The 2012 International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin ran across keynotes, research panels and business sessions.
Richard Gingras, head of news products at Google, opened with a call to rethink journalism. Bob Metcalfe of the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering started day two on disruption and on getting readers to pay. Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News and chairman of the Newspapers Association of America, took the afternoon keynote on local media for a mass intelligent audience. Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, closed by arguing that the challenge was turning good content into good experiences.
On the research side, Carrie Brown of the University of Memphis presented #Memstorm, a study of Twitter as a community-driven breaking news reporting tool; Linda Jean Kenix of the University of Canterbury found the Samoa Topix forum falling short as local news; and researchers from the University of Missouri examined how photographs carried the human cost of the Japanese tsunami. A separate panel presented the study of Andy Carvin’s sourcing during the Arab Spring.
Data journalism had two sessions: Angelica Peralta Ramos of La Nación in Argentina on the practical obstacles there, and Alberto Cairo of the University of Miami on whether visualisation was actually useful to audiences. The business strand covered a Reuters Institute report on European journalism start-ups struggling, John White of the Winnipeg Free Press on the paper’s downtown News Café a year in, and Mark Briggs on the six traits of successful entrepreneurs.