Tag Archives: Journalism

Wired.com: Columbia to offer joint computer science and journalism degree

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US university Columbia has created a new masters’ degree combining computer science and journalism.

The Columbia programme, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of newsgathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.

The cross-disciplinary programme will equip journalists with vital data mining skills, technology to make their work more efficient and ideas for “new storytelling media using 3D photography and other methods”.

Full story at this link…

Boston Globe launches midday video news update

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The Boston Globe has launched a daily news video update. The 90-second broadcast is available on the paper’s homepage, Boston.com, between 11:45 and 1:45 pm EST. As reported here earlier this week, the Globe’s sister paper the New York Times has also launched a midday video news update, TimesCast.

Globe Today is more of a traditional news broadcast than TimesCast, which takes a behind-the-scenes approach, and is significantly shorter, weighing in at less than a quarter of the length of the Times’ feature.

The other significant difference is that Globe Today also appears on YouTube, making it embeddable, meaning I can embed it for you right here:


Must-read: PEJ’s annual State of the News Media report goes live

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Each year the US Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) produces a report on the State of the News Media, aggregating other reports on what has happened to news organisations during the previous 12 months and providing its own research into what lies ahead.

The 2010 report weighs in on paywalls, and why there’s still a “hill to climb”; the increasingly niche-focus of both traditional news organisations and new online-only players; and features a special report on the state of community media or citizen journalism projects.

It’s an incredibly thorough survey – featuring figures on changes in advertising spend across all sectors and analysis of news sites’ traffic figures – and is best read in full at this link.

Some highlight quotes:

Advertising:

  • 79 per cent of those surveyed said they had never or rarely clicked on an online ad.

News content:

  • “When it comes to audience numbers online, traditional media content still prevails, which means the cutbacks in old media heavily impact what the public is learning through the new.”
  • Online news coverage is still geared towards breaking news. New technologies for live reporting can provide a less vetted version of releases/press conferences;
  • BUT: “While technology makes it easier for citizens to participate, it is also giving newsmakers more influence over the first impression the public receives.”
  • News organisations are becoming disseminators rather than gatherers of news, and becoming more reactive than proactive.

Social media:

  • Eventually, the news operations that develop social networking strategies and distribution mechanisms well might be able to convince advertisers that they have special access to attractive news consumers – especially those who influence the tastes of others;
  • Blogging, amongst news consumers, is declining in frequency;
  • 80 per cent of links from blogs and social media sites studied are to US legacy media.

Niche news:

  • “Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate.”
  • “Online, it is becoming increasingly clear, consumers are not seeking out news organisations for their full news agenda.”

More on the report’s take on niche news at this link…

Columbia Journalism Review: The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook

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The excellent Craig Silverman has written a short guide to avoiding and detecting plagiarism and fabrication for the Columbia Journalism Review. To his knowledge no-one has yet written a “definitive guide,” he says.

Among the tips:

Use a different font and text color for your research files. This will help you instantly recognize other people’s words when you paste them into your story. (Many people have suggested this over the years. It works.)

The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook at this link…

(via StinkyJournalism.org)

The Indy’s new wall

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Independent.co.uk has a new wall, but it’s not of the Murdochian sort. It’s a News Wall displaying free content.

“It’s basically just a different way of presenting content. It simply pulls in new stories which have pictures attached and presents them,” editorial director for digital, Jimmy Leach, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s an aggregator of our own content, but trying to be an engaging one. Partly different presentation and partly, to be honest, an SEO play, giving the spiders something to crawl over,” he said.

Meanwhile, one of his colleagues, Pandora diarist Alice-Azania Jarvis,  isn’t entirely convinced. But what’s it for, she tweeted. Leach replied: “It’s a wall. It has news on it. It’s the News Wall. C’mon, what else do you need?”

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Thoughts from the AJE’s entrepreneurial journalism seminar

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Rob Campbell reports on the AJE conference on journalism education and entrepreneurship:

Meet Danny, Jack and James, of Little White Lies , Bad Idea , and London-Se1. They are young journalism entrepreneurs, who recently shared their thoughts with journalism lecturers at the January seminar of the AJE . Delegates also heard about Goldsmith College’s East London Lines start-up, and about the way students are working with a hyperlocal news site in Newcastle. And the icing on the cake (more icing later) was a skype chat with Jeff Jarvis speaking from his desk at CUNY.

Full post at this link…

(Hat-tip Paul Lashmar)

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IFNC pilot will launch Newcastle University’s events on journalism

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Newcastle University will this month hold the first in a series of seminars exploring ethnic diversity in the news industry workforce.

The seminar Widening Ethnic Diversity in the News Industry Workforce: Towards Solutions will coincide with the launch of the Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC) pilot schemes; an initiative in which interested parties are invited to bid to produce local content to replace the ITV regional news network.

Newspaper and broadcasting companies, independent producers and universities have formed Independently Financed News Consortia (IFNCs) to bid for around £21m to run three multi-platform pilot news services in Wales, Scotland and the Tyne Tees and Borders region.

But the news industry as a whole has a poor record of reflecting in its workforce the cultural and ethnic diversity of British society – and minority communities are entitled to expect changes if they are sharing the costs of this project.

Speakers at the event on 20 January at Newcastle University include International Federation of Journalists president Jim Boumelha and Bob Satchwell of the Society of Editors.

The two-year series of seminars, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will take place at six universities across England and Wales.

University journalism course acceptances up by 15.7 per cent

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Journalism is among the British university undergraduate subjects with the highest increase of acceptances in 2009, UCAS reported today.

The UK higher education service today released its provisional final figures for this year’s student entry, following ‘a record-breaking processing year for applications’ it said.

Overall, UCAS has seen an increase in acceptances by 5.6 per cent from the same point last year, and journalism (undergraduate) has shown a 15.7 per cent rise to 2,675 places – faring better than courses ‘linked with linguistic skills’.

Science, technology, engineering, business and maths related subjects have shown improvements too, UCAS reported, with nursing acceptances up by 20 per cent.

The Guardian reports that universities ‘could face multimillion pound fines after breaking a government-imposed cap on student numbers’.

Update: This article was update to reflect UCAS confirmation that all the courses included in this figure are undergraduate courses.

Newspaper lessons learnt by Roger Alton

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Independent editor, Roger Alton shares five hard lessons he has learnt about newspapers in the current edition of The Word Magazine. Jon Slattery has provided an edited version at this link.

Spell-check is a sat-nav for language, Alton says, and ‘journalists should be involved with everything and everyone around them, but not necessarily sleep with them..’

On celebrity content Alton says: “If you can’t see that Britney shaving her own hair off matters, just as the Budget matters, or Bono, though not necessarily in the same way, you aren’t going to enjoy working in newspapers.”


A cure for journalism: Printoxafin

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It really should be Friday to justify posting this, but it is very funny.

“Journalism is a serious and debilitating illness. Turns out that 9 out of 10 reporters suffer from journalism, and surveys have shown a full 97 per cent of those who contract journalism eventually die… but you don’t have to suffer in silence. Printoxafin is here to help.”

Dreamed up by reporter Tristan Stewart-Robertson, whose work can be found at http://www.w5pressagency.com/.

(Hat-tip: Jon Slattery’s blog / AllMediaScotland)