Giornalismo Digitale

Toronto-based freelance reporter Naheed Mustafa always paid her own way when she reported from abroad. But that meant that about 70 percent to 80 percent of what she earned went straight toward paying for the costs of traveling.

Most news organizations don’t reimburse freelancers for travel costs, and the ones that do don’t offer a lot. Mustafa was looking for a more cost-effective solution, so she turned to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise $15,000 to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan for in-depth reporting on how its citizens are affected by conflict and war. After two months, she successfully reached her goal and will head abroad this month.

In a shrinking economic climate, many newspapers are cutting back on freelance budgets and expense reimbursements. Frustrated with this new reality, some journalists have taken financing into their own hands.

Joey Coleman has completed two crowdfunding campaigns, raising more than $20,000 in total,  and used the funds to provide extensive coverage of Hamilton, Ontario, municipal politics. And a Carleton University journalism student is hoping to raise $5,000 to help pay for costs while reporting in Uganda.

- See more at: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/05/crowdfunding-journalism-a-new-financing-model-for-freelancers#sthash.kDe6GNOO.dpuf

 Journalism, as an industry, has gone through difficult times since publications moved online.

Ad revenues are down and local newspapers are closing, leaving many reporters unemployed. Crowdfunding has been brought up as a potential solution, and individual campaigns have shown that the new way of fundraising can, indeed, support journalism.

Consider, for example, Planet Money’s recent Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $600,000 from over 20,000 backers. Or, the Dutch news startup ‘De Correspondent’ that raised $1.3 million before publishing a single article. On a smaller scale, Homicide Watch D.C., raised over $45,000 for a crime reporting lab.

But we have yet to see a crowdfunding platform for journalism take off in a big way. That’s not to say these platforms don’t exist: one of current players in the space, Emphas.is, focuses on the photojournalism niche and has funded over 45 such projects. But it’s one of very few successful platforms. Spot.us, a pioneer in the crowdfunded journalism field, started off with much promise, but hasn’t funded a story since November 2012.

There’s a lot of untapped potential here, and Vourno, a new platform that launched today, is taking a crack at filling the crowdfunded journalism gap.

Vourno site: https://www.vourno.com

Did you ever think that consumers would prefer digital magazines over print magazines? We do, and we think it'll happen within the next seven years.

And that judgement isn’t even based on speculation.

We just completed our first annual 2013 Mequoda Tablet Study, which revealed that in 2013, 55% of internet users own or have access to a tablet.

If growth occurs at the same rapid pace we’ve been witnessing thus far, we predict that market penetration will be at 85% by 2020".

I just finished reading Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. If you haven’t read this book yet, you should… in self-defense.

Holiday is a media strategist who has worked for, among others, Dov Charney, Tucker Max, and Robert Greene. The book provides some insight into online media, with Holiday styling himself as an insider who is spilling the beans on how easy it is to get publicity, make rumor and innuendo seem like credible news, and distort the truth. Holiday charges that far from being a grass roots alternative to “mainstream media,” the blogosphere is actually dominated by big networks that use poorly paid writers to churn out endless amounts of sensationalist crap to gain “pageviews” from fickle readers like you and me.

I love this “secret of adulthood” by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project: “Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy.” Continue reading →

It is no longer enough to tell audiences that your product is great and that they should buy it. One of the buzzwords that characterizes the shift away from pure selling is ‘storytelling.'

Tips on building communities, retaining followers and growing an engaged social media following

link to podcast: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Growing-social-media-communities_mixdown.mp3

Community manager at the Guardian Laura Oliver explains how the Guardian's flagship Twitter account is managed and shares her tips on community building

The Guardian yesterday passed the 1 million follower milestone on Twitter for its flagship @Guardian account, which acts as a showcase for the top stories and best content from the news outlet.

It is not the Guardian's first account to pass the mark, with@GuardianTech already attracting more than 2 million followers, helped by both being in Twitter's 'suggested users' list in the early days, and arguably by the technology audience being big users of Twitter.

Journalism.co.uk has been speaking to Laura Oliver, community manager at the Guardian, to find out the how the @Guardian account is managed, how it attracts new followers, and to gather some tips on growing a Twitter community.

Managing the account

The @Guardian account is "highly managed" by the community team, Oliver explained. There are three community coordinators who manage the account, with one person focusing on it at any given time between about 8am and 7pm on weekdays. At other times the account is managed by other editorial teams in London and by the US team. Some scheduling also takes place, with the community coordinators using HootSuite to push out content at key times.

The community coordinators "identify stories they think will play well for the Twitter audience, identify stories that need to go out at different times of day depending on what geographic audience we are trying the attract", Oliver said. They are constantly "looking at the language we use, looking at how we cover breaking news events with this account, and how we recommend our journalists and the site sections we have".

continue to read: http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/twitter-tips-how-guardian-reached-1m-followers/s2/a552990/

Advice from experts and trainers on how to start turning statistics into stories

"We've got so much data being published every day that you have to get these skills, you can't ignore the open data movement and you can't stay any longer without these skills. You need to get them."

Those are the words of Marianne Bouchart, a web producer for EMEA and data journalism project co-ordinator at Bloomberg News, which neatly sum up the importance, and opportunity, for journalists to get to grips with data.

In the 21st century, almost everything is logged electronically in some way or other. Making sense of the data is a growing necessity among journalists but, for some, that first step from the safe world of words to an alien landscape of numbers can be intimidating.

"I think it's easy to get scared by data journalism," continues Bouchart, "thinking, 'oh my god I don't know anything about numbers and I don't know anything about the subject of this data. Where am I going to start?'

"That's usually the first impression you get when working on a data journalism project and the advice I would give is to forget about fear and just be bold and take this as a great opportunity to learn new things."

So where do you start?

continue to read http://www.journalism.co.uk/skills/how-to-get-started-in-data-journalism/s7/a552981/

È una ventina di giorni ormai che sto provando Pullquote e si sta rivelando un servizio di quelli che potrebbero davvero fare la differenza su Twitter.
Se vi capita di linkare frequentemente articoli, post, ricerche (più o meno lunghi) online avrete spesso l’esigenza di attirare l’attenzione del lettore su uno specifico concetto o paragrafo chiave.
Come fare? Finora si poteva sintetizzare il concetto (sempre badando al limite dei 140 caratteri) e fornire il link per l’approfondimento lasciando però al lettore il compito di ritrovare il punto o leggersi tutto il pezzo.
Ora si può usare Pullquote.

Pullquote fa una cosa molto semplice: evidenzia la porzione di testo da noi selezionata in una qualsiasi pagina web su browser fornendo un link ad hoc già accorciato.

Quando si clicca sul link si arriva sull’articolo ma con il testo immediatamente evidenziato.
L’evidenziazione è molto efficace perché l’estratto è in una finestra in primo piano chiudendo la quale si può leggere l’articolo intero.
In questo modo si può leggere prima il concetto chiave e poi allargare la visione al contesto o al pezzo completo.

[...]

Probabilmente Pullquote è uno di quei piccoli servizi che possono aprire scenari interessanti per l’editoria online: basterebbe immaginare un add-on per editori al sistema per fornire citazioni di testo liberamente visualizzabili rendendo però a pagamento (o con abbonamento) la lettura dell’articolo intero.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says that many of the cultural barriers to doing “networked journalism” have been lowered, and he is trying to help media outlets develop smart tools and ways of making use of crowdsourcing.

As the media have become more social and thereby more “networked” — whether they like it or not — smart publishers like The Guardian and ProPublica have taken advantage of this phenomenon to crowdsource knowledge in a variety of ways. A decade or more after the concept started to become commonplace, the battle over whether it has journalistic value seems to have been mostly won. Now it is about developing a shared vocabulary and methods for helping journalists do it.

Scrivo da anni della necessità di nuove metriche per siti e pubblicità online, metriche ancor oggi eccessivamente ancorate agli utenti unici e soprattutto alle pagine visualizzate, le cosiddette pageview.

"Taroccare utenti unici e pagine visualizzate è ormai un classico per molti editori online: per guadagnare pageview vengono usate tecniche evidenti anche al profano (come il classico auto refresh dell’home page dei più noti quotidiani), ed altre un po’ più sofisticate e meno lampanti a primo acchito (come l’acquisto di traffico su keyword dai bassissimi costi, da network di pessima qualità, per non parlare di webpage che si aprono dentroiframe da 1×1 pixel o via popup/popunder)".

Gawker has just taken checkbook journalism to a whole new level — asking the public to help buy a video tape that is likely to bring down the mayor of a major city.

This piece at Forbes about Boston journalist Justin Rice is interesting for a few reasons:

— It describes how Justin, a few years back, started an independent, no-revenue site called BPSsports that covered high school sports in the urban Boston public schools — something local media wasn’t particularly interested in covering. After building it up, it was scooped up by The Boston Globe, where it lives on as BPS Sports Blog at Boston.com, with Justin still serving as lead writer. It’s a nice example of the value of just starting something and of the opportunities that can open up.

There’s been a bit of a backlash brewing in media circles lately: a growing movement against the idea that online journalism has to consist solely of hundreds of tiny news briefs or slideshows, and in favor of the idea that “longform” writing can also thrive online. Along those lines, the technology site Fast Company provided some interesting data recently about its experience with writing longer pieces — but I think the conclusions it arrived at aren’t about length as much as they are about engagement…..

Su NiemanLab la sintesi di un recente studio che affronta l’ ipotesi di una analogia fra la presunzione di oggettività dell’ algoritmo e i suoi meccanismi fondativi e la concezione della ‘’oggettività’’ che è alla base stessa del giornalismo occidentale.

Una Conferenza alla New York University sulla ”Relevance of Algorithms”.

Gli algoritmi sono sempre più invocati come entità potenti, che possono controllare, governare, ordinare, regolare e dare forma a tutte le cose, dai traffici finanziari ai mezzi di informazione. Tuttavia, la natura e le implicazioni di tali strutture sono tutt’ altro che chiare. Che cosa ‘’fanno’’ esattamente gli algoritmi? Qual è il ruolo attribuito agli “algoritmi”? Come trasformare il “problema algoritmi” in un oggetto di indagine produttiva?

Questi interrogativi erano al centro di un incontro che si è svolto alla New York University dal titolo Governing Algorithms conference.

La conferenza è stata preparata da una serie di contributi preliminari.  Fra di essi  Niemanlab segnala in particolare quello di Tarleton Gillespie ,  “The Relevance of Algorithms” , che collega l’ idea di una possibile natura ‘’oggettiva’’ dell’ algoritmo alla concezione giornalistica della ‘’obbiettività’’.

Niemanlab ha selezionato i passi più rilevanti di questo studio e li sottoponiamo ai lettori di Lsdi perché contengono spunti  interessanti, anche sul piano dell’ approfondimento della cultura giornalistica americana (i neretti sono del redattore di Niemanlab)

Troy Thibodeaux pubblica su Poynter “10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient” , una guida pratica per chi vuole cimentarsi nel campo del data giornalismo e desidera avere una panoramica degli strumenti migliori e più utilizzati dagli esperti nel settore. La nostra redazione vi offre la traduzione integrale della guida Thibodeaux così da renderne la fruizione più ampia e significativa possibile.

10 tools che aiuteranno i datagiornalisti a fare meglio il loro lavoro, ad essere più efficienti.

È difficile sviluppare competenze professionali che ci aiutino a gestire con pari destrezza tutte le mansioni richieste dal datagiornalismo.

A rendere le cose più complicate (o a migliorarle, in verità) sono i data giornalisti che non accennano a voler rallentare la loro vorace corsa verso la scoperta e l’applicazione di metodologie e strumenti digitali sempre nuovi.

Content Curation, in its most simplest terms, is the act of gathering related, targeted pieces of content and sharing it. Like an art curator, a Content Curator is a taste maker—an influencer—and has authority in a given topic.

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity.