Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, recently gave the 2015 Hays Press-Enterprise lecture at the University of California on journalism’s move from print to digital. Here are 14 highlights from the speech.
While debates about the ethics of User Generated Content (UGC) roll on, it’s time to focus on the next big challenge: leveraging User Generated Data. UGD is an idea being explored by Fergus Bell. In this guest post, he outlines his tips for editors keen to do more with audience data, and highlights the early emerging ethical challenges.
The Apple Watch has brought renewed buzz (and mixed reviews) to the wearables discussion, with news executives watching to see what publishers do with the device. New York Times R&D lab’s Executive Director Matt Boggie looks beyond the release of a single device to the future implications of small screen technology.
At a breakfast at its London headquarters Editor-in-Chief Richard Addis unveiled a strategy to grow the European audience through investments in redesign and a focus on quality and longform reporting.
Just one week before the Finnish elections on 19 April and with the potential new Prime Minister in the studio next door, Hanna Kouri, Channel Director, ISTV, took time out to tell us about their success with their online video platform.
Gannett has become an industry leader in virtual reality story telling and its flagship newspaper USA Today is embracing the technology with strategic purpose. Editor-in-Chief David Callaway says the growing use of VR in news is a natural progression from the widespread uptake of video in online content and it’s about to take off. Callaway spoke to Angelique Lu.
“News doesn’t belong on paper anymore,” says Samir A. Husni, Professor and Hederman Lecturer, Magazine Innovation Center, The University of Mississippi, USA. “My daily newspaper must remain daily, but the content must become weekly on a daily basis. And that’s what we’re seeing with magazines; all the successful ones are becoming monthlies on a weekly basis.”
“News publishing is diverging along two very different tracks,” says Kerry J. Northrup, a career journalist and media executive who specialises in prototyping the future of journalism. They are “the editorial services industry and experiential news media. They have different business models, different content models, and two very different newsroom models. That’s the key difference to be looking at in newsrooms going forward.”
“As is common for technology companies, the ‘beta’ concept has permeated our work initiatives,” says Marta Gleich, Executive Editor of Zero Hora and seven other RBS Group newspapers in southern Brazil.
There has been a significant increase in threats to Paris newsrooms following January’s Charlie Hebdo attack, according to the Director General of France’s TV5 Monde. An international Francophone broadcaster, the network is one of the most identifiably vulnerable media groups in the aftermath of the newsroom massacre, in which 12 people were killed. Julie Posetti reports.
Having a solid digital strategy that appropriately incorporates the vast amount of data at their disposal is essential for publishers, but it is also a complex undertaking. “The first step is understanding the critical strategic value of your behavioural data, and not outsourcing its capture, management, and processing to a third party,” says Annika Jimenez, Vice President, Pivotal Data Labs.
Since the financial crisis of 2008/2009, the publishing industry has seen a number of innovations that as of yet have failed to pay off in a big way. But unlike the iPad, paywalls or web-TV, the ongoing industry buzz around big data analytics may signal a true paradigm shift for publishers willing to invest, according to big data specialist Tor Bøe-Lillegraven.