Part I: Online News Transforms Traditional Media

“News is becoming more mobile, more social, and more real-time. Audiences increasingly want news on any device, in any format, and at any time of day.” — Reuters Institute Digital News Report 

Disruption of the news ecosystem:

* News organizations used to control the gathering, packaging, distribution and sale of the news product. Today, journalism is a disintegrated and open process.

* This has also created opportunities for news organizations willing to challenge their own assumptions by looking beyond their existing business models for new ways of finding value.

* There are three distinct areas of  open to innovation.   First, the newsgathering: collecting, writing, shooting, editing, producing and packaging of news and information. Second, distribution of the product. Third, selling of the news — sales and subscriptions but also advertising and marketing.

Sources: Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism, By Clayton M. Christensen, David Skok, and James Allworth, Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2013

Trend #1: More news is created and consumed than ever before

* In the U.S., roughly nine-in-ten adults (93%) get at least some news online (either via mobile or desktop), and the online space has become a host for the digital homes of both legacy news outlets and new, “born on the web” news outlets. (Pew 2018)

* Around four-in-ten U.S. adults (43%) get news from Facebook, according to a survey conducted in July and August.

* Search engines, aggregators, blogs and social media are just some of the avenues for audiences to consume and create information.

* Recent political events has sparked more interest in news.

* Changing demographics of the U.S. will change the consumers of news.

Top Digital Native Sites:

Trend #2: More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device (85%), compared with 72% just a year ago and slightly more than half in 2013 (54%). (Pew 2017)

* 94% of both those ages 18 to 29 and 30 to 49 get news on mobile.

* About eight-in-ten adults with household incomes below $30,000 (79%) get news on mobile, double the portion of those who did so four years ago (37%).

Trend #3: New technologies have increased overall news consumption, not replaced online sources

* An overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. (Pew study: Understanding the participatory news consumer) (Pew)

* Mobile news users are consuming more news. 54% of tablet news users say they also get news on a smartphone; 77% also get news on a desktop or laptop computer; 50% get news in print and a quarter get news on all four. 31% of tablet news users spend more time with news since getting their mobile devices.

* Mobile devices are transforming the news environment through the rise of the so-called second screen phenomenon, in which users log onto the internet while also watching television, particularly during live news events such as presidential debates, election night and the State of the Union address.

* Audiences for news on each social platform differ. LinkedIn news consumers stand out as being high earners and college educated while Twitter news consumers are significantly younger than news consumers on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn. Facebook news consumers are more likely to be female than news consumers on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. (Pew)

Trend #4: Value of news changing

* Wealth of information available has lowered the value of the general interest news story such that it’s often less than the cost of production. General interest and breaking news reporting comprised of answering the “who, what, when and where” has become commoditized. It cannot create enough value to sustain a news organization in the long term.

* The value for news organizations now increasingly lies in providing context and verification—reporting the “how, why and what it means”—and facilitating communities around that news and information.

Trend #5: Search engines and social media are playing a growing role in driving news traffic.

* News organizations are increasingly dependent on Google and a handful of other powerful tech firms for the tools and platforms needed to reach their audience.

* Increasingly, Americans are consuming online news that has been referred by friends, family or colleagues through social media such as Twitter or Facebook.

How did we get here?

Story of the Web

2000-2018 – Milestones in Online Journalism

September 11, 2001 – Users flock to the web for September 11th coverage.

February 01, 2003- News organizations seek eyewitness reporting after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off.

September 2003 – Over half of the people in the United States — 150 million — went online, a record for web use.

May 2004 – Terrorist video is distributed online

December 26, 2004 – Online users share South Asia tsunami images and video.

July 7, 2005 – Cell phones help report London subway bombing. The BBC Online website recorded an all-time bandwidth peak.

Adam Stacey, on a tube train between King’s Cross and Russell Square.

December 2005 – On average, 46 million visit newspaper sites each month.

August 2006 – Video is the most common form of newspaper multimedia.

January 14, 2007- For the first time in a federal court, the press section has two seats for bloggers. This happens during the perjury trial of former White House aide Lewis Libby.

April 16, 2007- Student cell phones help report Virginia Tech shooting.

July 23, 2007 – CNN and YouTube host presidential debate.

October 2007- Google Maps help report California’s wildfires

2008 – Forty-six percent of Americans have used the Internet, e-mail or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign.

2008 – Eight-seven percent of U.S. uses mobile phones.

2008 – The Internet hosts more than 130 million blogs, including the White House.2008 – Pulitzer Prizes are broadened to include online-only news.

2008 – Fifty-eight percent of newspapers publish user-generated photos.

May 13, 2008 – Online sites report on the Chinese earthquake in which around 70,000 people died.

January 15, 2009 – First Hudson River crash-landing photo sent with Twitter.

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

June 20, 2009 – The “Neda” YouTube video of a young woman dying on the streets of Tehran spreads quickly among social networks and traditional news organizations.

September 2009 – Seventy percent of journalists use social networks for reporting

2010

(Added after the Poynter Institute report)

April 2010 - ProPublica, in an historic first for online journalism, won a coveted Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting about controversial deaths at a New Orleans medical center following Hurricane Katrina.

April 2010 – Apple releases the tablet computer the iPad.

2010 – Twitter grows by more than 100 million accounts. Top trending topics include: Gulf Oil Spill, FIFA World Cup, Inception, Haiti Earthquake, Vuvuzela, Apple iPad, Google Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, and Pulpo Paul.

June 16, 2010 – Stephen Colbert, tweets: “In honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles.’” It is the number 1 retweet of 2010.

November 28, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes over 250,000 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents to be released into the public domain to date.

(All of the above from Poynter Institute: 2000-2010 Moments that have transformed journalism)

January 2011 – Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube used to organize and document protests in Tunisia and Egypt.

Dubbed the “Jasmine Revolution,” this sparked a larger unrest and led to the “Arab Spring.” These events also illustrates how repressive regimes can “shut down” or censor the Internet when it suits their purposes.

March 2011 – Millions turn to social media in the recovery and relief operations in Japan after a devastating earthquake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SybWjN9pKQk

May 1, 2011 – Rumors of Osama bin Laden’s death hit Twitter before President Obama makes the official announcement.

First, Pakistani Shohaib Athar, who was awoken by the sound of a helicopter above his house, tweeted about it, unknowingly breaking the news of the US raid on the compound in Abbottabad.

Keith Urbahn, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the above at 10:24 p.m.

Followed by above tweet from President Obama, at 11:30 p.m.

August 2011 - Reporters, government officials, non-profits use social media extensively to report, disseminate emergency info and to help those who need extra assistance in face of the massive storm. Case Study: Three Days, One Storm, a Deluge of Digital Data

October 2011 – The Occupy Wall Street movement grows exponentially with social media playing a big role in its spread.

Occupy tweets in July:

Occupy tweets in October:
Source: “How Occupy Wall Street Occupied Twitter, Too”

December 2011 – Egypt, Japan and Charlie Sheen’s “tigerblood” top the most tweeted topics.

January 2012 – Republican candidates turn to Twitter to mock their opponents, to monitor voter response to debate topics and to keep a close eye on political pundits. “With 100 million active users, more than 10 times as many as in the 2008 election, Twitter has emerged as a critical tool for political campaigns, allowing them to reach voters, gather data and respond to charges immediately. — NYT”

January 18, 2012 – Wikipedia (English) and thousands of other sites join together to stage a blackout, protesting Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), controversial anti-piracy legislation which they believed promoted censorship. In addition to the blackout, petitions were signed by millions and rallies held in protest of the bills. Within the week, both bills were put on hold.

January 26, 2012 – Twitter announces that it will censor tweets in countries if they considered illegal under that nation’s laws. “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

March 1, 2012 – Google proposes new privacy rules due to go into effect at the start of March. While Google says it will be more convenient for users, many say it is invasive. You can find out what Google thinks about your age, gender and tastes here. Or type www.google.com/settings/ads.

April 2012
The Pulitzer Prize is awarded to western Alabama’s Tuscaloosa News for breaking news reporting based on its coverage of the massive tornado outbreak that hit the region, in which it heavily relied on Twitter.

July 20, 2012 – Social bookmarking site Reddit covers the Colorado movie theater shooting. – Reddit, With approximately 70 million unique visitors a month and around five billion page views, the influence of Reddit continues to grow.

During breaking news of the July 20, 2012, movie-­theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, Reddit posted stories from victims of the attack and created a comprehensive timeline of the attack. During the same event, false Facebook profiles were circulated, naming erroneous suspects.

December 14, 2012 – Social media sites spread breaking news and misinformation during horrifying murder of killing of at 20 elementary school students and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut. The New York Times public editor blogs “Errors in Newtown Shootings Coverage Reflect Growing Pressures.”

2013

Data mining and data visualization become increasingly important journalistic tools as search terms, social media sites, governmental records and to a lesser degree smartphones, offer up vast amount of information for evaluation. Certain news sites, like The Guardian’s Data Store, offer new ways of storytelling with insightful data crunching.

March 2013
A comScore report, “2013 Mobile Future in Focus” reveals that the number of smartphone users grew 30% in 2012.  50% of Americans now owning a smartphone and 50 million own tablets. The report also says that one in three minutes spent online (37%) is now on mobile devices — and growing. Nearly two-thirds of tablet owners use the devices for news and half for smart phones.

April 18, 2013 – Not long after the FBI released a photo of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, a Reddit user posted a picture of the suspect, side-by-side to a missing Brown student, Sunil Tripathi, 22. The speculation spread rapidly through Twitter, resulting in a wrongful identification of a man later found dead in the Providence River.

June 2013

The Guardian publishes a report that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring data from Verizon, Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube,  AOLand other online companies in a program named PRISM.  Data includes email, chat, and search history.

2015  Net Neutrality Establishes Rules to Keep Internet Access Open

Because the record overwhelmingly supports adopting rules and demonstrates that three specific practices invariably harm the open Internet — blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization — this order bans each of them, applying the same rules to both fixed and mobile broadband Internet access service. –PARAGRAPH 14

November 2016 – Fake News on Social Media Networks Impacts 2016 Presidential Election

“A fuller picture of Russia’s use of social media to influence the 2016 US election has begun to emerge, weeks after Facebook announced that “inauthentic” accounts most likely operating out of Russia had purchased $100,000 worth of political ads between 2015 and 2016.” — Business Insider

July 11, 2018 – Net Neutrality Repealed

In 2015, the F.C.C. stripped the F.T.C. — the nation’s premier consumer protection agency — of its authority over internet service providers. This was a loss for consumers and a mistake we have reversed,” – Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

August 24, 2018 – Google Bends to Chinese Demands for Censorship

Inside Google’s Plan to Launch a Censored Search Engine in China

Sources: PBS.org/IdeaLab, Mashable, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Digital Journalism Study 2010: Blogs, Apps and Paywalls – How the Digital World is Changing the Way Journalists and Publishers Work, Web Journalism by James Glen Sovall, The Poynter Institute, Online News Association, Interactive Narratives, Webby Awards, Digital Journalism Study 2010: Blogs, Apps and Paywalls – How the Digital World is Changing the Way Journalists and Publishers Work

How are media organizations taking advantage of the web’s immediacy, flexibility, capacity, permanence, and interactivity to create an altogether new type of narrative experience?

Immediacy – Stories can be posted in near real time and they can be told in greater context.

Flexibility – Stories can be told using words, images, audio, video, graphics, and animation, depending on the which does the job best.

Capacity – There are none of the traditional limits of space (print) or time (radio and television). There are also fewer cost barriers, opening the door for more independent content producers to create original content.

Permanence – Ongoing stories can be presented in their entirety as the Web offers vast archival options.

Interactivity – Journalists interact directly with the audience, feedback is immediate through comments, forums, chats. Increasingly online audiences are contributing directly to the story in the form of user-generated content.

Live Event Coverage – As it Happens

Traditional news outlets have made dramatic changes to their formats and delivery of breaking news, as in the example of natural and man-made emergencies. Online outlets use eyewitness accounts and provide in-depth context for unfolding stories.

In times of rapidly developing news, many organizations are turning to use a “live blog” format, where they combine all media from their reporters, along with social media sources.

Nice Attack – As it happens

Newtown School Shootings

Often news “breaks” on Twitter and other social media platforms

Some of the first big stories to break on Twitter: the crash of US Airways flight 1549

January 15, 2009 – Hudson River crash-landing photo sent with Twitter.

May 1, 2011 – Rumors of Osama bin Laden’s death hit Twitter before President Obama makes the official announcement.

First, Pakistani Shohaib Athar, who was awoken by the sound of a helicopter above his house, tweeted about it, unknowingly breaking the news of the US raid on the compound in Abbottabad.

Keith Urbahn, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted this at 10:24 p.m.

Followed by a tweet from President Obama, at 11:30 p.m.

Interactive, Immersive Multimedia

Special reports, documentaries, and experimental sites are exploring new technique to tell stories by combining media in innovative ways.

Snowfall

This long-form narrative about a Cascades avalanche won a Pulitzer for feature writing. It also featured some very creative uses of video and animation. The piece was created using tools/libraries that include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address.

Cracking the mystery of egg shape

Welcome to Pinepoint

This multimedia documentary about an old mining town that went belly up features many creative video clips, mixed with a range of other media: photos, graphics, and animations. The National Film Board of Canada is an excellent place to find innovative interactives.

National Film Board of Canada: Highrise: Out My Window

This is a “360 degree” documentary about the lives of highrise dwellers around the world. It features 49 interviews with people from 13 different countries. Story subjects, say creators, “harness the human spirit — and the power of community — to resurrect meaning from the ruins of modernism.”

The New Age of Walls

How One Photographer Is Mapping America’s Poverty

MSNBC visits more than 70 cities and towns connected by the simple fact that more than 20% of their residents fall below the poverty line. It documents the struggles and triumphs of the people at the heart of these communities.

National Film Board of Canada: This Land

Da Da Net

Photos

Photography plays a critical role in online storytelling and is no longer just the realm of photojournalists.

“(The waves of asylum-seekers) worry Europe much, much more than the issue of Greece and the stability of the euro.” — German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Omran Daqneesh, 5, sits alone in the back of the ambulance after getting injured during an air strike targeted the Qaterji neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, on Aug.17.

Reporters Notebook: Traveling in Europe’s River of Migrants

Refugees ride the train in Macedonia that takes them from the southern border with Greece to the northern border with Serbia.

NYT – Voyages

Around the World in 24 Hours

Panoramic, 3-D

CNN Gigapixel

Then/Now

Houston, Before/After

Animated

There have been an explosion of animated GIFs on the Internet over the last few years. Here are a few that are slightly more journalistic in nature.

Miss Korea Plastic Surgery

London’s Saatchi Gallery teamed up with Google+ for the The Motion Photography Prize, the world’s first competition for artists working with animated GIFs. The winning entry, shown here, was by Brooklyn artist Christina Rinaldi.

Glitter in the Dark

Gerda

Scrolling

Magnifying glass

Menaced by Mold | A Leaky System

Illustration

Al-Jazeera Terms of Service: Understanding Our Role in the World of Big Data

“Big Data powers the modern world. What do we gain from Big Data? What do we lose? Al Jazeera America examines the role of technology and the implications of sharing personal information in the network’s first graphic novella….New products and technologies like Gmail are often shocking (it scans your emails for keywords that it uses to show you ads) but then become more normal over time.

The Big Draw

Sketch Guy: Personal Finance on a Napkin
In this series of back-of-the-napkin drawings and posts, Carl Richards, a financial planner, explains the basics of money through simple graphs and diagrams.

Animated election

This is an innovative take on the action-packed journey to the 2012 election done in graphic novel form.

NYTimes en Espanol – Me vetaron en Venezuela por reportar su realidad

Audio

We will focus on unique digital uses of audio, rather than traditional radio reporting, using audio snippets, raw audio, interactive tools.

Q&A

New Yorkers Speak Out on Stop, Question and Frisk Policy

Raw – ATC recordings
Flight 1549 – “We’re going to be in the Hudson.”

Some audio is so compelling, shocking, or unique as in the case of eyewitness testimony, 9-11 calls, and cockpit recordings that it can really place listeners at the scene.

Interactive audio

Bob Dylan Jam Sessions

Build a Pop Song

The Top 25 Songs That Matter

Audio slideshows

Lost and Found
This animated NPR feature tells the story of the discovery of Charles Cushman’s color photography from the 1930s.

Podcasts

Video

Full-screen, modular vignettes, interactive, collaborative, crowd-sourced, user-generated, live, raw, streamed, annotated, 360 and geolocated

After breaking the NSA surveillance story, The Guardian produced an in-depth multimedia piece.

Full-screen

The Luge

“Luge is often the fastest event in the Olympics — so fast that track designers for Sochi tried to slow it down.” — NYTimes.com

Super-short/Animations

Signing Science

In this feature about the challenges of signing science terminology, 5-10 second video clips of an ASL interpreter accompany a longer 3-minute piece.

Interactive
These videos are “interactive” in the sense that the user is a character in the story or decides the course of events.

The Waiting Game

Can You Make It in the Gig Economy

Time-Lapse

Barcelona GO! from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

Geo-tagged

A Bear’s Eye View of Yellowstone

Silk Route

In this scrolling multimedia piece, short looped videos activate automatically when the viewer scrolls past. The 30-60 second clips are mixed in with still photography and geotagged to the map running alongside it.

NYT – Time Lapse of NYC Marathon

360 Video

Fight for Fallujah
Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart

Social video

Buzzfeed – Tasty

60-second Doc

Augmented Reality: David Bowie in Three Dimensions

Interactive Graphics, Data Visualization

“Static visualizations have long been used to support storytelling, usually in the form of diagrams and charts embedded in a larger body of text. In this format, the text conveys the story, and the image typically provides supporting evidence or related details. An emerging class of visualizations attempts to combine narratives with interactive graphics. Storytellers, especially online journalists, are increasingly integrating complex visualizations into their narratives.”– Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

Online data visualizations include interactive infographics, maps and timelines. They are used to illustrate stories in geographical space and over time. Often, interactive infographics explain very complicated concepts in a very compact amount of space.

Earth Temperature Explainer

Economist Big Mac Index

Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical
At the Olympics, the blink of an eye can be all that separates the gold medalist from the 10th-place finisher. In some events, this is obvious. But in others, with athletes racing one by one, the closeness of the race is harder to perceive.

Public opinion of OWS

The Language of the State of the Union

“An interactive chart reveals how the words presidents use reflect the twists and turns of American history.” – Atlantic Monthly

Workers’ Comp Benefits: How Much is a Limb Worth?

“If you suffer a permanent injury on the job, you’re typically entitled to compensation for the damage to your body and your future lost wages. But depending on the state, benefits for the same body part can differ dramatically.”

Interactive Tools

The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares

“Children who grow up in some places go on to earn much more than they would if they grew up elsewhere.” — NYTimes.com

Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

“The choice between buying a home and renting one is among the biggest financial decisions that many adults make. But the costs of buying are more varied and complicated than for renting, making it hard to tell which is a better deal. To help you answer this question, our calculator takes the most important costs associated with buying a house and computes the equivalent monthly rent.” — NYTimes.com

Datamining

It is often said that ‘information wants to be free,’ but it is even truer in the digital age that information wants to be analyzed, shared, synthesized, curated, aggregated, commented on and distributed. — Journalism Next, Mark Briggs

The Internet and social networks have opened up countless new ways for journalists to take the pulse of the nation and world. While aiming to avoid invasions of privacy, content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and even Craigslist can be used to tell stories.

#tagsandthecity

The Rhythm of Food

Glenn Greenwald: in his readers’ words

Top World Cup Players on Facebook Day to Day

The 258 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List

Gizmodo: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

“What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.” — Annalee Newitz

Mapping Stories

Where American Men Aren’t Working

“It’s vastly more common today than it was decades ago for prime-age men not to be working. Across the country, 16 percent of such men are not working, be they officially unemployed or outside of the labor force — disabled, discouraged, retired, in school or taking care of family. That number has more than tripled since 1968.” — NYTimes.com

Spies in the Skies

“America is being watched from above. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities — but usually take the weekends off.”

Losing Ground

“In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year — due to climate change, drilling and dredging for oil and gas, and levees on the Mississippi River. At risk: Nearly all of the nation’s offshore oil and gas production, much of its seafood production, and millions of homes.” — ProPublica

Transparency

A Rogue State Along Two Rivers

“The militant group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seemed to surprise many American and Iraqi officials with the recent gains it made in its violent campaign to create a new religious state. But the rapid-fire victories achieved over a few weeks in June were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.”

What’s in an American Name?

Quizzes, Polls, Games

Which Terrifying Political Voice Said It?

Executioners vs. Veterinarians

“The Marshall Project compared two ways this country legally dispenses death: the execution of death-row prisoners and the euthanizing of incurably sick dogs and cats. See if you can guess which rules apply to which category of condemned creature.” — The Marshall Project

Spot the Ball

TrumpInsulter

Feeling left out that Trump hasn’t gotten around to insulting you or your friends? Here’s an app for that. Built on the real-live insults taken from the would-be President’s Twitter feed, @RealDonaldTrump, the generator below provides a Trump insult for everyone.

Bustle flow charts

Collaborative: Crowd-sourcing & User-generated Content

Some of the most popular sites on the web today are those built by user-generated content: Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, Vimeo, Instagram, SoundCloud, Pinterest. User-generated content means that some portion of the media is created by the user/viewer/reader.

The internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience. In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory.

Increasing numbers of internet users contribute to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

News organizations are utilizing content from users for a wide range of purposes:
- To document a live or breaking news event, “eye-witness” or opinion
- To search for sources of information, story subjects or ideas
- To provide coverage from distinct perspectives
- To connect families during times of emergencies
- To take the pulse of the general public on a topic

Finding the Quiet City

Even in noisy New York, pockets of peace exist. The NYT asked readers to submit their favorite quiet spots in the noisy city.

Political Ads

Interactive Documents

William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52

What might President Obama’s 2015 State Of The Union address mean for California?

20 key findings about CIA interrogations

“Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings.” — Washington Post

Multiplatform

News Apps

Guardian

Flipboard

Quartz new app

News 360

Snapchat

HTML/CSS

- HTML to define the content of web pages
- CSS to specify the style and layout of web pages
- JavaScript to program the behavior of web pages

Analytics, SEO & SMO

Understanding User Behavior

Pew Research 2017

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device (85%), compared with 72% just a year ago and slightly more than half in 2013 (54%).

Source: State of the News Media 2016

Google Analytics

Design Principles

Candy Issue

From rainforest to your cupboard: the real story of palm oil

“You wash with it, you brush with it, you toast it, it’s in 50% of what you buy – but what’s the real story of palm oil? ” — Guardian

100 Years of Design

- Many of the native digital news organizations are small, nonprofit and young.

- Many of the smaller digital organizations focus on filling reporting gaps in local news and investigative journalism.

- Among the larger digital outlets, a number are investing substantially in global coverage.

- Digital news organizations are hiring a mix of legacy and non-legacy journalists, with a clear emphasis on new storytelling skills.

PEW Report: The Growth in Digital Reporting

Vice – “The Definitive Guide to Enlightening Information”

First Look – Intercept
The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism. We believe journalism should bring transparency and accountability to powerful governmental and corporate institutions, and our journalists have the editorial freedom and legal support to pursue this mission.

- First Look Media, Project X and the new FiveThirtyEight blog

Buzzfeed News

Vox.com

Quartz.com

The Marshall Project

A Dangerous Brain: Can neuroscience predict how likely someone is to commit another crime?

Opinion vs. Objectivity, Truth vs. Lie

PunditFact
PunditFact is a project of the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute, dedicated to checking the accuracy of claims by pundits, columnists, bloggers, political analysts, the hosts and guests of talk shows, and other members of the media.

Pew Research Journalism Project – State of the Media

Medium

Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.

Reddit – The Internet’s Front Page

Other news developments:

- The impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience
- Native advertising: paid for by advertisers, written by journalists (Atlantic, Mashable, NYTimes)

10 Digital Trends – Journalism.co.uk

1) Mobile and responsive design
News outlets should be creating content designed specifically for different devices, whether users are at home using a tablet or perhaps at the airport using a smartphone.

2) Geo-targeted content
Geotargeted content will become just as important as real-time news with the use of apps.

3) Private social media
Snapchat and Instagram Direct and Twitter can now share direct message with photos – how do news organizations get content onto those platforms?

4) Drone journalism
Drone journalism, especially photography from drones, is going to become “not commonplace, but very frequently used” by the end of 2014.

5) Short-form video
Mobile devices are designed for short videos, mostly. So are new organisations going to respond to that by giving people that kind of content?

6) Real-time analytics
A trend for media organisations “really exploring analytics”.

7) Windows Phones
At the moment Windows Phones slightly fall down in that they have fantastic cameras, they just don’t have the apps that let you do clever things with the content you get.

8) Wearable tech
In technology [we can] expect more hype around wearable computing (iWatch), smart home appliances and the coming of age of 3D printing and virtual reality headsets (Oculus Rift).”

9) Anticipatory news
News that’s built around the data you’re sharing, for example your calendar or your location. Anticipating where folks will be and what they’re doing based on the information they’re building up.

10) Native advertising
News organizations using “creative solutions” or sponsored content.

Trends in Newsrooms

1) The need to shield journalism in the post-Snowden era
The threat to investigative journalism posed by mass state surveillance, as revealed by the Snowden leaks, cannot be overestimated. It demands much more attention from editors globally, who have an obligation to ensure their journalists undertake basic cybersecurity training. — Guardian US editor Janine Gibson

2) The rebooting of mobile strategy as “wearables” hit the market
Even the term “mobile-first” is up for renewal as platform agnosticism meets the arrival of wearable news delivery devices.

3) The application of social media verification to support trust and credibility
“We have the ability to get news out faster than ever, but we will break it all if we don’t verify and get it right,” said Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor.

4) The increasingly important role of newsroom data and analytics
Today, a journalist — and more widely anybody who produces content — who refuses to use data analytics to assess in real time the level of interaction he or she is having with the readers is someone who has decided not to turn the light on and stay in a dark room.”

5) The emergence of online video storytelling as a potential challenger to broadcasters
The trend is for short videos, according to AFP’s head of video, Marie Noelle Valles: “The point of entry is … a short, agile, quick video.”

6) The global collaborative journalism breaking new barriers
As crime and corruption go global, so does collaborative investigative journalism. From the Ukraine — where journalists from competing media organizations joined forces to salvage and document evidence of corruption in the hours after Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, forming #Yanukovychleaks — to cross-border investigations into organized crime by a new Italian investigative journalism collective.

7) The realization that digital mega-stories make an impact
Knight International Journalism Fellow and digital innovator Justin Arenstein highlights the value of small-scale data journalism projects designed for mega-impact.

8) Attempts to navigate the ethical challenges of native advertising
Native advertising — paid content designed to mimic editorial — continues to cause concern in newsrooms around the world. “There used to be a very clear wall between editorial and advertising, and this wall has crumbled, and it might have crumbled permanently.”

9) The evolving role of the editor to meet new business and technology challenges
Not only must he or she be an expert editorial manager and an excellent people manager and team leader, but also a person with the stomach to lead innovation, an entrepreneur’s approach to new technologies and products, and possibly even an MBA.

Post-Industrial Journalism: 20/20 Predictions (Tow Center Columbia)

- The Internet has unleashed demand for more narrative and more data-driven news, for a wider range of real-time sources and wider distribution of long-form pieces.

- There will be more nonprofit news organizations, driven by several kinds of donation—direct cash subsidy by philanthropies and other donor organizations (Ford Foundation funding Los Angeles Times reporters; William Penn Foundation funding PennPraxis), user donations of cash (NPR; TPM), and in-kind donations of the time and talents of a particular community (as with the creation of Wikipedia disaster articles, or Twitter hashtag streams).

- One of the great surprises of Twitter, a medium built around “short” and “now,” is how much demand it has exposed for long-form writing and video. News.me, a recent startup, filters through people’s Twitter feeds and recommends the most widely viewed links from previous 24 hours; a remarkable amount of what gets surfaced is not singing cats but long, careful pieces of reporting or opinion.

- Each newsroom will become more specialized, with less simple replaceability of employees and functions from one newsroom to the next. Each newsroom will have a better sense of who its partners are, among institutions and the general public, and will have customized its sense of how best to work with them.

Resources:

Post-Industrial Journalism
Encyclo – Neiman encyclopedia of the future of news
Free Future – MIT civil liberties in a digital age
Neiman – Predictions for journalism