Steve Buttry’s website is great for anyone looking for resources and advice on student journalism. He recently wrote an article titled, “Questions to help student media (and pros) brainstorm transformation.” It is basically a summary of a speech he gave with a list of questions student journalists should be asking themselves as they seek to be innovative in campus journalism. Definitely worth a read.
This is a great resource for data journalism and comes highly recommended from your very own Amy O’Kruk. It’s an online book and completely free. You can find it here.
We hear a lot about digital transformation of media outlets these days. Every news organization which didn’t start off as an online-native, such as Vox or Buzzfeed, is drafting their own plans to effectively compete in the digital realm. While all of them have different approaches in certain areas, there are some underlying directions which most media organizations are moving towards in their practices.
This article highlights some of the common factors in these digital transformations.
Alan Rusbridge, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, writes about challenges facing journalistic independence as the platforms evolve and move towards a more digital frontier.
“Conventional thinking will not be enough to help news organisations survive — still less thrive in — the revolution gripping the news business. Deep pockets and structures protecting journalistic independence will be essential.”
You can find Rusbridge’s column here.
This piece published in the Toronto Star is a well written feature on anorexia that uses a personal story as a focal point but also explores myths of the disease, history, and symptoms. Partway down the page is a good example of interactive graphics – a simplistic timeline with multiple tabs that may be good for giving context in longer stories in small chunks.
The story can be found here.
The New York Times is planning a major overhaul of how it views and conducts journalism.
The new plans come two years after NYT’s innovation report came out, which was an extensive blueprint of how the paper views itself in the digital age moving forward. The current plan is more tangible — it talks about having ‘clusters’ instead of clumping major topics like climate change under certain desks like National, International or Metropolitan. There are also plans to move away print planning from all editors to dedicated teams of designers and editors for a more extensive focus on digital storytelling.
Here’s a Poynter article on NYT’s plans.
This is a free, video-based course on data journalism available online. It has lectures, tutorials, assignments, readings and discussion forums.
The course has modules which teach journalism students how to find ideas with data analysis, managing messy data and telling stories with visualizations. It is taught by five journalism experts, including university professors and professionals specializing in data.
The course can be found here.
This format for video is more creative than many that are released from most news outlets. Vox has used a technique similar to white board drawing videos that are erased as the narrator speakers. This is also a great example of a research driven video that is visually interesting and might have social media users pausing on timelines and news feeds.
The Queen’s Journal does a surprisingly solid job when it comes to long form stories. “Stereotypically Queen’s” incorporates interactive graphics, video and an engaging story within a beautiful interface. As you scroll through the page, the graphics and facts on the left change to keep readers engaged. You’ll also notice that this story had a team of eight working on it from writing, editing, research and multimedia. In order to have a strong story that features video and multimedia — it requires a team and planning ahead! When a story is pitched, these things were evidently thought about.
This multimedia collection on President Obama’s presidency in the Washington Post is very well done. The entire front end of the feature is presented in full-page graphics. It provides a great template idea for presenting long-form stories and features with timelines.
The story can be found here.
