Online Journalism

The Essential Guide

Steve Hill, Paul Lashmar

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446293232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"An essential guide for anyone hungry to learn how journalism should be practised today, and will be tomorrow. Hill and Lashmar encapsulate the transformative impact technology is having on journalism, but anchor those changes in the basic principles of reporting."
- Paul Lewis, The Guardian "As the news business transforms, Online Journalism is a fantastic new resource for both students and lecturers. Informative, straightforward and easily digested, it's a one-stop shop for the skills, knowledge, principles and mindset required for journalistic success in the digital age."
- Mary Braid, Kingston University Online and social media have become indispensible tools for journalists, but you still have to know how to find and tell a great story. To be a journalist today, you must have not only the practical skills to work with new technologies, but also the understanding of how and why journalism has changed.

Combining theory and practice, Online Journalism: The Essential Guide will take you through the classic skills of investigating, writing and reporting as you master the new environments of mobile, on-demand, social, participatory and entrepreneurial journalism. You will also develop must-have skills in app development for smartphones and tablets, as well as techniques in podcast, blog and news website production. What this book does for you:

• Tips and advice from leading industry experts in their own words
• QR codes throughout the book to take you straight to multimedia links
• A fully up-to-date companion website loaded with teaching resources, detailed careers advice and industry insights
• Exercises to help you hone your skills
• Top five guided reading list for each topic, so you can take it further

Perfect for students throughout a journalism course, this is your essential guide!

SECTION 1

Foundations of Online Journalism

What are the Essential Skills?

Understanding Your Users

CHAPTER 1

What are the Essential Skills?

INTRODUCTION

In the aftermath of the summer 2011 riots in cities across England, the Guardian newspaper embarked on one of its most ambitious interactive projects to date. To try to understand how rumours and speculation to do with the riots spread using social media, the newspaper, in collaboration with a team of academics, examined 2.6 million tweets. The Guardian found it was full of outlandish misinformation. There were false rumours that tanks were being deployed by the government and that rioters had broken into London Zoo and were releasing the animals. The Guardian produced an interactive visualization on its website that charts how misinformation spreads widely on social media and, more interestingly, how users quickly self-correct false rumours.

The Guardian’s Riots Interactive Project is just one example of how journalism is undergoing a radical transformation brought about by the internet and associated digital technology. It is traditional, public interest, verification (fact-checking) journalism for the modern age. It explains a complex topic to a non-specialist audience in a visually appealing and easy to understand way. As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2003) write in their classic text on media ethics The Elements of Journalism, the role of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be ‘free and self-governing’ and it must be ‘independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive’.

However, data journalism is just one way that technology is being used to better inform our audience. In this chapter, we examine a series of new practical and theoretical issues you will need to understand to survive and thrive in the new digital environment. Journalism just became infinitely more interesting.

>>OBJECTIVES<<

In this chapter, you will learn:

• mindset skills for coping with constant change;

• the core principles of journalism;

• how convergence affects our professional lives;

• new forms of journalism including mobile, social and data journalism;

• why it is important that journalists are numerate.

THE MULTIMEDIA MINDSET

Many experienced journalists love newsprint. Newspapers have a smell to them and a tactility that gives the format an emotional appeal. We experience a buzz when we see our work appear on the newsstand, which is very different to seeing work appear on a website.

But newspapers and magazines in print format are expensive to produce when compared with a digital output and their audience is falling. A few exceptional magazines in the UK retain readers while providing very little online content. Satirical magazine Private Eye retains a circulation of over 200,000 an issue with a modest internet presence. Some papers have made a unique selling point of being non-digital. The French satirical magazine Le Canard (The Duck) states defiantly on its single page website (www.lecanardenchaine.fr), ‘Le Canard ne vient pas barboter sur le net’; or to crudely translate, ‘The duck does not splash on the internet’. The editor writes that Le Canard sees its role to ‘inform and entertain our readers with newsprint and ink’ and politely points out that readers should pay a visit to their local newsagent to find their favourite magazines.

We love newsprint, but users are increasingly consuming and interacting with content on a range of internet-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers – the evidence is all around us to see whenever we take a bus or train. Ken Doctor, a US-based media analyst, in a 2011 blog post entitled ‘The Newsonomics of Oblivion’, warned the newspaper industry that only by adopting a digital-first strategy, where digital media takes priority over paper, and re-organizing themselves to ‘scrap old structures, budgets, job descriptions—and, massively, costs’, will they have any hope of survival in the new, mainly digital, age.

Simon Waldman (2010), the former head of digital at the Guardian newspaper, studied how legacy businesses (companies who have been successful in the pre-web days) have adapted to what he terms the ‘creative disruption’ caused by the internet. Some companies have successfully re-invented themselves as digital companies. Many, such as high-street retailers like HMV and Blockbuster, have not.

Forward-thinking newspapers and magazines have re-branded themselves as multimedia businesses. Regional newspapers that once came out daily in print are now coming out weekly. The print versions focus on longer opinion and feature articles, which is what print media do best. Meanwhile, online outputs, such as websites and mobile apps (smartphone or tablet computer software applications), are being used to keep users up-to-date with breaking news; this is sometimes known as a digital-first strategy.

A new range of independent news websites have launched with smaller editorial teams and lower production and distribution costs, such as politics site the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com). These online-only news outlets are usually run on shoestring budgets compared to those of national newspapers, but they are forcing the mainstream media brands to re-invent themselves. As professional journalists, we also need to adopt digital working practices and this will involve learning many new skills throughout our careers and adopting a multimedia mindset.

So what is a multimedia mindset?

1 It understands that in our careers as journalists we will face yet more constant, rapid change in our working practices caused by new technologies. We must not succumb to common human emotional responses to change, which include fear, resistance and denial. Instead, we should actively seek out new opportunities that technology affords us to keep our users informed and deliver on our core journalistic principles.

2 We understand that we can learn a lot from those with expertise in computing. We become more employable if we understand just a little bit about computer programming.

3 We understand that we need to be flexible in how we work. There will be periods of time that we will work as a full-time employee for one media publisher and other times when we work on a freelance basis for a number of websites, broadcasters, charities and other employers simultaneously. Our skills as journalists are remarkably transferable. We need to become jugglers and cope with competing demands for our time.

4 We must learn about the media business and how content can be monetized (how it generates revenue). François Nel (2010) from the University of Central Lancashire writes: ‘I’ve argued before that being independent from commercial pressures is not the same as being ignorant of commercial imperatives, and that for journalists to understand the various aspects of the business they’re in is crucial.’ We couldn’t agree more. Our role is simple – we serve our users. Our role is not to serve politicians, members of the public relations industry and certainly not advertisers. However, we don’t feel we are tarnishing our journalistic ethics by understanding how journalism generates revenue. It makes us more responsible.

5 We must be numerate and understand statistics. What is it about journalists not being skilled in maths? The joke is that while a journalist can spell ‘innumerate’, they won’t be able to tell you how many letters are in it. Yet numbers are the heart of some of the biggest news stories such as the global financial crash.

6 We must understand the traditions and importance of journalism. We need to understand how the technology works, but it is a means to an end. It is the story that matters most.

What would Google do?

One massively successful digital company is the search engine Google. Although not a media content producer as such, it is a huge distributor of content produced by others and also runs a massively successful online advertising network. Jeff Jarvis in his 2009 book What Would Google Do? urges readers to ask themselves the question in the book’s title when looking at the challenges we face as journalists. Jarvis refers to a post-information scarcity, open source and gift economy. That’s to say we live in an era where journalistic content is easily available to our audience and often for free at the point of consumption.

TRADITIONAL JOURNALISM VERSUS THE MULTIMEDIA MINDSET: A CONFLICT OF INTERESTS?

In the section above, we have highlighted how journalists are adapting to digital working practices. By far the biggest challenge is how we learn the new skills required while retaining traditional journalistic values.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2003) list nine key principles which are worth remembering as we contend with difficulties caused by the growth of digital technology:

1 Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

2 Its first loyalty is to citizens.

3 Its essence is a discipline of verification (fact checking and accuracy).

4 Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.

5 It must serve an independent monitor of power.

6 It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.

7 It must strive to make significant events interesting and relevant.

8...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• So what are these weird QR codes?
• Introduction
• Section 1 Foundations of Online Journalism
• Section 2 Skills for the Multimedia Journalist
• Section 3 Building Communities, Interaction and Entrepreneurship
• Section 4 Becoming a Thinking Journalist
• References
• Index