Saturday 31 May 2014

Latest Stories | Columbia Journalism Review

A hashtag made headlines again this week. #YesAllWomen was created in the wake of the Isla Vista shootings as a way for women to share their experiences of being threatened with male violence, particularly when they refused sexual advances. The hashtag has stayed on the list of US trending topics for several days--and led to dozens of second-day news stories and opinion pieces.

m.cjr.org/303546/show/86fee64c3f8828b271d79598912b4efb

The Journalist's Toolbox: Mobile Journalism Archives

This is a collection of mobile resources from Mike Reilley and the Poynter Institute's Regina McCombs, Dave Stanton and Damon Kiesow, as well as many others. A list of mobile reporting tools appears at the end of this page. Most apps are tailored to the iPhone but have versions available for many other smart phones, too.

www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/mobile-journalism

Wednesday 21 May 2014

How A British Blogger Became An Unlikely Star Of The Ukraine Conflict



How A British Blogger Became An Unlikely Star Of The Ukraine Conflict

Graham Phillips has won internet notoriety for his guerilla field reports from eastern Ukraine for Kremlin TV. Via Facebook: eurokharkiv

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — It was the bloodiest day yet in eastern Ukraine. On May 9, during Victory Day celebrations in the drab industrial seaside town of Mariupol, dozens of armed militants barricaded themselves inside a police station and exchanged fire with government forces. During the fighting, the building burned down. Pools of blood and singed bodies appeared in the street.

But how many people were killed? Local news reported two deaths. Ukraine's interior minister said 21 people died in the fighting. Human Rights Watch could only confirm seven deaths after visiting all four hospitals where the wounded were taken.

None of that seemed right to Graham Phillips, a roving Ukraine-based British blogger who films guerilla field reports from the conflict's hotspots for his own YouTube channel and has become a growing star on Kremlin-owned media. So he set out to investigate in the way that has made him a cult micro-celebrity in east Ukraine's crisis: interviewing angry people on the street for 90 seconds at a time.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/how-a-british-blogger-became-an-unlikely-star-of-the-ukraine

Monday 19 May 2014

Tips from the Guardian for creating shareable content



Tips from the Guardian for creating shareable content

The Guardian looks to sites such as BuzzFeed and Vice to understand more about what makes content highly shareable, Laura Oliver, the outlet's social and community editor, UK, said at the London Social Media Summit.

"We take these guys very seriously," Oliver said, speaking at the event on Friday (16 May) organised by the BBC College of Journalism and the New York Times.

"We look at ways that we can learn from them [in terms of] formats, headlines, the type of content, how it's built, how shareable is it and what's going to make people share it."

She added that the Guardian also spends "a lot of time" looking at their own stories which have gone viral, and what factors may have contributed to their popularity.

Although she noted that "there's often a lot of things we can't control," she said there were three key factors that the Guardian had identified in content that was well-shared, both on social networks and other off-site sources.

Friday 2 May 2014

MediaWireWorld: France 24 works with thousands of citizen observers



MediaWireWorld: France 24 works with thousands of citizen observers

On Friday, Reporters Without Borders announced a new partnership with TORSERVERS.NET "to create and maintain 250 additional relays for the Tor network."

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/249451/mediawireworld-france-24-works-with-thousands-of-citizen-observers/

5 lessons in start-up journalism from De Correspondent



5 lessons in start-up journalism from De Correspondent

Last April, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth raised $1.7 million in crowdfunding for De Correspondent, a new, online-only publication

The idea was to go from 'the news' to 'the new'," said Wijnberg, De Correspondent's editor-in-chief, who was previously editor-in-chief of nrc.next.

He and Pfauth, publisher of De Correspondent and former online editor of nrc.next, said they had tried to change the direction of their previous publication and failed. Instead, they took the ideas they had tried to implement for their own project.

"I thought the conversations I was having with the people writing articles were more interesting than the articles they were writing," said Wijnberg, and resolved to create a new publication based around each journalist – or correspondent – the stories they can tell and the conversations they can create.

A year after securing a reported world-record in crowdfunding for journalism, Pfauth and Wijnberg shared the lessons learned from their experiences so far at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.

As it Happens: How live news blogs work and their future



As it Happens: How live news blogs work and their future

All the talk is of a crisis in the news media, but we sometimes forget that digital technologies can give us better journalism, too. A great example of this is live blogging. Everything from football matches to parliamentary debates are now routinely covered by a range of live blogs.

In a 2010 Polis report on networked journalism we hailed it as 'the new front page' and for some readers this is now the most visible part of their online newspaper. It is the bit where traditional journalism is transformed into a mixture of broadcasting and instant storytelling. It is a narrative form that can combine tweets, audio clips, photos, video and graphics. It can draw material from social media or direct sources. It can cite learned academics, rival reporters or citizen's emails. It's fast moving, interactive and very accessible.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2014/05/02/report-launch-as-it-happens-how-live-news-blogs-work-and-their-future/