Making News in the Digital Era

Journalism and Digital Times: Between Wider Reach and Sloppy Reporting Ying Chan. CHAPTER FOUR. News Choice and Offer in the.
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Therefore journalists also have to recognise the vital role audiences play into the news production, specifically in the increasingly dominant online news offering. In order to fully understand the relevance of viral strategies, it is important to consider how this phenomenon relates to digital disruptions in media. Print newspapers are especially confronted with more negative sides of the digital disruption. In fact, news agencies are facing a business crisis due to the fast decline of their circulations and loss of audiences.

To make matters worse for print newspapers, the digital landscape has opened up vast opportunities for new competition: Media organisations that exist solely online, including Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, have become significant players. Being native online players, these news organisations take advantage of social media to distribute their content and to use the metrics analytics to analyse their impacts. Applying viral strategies is then often a way to increase their reach. This shows how vital viral news can be for journalism as a business.

Clickbait and listicles are strategies for virality, but they are also strategies for commercial revenue. Social media platforms are omnipresent. Facebook is now a common setting for audiences to receive news. Most news organisations recognise this trend which is why social media is one of the main avenues to publish their news stories on. News use and social media use are hence deeply entangled. Journalism as an institution is affected because it can no longer perceive the people as just an audience or consumers.

Indirectly, users are becoming part of journalism as an institution as they contribute to the distribution of news. In the midst of many changes occurring due to the digital era journalism has drifted into, some things remain the same. The strategy of using the headline of an article to entice the reader is not a recent phenomenon.

Even the use of viral strategies already existed before, but the concept used was sensationalism. Although it is happening at a more frequent rate by multiple news organisations, taking advantage of a headline for capturing attention occurs continuously. In addition to that, even though legacy news media are being challenged by online news sites, they are still regarded as important sources of news and audiences still turn to them. We can also consider certain legacy news formats as viral news, especially for hard news and breaking news.

Long form and in-depth journalism also continues to be significant even in the online environment. According to a Pew Research study , people spend more time on average reading long-form news articles than shorter articles and both long and short form articles receive a similar number of visitors. It is interesting to note that even Buzzfeed is not solely relying on the viral content they are most known for.

Particularly with a new editor-in-chief, Ben Smith who previously worked at Politico , Buzzfeed has accommodated for a more serious tone, long-form journalism and hard news reporting. T he use of listicles and clickbait as viral strategies has been actively debated by journalists, editors and academics. Moreover, the next question is in what circumstance should they be used?

Again Andrew Trench expressed his personal concerns on when viral strategies are appropriate:. Many point to the advantages of using these strategies and deny that these format affects the audience negatively, while others contest it and consider it a challenge to journalistic standards or simply as ineffective. The above five points show how listicles can serve a specific information purpose.

They are said to make an easier reading and thinking experience because from the start they give readers a clear picture of the level of attention required to read the story. Organising information in a list also helps the brain process the information and readers to skim the content.

T here are plenty of criticisms towards viral strategies, especially from academics. Rather than those supporting, which mostly focus on the readers, those criticising look at the a larger picture: The most important and valid criticism is that viral strategies do not create viral news. And as stated before, sharing content is the essence of virality. If these viral strategies do not serve their goal, it requires journalists to understand what does in fact motivate sharing.

Scholars have found that sharing content, hence, content going viral, heavily relies on how the audience connects to the content, not so much to the format. This is why a study on viral content found out that important determinants are its contents: The emergence of self-publishing platforms like the Geocities of old , or the Wordpress blog of today, has reduced the barrier and cost of publishing to virtually nothing.

The growth of easy digital publishing technology brings with it new ethical dilemmas for journalists. Even as the press write scare stories that Facebook can give you cancer , sex diseases and is a danger to your children , newspapers use it as a valuable research tool. Whenever a young person is in the news, Facebook or other similar social networks are usually a ready source of images. No longer does the news desk have to wait for a family to choose a cherished photo to hand over. A journalist can now lift photographs straight from social networking sites, and often, in the most tragic cases, newspapers republish tributes to lost friends that have been posted online.


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This leads to a new potential for ethical problems. The Scottish Sunday Express, for example, splashed with a story that survivors of the Dunblane massacre had been 'shaming' the memory of their fallen classmates on Facebook. To most people it just seemed that they were acting like ordinary teenagers on social network sites, and that the 'outrage' was entirely manufactured by the paper.


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The Express was ultimately forced into an apology for the article , and in part this was because of an online petition of over 11, people protesting about the article. It is Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir , however, who has become the text book example for this kind of thing. Moir wrote a column about Stephen Gately's death that was accused of being homophobic, and, with publication on the eve of his funeral, was at the very least extremely poorly timed. Digital publishing and the growth of social media facilitated widespread protest against her piece, and as links to the article spread across the web, an unprecedented total of over 22, complaints were registered with the Press Complaints Commission.

Well, maybe not, since in the end, the PCC effectively brushed aside the complaints , and argued that Moir had a right to comment and express her opinion. I don't think the episode was without consequence though.

Essential considerations for journalists in today’s distributed news era

I'm not clear that many of those 22, people complaining would have even heard of the Press Complaints Commission before the janmoir hashtag and Facebook campaign pages got going. They've now had a dispiriting experience of press self-regulation. Subsequently, Rod Liddle has become the first person to have complaint about their online blog upheld by the PCC , because they ruled an opinion piece must have some basis in fact. The Liddle article was also widely complained about online, and this particular ruling may be the beginning of us seeing online protests having an impact on press accountability.

There is still an inequality in publishing - albeit one that I think sometimes journalists don't appreciate. Journalists still have exclusive access to newspaper audiences, and the technology developed by the news industry. But they also have access to all of the other freely available tools as well. When I look at a publishing platform like Tumblr , it sometimes seems like the only way you can't publish to the Internet is by folding up a message into a bottle and throwing it into the sea.

Everything else - email, voice phone call, desktop app, iPhone app - is catered for. There is no reason why a journalist cannot use Tumblr or YouTube or Dipity to tell their story. They are not forbidden from using the same tools as the 'citizen journalist' or blogger. Blogging was only subsequently integrated back into the BBC site when he had demonstrated that the medium had journalistic value. The amount of equipment needed to cover events has also drastically decreased. A single decent smartphone can replace the separate camera, sound recording equipment and laptop needed to report from events even just a couple of years ago.

Somewhat taking its shape from the over-by-over or minute-by-minute text sports commentary, these are rolling articles on a topic updated during the day as a story unfolds. It's seen newspapers fold and consumption shift from print, television, and radio to podcasts and YouTube, largely accessed on mobile phones and tablets. Things are understood to be much more fluid and a work in progress because they can be changed and updated. One of the most complex challenges for media outlets today is how to reshape the editorial responsibilities of journalism itself.

Which journalistic ethics still fit the digital age? I wondered how, unshackled from principles drawn up in the pre-internet era, the digitally native outlets were approaching editorial standards. I also wondered how traditional news outlets were handling the challenges of the digital era.

"Journalism in the digital age: trends, tools and technologies"

Could the famously neutral tone of The New York Times really work in the social media space, one that favours opinion? One of the more interesting news outlets operating without traditional infrastructure is Vice News. The lo-fi documentary makers, who recently rode with the Islamic State to produce a five-part video series, proudly boast a subjective style. Vice News is but a year old and already its audience figures are astonishing, especially considering world news was never considered a niche that younger audiences would be drawn to.

"Journalism in the digital age: trends, tools and technologies" | Help | The Guardian

It takes you into the story,' he says. A documentary featuring basketballer Dennis Rodman in North Korea has amassed more than seven million hits, while a moving documentary called Ghosts of Aleppo takes you inside Syria in a way other media outlets have not managed to do.

Meanwhile, business site Quartz , owned by the Atlantic , is using new tools to enhance the accuracy of its articles. Annotations also encourage anyone with expertise to contribute to a story, which is an acknowledgement that journalists are not the only experts on an issue— and in fact may not be experts at all. Quartz 's global news editor Gideon Lichfield says the digital era calls for media outlets to be fluid and transparent with information. You either had to try to pretend to know everything, or only write about things you know about,' he explains.

Further, Quartz has eschewed the strictly impartial approach of other business publications such as The Wall Street Journal. For The New York Times , the most significant editorial challenge has been the so-called flattening out of web content. A traditional newspaper provides the reader a roadmap of sorts. Aron Pilhofer, executive digital editor with the Guardian and formerly of The New York Times says this has major implications. Or they are very subtle. Martin Belam of UK multimedia publisher Trinity Mirror runs several data-driven news websites and has a different view about the blending of hard news with opinion and entertainment.

Add to this the complexity of also distinguishing news and commentary from native ads and you have another monster to wrestle. The verification of information, especially in the fast-paced viral news world, remains the greatest challenge of the digital news revolution. You do see this.