The End of the News as We Know It: How Facebook Swallowed Journalism

This is the full text of a lecture delivered by Emily Bell last week at the University of Cambridge, where she is the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media 2015–16 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social…

New Report — The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data

On March 24, the Tow Center launched “The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data” — a research project led by Tow Fellow Jonathan Stray. The launch event, held at Columbia Journalism School, featured a presentation of the report followed by a…

Exposing Algorithms @ NICAR2016

Algorithms are everywhere we look (and even places we don’t look) controlling what we see, do, and where we go. They’re great for solving our problems and helping us make better and quicker decisions, or taking the decision-making out of our hands. Their guidance is perfect…

Capturing Journalistic Practices and Norms in the Digital Age

In my research on journalism and emerging media, I am often asked to answer questions about the fast changing nature and uses of social media. How can researchers capture the constantly changing uses and nature of social…

Studying Chat App Usage by American News Organizations

In the past 12 months, chat apps (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Telegram, Firechat, BBM, and others) have taken on new significance in news production and journalist-audience engagement. For US-based news organizations, chat apps…

What Universities Can Teach News Organizations About Innovation

History reminds us that often, some of the most impactful ideas in the media industry were inspired and developed not in valleys or alleys…

Computational campaign coverage based on PollyVote.com

Algorithms for automatically generating stories from machine-readable data are shaking up the news industry, not least since the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news and most reputable news organizations, has started to…

Introducing “Beyond 140 Characters”: A Tow Center project about the forces that shape journalists’ strategic Twitter engagement

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Illuminating 2016: Helping political reporters cover social media during the 2016 presidential campaign

Although Donald Trump seems to be getting a lot of love from journalists who cover what he is tweeting about, all of the presidential candidates are…

Students Create New Ways to Use Existing Content