Saturday, 24 September 2016
KEYNOTE: Do We Need a Bechdel Test for News? How Inclusiveness and Credibility Can Expand Coverage
From Online News Association
Around the world, news features women only 24 percent of the time, a data point indicative of journalism’s larger problem with inclusiveness in all forms of diversity, including race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. As tragic incidents in Orlando, Baton Rouge, Nice and Dallas have underscored, newsrooms on average lack diversity in sources, expert commentators and subjects -- and often that starts with the make-up of staff. Our innovative experts will provide case studies and concrete insights into challenges and successes of inclusivity, and share how technology, transparency, partnerships and editorial prioritization can fuel growth in both reach and impact.
Around the world, news features women only 24 percent of the time, a data point indicative of journalism’s larger problem with inclusiveness in all forms of diversity, including race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. As tragic incidents in Orlando, Baton Rouge, Nice and Dallas have underscored, newsrooms on average lack diversity in sources, expert commentators and subjects -- and often that starts with the make-up of staff. Our innovative experts will provide case studies and concrete insights into challenges and successes of inclusivity, and share how technology, transparency, partnerships and editorial prioritization can fuel growth in both reach and impact.
Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved
The problem and lots of stuff that are not the answer. Joshua Topolsky on Medium
Your problem is that you make shit. A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.
The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let’s say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people — they were made to reach the right people. Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines. What will save the media industry — or at least the part worth saving — is when we start making Real Things for people again, instead of programming for algorithms or New Things.
How to prepare for journalism jobs of the near-future
This is just a snapshot of the whole article - must read in more detail from here: Poynter.org
Data and algorithms investigations team: You can use algorithms to do things like calculate really large numbers or compress audio or produce thousands of automated news stories on a particular topic.
If you’re interested, Dartmouth has a good intro to algorithms class online.
Enhanced Reporter: reporters using artificial intelligence to help them discover trends or different angles of a story.
It may sound farfetched, but it’s the same technology that’s used in facial recognition software, automatic scheduling software and speech recognitio
this Stanford syllabus, and then supplementing with video lectures from MIT.
More reading: 4 Examples of AI’s Rise in Journalism (And What it Means for Journalists); My battle to prove I write better than an AI robot called ‘Emma’
Augmented reality producer: this CJR piece which details lots of examples, and then reading this Knight Foundation series on virtual and augmented reality storytelling
Bot developer: this excellent tutorial by Darius Kazemi if you’re interested in making your own.
How are they useful? Think of something you’d like to automate, or monitor, or do — and there’s likely a bot you can design to help you.
More reading: The New York Times has a 2016 Election bot; Automation in the Newsroom.
Platforms manager, data scientist: this Stanford stats class, along with some classes in data analysis and SQL — because you’ll likely be juggling lots of data and then crunching the numbers to make decisions for your newsroom. Reddit’s Data Science community is quite helpful, as is learning how to use Jupyter notebooks for data visualizations.
A Harvard professor studied 10 major media outlets and found a harsh reality about election coverage
10 major outlets studied
Each report was based on a detailed content analysis of the presidential election coverage on five television networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC) and in five leading newspapers (Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today).The analysis indicates that substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention in the 2016 election coverage.
But in the overall context of election coverage, issues have played second fiddle. They were at the forefront in the halls of the national conventions but not in the forefront of convention-period news coverage. Not a single policy proposal accounted for even 1% of Hillary Clinton's convention-period coverage, and collectively her policy stances accounted for a mere 4% of it.
Trump's policies got more attention — but not until after the Democratic convention ...
"Medialities" is the label political scientist Michael Robinson has given to such controversies. Journalists find them irresistible,
More here from The Conversation
What distracts us
The leading "mediality" of the 2016 campaign has been Clinton's emails. That and other news references to Clinton-related "scandals" accounted for 11% of her convention-period coverage.Policy issues, on the other hand, lack novelty.
How Digital Media Is Changing News Media
From Digital Mag
more here
Trends in digital media have therefore shaped the way we gather, process, and analyze information. This extends not only to news stories, but also to lifestyle articles telling us who wore it best. We now want to know not only who wore it, but also when, at what event, and with whom. And most importantly – we want this information delivered at the source, preferably in the form of an interview at the event itself.
Has the role of local media died?
Not quite.How has today’s audience changed?
Today’s audience is not just linked to people who have TVs.What role will local media play in the next few years?
Local news outlets must adopt digital media strategies that will position them to think and market globally. Live streaming information, tweeting at the source, and continuous news feeds will be continuously relevant.more here
Young and old news consumers want to get their news in very different ways, says Pew
From Neimanlab.org
(Mobile news consumption on the whole is rising, though: Around 72 percent of respondents said that they get news on mobile devices. That’s up from 53 percent in 2013.)
Viewership among young people is sinking.
- 54 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say that prefer to get their news digitally,
- 38 percent of those ages 30 to 49 say that prefer to get their news digitally,
- 15 percent of those ages 50 to 64 say that prefer to get their news digitally,
- 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say they prefer to only get news on mobile devices.
- 53 percent of people ages 30 to 49 say they prefer to only get news on mobile devices.
- 29 percent of those between the ages of 50 and 64 say they prefer to only get news on mobile devices.
(Mobile news consumption on the whole is rising, though: Around 72 percent of respondents said that they get news on mobile devices. That’s up from 53 percent in 2013.)
Viewership among young people is sinking.
- 72 percent of people between 50 and 64 and
- 85 percent of those over 65 say they get their news from TV,
- just 29 precent of 18- to 29-year-olds say the same.
Commentary on Comments
There has been a rash of commentary about comments. Once the very basis of the internet then the web - an exchange of ideas - open to readers on newspaper comment sections, these places where people were expected to have interesting, stimulating discussion and disagreement have become disagreeable places.
Here is one comment from the New York Times by Jamilah Lemieux is the senior editor at Ebony magazine under the title Get Rid of Comment Sections (April 2016)
Again April 2016.
Here is one comment from the New York Times by Jamilah Lemieux is the senior editor at Ebony magazine under the title Get Rid of Comment Sections (April 2016)
"As most of my writing deals with subjects of race, gender and sexuality, there is a large built-in base ready to attack. I thank them for giving our site (which they claim to hate) daily web clicks, but I will not reward them with engagement. Once a fantastic space for a meeting of minds scattered across the globe, comment sections have become rest havens for racists, sexists and homophobes.
"Unfortunately, this behavior isn’t limited to sites that deal with polarizing subjects like “Why Black People Have the Right to Exist” or “Women: Humans, Too!” Even beauty and mommy blogs and movie review websites are littered with the scourge of the earth, desperately seeking attention."
"Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There’s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny."One example worth reading more about is covered by
Again April 2016.
"The latest high-profile victim is Alison Rapp, formerly a spokesperson for Nintendo of America. Rapp has been in the crosshairs of an online mob since fall, when Nintendo changed several female characters in American versions of its games to make them less sexual. Critics wrongly assumed that Rapp, an outspoken feminist, was involved, and launched a very public investigation into her personal life. In between deconstructing her Amazon wishlist, surfacing anonymous social accounts and circulating copies of her undergraduate thesis, the self-styled investigators also found evidence that Rapp was working a mysterious second job"Dewey also wrote In the battle of Internet mobs vs. the law, the Internet mobs have won for WaPo. Another excellent example.
Here are a bunch of fascinating tidbits about BuzzFeed
This from Niemanlab,org
‘Twas the week for BuzzFeed strategy analysis pieces: Fast Company declared BuzzFeed the most innovative company of 2016, kicking off a week of coverage; Poynter also ran a story on how BuzzFeed built its investigative reporting team.
You’ll probably want to read the articles in full, but here are a few noteworthy things:
- Video is huge - 5 billion monthly views
- Traffic “remained steady” at 80 million people from the U.S. every month
- BuzzFeed has 90 Facebook pages.
- BuzzFeed publishes 65 original videos each week, “for YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, as well as for brands.”
- A data initiative called Hive aims to “track every editorial idea, even ones that aren’t published
- Content that goes viral in one country can go viral in another even if it seems particularly local
- BuzzFeed will become one of a handful of media companies with the ability to effectively distribute a worldwide advertising campaign
- “The data never tells you why anything happens,” says publisher Dao Nguyen. “Data will tell you, if you’re very lucky, what happened. It won’t ever tell you why.
The dark side of Guardian comments
"As part of a series on the rising global phenomenon of online harassment, the Guardian commissioned research into the 70m comments left on its site since 2006 and discovered that of the 10 most abused writers eight are women, and the two men are black. Hear from three of those writers, explore the data and help us host better conversations online"
Read the full artile here.
Political debate, a crucial element of any democracy, is becoming ever more poisoned.
One of the predictions and dare I say dreams about how we will use social media in the future was to - as responsible citizens - hold people in power (politicians, media, business) to account. But as Owen Jones writes in the Guardian,
"Take the comments underneath newspaper articles. Columnists could once avoid any feedback, other than the odd missive on the letters’ page. Now we can have a two-way conversation, a dialogue between writer and reader. But the comments have become, let’s just say, self-selecting – the anonymously abusive and the bigoted increasingly staking it out as their own, leading anyone else to flee. Such is the level of abuse that many – particularly women writing about feminism or black writers discussing race – have simply given up reading, let alone engaging with, reader comments."
Political debate, a crucial element of any democracy, he argues "is becoming ever more poisoned.
"Social media has helped to democratise the political discourse, forcing journalists – who would otherwise simply dispense their alleged wisdom from on high – to face scrutiny. Some take it badly. They are used to being slapped affectionately on the back by fellow inhabitants of the media bubble for their latest eloquent defence of the status quo. To have their groupthink challenged by the great unwashed is an irritation.
"In truth, the intensity of the scrutiny ranges from the intermittent to the relentless, depending on a few things: how far the target deviates from the political consensus; how much of a profile they have; and whether they happen to be, say, a woman, black, gay, trans or Muslim. There’s scrutiny of ideas, and then there’s something else. And it is now so easy to anonymously hurl abuse – sometimes in coordination with others of a similar disposition – it can have no other objective than to attempt to inflict psychological harm."The whole article is here.
4 current digital media trends that will continue to shape news in 2016
On Christmas Eve 2015, Journalism.co.uk published "4 current digital media trends that will continue to shape news in 2016"
They were (and I suppose now in September 2016):
They were (and I suppose now in September 2016):
- The rise of 360-degree video
- Mobile is no longer just an extension of the web
- Live streams as eyewitness media
- Chat apps as a newsgathering tool
There is also a podcast to go with this article embedded below
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