Can John Oliver’s 19 minutes rivet attention as all the bolts and screws continue to come undone in the local news business?
That seems a hope against hope — and yet 3.7 million YouTube views of his Sunday evening HBO program say something. Oliver offered no new revelations, but he connected the dots as he has so expertly done week after week on Last Week Tonight since its April 2014 debut.
The Huffington Post will soon be post-Arianna Huffington. The president and editor-in-chief announced publicly on Thursday she would be stepping down from the site she cofounded in 2005 with Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti, despite having several more years on her contract, to focus on her new lifestyle, health and wellness venture.
Raise your hand if you’re a reporter or editor who loves your newsroom CMS. You compose in it directly. There are story templates perfectly suited to your writing process, just complex enough. There are no extraneous fields to complete (or forget to complete). Every single person in the newsroom understands how to use it.
The Olympics are, like the quadrennial U.S. presidential election, the perfect opportunity for news organizations to experiment with new ways to present news online. The Games are a massive story, but the stakes are typically relatively low, and, perhaps most importantly, the date of the event is known years ahead of time. As a result, outlets have plenty of time to plan coverage and build out interactives.
Reported.ly, the social news site funded by Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media,said Monday that is will “suspend its operations” as of August 31. In a Medium post, Reported.ly editor Andy Carvin said that First Look “has chosen to part ways with us, so we will no longer receive financial support from the company.”
The announcement of Instagram Stories last Tuesday came with mixed reviews, many considering it a blatant ripoff of Snapchat. Allowing users to share real-time life updates, news media have a new opportunity to report from the field while also giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life at the publication. Snapchat and Instagram Stories differ as far as audience and ease of use, given that Instagram is predominantly used for high quality photography (often curated after the fact). On both platforms, users can upload photographs and videos previously taken (though in Snapchat they’re framed as Memories), while Instagram only allows for media that has been shot over the last 24 hours (though screenshotting old photos gets around that). One thing that attracts the non-teen generation to Facebook and Instagram is the idea of content longevity, a gap Snapchat has attempted to bridge.
In 2016, citizen media plays a crucial role in almost every breaking news story around the world. It is increasingly rare that a news event will go by without a picture or video from an eyewitness at the scene.
One well-documented trend has been the way journalists contact eyewitnessesin the moments that follow them posting their photo, video or tweet online.Much has been written on the ethical challenges this poses and the best practices for contacting eyewitnesses.
A note to our readers
Reported.ly to suspend operations August 31
To friends and supporters of reported.ly:
It is with great regret that I must announce that reported.ly will suspend its operations on August 31, 2016. Our funder and employer, First Look Media, has chosen to part ways with us, so we will no longer receive financial support from the company.
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