How Journalism Professors Calibrate News Industry Trends in the Classroom
It’s not easy, but media educators are thirsty to know about research-driven trends, and here are some recent ones.
Amid offering coaching, planning lessons, learning new software, adhering to policy and grading, educators don’t get enough credit for how difficult it is to stay abreast of evolution since just about everything is being disrupted.
Within the ranks of journalism faculty, the challenge is to know how swiftly to embrace storytelling techniques and associated software or devices. The way educators do that is pay close attention to research. This autumn, some significant reports and surveys have been released that shed light on advancements (or not) that might lead to the reframing of courses for next semester. Among them:
Tech Trends You Need to Know for 2017
Amy Webb always mesmerizes attendees of the Online News Association conference each autumn in presenting the perspectives of The Future Today Institute, her consultancy. Her 10th annual review conveyed a sense of urgency for the news media, in face of rapid developments, particularly artificial intelligence. See the 2017 Tech Trends on Slideshare or download it. Because the report is so expansive (not all 159 trends are particularly relevant to journalism), it deserves to be studied, but heed her warning in the top right of the below graphic. See also a folder of her presentation’s key slides, watch it or listen to it.
The Global Survey on Journalism’s Future: A new global survey by the Future Today Institute about how those working in news think about the future
Simultaneous to Webb’s presentation at ONA17, she released more data and comments. In her analysis of the survey results, she pointed to “nowists” as obstructing rapid evolution because these managers, typically 44 to 65 and charged with making decisions about strategy and tactics, really can’t look more than a year ahead. Download the report
The State of Technology in Global Newsrooms: First-Ever Global Survey of News Tech Reveals Perilous Digital Skills Gap
Visual excerpts from the full report conducted by the Center for International Journalists (working with Georgetown and supported by Google and Storyful) appear on a Medium post. Two appear below.
Writing for MediaShift, Jason Alcorn analyzed the results from the perspectives of understanding analytics, and concludes that global newsrooms are falling behind. The report indicates that fewer than half of editors charged with understanding data analytics had experience in them before being hired.
According to the ICFJ survey, about 20 percent of new hires in digital, traditional and hybrid newsrooms alike are arriving with experience in using data analytics, roughly the same number who have experience using a content management system, or CMS. Digital newsroom hires are most likely to have experience with analytics, and traditional news outlet hires are the least likely.
World News Publishers Outlook Survey: Publishers’ Fear: ‘Reluctance to Innovate’
Almost 250 “decision makers” surveyed by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers replied to 22 questions surrounding the overarching issue of “the single-most important risk to a news organization’s future success.” WAN-IFRA makes full report free to members, but Nieman’s Wang offers a great summary and a relevant graphic:
Artificial Intelligence: Practice and Implications for Journalism
This report (pdf), crediting four authors, summarizes the findings of a June conference of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, billed as “a policy exchange forum of technologists and journalists.” The recommendations: invest in training editors and reporters, develop guidelines; build partnerships because AI is costly for newsrooms; and continue to fight hidden bias in AI.
State of Data Journalism in 2017: The Current State and Challenges Facing the Field Today
Google News Lab teamed PolicyViz on 56 qualitative interviews and an online survey of more than 900 journalists “to better understand how journalists use data to tell stories.” The report as pdf was released Sept. 18, 2017
Attitudes to Paying for Online News
Many interviews with consumers conducted as part of the Reuters Institute’s annual global Digital News Report, released in June, focused on subscriptions, micropayments or donations. Nieman’s Wang reported on that arena in her article, What makes people willing to pay for news online? Quality content; a clean, convenient reading experience. The qualitative study of consumer monetization attitudes was published in August.
Who Works in America’s Newsrooms
Google’s News Lab helped ASPN
The American Society of News Editors’ annual diversity survey got a boost from the Google News Lab, releasing a visualization of U.S. newsrooms have changed (or not) since 2001.
Jody Brannon is community manager for the Tow-Knight Disruptive Educators project, which is affiliated with the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. For more information about the Disruptive fellows program, contact jprofs@journalism.cuny.edu; faculty and adjuncts, both current and aspiring, are invited to join the group on Facebook.
