One of the leading thinkers on journalism ethics, Stephen Ward, laid out a six-point approach towards teaching journalism ethics at a time of media transition at the Journalism Interactive conference. Ward’s starting point is that in a mixed media environment, everyone has the potential to perform an act of journalism. As a consequence, he argued, ethics is for everyone. The responsible use of media tools needs to be taught across the
PDF Amy Webb of @webbmedia took the Journalism Interactive conference on a tour of emerging tech trends for academia. She started off by talking about gestural technology, showing as an example a Wacom product that allows you to draw on paper and upload the image digitally. Webb also mentioned Livescribe which plays back audio from notes of an interview. It also has OCR so can convert notes into digital text. She showed
The second day of the Future of Journalism conference was opened with a keynote by Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Picking up from Emily Bell’s Thursday keynote, McChesney agreed there were some great experiments being done in the US, but he said he didn’t believe that was going to be enough. He insisted there was a need for
One of studies presented at the Future of Journalism conference looked at the practice of updating stories on news websites. Kostas Saltzis from the University of Leicester looked at how the news story was changing, given a 24/7 news cycle in an online environment when a story can be constantly updated. He studied the news sites of several UK newspapers such as the Guardian and the Times, and broadcasters such
David Cameron’s statement on social media and the riots in England risks stirring a moral panic about social networking. Speaking in parliament, Cameron said: Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop
You can almost hear journalists across newsrooms in Canada breathing a sigh of relief. Canadians still trust the mainstream media, despite the rise of social media, according to the latest Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC) report. According to a recent online survey of 1,682 adults, nine out of 10 Canadians judged information provided by traditional news media to be reliable and trustworthy. This compares to only one in four who say
A Pew study provides further evidence of the growing importance of social networks as a way for people to share and recommend news stories. The study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows how Facebook is increasingly driving traffic to news websites. While Google was the top referral service, accounting for about 30 per cent of traffic to news sites, social recommendation is playing an increasingly significant role.
One of the questions that came out of the CMRC report on social media and the news was about the reliability of social networks as a news source. Our study, Social Networks Transforming How Canadians Get the News (PDF), found that 71 per cent of Canadians who use social networks - more than 10 million people - value them as a way of keeping up with the news. But we also found that only
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
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