Journalism agenda: “storytelling ‘is still everything’, despite new journalism tools…”People will read your long stories on their phones…
Planning for news, misidentification and verification as a process
Hi everyone,
So this week we held the second in our series of free training workshops from global newsrooms, this time livestreamed from the headquarters of The New York Times.
As publishers’ tablet dreams diminish, are smartphones picking up the slack when it comes to reading long articles online? A report out Thursday from the Pew Research Center tries to answer that question, and comes away with some reassuring findings: Yes, people are willing to engage with longer content (i.e., news stories over 1,000 words) on their phones.
The Wall Street Journal has (almost) never been free to read online. When the full website — then called the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition — officially debuted online 20 years ago today, it was free for a few months.
Discovery and verification of social media content is playing an ever-increasing role for news organisations across the world. Many are choosing to outsource the bulk of this work to third parties, while others build in-house technology, or spend money on subscriptions to tools that claim to do the bulk of the work at the click of a button. This can be a costly expedition for newsrooms, but it doesn’t have to be.
Google announced late last month that it’s chosen 128 projects, from 23 countries across Europe, to receive funding from its Digital News Initiative European Innovation Fund. Google plans to spend €150 million (USD $164 million) over three years to “help stimulate innovation in digital journalism,” and is offering up €27 million to the first round of projects.
I’m signed up for every newsletter imaginable, from New York Times briefings toLena Dunham’s Lenny Letter to a newsletter targeted at teens to public media training newsletters to our own here at Nieman Lab (shameless plug: we have two options).
Facebook will be opening up its chat app Messenger to publishers looking to distribute content through the service, Marketing Land reports. The announcement will reportedly be made at the company’s F8 developer conference on April 12, when Facebook also plans to officially announce that it’sopening its Instant Articles initiative to all publishers (though it let the cat out of the bag early on that front for various reasons). I reached out to Facebook, which declined to comment.
Digital disruption is coming quickly to TV news; how can broadcasters adapt and respond?
Television was supposed to be different, more resilient to digital disruption than print. For a long time, it was. It no longer is. Television today faces the full gales of creative destruction and digital disruption on a scale similar to what other media industries have faced. It is still an important medium, and will be so for years to come, but television will not remain the dominant force it was in the second half of the 20th century.
Getting to know the tips, techniques and technology now available to journalists can make a big difference in speeding up the job.
Speaking at the 10th International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Google media trainer Elisabetta Tola shared her tips for newsgathering and verification using Google tools.
Facebook for most publishers is distribution-first, community-second. But a recent effort from NPR is turning that dynamic on its head by putting community at the core.
The Glitch News Network is the latest twitterbot from Shardcore, a prolific purveyor of mad bots (previously).