Tag Archives: future

The Future of Social Media in Journalism

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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

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University of Colorado may shut down journalism school to create a more tech-oriented degree program

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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.

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Let’s subsidize open broadband, not journalists (newspaper industry deserves to die)

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Dan Gillmor:

I love newspapers. I worked in them for almost 25 years. But I'm not itching to bail out a business that is failing in large part because it was so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition. With a few exceptions, the newspaper industry essentially deserves to die at this point.

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Ad-funded Guardian could switch off presses by 2015

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Alan Rusbridger:

We are earning tens of millions of pounds and it’s increasing at about 100 percent a year at the moment

[...]

Let’s say we’re earning about £40m at the moment in digital revenue.

Peter Kirwan:

Now these are important numbers. Among other things, they suggest that Guardian News & Media (GNM) might yet succeed in building a fully-digital future without any help from paywalls, even if Wapping does meet with success.

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Commercial Hack Day Results

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Michael Brunton-Spall:

The Guardian ran a 'Developer Challenge' as part of the Open Platform launch last week. The idea was to emulate the Hack Day formula but with an interesting twist: our media partners gave us briefs to answer.

We asked all the media partners invited to attend the launch event to stay and brainstorm concepts with us that would demonstrate the power of the Open Platform. For example, they could ask us to create an engaging user experience around gardening DIY, eco friendly travel, social search, mapping, etc.

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Journalism with depth – Philly Inquirer goes 3-D – Editors Weblog

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Colin Heilbut:

“The Inquirer’s move follows a recent global trend in experimenting with 3-D daily papers. Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure was the first European paper to use 3D technology in a publication, and their efforts resulted in an increase in circulation from 85,000 to 115,000 copies. The Sun, a British tabloid owned by News International, will be releasing their own 3-D World Cup edition on June 5th. Despite the increased sales and higher premium publishers can charge for 3-D advertisements, the technology remains cost prohibitive to use on a regular basis. It also remains to be seen if this sort of gimmick can help make a substantial impact on a publication with as much red ink as the Inquirer.”

Cost-prohibitive? Right. What I don’t get is why there doesn’t seem to be an outcry against the environmental impact of such experimentation… environmentally-prohibitive?

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Del.ici.us tags: 3d newspapers experimentation future teaching-example environment

#wmf: Jon Snow slams leaders’ debates in ‘golden age’ for journalists

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    Jon Snow speaking at the Westminster Media Forum event, 'The Future of News Media':

    "Three debates and the lifeblood was drained from the rest of the campaign. You used to have spontaneous press conferences (…) but [in 2010] in terms of actually putting out their stalls in which policies are aired in a structured way over three weeks, there was none of it. There were three men everywhere you went.

    [...]

    The tabloids had a dreadful election because there was nothing to report. All there was to report was the TV debates, they had to hook into TV (…) When the viewer had thought that somebody had won they were then told by the media, the tabloids, they were wrong."

    Read on for comments on current and future of journalism.

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    Del.ici.us tags: jonsnow futureofjournalism future journalism election2010 tvdebates

Do journalists need to learn to be programmers? Yes. And no. – Martin Belam

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    Martin Belam hits the nail on the head:

    "I've yet to see a software developer stand up and say that "citizen coders" will inevitably devalue the work that they do, and lead to job losses and a lack of quality in the sector.

    [...]

    The second thing is the whole premise itself – do journalists need to be able to program?

    I think the ability to mark-up some HTML and understand why <span>, <div>, classes and IDs are important for CSS and Javascript is essential for anyone publishing in the web.

    But my answer is that no, journalists don't all need to be able to write program, but the ability to think like a programmer is an invaluable skill."

    Question remains, which is the best way to teach someone to think like a programmer?

    Whilst I was at Teesside University we ditched Dreamweaver for CMS/template based design, and we're about to enter the same discussions at Bournemouth University over the summer. Looking forward to it ;)

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    Del.ici.us tags: journalists practice webdesign programming future martinbelam

Why Twitter is the quickest way from Q to A – The Observer

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    John Naughton

    "If you're not into network theory, then the difference between six and four may not seem very significant. But if you're interested in how news spreads around a network then it's dynamite. Next to traditional, few-to-many broadcasting, Twitter is the fastest way to spread news and information. In fact, it's the nearest thing the web has to wildfire. And the key mechanism that enables that is retweeting. The Korean researchers have found that this single facility generally enables any given message to reach a much bigger audience than those who are followers of the original tweet. So the moral for those politicians out there who are thinking about the next election is: forget Facebook, think Twitter."

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    Del.ici.us tags: twitter history future journalism