May 13, 2015
Allowing the public to access police body camera footage should help hold law enforcement authorities accountable.
May 13, 2015
Mentor Kevin Blackistone tells an aspiring sportswriter that opportunities for the impassioned hustlers lie on the Internet.
April 28, 2015
UMD professor Sarah Oates explores the logic behind media coverage of the riots in Baltimore.
March 3, 2015
News Editor Lisa Rossi has resigned her post at American Journalism Review.
February 11, 2015
When big-name journalists in the limelight come under scrutiny for errors, everyone likes to pile on and say something about how journalism should be done. Brian Williams has been a trending topic all week. Maybe that is why in the past two days social media users are eager to share their #AdviceForYoungJournalists.
This hashtag caught fire on Twitter this week after seasoned journalist Felix Salmon wrote on open letter...
January 26, 2015
A story about a Mexican journalist found dead posted on a Huffington Post Facebook page was mistakenly accompanied by a photo of the American singer-songwriter.
January 5, 2015
News editors and teachers are spending a lot more time reviewing video--yet not everyone is equipped to judge its quality.
December 19, 2014
’Tis the season for cool toys and technology. You’ve stuffed your kids stockings full of Elsa dolls, Transformers and maybe a Furby, but now it’s your turn. You’ve been good. You donated charity this year, volunteered at a nonprofit and made your wife or husband dinner a couple of times. So in the spirit of commercialism, here’s my Festivus wish list for the video journalist or documentary filmmaker.
December 6, 2014
The news media should treat sexual assaults like any other crime.
November 18, 2014
Through the photo messaging app, Snapchat, I asked for pictures of food college journalists eat throughout the day. And to quote TV’s Liz Lemon, "I’m going to talk to some food about this."
November 18, 2014
Take note: A longform podcast that has become wildly popular means one thing: Audiences like good stories.
November 13, 2014
University of Maryland senior Shea Winpigler writes about the flood of emotions she's facing as graduation with a journalism degree approaches.
November 12, 2014
What does it mean to be reader-first in the era of digital news? One analytics firm explores how smart use of audience data can help publishers connect with readers.
October 29, 2014
Smartwatches have been attempted many times, with little success. But journalists might be making a smart bet that the Apple Watch will be different. Your watch tells time? Mine takes interviews.
October 24, 2014
Nick Diakopoulos, the co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium organizing committee, sees a bright future for collaborations between computer science and journalism.
October 21, 2014
When does a meme officially "start?" When is it over? BuzzFeed brings us answers by looking at the Ice Bucket Challenge coverage.
October 6, 2014
Hungary's slide back toward authoritarianism drew little attention from the U.S. media until its prime minister recently proclaimed his desire for an "illiberal state."
September 16, 2014
The Yo app: It can be novel. It can be annoying. And, yes, people are using it ironically.
September 15, 2014
The sports media has perpetuated a stereotype that football players are more prone towards violent expressions of misogyny than others.
September 13, 2014
A law professor argues the U.S. should not pressure Arab states to use their nationally owned media to slant ISIS coverage.
September 10, 2014
Some ideas for how the image-sharing network can take you beyond wedding planning and birthday parties -- and into news.
September 10, 2014
Several mobile apps can help reporters create compelling visual content for social media.
August 28, 2014
Fewer and fewer media seem big and fearsome enough to directly confront and scare off the bullies.
August 22, 2014
The Huffington Post answers questions on its strategy for covering the story in Ferguson, Missouri.
August 20, 2014
Worried that Facebook is just an ice-cold mess of gooey feel-good news? Don’t worry. There are other places to get informed.
August 14, 2014
Newsroom internships remain an intense, often embarrassing experience of putting yourself out there, often with mixed results.
July 31, 2014
If there’s a bright spot in the generally depressing news about the decline in state capital bureau reporters, it’s that students are compensating for some of the professional staff cutbacks.
June 17, 2014
AJR Opinion: At the crossroads of click great and click bait.
May 28, 2014
Mobile phone reporting means having to choose between high-quality production or true mobility.
May 21, 2014
Journalists of all stripes find themselves tossed into the management role without being prepared for its manifold demands.
May 19, 2014
For one week this spring, I decided to bite the bullet and drop legacy media. The lucky sites were Quartz, FiveThirtyEight, Vox and the viral behemoth BuzzFeed, which actually does have a hard news section.
May 19, 2014
The competition for journalism jobs is rough.
So how can an aspiring reporter stand out?
Turns out, there are skills that can help develop a young journalist into star reporter that go beyond hustling for bylines at an internship or the college newspaper (though don't bypass that; it still is considered a rite of passage into the profession).
Here are six unexpected pastimes that can boost a journalism resume.
May 9, 2014
AJR editors roll out this week's #mustreads, including headlines on drones, Pulitzers and college newspapers.
April 22, 2014
Get more value from a journalism degree: Go beyond the basics and be a creative innovator.
April 15, 2014
Tony Haile speaks out against incentive pay plans based on metrics and why even though the pageview is a simple metric, it “poses problems for newsrooms.”
April 15, 2014
When used poorly, metrics can lead to low morale in newsrooms and justify fears that the desire to create great or important content will be sacrificed in favor of cat videos and an endless stream of Miley Cyrus stories.
April 9, 2014
The company aims to inundate the world with Spritz by 2016. If that happens, though, I predict culture — and journalism — will suffer. Spritz turns reading into a task that needs to be accomplished rather than a leisure activity that gives us calm. It takes away the beauty of storytelling.
April 8, 2014
As the person running social media and overseeing editorial production for the Journalism Interactive Conference held recently at University of Maryland, I was eager to see what would unfold when an army of journalism educators and journalists attended a conference reflecting on the future.
April 5, 2014
Thanks for all the tweets. Winners get glory and an AJR coffee mug.
April 5, 2014
I've tested well over 250 mobile photo/video/audio apps. But I find myself using the same seven tools for mobile news gathering.
April 3, 2014
I’m fully aware of the challenges facing the journalism industry, thank you so much for mentioning them, but there are more effective ways to give meaningful advice.
March 24, 2014
We conducted interviews with seven journalists about press freedom in Latvia and the challenges they personally faced. Among them were two journalists who gave up their jobs rather than their independence -- and moved forward to create their own publications.
March 18, 2014
Good writing and reporting skills transcend borders and time zones. Opportunities abound for young journalists who are interested in putting their skills to use in countries where there is a need for quality journalism.
Below are 10 media outlets across continents that are expanding their newsrooms on their home turf and outside of their borders. All are seeking reporters who are versatile, tech savvy (think mobile journalist), and...
March 17, 2014
USA Today College editors work with dozens of young writers from around the country to report and publish interesting, newsworthy college content and help them develop into better reporters and editors.
March 13, 2014
“Mobile journalism” is a ridiculous title, like “camera journalism.” It’s just journalism, and the mobile part just refers to the tools.
March 10, 2014
There’s something that feels wrong about teasing a serious, brutal story with such a casual, conversational headline.
February 28, 2014
And the winner for best documentary is.... Netflix and you.
February 24, 2014
The problem with Twitter for journalists (and anyone, really): It’s hard to be funny and not offensive in 140 characters. The same could be said for efforts at irony.
February 21, 2014
Pitching is one of the most difficult tasks young journalists face in the workforce, and it has become increasingly difficult as demands increase for a high volume of fresh copy to keep media websites vibrant and relevant.
February 18, 2014
The wordsmith and journalist in me is becoming increasingly offended at the use of the term “new media,” and I think it’s time this quaint phrase is damned to the dustbin of history – along with, well, dustbins. Here are five reasons why:
February 13, 2014
As a 21-year-old journalist, I applaud BuzzFeed for confronting the words that are might considered taboo at mainstream publications. Censoring quotes — or omitting a particularly descriptive one just because it includes a four-letter word — makes us less transparent journalists. Swearing is frequently used to stress a point rather than to offend — so why waste time policing what our sources say?
February 8, 2014
Welcome to the rest of the world. People in it put up with a little less than do we.
These sorts of stories, which often raise themselves at global sporting events, make my eyes roll. They are symptomatic of what happens when a cloistered press, the U.S. sports media in particular, is forced out of its comfortable confines into the vagaries that foreign correspondents put up with all the time...
February 7, 2014
What does it say about the public's appetite for serious news that a dialect quiz topped the list of most visited content on the New York Times website last year? Journalism professors across the country weigh in.
February 6, 2014
Paper marks a new focus for Facebook; a foray into the much-hyped field of news aggregation. Along with the new layout of your traditional news feed, users can select curated topics to follow, like “Pop Life” for entertainment, “Score” for sports, “Ideas” for think-pieces and “Planet” for science and the environment.
February 5, 2014
Pushback in this profession is expected and demands an unblinking toughness that is usually cultivated with experience.
But how do you teach this grit to a young student journalist or new reporter? How can an educator or editor prepare a beginner to stand their ground when attempts at bullying or intimidation may come their way on sensitive stories?
February 3, 2014
Learning to try, fail, learn and try again.
January 31, 2014
Only half of the photographs of Super Bowl XLVII published by major sports and news media pictured the “game” itself.
January 29, 2014
I made my fair share of mistakes when I first became a journalist. Using only one source in an article. Trying to go undercover when it wasn’t actually necessary. Sending an angry email to an editor after my story ended up with a factual error that wasn’t my fault.
Luckily, these weren't blunders that would haunt me forever. Yet I began thinking about the new issues emerging technology has introduced...
January 24, 2014
Sherman is the latest link in a lineage of black athletes in this country to be cast in a negative light by a majority white sporting press and public for violating an unwritten constitution they ignore for others, by virtue of screaming no profanities during a post-game interview in the immediate aftermath of a highly charged championship game.
January 23, 2014
Don’t overreact to the news that the most visited New York Times link in 2013 was an interactive quiz that used questions about word choice to pinpoint where we grew up.
It’s interesting but hardly surprising.
January 13, 2014
American Journalism Review recently published a story about Ky Harlin, BuzzFeed’s director of data science, who created algorithms to predict which stories may go viral. While this piece hasn’t gone viral per se, it has received a high number of clicks by AJR’s standards.
At this point, though, almost anything with a BuzzFeed label draws a lot of traffic. One of the riddles of the Internet has been how to...
January 9, 2014
The almost knee jerk reaction of some news outlets not to play the tapes ignored the fact that 911 tapes are public records in almost every state.
They are public records for a reason. The release of these tapes enables the public to evaluate the response of the police and emergency response personnel.
It is a critical part of the news media's watchdog role.
Indeed the...
January 8, 2014
I recently stumbled across a video about a 10-year-old, 99-pound, Orthodox Jewish female weightlifter. It was an incredibly compelling, well-shot story by the Jewish Daily Forward.
It turns out the niche paper is pushing the envelope in streaming media.
December 31, 2013
Be honest. When given the choice between clicking on a story about Syria or Miley Cyrus in 2013, which did you choose?
Several news organizations, using new analytic tools, set out to find the answer.
The alleged chemical attacks on Syrian civilians and rebels were reported to have occurred on Aug. 21, a mere four days before MTV’s popular Video Music Awards aired live on Aug. 25. Thanks to analytics, media...
December 30, 2013
Exploring reasons for the lack of innovation in journalism AND opportunities for innovation in journalism through the three “P’s” – People, Possibilities, Process - outlined in a book called, "The Innovation Expedition."
December 30, 2013
Instead of selling commercial space to the usual suspects, Fox uses it as a marketing sandbox and experiments with strategies to attract international viewers.
We’re given a rare and unique example of an American network—freed from the shackles of profit margins—that can approach self-promotion opportunities with virtually nothing to lose.
December 23, 2013
I was 17 when I started my account. I'm only 21 now, but in those years in between it seems like we mature and change exponentially.
When I got down to some of my first tweets, I felt like I was reading a different person's voice. Did I really write some of these things?
It felt strange deleting some of my tweets, but as a graduating senior about to enter...
December 20, 2013
This week, David Carr wrote in The New York Times, what some called practically an “obituary” for the network of hundreds of sites: “The hunt to own the lucrative local advertising market, Armstrong’s white whale, is over. But Patch did not go quietly — hundreds of people lost their jobs over the last six months — and neither will Mr. Armstrong, the chief executive of...
December 17, 2013
Earlier this week, I was catching up with a friend and former editor on Gchat. We were talking about journalism, and he wrote, “I wanted to send something along, ‘cause I figure you’d appreciate it as a longform person.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve been referred to as a “longform person.” Over the past few years as a student at the University of Maryland, I’ve built up a reputation...
December 13, 2013
There are few things that grate on the nerves of hiring editors more than spelling, grammar or fact errors.
“If the resume and cover letter are imperfect, what shape will your copy be in after you've got a job?” said Doug Tallman, editor of The Gazette, a chain of weeklies owned by the Washington Post. “I probably won't worry about a that/which error in the 13th paragraph in a 30-inch...
December 12, 2013
You wouldn’t print an article without a headline and you wouldn’t play a TV news package without an anchor intro.
So why would you publish a video without a proper thumbnail?
The effort you put in reporting, shooting and editing your video won’t mean anything if people don’t watch it. Writing a video title and description will help draw viewers, but you need to put just as much effort into the...
December 11, 2013
A story by Jackie Spinner about photojournalism and the era of the Super Journalist, or a reporter who reports, writes and captures multimedia elements, is among the most highly clicked on stories thus far at AJR.org.
Many news outlets, Spinner reported, are asking their journalists to be jacks-of-all-trades, producing both multimedia and text.
The concept turns Henry Ford’s assembly line model on its head and begs the question: Is the efficiency...
December 10, 2013
For those of us who have tried for decades to convince state and federal lawmakers and judges across the nation the value of allowing journalists to protect the identities of confidential sources, the
opinion issued Tuesday by New York’s Court of Appeals could not have been more heartening.
There is “no principle more fundamental or well-established than the right of a reporter to refuse to divulge a confidential source,”...
December 9, 2013
While The Onion employs more writers with comedic backgrounds than journalism backgrounds, the business may have some lessons to offer other media outlets.
This year, The Onion announced plans to end its print edition and go completely digital.
The company’s began creating exclusively digital content when it launched the Onion News Network, its exclusive-to-the-web video section, in 2007.
Since then, the company has taken advantage of its web presence to expand the...
December 9, 2013
Fewer than half of the 841 Kickstarter campaigns recently labeled as "journalism" met their fundraising goals. Why do so many miss the mark, and what are the hallmarks of success?
December 4, 2013
While continuing the award-winning media criticism for which AJR has long been known, we have a new look and a new mission -- to promote excellence and inspire innovation in journalism.
We will cover entrepreneurs who develop business models to support news coverage as well as visionaries tackling inventive ways to tell stories.
December 4, 2013
I am working towards a dream of creating a hyperlocal news network in Egypt to become a platform for people to speak and participate in making their future. In March of 2013, I received an email from the Institute of International Education (IIE) to tell me that I have been selected for the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship.
November 29, 2013
I recently attended The Online News Association’s annual conference, armed with a list of questions about the evolving nature of digital news. Here are my takeaways, covering everything from aggregation and memes to paywalls and user-generated content.
November 29, 2013
When Jim Brady left his post as assistant managing editor of Washingtonpost.com in 1999 to head to AOL, some of his fellow Washington Post employees told him he was crazy. Why would he leave at a time when the paper was so successful? The web, they said, was just a fad.
But one of those reporters — Richard Justice, now an MLB.com columnist — had a different opinion, Brady said....
November 21, 2013
Sexist, gratuitous and inappropriate are some of the milder comments that zipped through a lengthy email discussion here at my journalism school on Paul Farhi's piece on CBS reporter Lara Logan. You wrote, “Logan’s femininity often attracts as much attention as her reporting; virtually every profile of her mentions that she was once a swimsuit model.
On Halloween, people who live in Logan’s neighborhood were startled to see the...
November 21, 2013
In an industry in turmoil, sometimes I wonder: Why would any young person sign up to be a journalist these days?
Carl Sessions Stepp, in his latest post in the AJR Voices section, offers an answer.
He recently asked his class, composed of freshmen, to write about both the old media and new media products that they consume.
Their answers were surprising. They said things like "love the smell of newspaper" and...
November 20, 2013
Over at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan argues that learning to code is a waste of time for journalists who want to work as writers and reporters. There's one obvious reason this argument is flawed; learning a little bit of CSS, HTML and Javascript opens up new, more effective avenues of storytelling.
Beyond the obvious storytelling advantages, learning to code can actually make a journalist better at the fundamental skills of...
November 20, 2013
Repeatedly, students associated legacy media with family and community, not just with information.
Students teach me things all the time, and they recently reminded me of a big lesson: The role of “social media,” trendy as the term may seem, isn’t new at all.
November 20, 2013
Washington Post Reporter Paul Farhi's story on Logan's flawed Benghazi report includes tidbits of gossip that are irrelevant and silly.
November 19, 2013
What’s more crucial than what a journalist tweets? A journalist’s Twitter bio.
I know what you’re thinking, but don’t laugh. It makes a difference in how potential and current followers view your account, and you only have 160 characters (or less) to catch their attention.
While personal Twitter accounts often feature quotes or short quips to get some laughs, professional journalists’ Twitter bios should give readers a glance at what kind...
November 18, 2013
Slate’s “If It Happened There…” series covers American events as if they were happening in another country.
November 6, 2013
The latest round of copy editor cuts raises a lifeblood-type question for news organizations - and it isn't whether lopping off editors will damage quality. Of course it will.
The deeper question is: Do the news media recognize what their real franchise product is, and can they protect it? What is their product? One answer, of course, is that it's news and information, sold to an audience, which in turn...
October 24, 2013
Most journalists who aren't using Twitter professionally in 2013 are eager to learn how to use the platform, but at this point, feel a little awkward getting into it, as there are already so many seeming “experts” who know all the special tricks and seem to do it with ease. We share a few quick and dirty tips for getting started.
October 15, 2013
More news organizations are on Instagram, and some, including The New York Times, have published Instagram photos on their pages. There is a right and wrong way to approach these photos, experts say.
October 15, 2013
Broadcast journalists increasingly are taking to social media feeds and experimenting with Instagram and Vine video to share more of themselves and promote upcoming news segments.
October 15, 2013
I have a routine each morning.
I smack the alarm clock, roll over and reach for my Droid X, which has been charging on the bed stand just a few feet away.
I can usually expect a few notifications each morning: a few text messages, some emails and maybe a Snapchat here or there.
But for a Philadelphia-area sports fan living just outside of Washington D.C.,...
October 1, 2013
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