2. New media in 2012
• Internet and mobile technology as disruptive
influences on news business
• Every journalist needs to start developing
‘new media’ skills
• The ‘people formerly known as the audience’
may already have these skills
• More competition for the audience’s limited
attention span
3. Types of sites
• Websites for news organisations that have
a core business offline
• Online-only news organisations
• Niche sites and blogs
• News aggregators e.g. Google News
• Social media e.g. Twitter, Facebook
4. Text and multimedia
• Text has big advantages over multimedia:
low bandwidth, easy to search, works
similarly across different platforms,
accessibility, many users prefer to read.
• Images and video are increasingly popular
• Trend towards infographics
• Flash and HTML5, interactivity
5. Basic writing skills
• Inverted pyramid for newswriting
• Spelling, grammar, accuracy
• Relevance to your audience
• Attribution (online means links)
• Importance of timeliness
6. New skills
• Following a developing story: start off with what
you’ve got and continue adding to it over time
• ‘Never wrong for long’ can hurt credibility
• Filing for different platforms: radio journalists
asked to take photos, print journalists asked to
film interviews; convergence
• Audience engagement, e.g. keeping across social
media reactions to your work
7. Popularity contest
• Audience interest can be tracked more
than ever before
• Real time data on online traffic and people’s
sharing habits
• Most popular stories are tabloid staples:
sex, crime, entertainment, offbeat
• Balancing act: light and shade
8. Headlines
• Short and sharp:
• five to eight words
• verbs, active voice
• most important words at beginning
• avoiding place names
• avoiding ‘crash blossoms’
• “Who is...?” “How to...” “Live blog...”
“I can’t stop reading this...”
9. Style and tone
• Depends on audience
• Hard news calls for serious tone
• Entertainment, sports news, opinion articles
can be more relaxed
• Always needs to be concise and direct
• Use appropriate vocabulary
10. Length
• Headlines and leads must travel alone
• Three paragraphs is rarely enough
• Some stories demand visual support
• Attention span is only barrier to long-form
feature/magazine-style writing
• Single page versus microsites
11. Passive versus active
• ‘Passive’ readers will follow whatever
stands out: attract them with interesting
headlines, colourful photographs, feature
best stories in prominent positions
• ‘Active’ readers looking for something
specific: help them by giving unambiguous
headlines, correct placement within
sections, appropriate keywords
12. Social media and UGC
• UGC: user generated content
• ‘Witnesses are taking over the news’ (Jarvis 2008)
• ‘People formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen
2006) access, organise, manipulate, create,
collaborate and share media content in
unpredictable and uncontrollable ways
• Credibility issues: similar process to using any
unverified information but needs to be faster
• Copyright, privacy and other ethical issues
13. Mobile news
• News events captured on mobile devices
• quality low but improving
• often unedited but instantly shareable
• citizens performing ‘random acts of
journalism’ (Lasica 2003) in moments of crisis
• not just developed world
• Mobile consumption habits, flexible formats
• Mobile social media, geotagging
14. Day in the life
• Copytasting
• Subediting
• Adding metadata
• Photos, videos, links, maps
• Producing bulletins
• UGC and social media
• Filling the gaps/reporting
15. What’s next
• Visit the websites of your favourite news
sources, on a computer, mobile or tablet
• Follow journalists and news orgs on Twitter
• Like journalists and news orgs on Facebook
• Cross-section: broadsheet/tabloid, local/
national/international, niche/general audience
• Learn to use an RSS reader
16. Next level
• Start a blog and post twice a week
• Use Facebook and Twitter to share your posts
• Aim to get retweeted or liked by 20 people
• Upload 100 photos to Flickr (cropped, colour
corrected) or another photo sharing website
• Shoot and edit a two-minute video and post it to
YouTube or Vimeo
• Create an account on Wikipedia and improve five
entries
