is its own medium

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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By  on AdAge, Nov. 29, 2011 – 

“While many publishers are bringing content to the growing number of mobile users, others still struggle to adapt. Transitioning to the medium in haste, many cut corners, not fully understanding the nuances involved. In advertising, for example, long-form video with sound and automatic-play is effective for desktop users, but fails when delivered on mobile. With seconds to get a mobile user’s attention, intrusive noises and slower-loading video will turn users off.”

“A strategy tailored specifically to mobile is essential. Publishers need to ask themselves a few key questions before jumping in:

  • Are we really committed to making mobile a revenue stream?
  • What resources do we need to add to maintain it?
  • Is there demand from our users — do we have page views on wireless devices?
  • Is there demand from our advertisers to buy mobile media?”

Read the full post on AdAge

 

 

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Current iPad Magazine Readers Say They’ll Spend More Time with Content

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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By Peter Kafka on All Things D, Nov. 21, 2011

“After an initial wave of excitement about iPad magazines, some publishers have dialed back their enthusiasm. But the readers who have actually downloaded them like them quite a bit.”

“So says a survey commissioned by a publishers’ trade group: It finds that two-thirds of people who read magazines on tablets and e-readers think they’ll be spending more time with digital issues over the next year. Many of them — 46 percent — are consuming more magazines — both in print and digital form — than they did before they got their hands on an iPad.* And 63 percent of them want more digital stuff to read.”

Read the full post on All Things D

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AEJMC Presidential Statement on First Amendment Rights of Occupy Movement & of Journalists Covering It

November 21, 2011 By 2 Comments
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Nov. 21, 2011 | The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is committed to freedom of speech and the press in the United States and abroad. AEJMC supports citizens’ and journalists’ First Amendment rights in every city and every state, including in participating in the Occupy movement. AEJMC fully supports the Occupy protesters’ freedom of speech and assembly as a whole, and urges that journalists’ right—and responsibility–to cover these important matters of public concern be respected by all law enforcement officials. This is all the more compelling because other countries are closely watching how city, state, and federal governments handle the Occupy movement across the United States.

While recognizing the need for law enforcement officers to maintain public safety, AEJMC encourages public officials and law enforcement officers to work with Occupy participants and journalists covering their protests to ensure that basic constitutional freedoms are maintained and not encroached. The rights to protest and to criticize government are core values enjoying Constitutional protection. Additionally, the press must be allowed to freely communicate to the public information about these important and powerful demonstrations and the ideas they express. AEJMC reminds public officials at every level of government that as a nation we are and should be exceptionally committed to the often tested proposition that, as the Supreme Court of the United States declared in 1964, debates on matters of public concern remain “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

For further information: Contact Linda Steiner, President, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2011-2012
Available at lsteiner@jmail.umd.edu
973-762-6919 (Nov 21-27). After Nov 28: 301-405-2426

About PAC
The AEJMC President’s Advisory Council allows the association’s president to weigh in on important issues that are central to the association’s mission. A three-member subcommittee of the Standing Committee of Professional Freedom and Responsibility helps inform and advise the president of important issues.

About AEJMC
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

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CAJ Report: Best practices in digital accuracy and corrections

November 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The Ethics Advisory Committee of The Canadian Association of Journalists recently published an article on best practices that news organizations should use when correcting or updating online stories.

They identified three main areas that are emerging in online corrections:

  1. Helping readers report errors
  2. Having transparency in corrections
  3. Placement of corrections

From those emerging areas, they made the following recommendations:

Transparency

  • All verified factual errors in digital content should be corrected promptly.
  • We should aim for transparency, telling audiences when digital content has been amended or corrected.
  • While we should not “scrub” content, minor editing to correct spelling and grammar errors that do not alter the meaning of the content for the reader may be amended without including a corrective note.
  • In correcting and amending developing content, particularly in a breaking news story in which sometimes contradictory facts will emerge over time, we should be transparent with audiences throughout the reporting process about what we know and when we know it. When there is a significant verified change in the information first published, subsequent files should inform audiences about how the new information differs from what was first reported.

Engaging Readers

  • We should make it easy for audiences to report possible errors of fact and errors of omission in digital content by providing a mechanism for audiences to report errors.
  • But readers are not always right. Changes to digital content should not be made as a result of readers’ errors reports without verification.

Timeliness

  • We have the ability – and responsibility – to correct digital content as soon as we verify something is wrong and no matter how long ago it was published. There is no time limit on making things right.
  • We generally do not unpublish content if we discover errors. In some rare circumstances, there may be legal reasons to delete digital content entirely. This is generally done on the advice of legal counsel.

Placement

  • When we verify factual errors in digital content, we should amend the copy to make it correct. In all but the most insignificant errors, we should also append a clearly visible note to the article to tell readers that the material was changed/edited/corrected from a previously published version and provide explicit details about what was corrected. For example: An earlier version of this article misstated the overnight price of a litre of gas as $2.40.
  • Legal circumstances can determine where corrective notes are placed within online content. Generally, retractions and apologies for legal reasons should be published promptly and displayed prominently at the top of content. In some cases, it may be necessary to publish retractions and apologies more conspicuously on a website’s homepage to fulfill legal obligations.
  • It should be easy for readers to find corrections. For instance, corrections may be captured on a prominent online Corrections page linked from a website’s homepage. And, when errors of fact are discovered as a breaking story unfolds through several published versions, corrective notes may be appended to link initial less complete reports to the most complete/correct report.
  • If inaccurate information is broadcast through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, audiences should be informed of the inaccuracy – and when possible given correct information – through those same channels as soon as the error is determined.

You can read the full best practices report on the Canadian Association of Journalists’ website

 

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AP Tells Staff To Stop Tweeting News Before It’s Published

November 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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According to Joe Coscarelli at New York Magazine, the AP recently sent out an email to its employees reminding them not to tweet breaking news before it’s been published. The email was sent after a number of AP staff were tweeting about fellow AP reporters being arrested at Occupy Wall Street protests.

Coscarelli wrote that the email said,

In relation to AP staff being taken into custody at the Occupy Wall Street story, we’ve had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off.

The official AP staff guidelines for using social media states,

Don’t break news that we haven’t published, no matter the format.

 

Do you think AP staff should refrain from tweeting breaking news before it’s published?

 

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Pew study says news orgs use Twitter as a one-way information stream

November 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Image courtesy of Pew Research Center

A new Pew study that came out recently shows that most news organizations are using Twitter to push their stories, rather then engage with followers. Thirteen print, TV and radio news organizations were studied. Megan Garber, from Nieman Journalism Lab, said,

 For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.”

You can read Garber’s post here or view the full Pew study.

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Recent US court verdict infringes on privacy, according to former WikiLeaks aide

November 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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By Dominic Rushe on The Guardian, Nov. 11, 2011 –

Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir has slammed the decision by US courts to open her Twitter account to the US authorities and is taking her case to the Council of Europe.

On Thursday a US judge ruled Twitter must release the details of her account and those of two other Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks. Jonsdottir learned in January that her Twitter account was under scrutiny from the Justice Department because of her involvement last year with WikiLeaks’ release of a video showing a US military helicopter shooting two Reuters reporters in Iraq. She believes the US authorities want to use her information to try and build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Later in the article Jonsdottir said,

“I want everybody to be fully aware of the rights we apparently forfeit every time we sign one of these user agreements that no one reads,” said Jonsdottir.

Read the article on The Guardian.

 

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JMC News Weekly Recap: Nov. 11

November 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Here’s a quick recap of the top journalism and mass communication news from this past week. Most of the articles and posts mentioned below were sent out from our Twitter account earlier in the week. Enjoy!

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