Changing journalism for the likely present

Media convergence and newsroom integration have become industry buzzwords as the ideas spread through newsrooms around the world. In November 2007 Fairfax Media in Australia introduced the newsroom of the future model, as its flagship newspapers moved into a purpose-built newsroom in Sydney. News Ltd, the country’s next biggest media group, is also embracing multi-media forms of reporting. What are the implications of this development for journalism? This paper examines changes in the practice of journalism in Australia and around the world. It attempts to answer the question: How does the practice of journalism need to change to prepare not for the future, but for the likely present.

Early in November 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review and the Sun-Herald moved into a new building dubbed the ‘newsroom of the future’ at One Darling Island Road in Sydney’s Darling Harbour precinct. Phil McLean, at the time Fairfax Media’s group executive editor and the man in charge of the move, said three quarters of the entire process involved getting people to ‘think differently’ – that is, to modify their mindset so they could work with multi-media.

The new newsroom symbolised the culmination of a series of major changes at Fairfax. In August 2006 the traditional newspaper company, John Fairfax Ltd, changed its name to Fairfax Media to reflect its multi-platform future. In March 2007 Fairfax launched Australia’s first online-only daily publication in Queensland, brisbanetimes.com.au. In May 2007 Fairfax completed its merger with Rural Press to become the biggest media company in Australasia, with annual revenues of about $2.5 billion and market capitalisation of about $7 billion. Two months later Fairfax got even bigger when it acquired at least one radio station in all Australian capital cities plus television studios when it bought Southern Cross Broadcasting. Fairfax is expected to bid for one of the two digital television licences made available by the changes to media ownership laws promulgated in May 2007.

The aim in moving Fairfax from a print to a multi-platform company was to reach as large an audience as possible. ‘We have a total readership in print of over 4 million per day and online of over 5 million per month’, CEO David Kirk said at the time of the Rural Press merger. ‘Our brand of quality, independent, balanced journalism will serve and support more communities than ever’ (Kirk 2007). A few months earlier chairman Ron Walker had written in the company’s annual report: ‘Fairfax is evolving into a truly digital media company’ (2006: 2). Within five years Fairfax would be a significantly bigger Internet company that distributed its content ‘over more media’, Kirk wrote in the same report (2006: 5).

Kirk developed a three-pronged strategy. The first part of the strategy involved the need to ‘defend and grow our newspaper publishing businesses’ – that is, to consolidate and develop the existing newspapers, whose circulations were holding steady during the week and improving on Saturdays. The second part involved plans to ‘accelerate the revenue and earnings of our digital business’. The third part was ‘to build a digital media company for the twenty-first century’ (Fairfax annual report 2006: 3). In June 2007 Kirk appointed Tim Mannes project leader for the Fairfax Media-Rural Press integration. ‘The purpose of the integration work is to bring the two companies together and build what is truly Australasia’s leading media company’, Mannes wrote in a memo to all staff on 7 June 2007. ‘It’s vital throughout this process that we maintain continuity and momentum and protect the interests and needs of our customers’ (2007: 1).

The business model appears attractive. Kirk said Fairfax’s increased scale and diversity would mean it relied less on classified lineage advertising in major metropolitan newspapers, so it could ‘rapidly develop the best online response to changing media advertising patterns’. In the two years to 2006, online’s contribution to Fairfax’s profits had grown from 1 per cent to 14 per cent with ‘much more to come’. Online’s share of the national advertising pie had grown from 2 per cent in 2002 to 10 per cent in 2006 (Beverley 2007: 6) and had jumped to 14 per cent in 2007. Analysts said they were happy with Fairfax’s move ‘from a newspaper company to a media company’ and banks such as Credit Suisse upgraded their profits forecast (AFR 19 September 2007: 37).

Planning for the move to One Darling Island Road in Sydney’s Darling Harbour started early in 2006. Fairfax CEO David Kirk took personal responsibility. He and chairman Ron Walker visited integrated sites around the world, along with a group of editorial bosses. The favoured site was The Daily Telegraph in London, which embraced convergence from June 2006. CEO Murdoch McLennan hired a consultant from Ifra, Dr Dietmar Schantin, director of the Newsplex, to facilitate the move from mono-media to multi-media at The Telegraph. Schantin said change was less about new technologies and more about altering the established mindset. The focus must be on the audience: ‘The whole idea of audience orientation seems to be quite new for some newspapers. In the past it was more “we know what is good for our readers and so we distribute the content”.’ Newspapers were a service industry whose service was information and news, he said. Newspapers had to learn to ‘serve’ its audience with the things the audience wanted to know, on any appropriate platform. ‘We start from the audience. What they want is a very important point. That does not mean that a newspaper should just do what the audience wants. The newspaper [also] needs to stick
to its core values’ (Luft 2006, Coleman 2007: 5).

Tom Curley, CEO of the world’s biggest newsgathering organisation, Associated Press, gave an important speech to the annual Knight-Bagehot dinner in New York in November 2007. The news industry had come to a fork in the road and needed to take bold steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism’s essential role for both the economy and democracy, he said. Otherwise the media industry would find itself ‘on an ugly path to obscurity’. He similarly emphasised the need to serve the audience: ‘Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs. That’s a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeper thinking. Sourcing, fact gathering, researching, storytelling, editing [and] packaging aren’t going away’
(Curley 2007).

Kirk appointed a ‘newsroom of the future’ committee from editorial (reporters and photographers), IT and HR. The committee initiated a study tour by editorial executives of leading integrated and converged newsrooms in the UK and the US in April 2007. This became known as the ‘Tier 1’ course and involved the editor and deputy editor of The Age, and the news editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. The Herald’s editor went to the annual conference of the World Association of Newspapers in Cape Town, South Africa in June 2007 because that event featured convergence as one of its main themes (PANPA Bulletin June 2007: 6). The committee designed a two-day awareness course for senior editorial managers, known as ‘Tier 2’, that was run in Sydney in July 2007. The ‘Tier 3’ program for all editorial staff started in August 2007 and this ‘multi-media awareness program’ continued until the end of the year. A ‘Tier 4’ course for about 10 per cent of editorial staff (about 40 journalists), where they learned a range of multi-media skills, was scheduled to start after the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The author facilitated most of the Tier 2 and 3 courses.

The Tier 3 and 4 courses have profound implications for journalism education in Australia because they represent the start of major changes to how journalists work in Australia. The process reflects evolution in newsroom practices around the world. In November 2006 Ifra, the international media research company, asked newspaper executives worldwide about their priorities for 2007. The survey attracted 240 responses from 43 countries and results appeared in January 2007. Integration, editorial convergence and cross-media strategies attracted the most attention. Four in five executives rated it one of their top priorities, and half made it their main priority in terms of allocating ‘significant’ funds (Ifra 2007: 34). Ifra repeated the survey in November 2007 and published the results in January 2008. Expanding web strategies was first on the list for 2008, just ahead of editorial convergence strategies, which topped the list in 2007. Improving video and audio content jumped 14 places, and mobile phone strategies leapt 9 places between 2007 and 2008 to be near the top of the list (Ifra 2008: 8).

Blogs bother me : social media, journalism and the curriculum

This paper grew out of the authors’ interest in updating the journalism curriculum at AUT (Aukland University of Technology) to better reflect the impact of online media, including social media, on the work of journalists. The challenge for journalism educators is to remain relevant in rapidly changing news and education environments. Our study suggests that while the vast majority of students have some engagement with social media, particularly social networking, and are aware that it can be a powerful tool for journalists, they are still not entirely comfortable with its techniques and they are not experimenting with social media as a production platform as much as we first thought. In short, it appears that they do not have command of professional fluency with social media tools. In response to these findings we have begun to introduce some social media tools and processes directly into the units we teach, in particular: digital story-telling techniques; the use of Twitter and location-based applications; encouraging the ethical use of Facebook etc. for sourcing stories and talent for interviews; podcasting, soundslides and video for the Web, Dreamweaver, InDesign and PHP-based content management systems. We do not see the work to date as the end-point of the changes that we know are necessary, but we are acutely aware of the limitations (structural, institutional and financial) that suggest we should continue with this small-steps approach for the foreseeable future.

Book review : Newsgames: journalism at play

Book review of Bogost et al's Newsgames: Journalism at play, which explores the potential to harness a new medium for journalism to provide a richer experience than that offered by traditional media, including web publication.

Fanfiction no jornalismo digital: nova matriz da produção jornalística na Web

That work to separate in three stages. The digital journalistic text and your characteristics, conceit definition to the cibersocial fan fiction phenomenal and to the end, search a journalistic production hybridization using the fictional fans contend

Tra società informazionale e prosumerismo: il citizen journalism e la partecipazione on line

I temi della ricerca riguardano il rapporto fra avvento del web e la modificazione dei processi di formazione di identità personale e sociale, della percezione dello spazio e del tempo, del prosumerismo digitale e delle varie forme di partecipazione ed associazione. Centrale è stata l’analisi del rapporto fra il Web 2.0 e la trasformazione delle forme di comunicazione a vari livelli, sia personali che sociali. Partendo da una analisi dei contesti socio-economici globali che hanno trasformato la società moderna nella società informazionale, è stato impostato un percorso di ricerca che approfondisse gli attuali criteri di strutturazione della propria identità, alla luce dell’avvento dei social network e delle reti virtuali di comunicazione come strumento preferenziale di socializzazione. La realtà delle reti sociali è stata analizzata in un’ottica di aggregazione spontanea mirata tanto alla comunicazione quanto alla tutela dei consumatori, e le trasformazioni portate dal Web 2.0 sono state la chiave di lettura per ridefinire i parametri della partecipazione dal basso generata dalla rete. Per comprendere la portata di tali trasformazioni nel contesto italiano è stato impostato un paragone tra l’uso del web negli Stati Uniti e in Italia, avendo le recente campagne elettorali dimostrato l’importanza del web nella partecipazione politica bottom-up; il percorso di ricerca ha dunque affrontato una comparazione di due casi, quello italiano e quello statunitense, finalizzato a comprendere l’attuale ruolo dell’utente nelle dinamiche di comunicazione mediatica. Per focalizzare al meglio le trasformazioni sociali generate dalla partecipazione on line è stato infine analizzato il caso del citizen journalism, per misurare, attraverso la metodologia dell’etnografia digitale, l’entità delle trasformazioni in corso. Il portale di giornalismo partecipativo YouReporter è stato il contesto privilegiato dove poter verificare le ipotesi iniziali circa le dinamiche di partecipazione, e il supporto di programmi di elaborazione statistica netnografica ha permesso di destrutturare al meglio tali dinamiche.

From Books to the Web: A Comparative Analysis of Holocaust Denial in the Internet Age

An analysis of print Holocaust denial literature as it compares to internet Holocaust denial, with a focus on how the transition from print literature to the internet has affected Holocaust denial.

Simulating Data Journalism to Communicate Hydrological Information from Sensor Networks

Presenting relevant information via web-based user friendly interfac- es makes the information more accessible to the general public. This is especial- ly useful for sensor networks that monitor natural environments. Adequately communicating this type of information helps increase awareness about the limited availability of natural resources and promotes their better use with sus- tainable practices. In this paper, I suggest an approach to communicating this information to wide audiences based on simulating data journalism using artifi- cial intelligence techniques. I analyze this approach by describing a pioneer knowledge-based system called VSAIH, which looks for news in hydrological data from a national sensor network in Spain and creates news stories that gen- eral users can understand. VSAIH integrates artificial intelligence techniques, including a model-based data analyzer and a presentation planner. In the paper, I also describe characteristics of the hydrological national sensor network and the technical solutions applied by VSAIH to simulate data journalism.

Herramientas Web en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje del ciberperiodismo en la Comunidad Valenciana

Internet es un recurso de trabajo imprescindible en la tarea del ciberperiodista. Los profesionales de este campo utilizan la red como fuente de información, para crear, editar y distribuir contenidos informativos. Estas nuevas formas de trabajo, apoyadas en entornos telemáticos, se están haciendo extensibles a la universidad española, donde se está produciendo un proceso de adaptación de metodologías, técnicas y herramientas en los estudios de Periodismo. Para facilitar este proceso de ajuste por parte de los profesores de ciberperiodismo, esta investigación pretende establecer una tipología del uso de estos instrumentos en línea según los objetivos planteados en las guías docentes. Para ello, se han estudiado los programas de las asignaturas relacionadas con la docencia del ciberperiodismo en la Comunidad Valenciana. Se han seleccionado los instrumentos Web más utilizados por los profesores y se han organizado en una tabla según criterios de finalidad, acción y tipo de interacción que realiza el alumno con las herramientas y asimismo los objetivos ciberperiodísticos que pueden lograrse con cada una de ellas. La tabla ofrece información general de cada herramienta. El propósito es facilitar a los profesores un criterio de selección para elegir y profundizar en los espacios e instrumentos docentes más adecuados según las competencias que el alumno debe adquirir durante el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje en estos estudios.

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context. From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.