From DSC:
I’d like to send a shout out to my sister, Sue Ellen Christian (Isacksen), who has been working hard on publishing her new book, Overcoming Bias. Sue Ellen teaches in the Communications Department for Western Michigan University. Congrats sister! I’ll be ordering my copy later today!
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British Library digitizes 300 years worth of newspaper archives, brings 65 million articles online — from engadget.com by Amar Toor
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011
Abstract
News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events (emphasis DSC). Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200–kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as “news is becoming more negative” and “American news portrays a U.S.–centric view of the world” are found to have merit (emphasis DSC).
Couple items from the Conclusions section
Monitoring first broadcast then print media over the last 70 years, nearly half of the annual output of Western intelligence global news monitoring is now derived from Internet–based news, standing testament to the Web’s disruptive power as a distribution medium (emphasis DSC).
…
While heavily biased and far from complete, the news media captures the only cross–national real–time record of human society available to researchers. The findings of this study suggest that Culturomics, which has thus far focused on the digested history of books, can yield intriguing new understandings of human society when applied to the real–time data of news. From forecasting impending conflict to offering insights on the locations of wanted fugitives, applying data mining approaches to the vast historical archive of the news media offers promise of new approaches to measuring and understanding human society on a global scale.
I originally saw this piece at the Futurist Update, from October 2011
Prototypes, visualizations take shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab –– from PBS.org by Cody Shotwell
Data Visualization: Journalism’s Voyage West — from Stanford University
This visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. The data comes from the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” project, which maintains a regularly updated directory of newspapers.
PressForward: A new project aims to rethink scholarly communication for the age of new media journalism — from niemanlab.org by Tim Carmody
Excerpt:
How journalists communicate has been radically changed by the Internet. Is it time for the academic world to catch up?
Today, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launches PressForward, a new discovery portal and publishing platform for scholarship and intellectual discussion on the web.
The big idea of PressForward is to create a digital-first alternative to the cumbersome mechanisms of traditional gatekeepers — academic journals — while keeping main benefits of print publication and peer review: their ability to concentrate a community’s attention around the best emergent writing and research. The project is bankrolled through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Information Technology program.
Addendum on 6/28/11:
Five tips for emerging video journalists — over at the Innovative Interactivity blog by Paul Franz
Excerpt:
But there are a few skills that I strongly believe all budding video journalists should take note of as they begin their careers in multimedia production.
…
a) Get used to editing as if you were working for MTV. For example, TIME recently rolled out a new magazine feature called “Pop Chart,” which is tantamount to a kind of a whacky news round-up. Normally, these affairs can be boring time sinks that do not attract a whole lot of viewers or interest. But with a few editing tricks and changes to your style, they can become fun little shows that entertain as well as inform.
b) Start getting comfortable with your voice. Many pieces just won’t have all the content you require to have a single character narrate an entire piece. Purists will argue that not having enough A-roll is tantamount to laziness, but the realities of the job will force you to use your voice frequently as a narrative bridge.
From DSC:
Speed, personalization, interactivity driving advancements in media today — I would submit that these trends are true for education as well.
See:
Excerpt:
Whether you’re talking about the future of television, news, or advertising, it’s all about speed, personalization, and interactivity. These three things are the driving considerations behind the advancement of all media today.
Say hello to Encyclo, our new encyclopedia of the future of news — from Nieman Journalism Lab by Joshua Benton
Addendum on 5/18 with a somewhat related item:
The story so far: What we know about the business of digital journalism — from Columbia Journalism School by Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, & Lucas Graves
From DSC:
This type of report is relevant for many of the industries being disrupted by the Internet, including higher education. To me, the words “reinvent” and “innovate” came to my mind while reviewing this report.
Also see:
Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book (filmed March 2011)
About this talk
Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad — with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is “Our Choice,” Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth.”
About Mike Matas
While at Apple, Mike Matas helped write the user interface for the iPhone and iPad. Now with Push Pop Press, he’s helping to rewrite the electronic book.
AP Interactive visualizes a future of stories that reach beyond text — from niemanlab.org
Excerpt:
Data visualization is “going through a kind of renaissance in journalism,” said Shazna Nessa, director of Interactive for the AP. What’s really behind the news collective’s uptick in graphics, she told me, is a kind of evolutionary change in journalism — one that’s reflected in the Interactive unit itself. Once a repository of charts and maps, the department is now creating what Nessa described as “comprehensive interactive stories,” and we can expect to see a lot more of them.
