Tuesday, August 2

Data Journalism at the Guardian

Data journalism has been around as long as there’s been data - certainly at least since Florance Nightingale's famous graphics and report into the conditions faced by British soldiers of 1858.




Read more here

The Foxification of News

The idea that journalists should be impartial in reporting news is a relatively recent one. With the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century came a more detached style of reporting. In effect, a deal was struck between advertisers, publishers and journalists, says New York University’s Jay Rosen. Journalists agreed not to alienate anyone so that advertisers could aim their messages at everyone.

One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”.

Read more here

Monday, August 1

10 Notable Moments in Student Journalism

Who says traditional journalism is dead? These students are making strides in the field of journalism before they’ve even started their careers. From breaking news to becoming "Internet famous," student journalists are making a difference. Read on to learn about ten notable moments in student journalism history, many of them within the past few years.

Read more here

Sunday, July 31

Google Effects on Memory

When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

Read more here

TV station Admits to Airing Staged Video

A Rhode Island TV station aired phoney footage of a local golf tournament.

Watch it here.

Saturday, July 30

McClatchy Ad Revenues Tumble 9%

The newspaper business is not getting any relief in 2011, as multiple publishers report continuing declines in print ad revenue. This week the McClatchy Co. joined the New York Times Co., Gannett, and Media General, all of which have seen total revenues fall by single-digit percentages.

McClatchy Co. revealed that total revenues declined 8.1% from $342 million in the second quarter of 2010 to $314.3 million in the second quarter of 2011. Circulation revenues also decreased 3.7% to $65.1 million, reflecting a 3.4% decline in daily circulation.

Read more here

Friday, July 29

Redesigning News Websites

In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise... which they call content.

Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc…) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, …oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually.

Read more here

Educators: Web filters verge on book banning

Online filtering software and school rules designed to keep out violence and pornography are also blocking educational and otherwise useful sites, teachers say, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- not to mention Google and National Geographic.

Read more at USA Today

Thursday, July 28

Mag Ad Banned

Makeup ads featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington won't be part of a U.K. ad campaign after the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority deemed the airbrushing used in post-production to be misleading to the consumer. The ASA made its decision that the ads were indeed misleading, but did so without the help of before and after shots.

Read more here

Sunday, July 24

News is becoming a social medium again

Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends.

In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.

The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt. Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.

Read more at The Economist

The people formerly known as the audience

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.

Read more at The Economist