Mobile news consumption has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past few years and journalism education should consider ways to incorporate smartphone news gathering/production in the curriculum.
The UK Guardian recently published a survey report on the mobile traffic to Guardian’s mobile and desktop sites in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Here’s a visualization of the traffic data in 2012: Continue reading
Survey shows that working professionals have strong demand for digital journalism training and increasingly turn to training organizations for help. Journalism schools, on the other hand, face obstacles to offer similar trainings which can better prepare their students for a digital career.
In August 2012, Knight Foundation conducted a survey of 660 journalists to find out the needs for digital training among working professionals. Here’s some interesting but important findings in the survey report:
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The free online data visualization tool just got better: infogr.am recently improved its template lineup and added new features (such as map!). I created a short demo for the various templates one can use to visualize a data set. Note that infogr.am can do more than what is demonstrated here. Continue reading
A digital journalism program should merge conventional tracks (print/broadcast), incorporate multiple digital journalism courses, and offer selected beats for students to develop in-depth knowledge on specific topics. This is how a forward-looking journalism program can innovate its curriculum to meet the changing needs of both the industry and the students.
For a quick reference to key points discussed in this post, see an infographic at the end. Continue reading
My compilation of 106 digital or multimedia journalism degree programs in U.S., out of more than 500 journalism and communication programs, has attracted tens of thousands of visitors to the list and the accompanying blog articles. Continue reading
For digital journalists creating interactive maps using Google Fusion tables, a common complaint that Google has not addressed is that the map does not come with an embedded legend. Here’s a simple workaround to add a customized legend to your map.
Alert: Google has updated Fusion Tables maps and legend is now a build-in feature. Check this tutorial for a step-by-step guide on how to create a demo interactive map (with legend).
For a Google Fusion tables map, Google automatically generates embedding codes for embedding the map in a web page or a blog post. However, the embedded map does not come with a legend. Take a look at the map below, where I plotted the median household income by county in New Jersey.
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The web and the digital media are getting more and more image-driven; yet photography is not considered an essential skill by many journalism educators – only a small number of journalism programs list photography as a core/required course in the curriculum.
Image is being produced and shared at an unprecedented pace, aided by the ever-increasing availability of digital cameras and smartphones, the viral image-driven social media such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the improving availability and quality of broadband Internet access. The phenomenal growth of Pinterest and Instagram this year has made 2012 the start of “visual web” era.
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News reporting: indirectly told by reporters; due to space limits, only a small amount of subject materials are selected based on “news values.” Digital storytelling: directly told by subjects involved; a fuller range of subject materials are included. Continue reading
Storify, the popular content curation tool, is also a useful tool for teaching multimedia production. See below for a comparison of two approaches to the discussion of “sequence video shooting techniques”: one approach is a “text + screenshots” style that is typical of online “how-to” articles; the other approach is more visual and engaging – it curates multiple selected text/image/video all in one place.
Move your mouse over the embedded article below and scroll down to explore how this article discusses the topic using mostly text with a few video screenshots, as well as a few links pointing to sample videos which, upon click, will show up in a separate window. Continue reading
