Emily Bell, professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, kicked off the Future of Journalism conference discussing the many futures of journalism. Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves. She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist
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Patric Lane, health and science editor at UNC Chapel Hill drew on Mark Twain to frame social media in his presentation at the WorldViews Conference on media and higher education in Toronto on Thursday. Lane skilfully drew from Twain’s comments on the benefits of travel to highlight the appeal of social media. In the original quote, Twain said (emphasis added): Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of
I had the honour of introducing the keynote speaker on social media, Sidneyeve Matrix, at the WorldViews conference on media and education. The session was packed, though some arrive after we started since an earlier session over-ran. So I am posting my introductory comments that were intended to seed the discussions. “Welcome to this afternoon’s stream on social media and new technology. The question on our agenda: Is this the
Here’s something for a holiday Easter weekend. A wonderful cartoon by Rob Cottingham on how to explain the internet. Noise to Signal Cartoon Print
Canadians love the internet. That’s the conclusion of a study that found that Canadians value their home Internet connection more than any other medium An online survey of 1,682 adults, conducted by the Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC )and Vision Critical, showed that 42% of respondents say they would be “least willing to give up” their home internet connection. Some 24% said they would be least willing to give up their television cable subscription,
An interesting project that seeks to help journalists and editors connect with each other has just launched in Canada. MediaCooler.com is the brainchild of my friend, Alison Yesilcimen. I’ve been following the development of the service since September last year. I’ve had long conversations with Alison about it, providing feedback and trying out the alpha site. MediaCooler aims to be a marketplace for media. In an e-mail, Alison said that she “always
Jim Brady, former editor of TBD.com and WashingtonPost.com, set the tone for a professional panel on engaging the audience at #ISOJ by saying they were going to stick to time and leave plenty of time for questions. First up was Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia, Norway. He started by stating that he tells his journalists to spend a minimum of 10% of time interacting and engaging with readers. Three-quarters of
The research presented at ISOJ by Jonathan Groves, Drury University and Carrie Brown, University of Memphis, looked at the Christian Science Monitor’s transition from print to web. For the paper (PDF), the researchers spend three weeks in the newsroom, watching how the journalists worked and talking to them about the journalism. The Monitor started in 1908 as a daily newspaper distributed by mail and switched to web-only daily in March 2009, with a
The first research paper at ISOJ from Tanja Aitamurto, University of Tampere, Finland, and Seth Lewis, University of Minnesota, looked at processes of innovation (PDF). Presenting the paper, Lewis highlighted the challenge facing news organisations today: keeping up with modern demands for R&D while finding new sources of revenue. He said media organisations have under invested in R&D and not expressed much interest in open innovation. The paper looked at NPR, the
John Kilpatrick, vice president of design for The Daily, provided an inside look into the new iPad app at the ISOJ. The Daily is a custom application with a custom content management system that was built from the ground up for product. The idea is to be able to create custom experiences everyday, exploring what works and what doesn’t work, he said. Kilpatrick explained that the experience of news on a