10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet. Journalists need to learn to speak some geek. . . Posted by Tom Foremski - August 17, 2005 . . .and learn to type Journalists have had it far too easy, for far too long, compared with the geek professionals--especially those involved in coding, scripting and building online sites. In those professions you have to upgrade your skills constantly. There's an astounding number of alphabet-soup technology acronyms that you need in your toolkit. Five or six years ago web site developers just needed to know HTML tags and some simple applications and tools. Today they need to know HTML, XML, PHP, PERL, MySQL, Linux, Flash, Javascript, and CSS.
And also be a master of sophisticated applications such as DreamWeaver, Movable Type, Illustrator, PhotoShop, plus they had had better have a good understanding of the underlying business processes. Yet journalists barely know how to type, or even how to spell (v. true believe it or not). Yes, journalists are very skilled, despite barely knowing how to operate a keyboard. Dump your word processor. The Linchpen. Nieman Foundation. Among The Boston Globe staffers who shared the Pulitzer Prize are Nieman Fellows (from left) David Dahl, David Abel, Mark Pothier, Christine Chinlund and Stephen Smith. The staff of The Boston Globe, including several Nieman Fellows, has won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. Reporter David Abel, NF ’13, and columnist Kevin Cullen, NF ’03, were among those who covered the bombings and their aftermath.
The Globe’s managing editor for news, Christine Chinlund, NF ’98, played a key role in organizing coverage, assisted by Stephen Smith, NF ’00, city editor, and David Dahl, NF ’03, assistant managing editor/operations. Mark Pothier, NF ’01, was deputy business editor at the time. The Pulitzer board recognized The Globe’s reporting “for its exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.” Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News. As newspapers struggle for viability, and media managers attempt to shift presence to the web, a need has arisen for talent with the technical skills of a programmer and the creative skills of a journalist.
Over at TechCrunch, we are fortunate to have talented developers who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into making the site what it is today. Northwestern University’s journalism school is offering free scholarships to software developers so they can further hone their journalism skills and possibly integrate the two for a media company down the line (disclosure: I attended this journalism school). The idea of creating programmers who understand journalism is compelling and brings attention to an important trend taking place in the industry. Hyperlocal news site Everyblock and the St. Petersburg Times’ truth finding political database Politifact were both built by developers with journalism backgrounds. SEM Blog - Hit Search Guide - Online Journalism : 6 Key Skills. The rise of the online journalism one of the aspects became particularly noticeable in 2009 and looks like a trend that will continue into 2010.
The ability to source information quickly and push out to worldwide audience with shocking immediacy has lead to journalists becoming much more efficient and copy is written much closer to a particular event. With the rise of the online journal ism; HitSearch have produced a list of digital tips that will help traditional journalists in the scary world of online. 1) Twitter - The micro blogging site is perfect for the budding journalist, for sourcing business contacts to finding people to talk about your topics.
Twitter will also provide great insight into what the public are talking about on an hourly and basis. Examples of UK journalist on Twitter are as follows BBC Rory Cellan-Jones - Declan Curry - The Telegraph Shane Richmond - Ten things every journalist should know in 2010 | Journalism.co. Multimedia Reporter. News Videographer | online video, journalism, training. Ten Basic New Media Skills Journalists Need To Know. Posted by Tom Foremski - March 31, 2008 Software engineers have to update their bag of skills constantly. They learn new programming languages, new web standards, new development systems, and new lexicons constantly. Most traditional journalists can barely type, they certainly can't spell.
And they are unusually useless in terms of PC and other tech skills. With all the new changes brought about by the Internet becoming the publishing platform for all media, journalists now need a few new skills. Ten basic new media skills that today's journalist should know: 1) How to upload an image to a blog. 2) How to add a link to text in an online story. 3) How to take and edit a photo and resize it for a web page. 4) How to embed the code for a video in a web page and resize it. 5) How to find relevant links to a story and add them to it. 6) How to take a digital video, edit it, and publish it in several formats. 7) How to make online stories discoverable. How journalists can use augmented reality | Media | guar. Augmented reality and journalism are made for each other. Journalism gathers information about the world around us.
Thanks to augmented reality, this information can be displayed where it got picked up – which is especially interesting for event reporting. But there are many more possibilities. So, having looked at what augmented reality applications are available, let's look at how it can be used in journalism. The living magazine Augmented reality found a mass market in smartphones last year, enabling users to see additional layers of data or 3D objects when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams. The men's magazine, published in the US by the Hearst Corporation, featured an augmented reality cover, in which Robert Downey Jr introduced the December issue.
You are right, the whole thing was kind of a ridiculous PR stunt, and nobody really needed it; on other hand new technology often is a bit clumsy. But that is just a start. Sports journalism & augmented reality Summary. Exclusive > The Spark Series, Part 3 - eGuiders. We Search. You. By Michael Sean Wright Fellow documentarian Marc Ostrick and I continue our journey through the real-time web with the release of ‘OPEN. " We traveled to the sleepy but progressive community of Petaluma.
This Northern California town, once known as the "Egg Capital of The World" and the film location for George Lucas' American Graffiti, isn't the first place that comes to mind when thinking of creating a media empire. Leo Laporte has carved out a nearly idyllic existence here in the land beyond Silicon Valley. He launched his own network and streams over a dozen “Netcasts” each week, live from the TWiT Cottage. Surrounded by the latest in tech, a superb staff, and the support of thousands of devoted geeks, Laporte is proving that you can build community from nearly anyplace.
The story of TWiT really began at the Paul Allen backed TechTV Network, which Laporte helped launch in 1998 (formally known as ZDTV). Appearances By: This Week in Tech Panelists: Leo Laporte, Leoville.com John C. Doing journalism in 2010 is an act of community organizing. Nothing frustrates me more than watching journalists who’ve lost their newsroom jobs entering the blogosphere… with no clue as to what they should be doing online. Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment.
The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters… they’ve become community organizers. Before the holidays, I had lunch with a local journalist who is making the transition from a print staff job to online entrepreneur. He wanted to pick my brain for ideas on how to make the switch, and I was happy to talk. But whatever he asked, my answer kept resolving to the same point: you have to have a community that supports you, if you want to make a living online. “But thousands of people read me in the paper,” they stammer. News:rewired, 14 January 2010, City University London.
Bente Kalsnes' blog. Interactive Narratives - The Best in Multimedia Storytelling and. Freelance Tools, Advice, and Resources | Freelance Folder. 25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers | Blo. Quote and Comment. How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News. Today's demand for programmer/journalists is one sign of how the Internet has changed the newsroom. While the role has become crucial to many forward-thinking news organizations, traditional newsrooms are often still struggling to integrate programmer/journalists into their everyday workflow. I spoke to some programmer/journalists about their hybrid roles in news coverage. They had much to offer about the new frontiers of journalism, and how programmer/journalists are bringing unprecedented value to both major and startup news organizations. The Hybrid Role “Some stories are just better told as databases and interactive web apps,” said Adrian Holovaty, founder of the neighborhood news site EveryBlock, which was funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and acquired by MSNBC.com in August.
Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, which was acquired by MSNBC.com in 2007, said he was initially more interested in the tech side, but become more vested in the storytelling process. Intelligent Automation. Journalism.co.uk :: Best of the journalism blogs. S Social Media Guide for Journalists. Navigating the journalistic seas this past year has been a particularly challenging/exciting task. As many a publication foundered in the economic benthos, others rode the wave of new technology into previously uncharted waters. Mashable has been there through it all, stepping in to provide journalists with touchstones and compass directions to help them do everything from tell more compelling tales through alternative storytelling to make the most of their Twitter accounts.
It's not enough today to have a good rolodex of sources (seriously, who even has a rolodex nowadays?) And a solid recorder, journalists need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today's almost real-time media landscape. It's time to add another factor to the boot leather equation. Here's how: Add Social Media Tools to Your Belt The Journalist’s Guide to YouTube The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook The Journalist’s Guide to User Generated Video The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter.
Christina's Blog. Online - Top Stories. If you listen to Rebooting the News, a podcast done by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, and Dave Winer, often described as the father of blogging and RSS, you’ve heard their ongoing discussion about the importance of context and explanation in a new system for news. Building on those ideas and several existing projects, Rosen has developed an idea that could make journalism better by allowing more people to participate in the process: ExplainThis. ExplainThis has two parts. One is an open system through which anyone can ask and answer questions and vote on them. The second part involves “journalists standing by.” Journalists would monitor questions, looking for ones that meet three conditions: Many people are asking the same thing.
Via instant message, Rosen described ExplainThis to me as a user-centric approach to the news. For example, my dad is a pretty typical news consumer. That’s the kind of question journalists would answer on ExplainThis. 100 Educational Twitter Feeds for Journalism Students | Online C. One of the most crucial ways that you, as a journalism student, can become a better writer, reporter, editor or broadcaster is to read as much news as you possibly can. By gorging yourself on headline news, editorials and opinion pieces, features, blog posts, podcasts and videos, you’ll learn about industry standards and style trends for quality reporting. Here are 100 educational Twitter feeds for all types of journalism students. News Sources Follow these top news sources so that you’re always on top of the most important stories and continue to learn how to write, analyze, and comment on the news while staying relevant to your readers.
@Newsweek: You’ll get a full range of news media from @Newsweek, including blog posts, audio and video coverage, and more. @nytimes: The New York Times blasts the top news, front page and culture stories here. @TIME: This popular news magazine shares articles and asks for feedback on current issues. Reporters and Editors Freelance TV and Video Industry. WEBCAST: Twitter for Journalists, or everything you ever wanted.
The Society for News Design. The Future of Journalism, Solved - Media - Gawker. Digitale medier (bachelor) Online - E-Media Tidbits. In the last month, there has been a lot of sturm und drang over Demand Media, its model of content production, and its proprietary algorithm for optimizing content. Most of what was said, however, missed the point. I believe Demand Media is more of a threat to social media communications than it is to journalism and journalistic standards because of the kind of content it provides and what it does by providing search optimized content for corporate sites and evergreen content for the news industry.
First, some background. Who are these Demand Media guys anyway? Demand Media was founded in 2006 by former Intermix Media & MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt and Shawn Colo. The company started out by buying up domains, Web sites and other abandoned or neglected Internet properties. DM grew quietly and strategically, while working on its proprietary algorithms for search engine optimization (SEO). Demand Media’s acquisition of Pluck was a wise move. Spoofing search isn’t anything new. The long and the short of media content | Emily Bell | Media. Is this article already too long? It's a question to which I'm sure many people already have a strongly affirmative answer, in which case – stop reading. But even if you aren't reading I have to carry on writing until the space is full. It's an uncontroversial model, an inevitable consequence of newspaper layout rules. But in a digital world, and one where the cost of journalism is not falling as quickly as the revenues that support it, the opportunity arises to rethink what is "enough" in terms of good reporting, or commentary.
In fact, online this article could be less than the 140 characters permitted on Twitter plus a link to the Atlantic Monthly article written by the journalist Michael Kinsley (theatlantic.com/doc/201001/short-writing), which posited that many newspaper readers are put off by most articles being too long and adding nothing to the value of the news. The debates about "what is an article?
", or indeed "why make albums? " Study Finds Newspapers Lead in Providing New Information - NYTim. News:rewired, 14 January 2010, City University London.