The Online Journalism Handbook

Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age

Paul Bradshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317645139
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Online Journalism Handbook has established itself globally as the leading guide to the fast-moving world of digital journalism, showcasing the multiple possibilities for researching, writing and storytelling offered to journalists through new technologies.

In this new edition, Paul Bradshaw presents an engaging mix of technological expertise with real world practical guidance to illustrate how those training and working as journalists can improve the development, presentation and global reach of their story through web-based technologies.

The new edition is thoroughly revised and updated, featuring:

• a significantly expanded section on the history of online journalism business models;

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• a new focus on the shift to mobile-first methods of consumption and production;

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• a brand new chapter on online media law written by Professor Tim Crook of Goldsmiths, University of London, UK;

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• a redeveloped section on interactivity, with an introduction to coding for journalists;

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• advice on the journalistic uses of vertical video, live video, 360 and VR.

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The Online Journalism Handbook is a guide for all journalism students and professional journalists, as well as being of key interest to digital media practitioners.

1 Introduction to the second edition

 

 

 

What an exciting time. This is a period of enormous creativity and change, a time when young journalists (and many older ones) have a unique opportunity to try new things, learn and grow quickly and innovate in a completely new form of storytelling.

Every year brings new challenges to get to grips with: new technologies to experiment with, new ways of finding and reporting the newsworthy and new debates about our craft to engage in. Online journalism is such an exciting subject – and there is little sign of things settling down anytime soon.

When Alan Rusbridger left the Guardian in 2015 after 20 years as editor of the publication, he noted how those two decades had been characterised by ongoing change: ‘Twenty years later, we swim in unknown unknowns’, he said. Words were ‘as likely to be in the form of live blogs as stories’; images were as likely to be still as moving. Audio, interactives, data, graphics and ‘any combination of the above’ might be needed to tell the story most effectively (Rusbridger 2015).

Since the first edition of The Online Journalism Handbook, the ‘online’ in online journalism has become ever more varied and distributed. ‘Online’ could mean publishing on the web, or on chat apps. It could mean email newsletters or social media; it could mean getting your stories onto someone’s watch, or into their connected speaker or car.

The ‘online’ in online journalism has also become almost invisible – part of the fabric of all journalism. Broadcasters, newspaper reporters and magazine correspondents are all required to engage with audiences through multiple platforms, and to create content for the web and social media. More journalists now work online in the UK than in any other medium – the proportion doubling in just three years between 2012 and 2015 (Thurman et al. 2016).

It is an industry reinventing itself. Thousands of traditional jobs in the industry have disappeared over the last decade – but thousands of roles that didn’t exist before have been created too, from data units and video teams to social media managers and community curators. On the surface these organisations may look the same, but in their internal organisation they are unrecognisable from a decade ago: web- and mobile-first, multimedia and multiplatform, data-driven and code-savvy; and converging technically while diverging commercially.

Then there are the new faces: hundreds of online-only startups from BuzzFeed and Vox to Mumsnet and ProPublica have set the pace in exploring new models for publishing and establishing new ways of engaging and serving communities. And increasing numbers of journalists are going outside traditional news organisations to reach a community and raise funding for their reporting directly.

Journalists across the industry have become much more entrepreneurial than was once the case; they are expected to take on many of the responsibilities that a publisher once did. They must make decisions about when and where to publish, take an active role in expanding the distribution of their content and monitor how effective that is. These demands require not just technical and editorial skills around storytelling, but also strategic and project management skills.

Online publishing has brought a global audience to our doorstep, and allowed them to connect with each other and publish themselves, but it has also fragmented them across multiple devices and platforms. News organisations increasingly have to manage relationships with technology companies such as Facebook and Snapchat, while constantly monitoring changes in the algorithms of search engines and social platforms, and experimenting in publishing on new connected devices.

A much wider range of organisations now employ individuals within publishing roles. From football clubs and fashion brands to technology platforms and non-profit organisations, the ability to communicate directly with a community and serve their information needs is raising new questions about the role of traditional journalists, and raising the bar for what we expect of professional communicators.

Changes in the second edition

When the first edition of The Online Journalism Handbook was published, expectations of journalism online were at their peak. Interactive publishing promised to allow ordinary people to share and check information; to circumvent the information powerbrokers, newspaper proprietors, network executives, media moguls and journalists. By sharing information, it was hoped, people could challenge received wisdom and publish their own version of events; anyone could broadcast 24/7 to the world; share and exchange information in real time, and even defy censorship.

Those expectations have since been tempered by a realism about the threats that the same technologies can help to create: fake news, fake social media accounts and fake commenters; domination by a new breed of media monopoly; widespread surveillance; and threats to the privacy of journalists, readers and sources (challenges which are addressed in the opening chapter on the history of online journalism).

This second edition of The Online Journalism Handbook represents an almost complete rewrite from the first edition. The proliferation of social platforms in particular has been recognised in two new chapters: one dedicated to writing for social media platforms, and a second on community and social media management. Liveblogging and mobile journalism now also warrant a separate chapter, and there’s an increased focus on techniques for finding and verifying information online.

The chapter on online video now includes specific exploration of live and vertical formats, and the role of drones, virtual reality and 360-degree filming, while the chapter on audio covers a number of new formats. The chapter on interactivity has been expanded significantly to address the increasing number of formats being used in the media to engage readers, from quizzes to chatbots, while also exploring the growing demand for journalists who can code.

Journalism’s role in a networked age

Throughout the book I attempt to address the question of what journalism is for, in an age when anyone can publish directly to an audience; and when information is free and abundant. In particular, it focuses on four roles of journalism that have seen increased importance in a networked age.

The first is journalism’s role in giving a voice to the voiceless: with such abundance of information it is easier than ever to overlook those who do not have the ability or access to publish their stories online. In fact, there is a term for this tendency: nodocentrism. As Ulises Mejias describes it: ‘If something is available in the network, it is perceived as part of reality, but if it is not available it might as well not exist’ (Mejias 2010, p.612). Mobile journalism, covered in Chapter 6, makes it easier than ever for journalists to get out into the physical world and digitise the stories that exist there. In a networked world there is no reason for the journalist to be restricted to a desk.

A second and related need is to make the hidden findable. Not everything online is easy to find: as Chapter 3 explains, there are parts of the web which are hidden to search engines, stories which are scattered across hundreds of pages, or which only come into focus when gathered from a range of sources and combined. Journalists have the ability to shine a spotlight on these corners, and make it easier for others to dig deeper into them. Data journalism and interactivity, each of which is given its own chapter, now make it easier to identify problems which affect communities, and personalise a user’s experience to highlight how it affects them.

The third role of the networked journalist is to connect communities. The algorithms of search engines and social media make it easier than ever to search for – and find – information which confirms our own biases (what is called ‘confirmation bias’). Journalists have always acted as go-betweens, carrying messages between those exercising power and those who are subject to it, or reporting on trends and innovations to those who need to know about them. This is recognised in the increasing role of community management, covered in Chapter 12, and video and audio, which can help bring us closer to communities we are separated from. If there is a risk that communities become more isolated in their own ‘filter bubbles’, it is vital that journalists remember that their role is to stand outside those bubbles – and poke holes in them.

The fourth role centres on verification and debunking. The proliferation of propaganda, hoaxes and ‘fake news’ represents one of the challenges of our time. Under pressure to react and report in real time, it is easier than ever to pass on false information without realising it. But it is also easier than ever to check and debunk the same falsehoods. Some key techniques for this are outlined in Chapters 3 and 6.

I hope that this book gives you the tools, techniques and inspiration you need as you grow as a journalist online. This is your time, and the challenges and opportunities are yours to take on and make the most of. Good luck, and enjoy it.

Bibliography

The access date for web material is 20 February 2017 unless otherwise given.

 

Mejias, Ulises. The limits of networks as models for organizing the social, New Media & Society 12(4), 2010: 603–619, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444809341392?rss=1&

Rusbridger, Alan. ‘Farewell, readers’: Alan Rusbridger on leaving the Guardian after two decades at the helm, Guardian, 29 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/29/farewell-readers-alan-rusbridger-on-leaving-the-guardian accessed 6 June 2015

Thurman, Neil, Cornia, Alessio and Kunert, Jessica. Journalists in the UK, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2016, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/journalists-uk

2 Histories, futures and the changing business and technologies of journalism

Chapter objectives

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This chapter will cover:

•How key events in the history of online journalism have shaped journalism today

•The shift from desktop to mobile

•The rise of ‘platform publishing’ – and concerns over the power of those platforms

•Sensor journalism

•Automation and ‘robot journalism’

•Debates over the business model that might support journalism online

•The increasing role of analytics in journalism – and the debate over metrics

•Information security: how journalists can protect their stories and sources

•Future developments in journalism and their potential effect.

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Introduction

History doesn’t repeat itself – but it does rhyme.

It is fair to say that ‘internet time’ operates at a different speed to developments elsewhere. Companies rise and fall, trends come and go and the focus is forever on the imminent, pressing, near future: ‘What’s next?’

Surrounded by this change it can be tempting to ignore the past. But understanding the past is one of the best ways to understand where we are right now – and what is most likely to happen next.

If you are one of those people who asks, ‘What technologies should we be looking out for next?’ then this chapter is for you. The path to that future has already started: not just histories of technologies, but the history of cultural change, commercial change and legal change.

It is often said that ‘The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed’. Many of the features of our future are already here – if you know where to look. And so, much of the ‘history’ of online journalism explored in this chapter has actually yet to take place in every part of the media industry, with the same lessons being learned over and over again in different publications. The newspaper sector, for example, has often been the first to experience the impacts of technological change – and also among the first to innovate in response. Many magazines and broadcast organisations are only now beginning to adapt to similar, albeit delayed, effects. And in different countries and at different speeds, similar transformations are repeating themselves.

You may find yourself in an organisation that decides to experiment with a paywall, or crowdfunding. You may be hired as part of a new data journalism or wearable tech unit; or join a newsroom which is going mobile-first or platform publishing. You will find useful stories about all these in this chapter.

How did we get here?

While the technology of mass communication advanced after the Second World War the tools of the trade remained the same right up to the 1980s: a notebook, a pen, a typewriter, two sheets of paper, a ‘black’ (photocopy paper) and a metal spike.

A typed report went to the printers where experts in movable type (of the kind pioneered by 15th century publisher Johannes Gutenberg) would ensure it rolled out on huge printing presses before being distributed by air, rail, ship, lorry and newspaper boy. Corrections were done on the ‘stone’ where demarcation of duties meant journalists had to ask printers to literally move lumps of hot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to the second edition
• 2 Histories, futures and the changing business and technologies of journalism
• 3 Finding leads and sources online
• 4 Writing for the web
• 5 Writing for social media and chat apps
• 6 Liveblogging and mobile journalism
• 7 Online audio
• 8 Introduction to online media law
• 9 Online video
• 10 Data journalism
• 11 Interactivity and code
• 12 Community, social media management and user-generated content
• Index