This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Your Brain on Story: Why Narratives Win Our Hearts and Minds - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

  "Neuroscientists published research showing the changes in neural patterns of volunteers after reading a narrative story based on real events. The researchers assigned subjects to read Robert Harris’ 2003 novel Pompeii, a piece of historical fiction based on real events. It is a genre cousin to narrative non-fiction and narrative journalism that employs the storytelling techniques of fiction to tell true stories. The results showed heightened connectivity in a specific part of the brain. The left temporal cortex lit up, and not just for the period immediately following the reading assignments. The neural changes persisted for several days. This is why we sometimes say that a story was so powerful we just can’t seem to shake it."

  tags: storytelling narrative

• How to get the best out of photo apps on your smartphone – video | Technology | theguardian.com

  Really useful mix of iOS and Android (ok, mainly iOS) apps, both paid for and free, to get the most out of smartphone photography.

  tags: photo apps smartphone video

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Reader Flow and theArticle Gateway

  I believe we spend far to much time faffing about making home pages look 'right' when much of our traffic comes to stories direct rather than from our shop window, so to speak. Therefore, of course I agree with this post (which also links to another worthwhile read on the subject at The Verge...TL:DR? Takeaway point is this - "the article page is the new homepage."

  tags: audience

• A Eulogy for Twitter - Atlantic Mobile

  "Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake

  tags: twitter

• Instagram’s Sweet Spot: Better for Brands than Facebook and Twitter? | Simply Measured

  "brands on Instagram are getting exponentially more engagement as a percentage of followers/fans than content on Twitter or Facebook."

  tags: instagram engagement audience

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• ∞ — Wearables versus there-ables. What if we’ve got...

  "What if we’ve got it all wrong?What if we’re not actually supposed to wear all sorts of technology on our bodies and on our clothes? What if we didn’t have to / weren’t meant to carry our technology with us as we moved around town?What if the technology was actually already in the room when we got there? Maybe that’s the kind of Internet-of-things that will be more sustainable and will win long-term."

  tags: technology wearables

• Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube - Open Culture

  Video, YouTube, Commons

• Digital journalism: we're still waiting for the third model of news publishing | Emily Bell | Economy | The Guardian

  "We are still waiting, though, for a third model of news publishing to emerge. A news organisation that holds institutional strengths, beliefs and resources at its core but allows the rise of the independently oriented journalist some freedom to succeed or fail is still at the drawing board stage.

  tags: future of news

• How to Make Cinemagraphs | Photojojo

  A little bit Daily Prophet... how to make a photo move. It's a bit time-consuming and involves photoshop but it's really got me thinking about how to use it in storytelling.

  tags: cinemagraph photoshop tutorial how-to gif

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• (Re)defining multimedia journalism — Changing Journalism — Medium

  • • This is the key for me. Immersive means I am lost in what I am reading/watching/hearing/experiencing. 

  • Immersive experiences rule. Take me somewhere I have never been. Show me something I have never seen.

• New digital tools every journalist should try - Knight Foundation

  I haven't used any of these but I'll give them a go "in digital years a lifetime for a product seems like about 21 months. “Moore’s Law”  predicted chip-processing power would double about every 18 months. It more or less has for decades, and each wave of chips remakes the digital world. In digital time, that means a tool born in 2012 was born a lifetime ago. There’s nothing wrong with the classic tools; they just aren’t the latest ones. "

  tags: tools

• The newsonomics of Digital First Media’s Thunderdome implosion (and coming sale) » Nieman Journalism Lab

  "Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to."

  tags: thunderdome DFM newsonomics

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Talking about Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism at the Society of Editors regional conference

I was asked to speak at the Society of Editors regional conference 2014 a while ago, and so on Monday I found myself talking to a room of people about coding, social media, and data journalism, among other things. 

It was a little distracting when the Duke of York loomed in the doorway towards the end of my talk - he was speaking about journalism and apprenticeships - but on the whole I got through without being boo-ed or having pastries thrown at me. 

There were enough discussion points from the day to make several blog posts (particularly around this panel discussion), and I intend to come back to those when I have more time, but in the meantime I thought I'd pop the draft of what I talked about (sans slides, which were purely illustrative) on the blog. 

Titled Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism, the talk was an expanded version of what I covered in my 5 minute slot at News:Rewired last February. So if this is TL:DR you should have a look at this instead. 

Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism 

When I was 18, the editor of the Tenby Observer suffered an unaccountable rush of blood to the head, and agreed I could to spend a year in his newsroom, working as a junior reporter.

He even paid me £30 a week and in return I supplied him with a headaches, calamities, the occasional story and, often, a weekly ‘correction’ roundup, amending whatever I’d written the previous week.

To celebrate my admission into the world of journalism, a friend presented me with a copy of the 1949 classic Journalism For Women, which imparts the following advice to an editor: “Maids respect a mistress who can do any of the tasks she expects of them”.

I’m going to use the term ‘journalist’ but most of what I say applies to everyone in a newsroom, including editors.

So, as I’ve been asked to talk about the emerging skills and opportunities in newsrooms, I think we should move forward with that phrase ringing in our ears.

Skill #1: Creative Journalism

Companies must invest time and money in training journalists for their digital roles, but I’d expect journalists to want to explore and master things themselves too.

There are few social storytelling tools out there that can’t be learned within a few minutes - from Awesome Screenshot to Zee maps - they aren’t complicated, and they make digital storytelling, sharing information and collaboration much easier and more effective.

In March, Trinity Mirror Regionals ran a two-day play and learn event for journalists at UCLan where a group of reporters, photographers, senior newsrooms executives, specialist reporters and newsdesk types got together to try new things.

Among the innovations that emerged were timelines, gifs, video soundbites for Explainer Journalism, interactive maps and, through the collaborative efforts of a deputy news editor and a mobile journalist from different titles, the Moyes Random Excuse Generator.

They used a site called Codepen and a spreadsheet to create a native design app for the MEN that summed up the spectacular popularity fail of the Man Utd manager.

Fun; shareable; drove traffic to other parts of the site including the home page.

Skill #2: Social Journalism  

Journalists should not only use social media but but absolutely familiar and comfortable with the nuances and tones of different sites and tools.

What works on Facebook doesn’t mean engagement on Twitter. When and why Instagram instead of Flickr? Live tweet, or live stream? It’s an essential skill for a reporter to have, and for their managers to understand too.

Shareable content is the holy grail; if you don’t know your audience - what tone to strike with them, and where, when or how they use social media so you can share your own and your title’s content with them well - you are missing an essential skill of modern journalism.

I’d expect any journalist applying for a newsroom job these days should have active Twitter and LinkedIn profiles listed on their CVs, plus links to their multimedia work and, preferably, their updated and engaging blog. These are the social journalism skills they need to do the job effectively and are as important as a decent cuttings portfolio - and for some roles, of considerably more interest.

We need bright, engaging, questioning communicators in our newsrooms, who can create networks of geographic and niche communities; it’s no longer enough to competently turn a ring-in from the newsdesk into a splash.  

Skill #3 Networked Journalism

This doesn’t mean you have a phone on you - it means your smartphone is an extension of your writing hand.

It needs to be packed with apps - such as Audioboo, Vine, Dropbox, Maps, Twitter, Snapseed - and your go-to tool for covering a story, whether it’s the scene of an accident, or a council press bench.

Journalists now can capture news more effectively on a phone that we ever could with a notebook and some overwrought adjectives; phones let us create multimedia, edit it and share it without going near a desk - we can crowdsource, create, package and market our work, and do it in real time, allowing more transparency and accessibility to what we do than ever.

At a time when regional journalists are still suffering a backlash as a result of some murky national practises, mobile and social journalism can help us a chance to re-establish an eroded trust, through open reporting, accessibility and transparency of information and purpose.

A mobile journalist is not someone with a mass of kit, it’s someone who sees a story and transmits it, in real time, via whatever device and medium best suits the purpose.

This is one of the most dramatic innovations in our trade of recent years, and the most exciting - the ability to self-publish reports, whether 140 characters or a live streamed video, means removing a filter and a time-lag between newsroom and audience.

Skill #4 Data journalism

I guess the old idea of ‘we’re journalists - we don’t do Maths’ was kicked into the long grass some time ago, and in Trinity Mirror the Data Unit, where journalists and coders work together to interrogate raw data and produce information, content packages and interactives of relevance and importance to all titles, is an absolute gift.

Certainly, when I was a daily title editor they kept my newsdesk supplied with a constant source of potential splashes and the daily Data Bulletin was a welcome email.

But data journalism isn’t the preserve of the expert - taking raw information, interrogating it and creating compelling, valuable content is now a pretty basic requirement. Using free tools like Datawrapr and Tableau lets us not only present a story in an interactive way but get to the heart of what the story really is.

Making data shareable adds another layer of engagement and an opportunity for further stories and content. Remember when the MPs expenses logs were made available? What newsroom didn’t gleefully fall on them?

Data journalism is more than spreadsheets though; today’s journalistic toolbox needs to contain basic coding skills too.

Coding isn’t a dark art and html isn’t someone else’s job - if you make a Twitter widget or to show conversation around an article, for example, or an embeddable map to show the location of a story, being able to hack the rudimentary backend code by adapting it for your site and purpose is important - and empowering.  Expecting someone else to sort out your multimedia or html equivalent of the newsdesk rewriting your intro - ie. not something any journalist wants to happen.

Skill #5 Measurable journalism

Know what works. Analytics have completely changed what we know; tools such as Chartbeat and Omniture tell us what our audience is reading, sharing, responding to - and sites such as Hitwise show us where they really are going to find their news.

Twitter analytics, Facebook Insights, the plethora of Twitter tools, retweets and favourites, indicate our social reach and engagement.

Analytics used to be the preserve of the marketing department - the digital journalist skillset should combine knowledge and application of analytics to get their stories in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Digital audience footprints are easy to follow and they let us build up a detailed picture of our audience, from when they are online, and with what device, to what they share or what they save to read when they have more time.

Knowing what your audience wants doesn’t mean we become Upworthy, or the preserve of listicles - it means we reach more people and make ourselves more relevant to their lives.

It means we make better products - what we create in digital can inform our print content and make it richer in tone, voice and authenticity.

It also means we make money; as more people come to our site, stay on it and share our content we understand more about them and our commercial colleagues can target them more effectively.

Liverpool Echo editor Ali Machray says his audience is now as large as it was during the glory print days of 1985. I think that’s something to be very proud of.

Innovation and creativity thrive in a digital newsroom where the priorities are audience, then content  and, finally, platform, not vice versa.

The new digital innovation team being built by Trinity Mirror is about using the skills and the mindset I’ve mentioned here, bringing a passion for journalism together with the expertise and interests of our audience and communities.

When I was a reporter I would file my copy and wait to see it in print. Sometimes I’d wait days, if it was a holdable splash.

Now reporters own a story; words, video, audio - whatever elements make it sing - publish it, market it and assess how it performed. You get instant feedback (not always a pleasant experience) from your readers and you see a story change and gain new legs as more diverse voices are added to the discussion.

It’s making us more relevant. While audience attention span may seem to be dwindling and the value of social sharing is questioned every time Facebook tweaks its algorithm, we know - thanks to some research on the subject - that the links that are most likely to be saved, shared and distributed, are actual news.

Not lolcats, not lists, but facts. This is the best time to be a journalist.

Thanks for your time.

Related articles

• We need to talk: 26 awkward questions to ask news organizations about the move to digital
• Autonomy in newsroom means better journalism
• Newsroom curators and independent storytellers: Content curation as a new form of journalism
• Optimism is the only option: The Washington Post's Marty Baron on the state of the news media

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Aron Pilhofer on data journalism, culture and going digital | Tow Center for Digital Journalism

  Interestingness " Right now, many newsrooms are stupid about the way they publish. They’re tied to a legacy model, which means that some of the most impactful journalism will be published online on Saturday afternoon, to go into print on Sunday. You could not pick a time when your audience is less engaged. It will sit on the homepage, and then sit overnight, and then on Sunday a home page editor will decide it’s been there too long or decide to freshen the page, and move it lower. I feel strongly, and now there is a growing consensus, that we should make decisions like that based upon data. Who will the audience be for a particular piece of content? Who are they? What do they read? That will lead to a very different approach to being a publishing enterprise."

  tags: journalism tow data

• Stories for Your Screen: annie96 is typing...

  Man, I *really* love this method of delivering a suspense story. I'm looking at how other media are using Snapchat and WhatsApp for audience engagement and it's interesting but not Quite There (in my view), but as a medium for fiction, the design of this is very clever.

  tags: whatsapp audience network storytelling

• The Big Roundtable’s Social Media Experiment - 10,000 Words

  Interesting, and the conclusion is that the people within networks - however small - are more useful than the framework of that network. I can see the logic in the theory; however, I'm not sure I subscribe 100% to it. "Longform startup The Big Roundtable (BRT) recently commissioned three college students to put its assumptions about social sharing to the test. The challenge? Taking one story, one month and whatever techniques they could think of (legal, of course), the three undergraduates were tasked with the challenge of racking up the most unique page views."

  tags: social media network audience

• Twitter Enhances Lists: 4 Ways To Take Advantage - Forbes

  No new Twitter hacks here, but 4 solid tips to get the best out of lists - I find the the 'subscribe & steal' one very useful

  tags: twitter lists

• Chartbeat CEO on native ads, viewability, and a metric standard

  tags: metrics analytics chartbeat

• Why Writers Need Metrics, Too | LinkedIn

  The pros of using analytics as a journalist - I really agree with the points raised here.

  tags: metrics analytics

• The Most Important Topics Of 2014, According To You - Upworthy Insider

  Surprisingly hard news is leading the way on Upworthy's poll - not sure if this is the equivalent of people saying they read the Guardian when the actually get all their news from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame but still interesting

  tags: upworthy news

• Your Facebook page's organic reach has been desecrated - so stop chasing Likes | Opinion | Marketing Week

  Yes, Facebook reach is decreasing, no that's not the end of news organisations' effectiveness on the site. Interesting content gets shared; it's the blah stuff that we shouldn't bother posting that won't get reach. Maybe it's social media natural selection... "It’s worth noting the lack in organic reach shouldn’t mean marketers should cease creating non ad-funded Facebook content altogether. Some 25 million people in the UK visited Facebook every day in December 2013, the most recently available country-specific figures. Brands need to be where their audiences are and Facebook takes up a big chunk of their audiences’ lives.  As a case in point: earlier this week, EE suffered a network outage that meant many of its customers had no access to its services for a number of hours. EE’s posts about the outage were shared and commented on thousands and hundreds of times respectively, despite the fact it didn’t pay to promote them, because customers expected up-to-date information to be readily available on its Facebook page. And it’s worth mentioning that actual marketing content from brands does show up in the News Feed, but just like word of mouth in any other form, it is only the exceptional marketing that creates a buzz."

  tags: facebook organic reach likes marketing

• Notes on TV — Benedict Evans

  The disrupted TV viewing model; interesting post and some excellent insights in the comments too.

  tags: disruption television

• Skegnes Standard to become officeless paper - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

  "Editor Stephen Stray said: “We really want to be at the heart of the community and our reporting team will now be out and about much more – getting to events and reporting on your stories.” “We are delighted to be holding regular ‘reporter surgeries’ at the Embassy and would like to thank them for allowing us space in there to meet readers.” However East Lindsey District councillor Steve O’Dare said the office’s closure would be “bad news for Skegness.” He said:  “It’s understandable but I think it’s going to be detrimental to Skegness. A lot of people like to pop into the office.”"

  tags: journalism future+of+news mobile+journalism

  • Another JP title to become officeless paper

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        by Paul Linford   <!--<span class="published">Published on .</span>-->  Published 31 Mar 2014. <!--END .entry-meta .entry-header--> 

     

     

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    The Skegness Standard has become the latest Johnston Press title to embrace

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Socdir | Your social media directory of tools.
  There are a lot of resources in this directory, from basic to complex tools, many of which are rated and assessed by users. Very handy
  tags: tools social media directory
  
  
  Heckta for OS X - photo magnifier 
  Hecta is an app for OS X which magnifies photographs without pixelation or blur.
  Photographers, designers, journalists — and you — can zoom in on the smallest detail with clarity and precision.
  
  
  Latent Semantic Indexing
  The long explanation is this: "LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.
  Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms."
  The short one is this: It's pretty good for finding out what words people are searching for in a specified geographic area, i.e. a useful journalism tool. 
  
  
  How organisations are engaging with the Snapchat community | journalism.co.uk
  Latest in the handy podcast series from J.co.uk 

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