Archive for the ‘Interactive Journalism’ Category
Social Media and User Generated Content for Journalists
There are so many great new buzzwords — distributed reporting, citizen journalism, crowd sourcing. They excite a lot of people who don’t think through their implications for public affairs reporting… and they terrify a lot of people who don’t realize that in many ways they are just juiced-up version of pretty common “old-media” techniques. In either case, they’re exciting because they pit two traditional journalism values — giving voice to the voiceless and accuracy — directly against each other.
Here’s an introduction, with audio to come in a future version. (If you can’t wait for the audio – give me a call or shoot me an email.)
When Everyone’s a Publisher, Who Will ‘Convene’ The Public?
Last week, Richard Hart of MDC, Inc., kindly came to speak to my Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class. He led us through an illuminating conversation about the nonprofit’s recently released report on the Triangle’s “Disconnected Youth.” (PDF)
At the end, I raised this question: If government is already publishing a lot of raw data online, and if organizations like MDC are already put together in-depth, relatively objective analyses of public policy issues like this, then what does he — as a former journalist and the nonprofit’s communication director — think is the role for journalists? How do we fit in to his overall communication strategy for this report, I wondered.
That was a good question, Hart said. He noted that his primary focus now, after an initial and relatively small media hit, was convening small groups of influential and interested area leaders from various sectors to discuss how to implement some of MDC’s recommendations.
That made me wonder: Should journalists be doing that? Presuming we think that the subject of high school dropouts is an issue that is relevant and important for our audience, how much effort should news organizations be putting in to creating conversation around content that is created elsewhere? Should journalists be conveners?
Viral News: The Distributed Watercooler
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, journalists are loath to do anything they think would make them “seem like a pimp.” The problem with their hesitancy is that it too often means that important news stories get buried beneath entertaining ones and the public discourse is diminished.
New Media Rochambeau: Twitter-Facebook-Email
You want a look at the future of breaking news? This is it.
How to Report for New Media
Links Referenced in This Lecture:
- Slide 3
- Slide 5
- Sworn Statements by Abu Ghraib Detainees (washingtonpost.com)
- The Fact Checker: Romney and Abortion (washingtonpost.com)
- Slide 7
- Bluffton Today
- Live Online With Bob Kaiser (washingtonpost.com)
- Wiki Scanner (wired.com)
- GasBuddy.com
- #ch-snow (Twitter.com)
- Ushahidi.com
- Veep-O-Matic (washingtonpost.com)
- Consumer Consequences (American Public Media)
- Slide 10
- MarketWatch.com
- War in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)
- Times Topics (NYTimes.com)
- Slide 14
- Breaking News Blog (L.A. Times)
- iReport of Va. Tech Shooting (CNN)
Additional Resources
How to Report a News Story Online (Online Journalism Review)
A Guide to ‘Crowdsourcing’ (Knight Citizen News Network)
Multimedia Storytelling (Knight Digital Media Center)
MP3 Audio of the Lecture
How to Plan an Online News Project
If I had to pick only one difference between the mindset of print and online journalists, it’s the way they plan. Online journalists are more likely to have to collaborate with a large group, they are often working on longer time horizons on products that has longer shelf-lives. They are dealing with lots of smaller moving pieces and have to try to get management approval using static words and images to represent a project that will have a lot of animation and user-driven customization.
So, if you want to work online doing something other than breaking news you have to learn how to plan. In my experience, any online project — from an election returns database to a deadline explainer on the capture of Saddam Hussein — needs six things:
- A product concept
- A storyboard
- Asset management
- A clear workflow
- A financial budget
- A testing and quality assurance procedure
Bootcamp: Data Driven Journalism
So much of the training and retraining of journalists seems to be focused on getting them to be multimedia reporters, backpack journalists or one of the other buzzwords we use for collecting audio and visual content and presenting it online.
Multimedia is one of three things that make online journalism different from offline journalism, but the other two things — interactivity and user-control — depend largely on journalists understanding data driven journalism. This isn’t about numbers, but about structured data. Here’s a bootcamp that’s intended to introduce journalists to the tools and concepts of structured data and data driven journalism.
Case Study: Link Journalism With Publish2
I start every semester in my online news classes teaching students the fundamental concepts of HTML. Not primarily because I want them to know the technology, but because I want them to appreciate that for all the bells, whistles and buzzwords it is the lowly link that makes online journalism fundamentally different than offline journalism.
If journalism is a conversation, I tell them, the first key to being a good conversationalist is being a good listener. You’d never walk in to a party and just hijack the first conversation you come across. You listen, wait and figure out what you can add and how you can move the discussion. Putting this analogy in to practice with links from your site to another site is the first step in developing authentic conversational leadership.
After all, the man who invented the hyperlink also hypothesized this role for journalists.
This semester, we are putting this concept in to practice in the site we’re building for Public Affairs Reporting for New Media. Using Publish2, the students are getting to practice “link journalism.” The site is now live, and here’s how we’re starting to build it out.
Public Affairs Reporting for New Media: Day 1
The new semester kicked off this at 9:30 this morning in CA 132 with “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media,” a new APPLES service-learning class I’m teaching.
The goal: Partner with N.C. news organizations to create a set of multimedia, interactive news reports about the state’s high school dropout rate. And since part of the class’s mission is to be a public service, I’ll be blogging from now until May 2 about the lessons we learn.
Here’s the syllabus and here’s how the first day went …
It’s a Battle of Style, Not Media
With the new Pew report out this week, a lot of people are wondering this: Is there “evidence in the survey that what the internet did to newspapers may soon happen to television”?
First, the Internet didn’t do anything to newspapers that the 1970s didn’t do more effectively.
Second, these aren’t the right questions to ask.
