Mobilizing Journalism Education

This paper evaluates several examples of integrating mobile social media within new pedagogical frameworks applied to journalism education, representing the reified activity of a journalism lecturer community of practice. We propose a mobile social media framework as a catalyst for new pedagogies that support student participation within a professional community. The framework leverages Skype and Twitter for facilitating authentic collaborative student-directed projects, establishing student eportfolios using a collage of social media, curating and critiquing mobile social media source material around news events using Storify, and the use of new and emerging collaborative mobile video applications such as Vyclone and Vine

Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism

Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers

Knight News Challenge: Casting the Net Wide for Innovation

Reviews the evolution of the Knight News Challenge contest for experimental projects in digital delivery of news and information to local communities, profiles winning projects and explores the grants' impact, and considers issues of sustainability

Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century

Despite the pervasiveness of media, the amount of philanthropic dollars in support of public interest media remains minuscule and, therefore largely ineffective. The report, based on a survey of the the funding sector, calls on philanthropists to embrace a practice of transparency and information sharing via technology, to determine how existing funds are being used and how they can best be leveraged to increase philanthropic impact within the media field

Preconditions for Citizen Journalism: A Sociological Assessment

The rise of the citizen journalist and increased attention to this phenomenon requires a sociological assessment that seeks to develop an understanding of how citizen journalism has emerged in contemporary society. This article makes a distinction between two different subcategories of citizen journalism, that is independent and dependent citizen journalism. The purpose of this article is to present four preconditions for citizen journalism to emerge in contemporary society: advanced technology, an \"active audience\", a \"lived\" experience within digital culture, and an organisational change within the news media.Sociology of Web 2.0, Citizen Journalism, Social Media, Digital Culture, User Generated Content, Digital Technology, Active Audience

Does social media usage matter? An analysis of online practices and digital media perceptions of communication practitioners in Europe

A key aspect for understanding and explaining online communication is the micro level of communication practitioners’ social media usage and their general attitudes towards digital platforms. This paper investigates how public relations practitioner's personal and professional use of social media is related to their perceptions of social media. A quantitative methodology was applied to perform this research. A population of 2710 professionals from 43 European countries working on different hierarchical levels both in communication departments and agencies across Europe were surveyed as part of a larger transnational online survey. Results show that practitioners with a high level of usage of social media give more importance to social media channels, influence of social media on internal and external stakeholders and relevance of key gatekeepers and stakeholders along with a better self-estimation of competences. Issues about diverse levels of overestimation of social media use, application and importance in the professional arena are also debated

A Thematic Review on Digital Storytelling (DST) in Social Media

Digital Storytelling (DST) is defined as telling stories using digital means. It has been initially applied for diverse purposes, including in community development, therapeutic benefits, and as an aid in teaching and learning. DST has recently been broadly used on social media platforms for marketing, running campaigns, journalism, and much more. However, no comprehensive systematic or thematic review of DST in social media has been conducted. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide a thematic review of DST in social media. The thematic review was carried out on 50 articles published from 2016 to 2021. These 50 discrete studies were selected because they met the inclusion criteria based on the research question of this review. The thematic review used ATLAS.ti as a tool to assist the review process. The results indicated that DST in social media was appropriate for marketing, including branding and advertising. Besides, using DST in social media over the years for education, training, professional development, community development and services, running campaigns, and therapy has significantly impacted these areas. Across the research articles, including case studies and essays, authors have reported several benefits of using DST in social media

Doing it for Real: Designing Experiential Journalism Curricula that Prepare Students for the New and Uncertain World of Journalism Work

The world of journalism in the digital age is changing faster than university curricula can keep up. News is now produced in forms and on platforms that were nonexistent 10 years ago. Journalists may increasingly generate their own work opportunities in entrepreneurial news outlets and start-ups, rather than as employees in legacy newsprint and broadcast media. Substantial workforce contraction has also occurred since 2012 as revenue in print and other traditional media has found new homes in social media and search engines, and over 1000 journalists (or 15 percent of the journalism workforce) were made redundant. Journalism graduates therefore need to be flexible, innovative and enterprising to survive professionally in this evolving setting. Additionally, financial and funding pressures on universities are leading them to reduce course costs and deliver more courses online. Elongated unpaid internships provide real world experience but access to these will likely reduce as workforces continue to contract. This article considers student feedback from three authentic experiential journalism projects in light of these changing times in journalism. It explores how the performative and very practical nature of traditional and digital journalism skills may be developed through a learning-centred curriculum anchored in authentic and experiential activities and settings. The article briefly considers some of the challenges facing journalism educators in delivering such a curriculum in e-learning settings, and sets out a simple framework for supporting the development of digital media workforce readiness

Smart Universities

Institutions of learning at all levels are challenged by a fast and accelerating pace of change in the development of communications technology. Conferences around the world address the issue. Research journals in a wide range of scholarly fields are placing the challenge of understanding "Education's Digital Future" on their agenda. The World Learning Summit and LINQ Conference 2017 proceedings take this as a point of origin. Noting how the future also has a past: Emergent uses of communications technologies in learning are of course neither new nor unfamiliar. What may be less familiar is the notion of "disruption", found in many of the conferences and journal entries currently. Is the disruption of education and learning as transformative as in the case of the film industry, the music industry, journalism, and health? If so, clearly the challenge of understanding future learning and education goes to the core of institutions and organizations as much as pedagogy and practice in the classroom. One approach to the pursuit of a critical debate is the concept of Smart Universities – educational institutions that adopt to the realities of digital online media in an encompassing manner: How can we as smarter universities and societies build sustainable learning eco systems for coming generations, where technologies serve learning and not the other way around? Perhaps that is the key question of our time, reflecting concerns and challenges in a variety of scholarly fields and disciplines? These proceedings present the results from an engaging event that took place from 7th to 9th of June 2017 in Kristiansand, Norway