Panel: Mimi Onuoha, Research Fellow, Data & Society, Tow Society for Digital Journalism, Katerina Stravroula, freelance journalist and radio producer based in Athen and Tobias Dorfer MO: Co-author of Tow report on the subject and before you read any further, you probably need to open this http://towcenter.org/research/guide-to-crowdsourcing/ Broadly defined by the Tow report as ‘The act... Continue Reading →
#ONALondon ‘When news breaks bad: UGC in the newsroom’ session
Panel: Mandy Jenkins, VP ONA board, head of news, Storyful; Fergus Bell, ONA Ethics committee, and Dig Deeper Media Ok, so for this blog post to make much sense you probably need to head straight to http://toolkit.journalists.org and have a look at that, because this is what we're talking about. Done that? Good - the... Continue Reading →
Audience engagement and newsroom attitudes
Several years ago, when the words ‘content is king’ was everywhere, I remember Joanna Geary observing 'collaboration is queen’. I loved that. I’ve been thinking about Jo’s twist on King Content because the phrase ‘audience engagement’ is so prevalent right now, and I think that if collaboration is queen bee then being part of the... Continue Reading →
15 thoughts on innovation for smaller newsrooms
How do you innovate in smaller newsrooms, was one of the questions that was sought to be addressed at the WAN IFRA international newsroom summit I attended in Hamburg on October 5. My answer is an emphatic: “Better, and more ambitiously than anyone tends to give us credit for”. The big guns, like the NYT and The Guardian,... Continue Reading →
The end of ‘behind closed doors’ journalism
There are times in a journalist's career when you are going to have to approach someone who is not having the finest moment of their life, and ask them to help you. It might be calling on a grieving family, or approaching witnesses to an accident, or asking someone who has just emerged the loser in a tussle... Continue Reading →
Pix or it didn’t happen?
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/200471527-001 So, Meerkat, eh? It was, by all accounts, the darling of SXSW and digital acres have been given over to assessing its worth (and here I am, adding to them). Search Twitter at any given time and it's everywhere, being [LIVE NOW]... Tweets about [live now] meerkat // I downloaded it a few weeks ago when... Continue Reading →
The beige world of clickbait journalism
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/170003092 Things I worry about: Why the airport tax charged by cabs from Belfast City Airport fluctuates by £1 for no apparent reason Is Rick from The Walking Dead aware of how awful his beard is? In the rise of Junk Food News, how do I avoid being a part of the problem? I like a good... Continue Reading →
Up the Boro! Tapping into the fans’ mood on Twitter
This is my new favourite thing, courtesy of the @GazetteBoro team in Middlesbrough (disclosure: yep, they're part of Trinity Mirror Regionals, like me). The gif (you might need to click to activate) is a simple, neat idea, and really summed up the how fans feel about being up in the rarified atmosphere of the top of the table. Lots... Continue Reading →
Six thoughts on emerging opportunities for journalism
Attending the Society of Editors* conference on November 10 and 11 meant a trip back to my old stamping ground of Southampton. I spent several years there in the '90s with the Southern Daily Echo (editor Ian Murray completed his term as SoE president this month) and it was good to go back - not least to see how much the... Continue Reading →
Open season on audience stalking
Photo by Trojan_LlamaThe quote below is taken from an interesting post on It's All Journalism today, that raised the question of why news media push content to social sites and engage users there, rather than on their own sites. “I think that we have to start driving our audience back to our freaking websites because we... Continue Reading →
Alison Gow | Building the New 