Ten Trends to Watch in Journalism - trends that are defining newsrooms today

  1. Newsrooms are increasingly outsourced. “Well-paid journalists in old media are frequently exchanged for free-lancers or external content companies with lower costs,” he says. “How this effects editorial integrity and the quality of journalism, we don’t really know yet. As editors, you have much less control over content produced by outside partners.”
  2. Two-speed journalism is now a reality.
  3. Breaking news is becoming digital. In this world, speed often trumps accuracy.
  4. Data journalism is accepted as a discipline.
  5. Infographics dominate print and web.
  6. The differences between print and broadcast have shrunk.
  7. More momentum from mobile.
  8. Social media enrich journalism.
  9. Ethics – going back to basics
  10. All-round newspapers are challenged online by big tabloids.

Fonte: editorsweblog.org

The lonely life of the lowly copy editor

The newsroom is a highly romanticized work environment. Reporters banging away at their keyboards, BlackBerrys buzzing with insider tips from networks of secret sources. Editors huddled in conference rooms, debating what news is important enough to make the paper. You can see why this setting has been idealized by Hollywood - and, for that matter, by most of the people who work there.

But there is one aspect of the newsroom for which there is no romantic vision, a job that devalues ingenuity and invention in favour of emotionless, robotic consistency. This position is never mentioned in pop culture re-creations of the newsroom because it belies the assumed high-mindedness of newsmaking. It is the role of the copy editor.

In the newsroom, the copy editor’s job is to fix other peoples’ mistakes. But by the time a copy editor gets his hands on an article, higherup editors have (one hopes) already investigated it for factual errors and adjusted for tone and general literariness. The errors that remain are usually small - a typo here, a grammatical glitch there. The most exciting part of the job is finding one of these mistakes, though this excitement is tempered by the fact that in most cases, the kinds of mistakes copy editor locate and fix would not be noticed by most readers were they left uncorrected. That is to say, copy editors may be the only people who value the job of copy editing.

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Fonte: nationalpost.com

Predicting the Spread of News

futurejournalismproject:

Researchers are analyzing if its possible to predict how widely news items will spread before publishing and promoting them via social networks.

By analyzing past performance of popular Twitter posts, the researchers from UCLA and HP Labs believe they can predict ranges of popularity on Twitter with 84% accuracy.

Via Technology Review:

[Bernardo Huberman] wants to know whether their is something about the news stories themselves that determine their popularity. In other words, he’s looking for factors that determine how popular a news story will be before it is even published.

To find out, Huberman and his colleagues examined the content of news stories during a single week in August last year as measured by the news feed aggregator Feedzilla. They scored each article based on four criteria: the news source that generates and posts the article; the category of news; the subjectivity of the language; and the people and things named in the article.

They then measured the way these news stories spread across the Twitter network to see which became popular and how quickly. They used this to work out how an article’s score in each criterion is linked to its eventual popularity.

Technology Review rightfully points out that this could have a profound effect on how newsrooms assign and schedule their editorial. It also suggests that we could have “social checkers” in our word processing apps and CMS’s that work similarly to spell checkers. The social checker would help predict how popular our stories will become.

An interesting metric even if it ignores the simple fact that often the most important stories aren’t the ones that reach the most eyeballs.

Study: The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity, via arxiv (PDF).