in Journalism and Mass Communication
By Katy Culver on Poynter, April 20 –
My students were recently on spring break, but that didn’t slow them in their march to improve my teaching through social media.
At one point, a student in my intro course tweeted:
He highlighted an ethics case I’d completely missed — NBC’s investigation of some clearly problematic editing of audio from the Trayvon Martin shooting.
At first I said, “Geez, how did I miss that?”
Then I thought, “Thank God for social media.”
By Herbert Lowe on Poynter, March 26 –
“As journalist in residence and a graduate student in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University in Milwaukee, I seek chances to match coursework with reporting and academic pursuits. This week’s assignment in my Humanistic Theories and Methods of Media Studies grad class required me to conduct a semi-structured interview – in which a list of questions must be asked and answered in order – before follow-up quizzing may occur.”
Read the transcript from the interview on Poynter’s website
By Katy Culver on Poynter, Jan. 13, 2012 –
“A friend and fellow educator sent a shock through my system last week. He told me he was so frustrated by rude and distracted behavior on digital devices in his journalism labs that he imposes a ban on laptops, tablets and cell phones turned on during class.
Not known for subtlety, I asked, ‘Are you insane?’
The interaction led to a productive conversation about digital distractions and effective teaching practices in a connected age. Somewhere in the combination of our approaches and their devices is a sweet spot that can move learning forward.”
By Jeff Sonderman on Poynter, Jan. 9, 2012 –
“One-third of tablet and smartphone owners in a Nielsen survey said they had downloaded a news app within the past 30 days, and 19 percent had paid for one. The chart below shows survey results for news and other categories.”
Image credit: Nielsen
From Bill Mitchell on Poynter, Oct. 19, 2011
For media executives awaiting reassuring evidence before experimenting with digital subscriptions, the time has arrived.
Simply put, their more adventurous colleagues at other companies have discovered multiple paths around the biggest risk attached to the pursuit of subscription revenue: diminished audience reach.
Here’s how they’ve navigating that tricky challenge:
- They’ve adjusted their paywall meters to permit whatever number of monthly free visits makes the most sense in their balance of reach and revenue. The trend, by the way, is definitely toward leaky walls rather than hard ones.
- They’ve recognized that, financially, their sites could afford to lose substantial traffic because their “sell-through” of online ads rarely approached their inventory anyway.
- They’ve made smart decisions, journalistically, about what content should remain outside the wall.
A new study by the BBC and Starcom MediaVest showed that tablet users spend more time consuming news than did previously.
Jeff Sonderman from Poynter said,
The results overall are encouraging for publishers hoping that iPads and other emerging tablets will play an important role in their digital futures. Among the most interesting findings:
- 63 percent of people said tablets lead them to rely more on traditional news providers and less on news aggregators.
- Tablets enhance the appetite for news. Fifty-nine percent said they access national or local news more often since they got a tablet. Seventy-eight percent said they follow a larger volume of news stories, and a greater variety of topics than before.
From Steve Myers on Poynter, Oct. 7, 2011
Recent news events from Joplin to Tripoli have provided plenty of examples of how news has become a real-time experience, something you observe and discuss as it’s happening rather than waiting hours or days to watch or read.
You may have lost the weekend of August 20 to Andy Carvin’s furious chronicling of the fall of Tripoli. Perhaps you followed along with Brian Stelter as he tweeted his observations and photos of the devastation left by the tornado in Joplin, Mo. Maybe you watched the minute-by-minute drama leading up to the execution of Troy Davis, or read tweets about the East Coast earthquake before you felt it. Earlier this week, it was the helicopter crash in the East River.
Such examples prompted Jeff Jarvis to wonder whether articles sometimes are just byproducts. If we can wade in the stream, what’s the point of a wrap-up article?
Perhaps it is unnecessary for the leading edge of news consumers – news junkies and people in the news industry. But the vast majority of people – anyone whose eyes aren’t locked on a smart phone or laptop screen – still desire for their news to be packaged in some way so they can make sense of what they missed.
By Troy Thibodeaux on Poynter, Oct. 6, 2011
Data journalist. Computer-assisted reporter. Newsroom developer. Journo-geek. If those of us who work in the field aren’t quite sure what to call ourselves, it’s little wonder that sometimes even the people who work beside us are puzzled by what we do. Part of the confusion (and one reason for all the competing labels) lies in the sheer variety of tasks that can fall under this heading. We may be fairly sure that some jobs lie within the boundaries of data journalism, but we’d be hard-pressed to say what can’t be jumbled into this baggy monster of a field.
In its current state, data journalism describes neither a beat nor a particular medium (unlike photo journalism or video journalism), but rather an overlapping set of competencies drawn from disparate fields. We have the statistical methods of social scientists, the mapping tools of GIS, the visualization arts of statistics and graphic design, and a host of skills that have their own job descriptions and promotion tracks among computer scientists: Web development, general-purpose programming, database administration, systems engineering, data mining (even, I hear, cryptography). And the ends of these efforts vary as widely as their means: from the more traditional text CAR story to the interactive graphic or app; from newsroom tools built for reporters to multi-faceted websites in which the reporting becomes the data.
By Eugenia Chien on Poynter, Oct. 3 , 2011 – For the last three years, I’ve been running the website Muni Diaries, where public transit riders in San Francisco submit stories that happened on the bus. Along the way, we have been approached by several large news organizations for content partnerships. This has become more and more common, as many news organizations don’t have the staff or resources to cover hyperlocal news quickly and adequately anymore.
We’re grateful that our successes have led to partnerships, but I also recall many meetings where both bloggers and media organizations have left frustrated because of misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. Based on my experiences, I’ve come up with some tips on how news organizations can create meaningful collaborations with local blogs.
1. Ask your local blogs what they need.
2. Be prepared to show specific mockups and plans.
3. Understand the business of the Web.
4. Get support from your advertising and marketing departments.
By Jeff Sonderman on Poynter, Sept. 29 , 2011 – Facebook again may have gone too far in its quest to make privacy obsolete, and this time some news organizations could get burned by going along with it.
Facebook spent years making it easier for us to share by building its network and placing “Like” buttons across the Web. Its latest idea goes much further, turning sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.
Encouraging sharing is great. Making sharing easier is even better. But this is much more than that. What Facebook has done is change the definition of “sharing.” It’s the difference between telling a friend about something that happened to you today and opening your entire diary.
News organizations and other content companies are eagerly accompanying Facebook down this path.
New Facebook-based apps like Washington Post Social Reader, and similar ones from The Guardian, The Daily and The Wall Street Journal, encourage Facebook users to read their stories and pump all that reading activity out to their friends.
And this isn’t isolated to what you read via Facebook itself. Yahoo News is asking readers to sign up to have their reading activity streamed to their Facebook profile. Services like Spotify and Netflix have their own apps to automatically share all media consumption.
This so-called “frictionless sharing” has big problems.
