News

How to keep climate coverage on your news agenda

2023-03-16. What makes it so difficult to get people to engage with climate change stories; which approaches make an impact; how can newsrooms best manage their coverage and what can other areas of journalism learn from great climate reporting? A new report, Climate Journalism That Works: Between Knowledge and Impact tries to answer these questions.

‘The biggest reconstruction story since World War II’: Wolfgang Blau on global climate adaptation

2023-03-16. In a Q&A in a new report on Climate Journalism That Works, the founder of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network says newsrooms must step up, urgently, to address climate change – which is a systemic challenge, not just a topic.

‘Media literacy should be our focus now’: Fact checkers on the disinformation frontline wary of ChatGPT 

2023-03-14. Fact-checkers have had a busy few years. The deluge of information on COVID-19 and climate change included rumours, misinformation and disinformation on every dimension of these challenges. Now, Open AI and ChatGPT have entered the mix…

Tension and anxiety in Georgia as NGOs, press face ‘foreign agent’ label

2023-02-03. A bill set to mark NGOs and media organisations in Georgia that receive funding from abroad as ‘agents of foreign influence’ is gaining momentum in parliament, sparking fears of an authoritarian clampdown.

How The Gender Beat aims to advance gender issues by taking cues from climate journalism

2023-03-02. Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, we are flagging The Gender Beat, a new global collective of journalists working to raise the profile of gender journalism, and the people who make it happen.

‘We’re just getting started’ – David Kaplan on the future of investigative journalism

2023-02-17. David Kaplan could well be credited for strengthening watchdog journalism around the world. As co-founder and inaugural Executive Director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, he led the organisation from an initiative with a few hundred followers in 2012 to a “network of networks” spanning some 244 groups in 90 countries.

Learnings from a year-long focus on gender issues in Malaysia

2023-02-02. On International Women’s Day last year, Malaysia’s The Star kicked off a year-long collaborative initiative to profile key issues affecting women in Asia. The aim? To position stories around the key challenges facing women on the news agenda throughout the year – not just as a key calendar highlight.

Why there should be more editorial focus on TikTok

2023-01-19. We always tell people to be where your audience is. Right now, 755 million people are on TikTok. smartocto spoke to Dutch journalist and well-known TikToker Marieke Kuypers about why the platform holds so much potential for newsrooms. And what you can do to be relevant.

New WAN-IFRA report on reader revenue: 10 cases of best-practice

2023-01-25. For many news organisations today, their North Star is to reach that point when digital revenue accounts for the largest share of their income. Ideally, at least in most cases, a heavy dose of that comes from digital subscriptions: recurring revenue that paves the way for a more sustainable business.

Newsprint: Washington Post launches interactive ‘year in news’ feature

2022-12-01. The Washington Post has launched an interactive, personalised feature that showcases a shareable summary of a subscriber’s top journalism engagement from the past year.