Excellent collection of graphical illustrations of Google's growth to "world domination", courtesy of Inspired Magazine.
Google This – 13 Years of World Domination Visualized
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Category Archives: Links
The Future of Social Media in Journalism
Vadim Lavrusik:
all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another. [...]
But more importantly, these social tools are inspiring readers to become citizen journalists by enabling them to easily publish and share information on a greater scale. The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever, and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents. Bloggers will no longer be just bloggers, but be relied upon as more credible sources.
Excellent overview of:
- Collaborative Reporting
- Journalists as Community Managers
- The Social Beat
- Social Stories
- Online Curation for a “Time-Poor Audience”
- The Social Network as the New Editor
- Beyond Twitter & Facebook
- Monetizing Social
- A Social Newsroom and the Personal Brand
- A Mobile Social Experience
Unions deserve to be covered by specialists
Christine Buckley:
But the signs are that this could change as the country begins to absorb the toughest public spending cuts since the 1930s and the trade union movement, with its seven million members, becomes one of the main forums through which people can protest. What a pity, then, that virtually no national media organisation has any specialist correspondents covering the unions.
[...]
But the bigger point about the demise of industrial reporters is the growing erosion of specialisms as media organisations cut jobs. Reporters are increasingly forced to regurgitate wire copy or quickly file stories with little or no knowledge of the subjects.
Couldn't agree more.
As university spurns NCTJ accreditation, do journalists need it nowadays?
Brian McNair argues that journalists of the future need:
talent, imagination, a spirit of independence, an understanding of IT and social networking and their impact on media, culture and society in general; everything in short, that the NCTJ curriculum squeezed out with its relentless stress on externally-decreed learning by rote.
[...]
The old world of print journalism in which the NCTJ was formed is passing into history, replaced by content-generating users, citizen journalists and all those journalistic wannabees who make up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century.
Future Challenges of Megatrends
Great blog network set up by the Bertelsmann Stiftung to discuss the newest research results, innovative ideas and best-practice examples in the following interacting megatrends:
- Demographic Change
- Migration
- Climate Change
- New Governance
- Natural Resources & Biodiversity
- Security & Anti-Terror Policy
- Pandemics
- Globalization
futurechallenges.org wants to foster the dialogue between experts and non-experts. Our aim is to empower people and institutions to discuss future challenges. For the very first time in the history of mankind we truly have the chance to understand our future as a common global one and to shape it by using the power of networks and the wide range of online collaboration tools.
The app that bridges them all, also a future for journalism?
Martin Belam:
Georgi Kobilarov illustrated the difference that aggregated linked data should make in the lives of people. He said that on his smartphone, he can download apps from Qype and Yelp and Foursquare and any number of data providers about listings or venues, using geolocation to tailor the content to where he is. But he doesn't want to have to check a multitude of data sources to find out what to do. He doesn't care about the apps themselves, or the app provider, he cares about the information that will help him plan his evening. He wants an app that bridges them all, and uses information from Facebook and Twitter to say 'There is a pretty lousy bar around the corner, but two of your old high school friends are there, so it is probably your best bet right now'.
The news and journalism version: "Accident has happened in a remote location, you have friends currently on vacation there… send them a message on Facebook to see if they are ok?"
Husker du internett i 1995? – images of early Norwegian online newspaper design
News article with some screenshots of the first Norwegian newspapers online.
University of Colorado may shut down journalism school to create a more tech-oriented degree program
Stefanie Chernow writing at the Editors Weblog:
Digital trends in the media are affecting every aspect of the journalism field, including education. The University of Colorado at Boulder is pondering closing its journalism department in favor of a new degree program that would combine journalism and computer science skills. According to Editor & Publisher, the new academic unit could compound on existing strengths in journalism, yet adding computer science course will "prepare students for an ever-changing communications and media marketplace."
Another example of other disciplines taking over journalism education.
Still baffles me how the industry struggles to differentiate between online / multimedia journalism and web development / production… the two are not and never will be the same thing.
How reporters mangle science on Gulf oil – CNN.com
Christopher Reddy:
As the number of science journalists gets smaller, this problem will grow. One solution is for scientists to gain skills needed to bridge the communication gaps between the academic world and the lay public, media and policymakers.
In addition, scientists need to learn how to say "no" to reporters.
For many of us, we desperately want to please a reporter, who for the first time cares about what you do. And scientists, including me, have egos, so we want our thoughts and work recognized. But scientists have a better chance of getting the story straight if they listen carefully to the questions asked by reporters and understand the reporters' goals.
[...]
Journalism, the first draft of history, is incremental, too. Consider each scientific report like a chapter in an epic novel, and not necessarily in order. Let the dust settle and read the book in a few years.
How NRK mined the WikiLeaks SQL database
Great article by Espen Andersen describing how NRK made use of the WikiLeaks SQL database file to identify incidents involving Norwegian troops.
[in Norwegian]