With rapid advances in Virtual Reality (VR) and video technology, and a high level of experimentation taking place in newsrooms, there is a hunger for information on what’s working and what’s not. At the news:rewired conference in London on Wednesday, Ben Kreimer, Journalism Technologist at Buzzfeed’s Open Lab; Sarah Jones, VR storyteller and educator; and Parminder Bahra, EMEA Executive Producer for the Wall Street Journal shared the lessons they have learned.
Distributed media company NowThis Media, which produces short form news videos, stopped publishing content on their homepage a year ago, yet grew its audience to about 1,2 billion monthly views with an impressive 79% retention rate. Ashish Patel, Vice President of Social for NowThis tells us about their innovative strategy.
Eyewitnesses armed with smartphones have changed the news gathering process dramatically. How fast and how well news organizations work with these citizen journalists is becoming a competitive edge.
A teacher will be among the winners of this year’s World Young Reader Prizes, the annual awards for excellence in youth engagement and news literacy from WAN-IFRA, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
Must-read for VR-innovators: a new report released by the Knight Foundation and USA Today Network on Sunday says that 2016 will be a decisive year for VR storytelling. Once the novelty wears off, will the hype take off or die down?
“The folks at Aftenposten, Norway, are among the most innovative teams in any newsroom,” writes Mario García in the foreward to our recently published “Best Practice in Digital Media” report, which profiles all the winners of WAN-IFRA World Digital Media Awards.
It’s easy to let cynicism creep into the most upbeat of media minds residing within the intensely competitive newspaper and news media landscape that is London today. Kevin Beatty, CEO of dmg media, publishers of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, MailOnline, Mail Plus, Metro and Elite Daily, will have none of that, thank you.
The wall erected by Greece on its border with Turkey was the catalyst for journalists to start The Migrants’ Files; a collaborative, cross-border, data-driven project that helps to put the European migration crisis into perspective. The main question: Has the wall made it more dangerous to get into Europe?
“No question: trust is our greatest challenge…We are constantly worried about resources, social media, monetization and all these kinds of things. All of those pale in comparison to this particular challenge.” A sobering warning from Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron.
Last year, Justin Kirby wrote a post for us about what traditional media brings to the branded content party. In it, he explained that despite a growing consensus amongst industry experts about how branded content will be at the heart of every marketing strategy, there was less agreement about what it actually is.
In recent years, Asia has appeared among the bright spots of the world’s newspaper industry in terms of traditional, print-based growth, and the view of many in the West might well be that news publishers there aren’t yet facing the same challenges that they are. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In a world overloaded with information and editors lacking resources, what is the future of journalism and how should editors adapt? The World Editors Forum spoke to Butch Ward, of The Poynter Institute.