The Future of News

So much of the training and retraining of journalists seems to be focused on getting them to be multimedia reporters, backpack journalists or one of the other buzzwords we use for collecting audio and visual content and presenting it online.

Multimedia is one of three things that make online journalism different from offline journalism, but the other two things — interactivity and user-control — depend largely on journalists understanding data driven journalism. This isn’t about numbers, but about structured data. Here’s a bootcamp that’s intended to introduce journalists to the tools and concepts of structured data and data driven journalism.

(more…)

If Chapel Hill had a patron saint of town-gown relations, it might have been Rebecca Clark. The 93-year-old woman was not only a leader in the area’s black community, but the mother of the late Doug Clark, who entertained generations of frat parties with his band, The Hot Nuts.

Ms. Clark died on Saturday. But the Triangle’s newspapers should ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

(more…)

I’d agree with this post from Andria Krewson — “technology will not replace human contact that reminds government employees to provide public information to the public.” Hopefully that elicits a big fat “no-duh” from most readers of this blog. But here’s how people and machines will work in newsrooms of the future …

(more…)

Collegerag.net is a site launched yesterday by two UNC-Chapel Hill journalism students, Sara Gregory and Andrew Dunn.

(more…)