Gift of Training + Shift in Newsroom Thinking = Multimedia Storytelling. Sixteen online tools for newsgathering. Copyright: Image by JM Some rights reserved. Here is a collection of free monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. Use these tools to set up alerts and hone your newsgathering skills online. Find out when a key word or phrase is mentioned online You maybe familiar with Google Alerts , which asks you to specify a keyword or phrase and you then receive an email every time a new webpage or news story includes that word, but there are a couple of alternatives worth knowing about. 1. Mention The first is a powerful tool called Mention. You can download a desktop version (Mac, PC or Linux), or choose to use one of the web or mobile apps. You can click on the alerts in the app and see the source. This app offers a great user experience and will be useful to journalists covering all beats.
There is a free 30-day trial and payment plans start at $6.99. 2. If you like the idea of a Google Alerts alternative go for TalkWalker. 13. 14. Why not writing a story is innovation. Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich.
But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kind of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories, or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting. To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written. Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories — on “the journalism of filling space and time,” as Jeff Jarvis put it. They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. Readers will simply go somewhere else. Filler news can take many forms. Victor discovered — surprise! Five Steps to Storytelling with Data. In the pre-digital era, data was a subject for mathematicians and scientists.
Now, one way or another, we can’t escape it. Our constant use of online services not only relies on data, we are also a continuous source of data, generating information about all aspects of our lives. Whether it’s data about the human body—thanks to the rise of wearables—our energy consumption at home, or data tied to our personal finance: we’re creating mountains of data, and now we need to find ways to make sense of it.
The rise of personalized data is poised to be a hot topic as companies seek to deliver real benefits from the information gathered on consumers. The challenge for designers lies in finding a way to reduce the complexity posed by such vast amounts of data and give data a human shape. Data has to be accessible to the average person. Data visualization has come a long way since its formative days as the basic pie chart invented over 200 years ago. 1. 2. Tweet this 3.Define the User Experience 4. 5. Online Journalism Blog. Required Reading from Journalism Professors. How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work.
Digital First means different priorities and processes for journalists. The name and approach of my company, Digital First Media , is getting a lot of attention in journalism, and other companies have declared they will follow a digital-first approach . But I don’t think the approach is yet widely or well understood. As I’ve visited our company’s newsrooms, I’ve heard again and again from editors that they are “all in” for our digital emphasis. But in the next breath, some editors ask questions about what Digital First means for them and their newsrooms. Digital First is way more than just publishing breaking news online and shooting video (though it involves both). Digital First is about making the future your first priority, with everything that implies. It requires restructuring all your priorities. In a series of blog posts starting today, I will attempt to explain what those priorities mean.
My series is part of an extended conversation about Digital First journalism. What else? I.