6 online tools for investigative journalism

journalism.co.uk reporting:

6 online tools for investigative journalism
'Civic technologist' Friedrich Lindenberg shares a range of tools journalists can use in investigative journalism projects

Investigative journalism has long been the marker by which news organisations – and journalists – measure their worth.

"As a journalist your main tool is talking to people and asking the right questions of the right people," said civic technologist and self-described "OpenGov and data journalism geek" Friedrich Lindenberg in a webinar on investigative journalism tools for the International Centre for Journalists last week.

"This is still true, but also you can ask the right questions with the right databases. You can ask the right questions with the right tools."

Lindenberg listed an arsenal of tools the investigative journalist can equip themselves with. Here are some of the highlights.

DocumentCloud

Lindenberg described DocumentCloud as a "shared folder of documents", offering different folders that can be used for various investigations, control over who can access which documents, the ability to annotate different parts of documents, search throughout and embed segments or entire documents.

Even better, DocumentCloud looks for "entities" – such as people, companies, countries, institutions – identifies them and makes them searchable, which is especially useful for legal documents that may stretch into hundreds of pages when you are only interested in a few key points...
Overview

A "bit more of an expert tool", according to Lindenberg, Overview lets the user import documents from DocumentCloud or CSV files and then counts the frequency of words to make a "hierarchy of terms" for words.

When used this way, Overview can give a quick rundown of large numbers of documents, making it easier to understand the core topics.

OpenCorporates...
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/6-online-tools-for-investigative-journalism/s2/a563510/?utm_source=API%27s%20Need%20to%20Know%20newsletter&utm_campaign=d520b51cfb-Need_to_Know_December_17_201412_17_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-d520b51cfb-31701933

Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out

Poynter reporting:
Facebook’s Liz Heron answered for a litany of perceived sins and slights last week during a conversation with The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal and attendees at the Online News Association conference in Chicago. Journalists are anxious about being left out of the loop about how Facebook works, and they want answers...
But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?
Facebook would say they’re not really deciding what news matters — they’re just revealing what news really resonates with each individual user. And that’s how you end up with Ice Bucket Challenge videos dominating your News Feed instead of the latest information about Ferguson protests...
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/271889/facebook-is-more-important-to-news-distribution-than-you-think-and-journalists-are-freaked-out/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=89244ee3b4-Need_to_Know_October_3_201410_3_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-89244ee3b4-31701933

The New York Times Launches New Homepage “Watching” Feature

NYT reporting:

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report.
Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of developing stories on NYTimes.com and curation of the most newsworthy and trusted reporting from around the web. It also features tweets from Times reporters and others, as well as photos and YouTube videos.

A team of New York Times reporters and editors, led by editors Marcus Mabry, Jennifer Preston, select the content for Watching and are in constant contact with various Times news desks. They search the web and social media for reliable breaking and developing news.
Readers can watch video, share stories and follow others on Twitter and email directly from the Watching module. They can also scroll through Watching indefinitely, to catch up on news they may have missed or track stories over time...
http://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-release-details/2014/The-New-York-Times-Launches-New-Homepage-Watching-Feature/default.aspx?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=d4bce92def-Need_to_Know_September_23_20149_23_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-d4bce92def-31701933

Journalism and the internet: Is it the best of times? No — but it’s not the worst of times either

gigaom reporting:

Writer David Sessions argues in a piece at Patrol magazine that journalism is worse because of the effects of the internet — but most of the things that he and others complain about have been a part of the media business for hundreds of years, including clickbait
Having just written what I consider a defense of the internet’s effect on journalism and the media industry, I didn’t expect to have to do it again so soon. But just after Andrew Leonard’s short-sighted piece in Salon about how the internet has crippled journalism, David Sessions wrote on the same topic in Patrol magazine, and arguably did an even worse job of describing the current state of journalism, calling it a morass of “cynical, unnecessary, mind-numbing, time-wasting content.”
It’s not just the over-riding pessimism of both of these pieces that bothers me. It’s the failure to appreciate that the complaints they have are the same ones that have been made about journalism for decades — combined with the unrestrained longing for some mythical golden age of journalism....
..Is this the best of times for journalism? No. But it’s hardly the worst of times either. The fact is that there was no “golden age of journalism.” Journalism has always been a messy and chaotic and venal undertaking in many ways — the internet didn’t invent that. All the web has done is provide us with more ways to produce and distribute both ephemeral nonsense and serious journalism in greater quantities. The good part is that it has also made it easier to find the things we care about. What we choose to do with that power, as always, is up to us.
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/28/journalism-and-the-internet-is-it-the-best-of-times-no-but-its-not-the-worst-of-times-either/

When it comes to chasing clicks, journalists say one thing but feel pressure to do another

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Newsroom ethnographer Angèle Christin studied digital publications in France and the U.S. in order to compare how performance metrics influence culture....
In my research, I analyze online news in two countries, the United States and France, which have different journalistic traditions. I rely on ethnographic methods, a mix of observations and interviews, to systematically compare what editors and writers say about their work with what they actually do when they are in front of their computers.  ..
Several factors explain why journalists react differently to web metrics, including the size and age of the website, its financial situation, its editorial line, the age of the staffers, their career background (print or web), the management style of the organization, and the country in which this takes place...
In other words, all media sites now rely on web analytics to make editorial decisions. But this does not mean that they all use and interpret metrics in similar ways. In fact, each editorial department makes sense of traffic numbers differently. There is not one but several “cultures of the click.”...
Journalism has a double nature. It is both a public good and a commodity. With the multiplication of web metrics, good and bad, new strategies are needed to protect editorial independence from market forces. The need to find workable arrangements between editorial ambitions and economic realities is as old as journalism itself. It is also the only possible way to secure the future of the media, online.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/08/when-it-comes-to-chasing-clicks-journalists-say-one-thing-but-feel-pressure-to-do-another/

When does giving the reader what they want turn into clickbait? It’s complicated

gigaom reporting:
The outrage over clickbait is really just a symptom of the change from a one-way, broadcast model of journalism to one in which we actually know what readers want to read — and it’s not always what we think they should
The conventional wisdom is that clickbait is the bane of internet journalism, a kind of desperate pandering by revenue-challenged media companies aimed at racking up eyeballs — driven by the relentless economics of pageview-driven advertising. But what is it really? Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, and Facebook is even trying to ban it from the network, but defining it is harder than it seems. In fact, the dividing line between clickbait and serving the interests of the reader is a lot more blurry than the conventional wisdom suggests.
What got me thinking about this again was a Nieman Lab post by ethnographer Angèle Christin, who has been looking at the impact that audience metrics and analytics have had on digital journalism in the U.S. and France. Christin — a post-doctoral fellow at the New School for Social Research — spent two years observing and interviewing journalists and bloggers about analytics, and studying the way newsrooms are being changed by the web.
Many argue that an obsession with metrics has put journalists on a “hamster wheel” and driven the quality of online journalism to new depths (an argument I’ve tried to refute a number of times), to the point where some media outlets don’t even allow their writers to see the metrics related to their work, for fear of distorting their motives. But in many ways, “clickbait” is just a natural outgrowth of the evolution in journalism from a one-way broadcast approach to a two-way model — in other words, from push to pull, or from supply-driven to demand-driven.
...Has this transformation resulted in more clickbait and pandering? Undoubtedly it has. But it has also arguably resulted in more content that readers actually want to read, as opposed to producing reams of newspaper articles that no one ever makes it to the end of, just because some random editor thought it was important. And that’s probably a good thing.
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/29/when-does-giving-the-reader-what-they-want-turn-into-clickbait-its-complicated/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=e5cc44aa23-c:mdad:08-30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-e5cc44aa23-99152541

Does having native advertising make a news site less credible? This study, at least, suggests no

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Native advertising is providing an ever-larger chunk of digital revenue for publishers these days. But despite (or perhaps because of) the money, lots of journalists are still squeamish about the topic. They worry that, at its core, native advertising is about tricking your reader into reading an ad and thinking its editorial content. Why would a reader who feels duped by a news brand ever want to return to it?
That’s the question that led Patrick Howe and Brady Teufel of Cal Poly to publish a research paper titled “Native Advertising and Digital Natives: The Effects of Age and Advertisement Format on News Website Credibility Judgments.” Howe, an AP journalist turned academic, said he heard experienced journalists worrying about the declining quality of advertising and the potential ethical dilemmas of native advertising...
...In fact, people in both age groups felt more or less the same about the credibility of the two sites, regardless of what kind of advertising it displayed. Young people were slightly more likely to recognize native advertising as an ad, but what they saw did not influence their judgment of the site. Older viewers, meanwhile, tended to find the news site more credible no matter what, suggesting that older readers of digital media are more trusting and less judgmental than their younger counterparts....
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/does-having-native-advertising-make-a-news-site-less-credible-this-study-at-least-suggests-no/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=a7866efca1-Need_to_Know_May_1_20145_1_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-a7866efca1-31701933

Day-old news won’t cut it in print anymore

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:

If you asked me what are the three main challenges of any newspaper
company today, my answer would be:
first, to evolve from mono-media companies to multimedia information engines;
second, to integrate all your editorial and business resources into an open multimedia newsroom;
and third, to rethink and reinvent the editorial models of your print products in this new multimedia landscape.
All of them are unavoidable. The first one must be led by owners, CEOs, and publishers. The second one needs the understanding and full support of top editors and general managers. And the third one, the most crucial one, the participation and involvement of all journalists.
Bosses can rule on vision, strategy, integration, and media architecture — but only with all your journalists aboard your company will be able to develop new editorial models.
Why? Because most of your editors, writers, reporters, and visual journalists came to your company when the print newspaper had an editorial model that for centuries nobody challenged. Newspaper newsrooms were, and always will be, the “core” of our news business. They were the best to find, select, write, edit, and design news and stories that your readers couldn’t find anywhere else.
For this reason, we presented ourselves as “newspapers of record.” Something that, today, we aren’t anymore. As The New York Times says: “We
don’t record the news. We find the news.” A training manual for new Financial Times journalists is very clear on this point: “News reporters do two things. They find the news and they write news. The first is hugely more important.”
In the past, every 24 hours, our newsrooms were able to produce a print newspaper with exclusive content, and readers needed to pay for our daily selection of the most relevant and interesting news and stories of the day before.
But that model has crashed. It’s dead and doesn’t work anymore. “Yesterday’s newspapers” are worthless. 
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/day-old-news-wont-cut-it-in-print-anymore/ 

The Need for a Digital "New Journalism"

Monday Note reporting:
News reporting is aging badly. Legacy newsrooms style books look stuck in a last Century formalism (I was tempted to write "formalin"). Take a newspaper, print or online. When it comes news reporting, you see the same old structure dating back to the Fifties or even earlier. For the reporter, there is the same (affected) posture of effacing his/her personality behind facts, and a stiff structure based on a string of carefully arranged paragraphs, color elements, quotes, etc.

I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to punch...
 1/ Readers' Time Budget. People are deluged with things to read. ..
2/ Trust factor / The contract with the Brand...
3 / Competition from the inside. Strangely enough, newspapers have created their own gauge to measure their obsolescence. By encouraging their writing staff to blog, they unleashed new, more personal, more... modern writing practices...
4/ The influence of magazine writing.
Digital media needs to invent its own journalistic genres.

http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/02/17/the-need-for-a-digital-new-journalism/

The Future of Journalism: Wanna' Buy a House?

Huff Post reporting:
"There are a lot of niches in a newspaper, and everyone of these is going to be a niche online."
John Rebchook, author, reporter and publisher of the Colorado real-estate blog, Inside Real Estate News, took two years to prove that the niche he had developed as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News could be replicated as a sustainable business online, and that the business could replace his old newspaper salary.
Rebchook expects to reach that mark this year after a struggle not only to craft an attractive online presence for his work, but also to carry his audience from the Rocky, which closed in February 2009, to the blog which he launched in July that same year.
Rebchook's blog represents the future of journalism in the 21st century. Out of the creative destruction of the newspaper industry, which is still struggling to find business models that work, comes individual journalists who turn their own work into a product sold through the new small businesses they create to replace their collapsed careers.
Small, online-only media start ups will not pull down the huge numbers that major media organizations consider necessary to sustain themselves -- usually measured in monthly unique visits to a website, with large organizations tallying those in the millions of visits per month. But small online businesses can pull down unique visits numbered in the thousands, and Rebchook has proven those numbers can sustain his small company.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-schwab/the-future-of-journalism-_b_1690492.html

Study: Online-only news sites 'struggling to cover costs'

Journalism.uk reporting:
A report looking at the successes and failures of online-only news websites in Europe has found that most are unable to cover their operating costs, meaning most survive for less than three years.

The study, "Survival is Success", published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), suggests that "surviving for more than a few years is a form of success in itself".

Out of nine start-up news sites analysed in the report, only two, Mediapart (France) and Perlentaucher (Germany) broke even. Mediapart is sustained by a paywall system, while Perlentaucher's low operating costs help its survival, combined with a "highly diversified business model" the report adds.

The rest of the nine have either shut down, been bought out by news magazines, or continue to operate at a loss, surviving only on support from external investors.

The report says there are two main challenges for online-only news websites:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/study-online-only-news-sites-struggling-to-cover-costs-/s2/a548867/

Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives

Digital First reporting:
John Paton: Good evening.
I’m old media.
This is my 36th year as a newspaper man – apologies – my 36th year as a multi-platform news executive.
It’s a career I started as a copyboy on this same street about a dozen blocks east of here.
I was hired for taking a picture of a belly dancer fooling with a drunk columnist. I was given the job of a guy who had just been fired for being a drunk. And I ended my first night on the job, taking home – dead drunk – the guy who hired me.
In my career the only reprimand I have ever received – if you don’t count the odd suspension for insubordination – was about expenses, specifically it was about booze. It read: “You are no longer allowed to order an Armagnac, digestif or any other after dinner drink that is older than you are.”
This is commonly referred to as the Golden Era of journalism.
And now, like many of you, I am struggling hard to teach this old dog new tricks.
Struggling to accept that much of what we know is no longer valid.
And trying to come to grips with the fact that crappy newspaper executives are a bigger threat to journalism’s future than any changes wrought by the Internet.
All of us have been subjected to the annual spectacle of a gaggle of print publishers gathering on a panel – Doug Knight, our moderator this evening, has officiated over a couple of these – to declaim they are not dead yet.
It’s an embarrassing display played out time and time again at conferences where our industry heads look like aging ingénues at Stratford declaring they can still play Juliette. And nobody has the heart to break it to them.
Or worse still, mediocre journalists, wrapping themselves in the flag of long-form journalism, to deride the value of social media as a reporting tool. A tool they don’t understand or care to understand.
http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/old-dogs-new-tricks-and-crappy-newspaper-executives/

Rusbridger on Open Journalism at the Guardian

editorsweblog reporting:

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger answered readers’ questions about open journalism in a live chat on the paper’s website this afternoon, following the paper’s ‘Open Weekend,’ which aimed to put the principle of open journalism fully into practice.
Rusbridger lists the paper’s ten principles of open journalism: essentially it is journalism which embraces information from others and enters into a dialogue with the wider world.
The issues he addressed in the chat include:
Transparency
Rusbrider said that the paper does already give background data in the form of facts and figures in some cases so that readers can make their own judgments. But “we could, and should, do more, he continued. “I've always been keen on the idea of footnotes. Difficult in print, easier on the web. Ditto links.”
Paywalls and advertising
During a session of the Open Weekend on what readers might be prepared to give back to the newspaper in return for journalism, Rusbridger said that paid online content has not been ruled out, Journalism.co.uk reported. He clarified in the online chat that the Guardian continues to keep an “interested eye on the economic models of other newspapers, particularly the New York Times,” but that “there's nothing on the horizon.”
When asked about potential pressure from advertisers he responded:“There are clearly dangers in over dependence on advertising, but, broadly I think it's been a beneficial factor in newspaper publishing over the centuries ... and will continue to be.”
The changing role of an editor...
Print vs online...
http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/03/26/rusbridger-on-open-journalism-at-the-guardian 

New operating model, new website: how Le Monde plans to connect with online readers

wan/ifra reporting:
With the debut of its redesigned website, French national daily newspaper Le Monde combined enhanced visual media and user participation in hopes of creating a more social news experience.
Le Monde.fr, the third most trafficked media site in France, launched its new format on Monday, as previously reported. Features of the site include more space for visual media, categorical tabs for each section of the news and a live chat window.
Editors Weblog spoke with Le Monde.fr Editor-in-Chief Alexis Delcambre about his primary goals for the newspaper in the online realm.
Social networking and the news
“The first objective is to improve the editorial formats that we’ve been experimenting with in our newsroom for a year,” Delcambre said.
One such new format is the “Live” feature, a chat window that appears on the home page of Le Monde.fr. On “Live,” users can ask questions of Le Monde journalists or make comments about certain topics, with journalists responding to their queries in real time. Delcambre said the feature is an innovation in France.
“It is inspired by chat windows that exist on Facebook and on Google Docs, just like a chat with a friend,” Delcambre said. “We sought to reproduce this format on our site so that when one participates on “Live,” one can have a dialogue with our editorial staff.”
As we previously reported, regional Swedish newspaper Norran offers a live online chat box, eEditor, in which users can suggest story ideas to journalists in the newsroom. UK daily The Guardian also recently began a Newsdesk live feature, in which journalists post breaking news and which stories they plan to cover on a daily blog for readers to see.
Delcambre said that “Live” aims to add an interactive dimension to the Le Monde website. Live chats not only allow users to question the editorial staff, but help journalists to better understand what information their readers want, he said.
The newsroom staff monitor the comments, choosing which to respond to on “Live,” he said. The task of responding to the questions posed in the chat window, while designated by time slots, is often a collaborative effort, he said.
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=4025588323270999487

Financial Times to set up new 'live news' operation

Journalism.co.uk reporting:
The Financial Times is to create a new "live news desk" at the heart of the FT.com operation, tasked with providing a rapid response to breaking news stories including on live blogs and Twitter.
The project, which has been in the pipeline for some time, will be led by Ben Fenton who until now has been the title's media correspondent.
He will lead a team of reporters on the breaking news operation, the size of which has yet to be confirmed.
The initiative aims to provide a "more live response" to developing stories and get a well-written first version online quicker, while freeing up specialised reporters to develop a longer take on the story.
FT.com editor Robert Shrimsley told Journalism.co.uk: "We think it's a natural evolution in the development of our digital offering.
"I was really pleased that Ben could come and do this. It's really important to have experienced and well-regarded journalists doing this."
Fenton wrote on his blog: "I am finally moving on to a new role that the FT has been keeping warm for me for several months.
"I am going to be overseeing the creation of a new live news desk, with live-blogging, Tweeting and rolling news stories about world events and business news from around the world."
Fenton said he was meant to start the job last year, but the "extraordinary events" surrounding the phone-hacking story and the Leveson inquiry caused the launch to be postponed.
He added: "Now, it's been decided that if we wait, it could be years before this story slowed down, so I'm pressing on in this new role.
In other FT news, the publisher has been awarded the best mobile innovation award for for its web app at the Global Mobile Awards in Barcelona.
The HTML5 app, which launched last June, includes automatic content downloads and the ability to read offline and has attracted more than 1.7 million visitors, according to the group.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/financial-times-to-set-up-new-live-news-desk-/s2/a548144/

Washington Post utilizes unconventional storytelling to depict the ‘media divide’

Innovative Interactivity reporting:
I recently came across Washington Post’s “The Media Divide: Inside America’s segregated news diet” by Evelio Contreras, Marc Fisher, Kat Downs and Jon Cohen. I love the irony of a news organization covering the nontraditional approach to news consumption in the 21st century and I think that this package does an excellent job at doing so.
Personally, I loved how they linked to the news sources featured in the video in real time. I also appreciated how the page scrolled down to the next section when the video finished (a small but much appreciate gesture!). My only wish is that they had included four people – two Republicans and two Democrats. I would have loved to compare/contrast a tea party republican to a liberal democrat!
As a sign of the changing time, I just finished reading “All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News” by James Hamilton where he discusses a 2000 Pew study stating that political news ranked at, or near, the bottom of Internet usage for every age demographic of both women and men. That is obviously not the case in 2012!
I asked Interactive Projects Editor Kat Downs to give II readers some insight into how the project came about. In total, she said it took less than a week to turn around the package with roughly three days spent in the field and two days spent in post production:
“Marc Fisher had the idea while back to track people through the day and watch what media they consume – what sources they use and how they access them. The idea came to fruition around the South Carolina primary. He found three people (one tea party republican, one conservative republican, and a moderate democrat) that agreed to have their media consumption tracked for the day. Evelio was assigned to do the video story.
Marc came to me with the story idea and we talked about how we could surface all the things the three people consumed in an interesting and meaningful way. He showed me some of Pew’s poll data that was informing the story and we decided to do a kind of calendar/poll that would track the media they viewed or read in that day. Marc was planning to keep a minute-by-minute log of all the TV, radio, newspaper, web and social news they looked at that pertained to politics at all. Then I talked to Evelio about how the video could fit into a bigger presentation. We decided to structure the video so the media we showed on screen flowed from morning to night. That helped create a relationship between the calendar and the video. We also wanted to offer our users direct links to the content that the characters were consuming onscreen. Evelio planned to shoot as much b-roll and active footage of them actually doing the watching/listening/reading as possible so we could make that idea work. Then Marc and Evelio went off to SC to work on the story.
http://www.innovativeinteractivity.com/2012/02/19/washington-post-utilizes-unconventional-storytelling-to-depict-the-media-divide/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InnovativeInteractivity+%28Innovative+Interactivity%29

Latest Job Cuts Are Sad - But That’s 2012 Newspaper Reality

paidcontent reporting: o it’s redundancy time once again. First, at the two Telegraph titles and now at the Mirror trio.
This is the stark reality of modern newspapers, the result of a coincidence of commercial necessity and technological innovation.
There is sure to be more hand-wringing at the decision by Trinity Mirror  (TM) to cut a further 75 jobs, amounting to 18.75% of its editorial workforce.
But, without wishing to appear to bless another tranche of redundancies at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, it must be obvious to all that it is the way of the world.
Most people are expected to leave voluntarily and it is to be hoped they pick up enough severance cash to ensure they can pay their mortgages for some time to come.
What many of them will know is that getting a replacement job is going to be very tricky indeed.
...
In June 2010, I reported that TM was making 200 editorial staff redundant. That 25% cut resulted in the overall staffing being reduced to the current 400.
So the three papers will end up in a couple of months’ time with 325 journalists between them. (I seem to recall, when I edited the Daily Mirror 20-odd years ago, that it alone had more than 400 staff).
TM has announced that its move is linked to what it calls “editorial restructuring”, which involves an expansion of its ContentWatch production system.
In its statement this afternoon, TM claimed that ContentWatch had “helped transform the newsroom”. It probably has. And it is probably right in claiming also that the restructuring will “create an even more efficient multimedia operation.”
None of can ignore the fact that it is possible to do so much so quickly with advancing digital tools.
Note, however, that “a centralised reporting and production hub” will operate with “teams working across all three titles” over seven days.
I can understand the production part of that operation. I am less sanguine about reporters working across titles.
Then again, somewhat contradictorily, the company’s statement also says that there will be a “retention of bespoke editorial teams for each title to protect their unique identity.”
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-latest-job-cuts-are-sad-but-thats-2012-newspaper-reality

In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not.

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
 2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond “digital first” platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I’m optimistic we will see this trend continue. For example, The Journal Register Co.’s open newsrooms and other efforts garnered a fivefold rise in digital revenue in just two years; the Chicago Tribune continues to hire news developers to work with reporters to build new tools for making sense of and accessing information; the Wall Street Journal has had surprising success with its investments in online video, earning $200,000 in revenue per month.
However, other newsrooms seem to be going in the opposite direction, continuing to lay off staff and limit their ability not only to innovate but even to maintain bare-bones levels of basic reporting, including 165 recently let go in Tampa and ongoing attrition at various Scripps properties, which included the kind of digital staffers, like an online video producer and a programmer, that one might expect to be especially crucial to moving forward in the digital space. I expect we’ll see this gap between digital news haves and have-nots widen, perhaps hastening the demise of print in some markets.
2012 will be a good year for local television...
...2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought....
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/12/carrie-brown-smith-the-social-media-bubble-may-burst-and-more-predictions-for-2012/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=0781b75080-DAILY_EMAIL 

Gateways in the Chinese wal

yelvington reporting:
In business, a Chinese wall is an information barrier that separates one part of the company from another. In newspapers, there's a Chinese wall between the journalism part (the newsroom) and the business part (advertising), and usually also the opinion part (the editorial page). Outsiders generally don't understand this, but left hand really doesn't know what the right hand is up to, and what's more, often don't want to know.
I was thinking about that the other night when listening to a live stream of a conference at CUNY in which Journal Register chief John Paton said every one of his #jrc newspapers will cover its newsroom costs this year with digital revenues.
How many journalists know their newsroom's budget? How many know their company's digital revenues? This information isn't passed around openly (and no, I'm not going to reveal any Morris numbers; I'll leave that to Derek May).
But ignorance of this information leaves journalists to guess, and often guess wildly wrong, then build towers of assumptions on these bad foundations. Ever wonder where dumb, self-defeating ideas come from? Now you know.
The oldest, deepest, most basic human emotion is fear. The worst fear is fear of the unknown. So in these uncertain and turbulent days of change for newspaper companies, we shouldn't be surprised that many working journalists, lacking any signals to the contrary, despair for the future of their profession.
Run this equation: N = newsroom budget / digital revenues * 100 N = digital revenues/newsroom budget * 100. Paton planted a flag at 100. Where is your N?
(Don't over-think this. Don't argue that print production costs shouldn't be counted. Just do the calculation. It's a barometer. It can predict fair skies and storms pretty well.)
I've seen papers perform from the 20s to 200. If you're in the middle, you should at least get a glimmer of hope that there is a sustainable future for local journalism in a digital world. In the worst economy in our lifetimes, you're covering your newsroom costs!...
http://www.yelvington.com/content/gateways-chinese-wall

Social Media Curation Tool Storyful Helps Separate News From Noise

PBS reporting:
An average of 155 million tweets are posted on the social networking site Twitter each day, the social media giant tweeted last week. In just one minute, an average of 35 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube as of November, and over half of American adults alone have Facebook accounts.
These social media sites are being used as new tools for journalists, protesters and everyday people looking for the news. However, as they grow, the amount of content is overwhelming. Not to mention, how do you know what is real and what is not?
That's where the startup Storyful comes in, Editorial Director David Clinch told Hari Sreenivasan.
Storyful is a social media news tool created by journalists that finds the most relevant, real and interesting video, tweets and posts coming from people in the middle of events around the world. A team of journalists work with Storyful's "behind-the-scenes" software to find, verify and curate all of this into playlists on YouTube, on their website and for Storyful Pro, a paid service for news organizations.
Clinch described the service as a type of social media news agency that provides lists of sources and content for a price to their pro subscribers. However, lots of content is in front of their pro paywall.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/04/social-media-curation-tool-separates-news-from-noise.html