Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: As publishing has moved to digital forms, journalists have discovered it is sometimes preferable to tell a news story without writing an article
But did you know: Quartz launches Atlas, a searchable platform for charts and data visualizations (Quartz)
Atlas is Quartz’s new home for its charts and data visualizations created by staff and select contributors. Readers are able to search Atlas, as well as embed and download the image files and the underlying datasets. Atlas will include native advertising, with sponsored charts that will be clearly labeled and handled by the advertising team. Quartz editor Kevin Delaney says: “We’re creating a platform for data and charting that minimizes friction for use elsewhere on the web that spreads on social media.”
+ Atlas is part of Quartz’s larger entrance into the world of distributed content: Quartz recently launched Quartz Africa and its first native iPhone app, as well as Actuality, a podcast in collaboration with Marketplace (Nieman Lab)
+ Noted: Verizon completes its acquisition of AOL for $4.4 billion (TechCrunch); Instagram revamps its Explore tab in the U.S. to add more newsy, real-time discovery for tags, people and places (Instagram); Vice partners with Unilever to launch a female-focused online video channel, with 11 more channels to follow (Guardian); Virginia Quarterly Review is commissioning one writer per week to create three to five stories for Instagram with an image and short essay (PBS MediaShift)
Advice for local news: Think about what local can do, not what it can’t (Journalism.co.uk)
While many people talk about the limitations of local news, Billy Penn founder Jim Brady says local news organizations should focus on their strengths — easy access to the community and consumers who are “all within your reach physically.” Brady says: “Local sites, they have this perception that they should wall themselves off a little bit. ‘We’re journalists, we’re reporting on what’s going on, it’s not in our job to get really involved with the community.’ And I think that’s a huge opportunity for sites if they’re willing to really engage.”
+ Earlier lessons for local news from Billy Penn: Instead of chasing the same stories everyone is chasing, use curation to achieve comprehensiveness and why you should sound less like a journalist
+ NYT’s Clifford Levy says its weeklong experiment blocking the desktop homepage for employees was successful in getting employees to think about mobile: “The thing I came away with is that we have to keep doing this more and more — not this particular experiment, but to be focusing almost obsessively on mobile and innovating and moving very fast toward the future” (Washington Post) and earlier: Why NYT blocked employee access to its homepage for a week
BBC diversity adviser: Fire executives who don’t help increase diversity (Guardian)
Lady Grey-Thompson, BBC’s diversity adviser, says in order for BBC to better represent the make-up of its audience, the organization may have to spend £100 million (about $157 million). Grey-Thompson also said that executives who fail to embrace diversity should be fired. She says: “People are able to hide behind discrimination — against disabled people, against women — are able to hide and discriminate in lots of ways and there has to be a point where we say: ‘Do you know what, this is not good enough, we just don’t want someone like you in the organization.’”
How SoundCloud keeps employees communicating between its four global offices (First Round Review)
SoundCloud’s VP of community David Noël keeps the company’s more than 300 employees collaborating between its four global offices. SoundCloud holds a weekly all-company meeting, which Noël made sure people feel is essential by picking a theme for each meeting and prioritizing the inclusion of remote employees via higher quality video feeds. Noël also facilitated the development of a comprehensive intranet for the company that was released in phases and included community-building features as essential elements.
When web scraping, should data journalists should still identify themselves as reporters? (J-Source.ca)
When reporters start asking questions, the first thing they do is identify themselves as journalists. But when data journalists use web scraping to gather data, a robot is the one sending queries to servers or databases. Glen McGregor, national affairs reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, says journalists should still identify themselves as such: “In the HTTP headers, I put my name, my phone number and a note saying: ‘I am a reporter extracting data from this webpage.’” But not all data journalists follow the same thinking. Philippe Gohier, web editor-in-chief at L’Actualité, avoids identifying himself: “I change my IP address and I change my headers too, to make it look like a real human instead of a bot. I try to respect the rules, but I also try to be undetectable.”
Charleston’s Post and Courier asks all 170 state lawmakers whether they believe the Confederate flag should be removed from SC statehouse grounds (Huffington Post)
The Post and Courier is taking on an ambitious assignment: It’s getting all 170 South Carolina lawmakers to say whether they believe the Confederate flag should be removed from the statehouse grounds. The paper’s editorial board argued Tuesday in a front-page editorial that the flag should be removed, but executive editor Mitch Pugh says the newsroom is not taking a stance on the issue by getting all lawmakers’ opinions on record: “Lawmakers have an obligation to tell their constituents how they intend to vote or how they feel about this issue.”
+ A look at how 13 newspapers led with the South Carolina governor’s call to remove the Confederate flag (Poynter)
The post Need to Know: June 24, 2015 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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