This article provides an account of the tensions between locative context-awareness and the act of writing journalistic copy for a mobile application. Based on the field trials of the interdisciplinary LocaNews project, the article discusses locative media's potential for spatially sensitive news journalism.In 2009 researchers in Norway made a medium design called LocaNews, and tested it out with pre-planned procedures for the two fundamental activities: production and reception. Of those who participated, 12 people worked as journalists, editors, technicians, and they generated 93 journalistic stories that were read and watched by 32 test-users who were interviewed. The present article deals with findings regarding the production of news content, and presents the strategies used to reinterpret the traditional news criteria of journalism to be fit for a GPS-equipped smartphone. First, the article discusses the connection between journalism and cartography, and then introduces the experimental method used for this research. The bulk of the article consists of an evaluation of the experimental attempt at practising location-dependent journalism. It deals with four issues: putting stories on the map, the characteristics of 'zoom in stories', the construction of an implied position for the readers, and finally the formulation of news criteria that focus on spatial proximity instead of temporal actuality.
This paper reports the evaluation of a new digital support tool designed to increase journalist creativity and productivity in newsrooms. After outlining the tool's principles, interactive features and architecture, the paper reports the installation and use of the tool over 2 months by 12 journalists in the newsrooms of 3 newspapers. Results from this evaluation revealed that tool use was associated with published news articles rated as more novel but not more valuable than published articles written by the same journalists without the tool. However, tool use did not increase journalist productivity. The evaluation results were used to inform future changes to the digital creativity support tool.
Media researchers should construct their own new media. It is in the public's best interest that academics as well as industry professionals and amateurs experiment directly with the materiality of new media. Due to a medium's potential for becoming important in people's lives, its success should be measured not only by its profitability and usability, but also by its communicative ability. The public interest of the many, as fostered by enhanced communicative abilities, counts more than the economic interests of the few. This article proposes that researchers combine media studies with a series of already established design principles from information science to attempt to make new and better media.Media design, as opposed to media innovation theory, is characterized by placing editorial content at the centre of new developments. Content is king in the simple sense that a new medium must have high quality content in order to function in the marketplace of ideas, and the researchers must therefore experiment with, for example, local news journalism, live music at festivals, or digital storytelling in a big city. All media design projects have to include an ethical platform, a responsible editor at some level of the operation, procedures and norms for content production, and a target audience that represents the public interest. These are severe limitations, but they are productive.The article first locates the media design method in relation to the two central concepts innovation and design. Thereafter, the six steps of the proposed method Nyre, Lars 87 are presented as follows: the research team must formulate a program of action based on the full potential of new media; build a prototype of a particular new medium; try out procedures for editorial content tailored to it; and evaluate it with external test-users in various experimental treatments. Towards the end of the project, the public value of the design project must be evaluated, as this is the ultimate measure of failure or success for a new medium.
A tool that helps journalists discover new story angles by offering insight not search results. BY NEIL MAIDEN, KONSTANTINOS ZACHOS, AMANDA BROWN, DIMITRIS APOSTOLOU, BALDER HOLM, LARS NYRE, ALEKSANDER TONHEIM, AND AREND VAN DEN BELD key insights ˽ Journalists identified more with digital tools to support them to discover and generate new angles on stories more quickly than now-tools that recognized and augmented their existing creativity skills. ˽ Different creative search algorithms applied to news information operationalized the strategies for discovering new angles on stories reported by experienced journalists. ˽ Evaluations of the INJECT digital tool in three newsrooms revealed it increased the novelty of stories written by journalists, but younger journalists more open to new technologies and working more autonomously were more likely to use the tool.
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