The New News

The Journalist's Guide to Producing Digital Content for Online & Mobile News

Joan Van Tassel, Mary Murphy, Joseph Schmitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000089271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The New News offers an approachable, practical guide to the 21st-century newsroom, equipping journalists with the skills needed to work expertly, accurately, and efficiently across multiple media platforms.

Emphasizing the importance of verification and authentication, the book shows how journalists adapt traditional practices of information-gathering, observation, interviewing, and newswriting for online publications. The text includes comprehensive coverage of key digital and multimedia competencies – capturing multimedia content, "doing" data journalism, mobile reporting, working in teams, participating with global audiences, and building a personal brand.

Features developed exclusively for this book include innovative visuals showing the multimedia news structures and workflows used in modern newsrooms; interviews with prominent journalists about their experiences in contemporary journalism; a glossary of up-to-date terms relevant to online journalism; and practical exercises and activities for classroom use, as well as additional downloadable online instructor materials.

The New News provides excellent resources to help journalism students and early-career professionals succeed in today's digital networked news industry.

The authors are donating all royalties to nonprofit LION's programs to support local online news publications.

Part I

News Now

1

Be Here Now: The View from 30,000 Feet

Chapter Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, students will be able to:

1. Understand how the COVID-19 global crisis highlighted the importance of accurate and timely news reports.
2. Describe the current media and communication environment of the news industry.
3. Evaluate the effects of many-to-many communication.
4. Analyze how new communication technologies and new media platforms enable news reporting and responding in real time.
5. Summarize the crisis of credibility that journalism faces today.
6. Appraise proposed solutions to the decline in trust of the news media.
7. Consider the role of verification in the news.

The coronavirus is a fierce reminder of just how much we need credible journalism, especially in times of crisis.

– Mark Hertsgaard, March 25, 2020

The Gist

In the opening months of 2020, journalism stepped up. The world reeled as a contagious, lethal virus challenged the lives and economic well-being of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people. Journalists sounded the alarm publicly before anyone else, including world leaders, public health officials, and medical professionals. They used every tool in their kit – new tech, old tricks – to wake people up to the growing threat and held leaders accountable for their actions and failures to act. That’s their job and they fulfilled their mandate.

This first chapter begins by describing the decisive role that journalism played as the coronavirus crisis unfolded. That clarion call by journalists to focus public attention on an existential danger provides a vital lens for this textbook, demonstrating why students must master the methods that online, multimedia journalists use to produce accurate, timely, and trustworthy news reports. In addition, the consequential coverage of the unfolding pandemic also highlights the importance of the global communication networks underlying the reach and impact of 21st-century news.

Chapter 1 covers how real-time digital communications transformed many aspects of traditional journalism. Modern fiber optic infrastructure dramatically increased the speed of all communications. But that’s not all. In addition to a faster network, it’s a two-way network, enabling interactive public conversations among billions of people that take place in near real time. For journalists, the advance in real-time delivery of news from media isn’t new (think TV’s live satellite transmission). However, on the record written responses to the news by potentially anyone on earth have never occurred in real time before.

Now we’re all adapting to many-to-many interactive communication, or M2M, bringing with it a multiplicity of ideas, perspectives, and beliefs that challenge the worldviews of just about everybody, including national leaders and mainstream journalists. By 2016, the virtually instantaneous spread of viral news over the internet was commonplace old news. The powerful effects of M2M exchanges astonished leaders everywhere as it became clear that this communication form could re-shape social and political realities with unprecedented speed.

At the same time, the stark economics of digital publishing caused many local publications to downsize or close their doors altogether. People in many locales lost their connections with familiar sources of news – they couldn’t see themselves or their lives reflected in the big-city news. Quite naturally, individuals tend to privilege the views of their own social network – family, friends, and colleagues – over those far-away elite news media journalists.

The rapid changes in the communication environment and the empowerment of anyone with an internet connection created a crisis of credibility for the news industry – its audience no longer passively accepted editorial pronouncements. The M2M network enabled people to seek their own sources and to do their own research from the largest information archive in history. Journalists increasingly faced demands for transparency about how they gather, produce, and publish news, requiring answers to such questions as: “What do you know?” “How do you know it?” “How did you verify the information?”

News organizations realized that they must face and find solutions to the decline of public trust in mainstream journalism. Many newsrooms explored powerful new ways of gathering, explaining, and telling news stories to foster public trust in the news. Ironically, the critical needs of the public for accurate information during the coronavirus crisis may offer journalists the opportunity to enhance the credibility of professional journalism.

And in the midst of all this transformation, essential elements of the profession have not changed: The responsibilities that journalists have to the public and reporters’ commitment to long-held values of accuracy and timeliness remain obligatory.

Rarely has journalism been more integral to people’s survival around the world. Stay tuned.

Infodemic: Reporting in the Age of COVID-19

Early in 2020, governments and their citizens around the world struggled to understand the danger posed by COVID-19. They needed to know the basics – how the virus spread, how to recognize the symptoms of infection, what to do in case the symptoms appeared, and where to go if their symptoms worsened. Some people required the answers to even more detailed concerns, such as immune-compromised individuals, medical professionals, hospital administrators, and local officials.

In many countries, the governments couldn’t or wouldn’t provide accurate, timely information. In the vacuum, misinformation and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic inundated the internet, circulated by governments, agencies, organizations, and individuals to dodge blame or to support their particular aims. The maelstrom led the World Health Organization (WHO) to characterize the resulting confusion as an “infodemic.”

The rapid spread of the coronavirus crisis raised the stakes for accurate news. The crisis stands as a stark indicator of just how important professional, trustworthy journalism is when reality bites. Get accurate news – and social distancing “flattens the curve” of a rising number of cases. Get fake news – and beach-going spring breakers spread the virus around the world, as shown in this heat map posted on Twitter.com at https://tinyurl.com/wtrmav7.

The press stepped up to meet the crisis head-on. News organizations scrambled to sort fact from fiction, science from opinion, and reality from hope. Newsrooms struggled to find qualified experts so they could report the known facts to a frightened audience. They also recognized their responsibility to convey the seriousness of the spread of COVID-19. Equally important, ethical journalists took care to prevent public panic by avoiding sensational language and images, speculation, and mere rumor (Kwan, Wardle, Webb, Townes, & Chen, 2020).

By downplaying the significance of events unfolding in January and February of 2020, administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom made reporting on the growing threat more complicated (Sullivan, 2020). For example, U.S. President Trump characterized COVID-19 as a “hoax” (Schlesinger, 2020) and the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted that people should wash their hands and go about their “business as usual” (Guardian Staff, 2020). As a result, the public faced conflicting messages about the virus: The press reported a serious evolving danger; leaders seemed to regard the stories as overblown.

Despite the casual dismissal of the risk by some leaders and conflicting messages blanketing the internet, news organizations continued to report the unfolding crisis. As more reports of the virus’ impact in Italy surfaced, journalists awoke people to the growing threat. Compelling stories and images from China, South Korea, and Italy, combined with warnings from public health experts and medical professionals, finally convinced substantial segments of the population to demand action.

As the crisis came into focus, strong disagreement about how reporters should cover leaders’ remarks came to the fore. How should journalists cover press conferences when leaders make misleading and false statements that can have deadly consequences? Should they confront speakers? Should they fact-check in real time or wait until after the presser? These questions were particularly salient for broadcast, cable, and live-streamed video coverage.

Some argued that by simply retransmitting incorrect information, journalists were complicit in the “fake news.” Washington Post media ethicist and columnist Margaret Sullivan explained the dilemma the press faced:

The reflexive media urge, deep in our DNA, is still to quote the president without offering an immediate challenge. That’s why we continue to see headlines and chyrons that parrot his [Trump’s]words directly, no matter how misleading: That the virus will disappear, that it’s not inevitable that the disease will spread, that a vaccine is coming along “rapidly,” [that the United States is] “very, very ready” to deal with whatever happens.

Sullivan wrote that media do bear the responsibility to report in the public interest rather than simply repeating and amplifying inaccurate statements – even if the speaker is the president:

It’s a dumbfounding notion, especially given Trump’s proven propensity for lies and falsehoods. But now as a deadly disease, the coronavirus, threatens to turn into a full-blown pandemic, it’s not simply bizarre in a way that can be easily shrugged off. It’s not just Trump being Trump. And it’s definitely not funny. It’s dangerous.

Informing the public about danger on their doorsteps is the very heart of journalism – always has been. Journalism is our distant early warning system: Journalists are the scouts, monitoring the environment, scanning the horizon, and fanning out to the edge of the known world to bring back accounts of lurking menace and surprising delights. Sometimes the tigers really roam out there and no one would know they were being stalked as they worked, played, sang, and slept – except for the reports from those journalist-scouts.

The passionate words of journalist Brandi Buchman, reporter for Courthouse News, serve as a reminder of this most sacred responsibility of journalism.

Vox Verbatim: Brandi Buchman, Reporter, Courthouse News

When journalists think about covering coronavirus, one of the most crucial things they can do to inform their reporting overall is to understand - with great clarity - that every word they put onto a page or shoot into the social media stratosphere is consumed by a living, breathing human being and that human being may very well use that reporter’s words to inform decisions they make regarding their most precious commodity: their life.

Know that. Own that. Respect that. Write accordingly.

Though this next part should always be the case, it cannot be reiterated enough during a public health crisis: Take time with information, even if it is five minutes more and it means you won’t get that “breaking news” tweet or won’t be “first” to publish. It is infinitely more important to be accurate and accurate the first time. This builds trust, credibility and reliability. Readers aren’t stupid, they see this effort, they appreciate this effort and they respect this effort.

And lastly, during a pandemic, remember this - solutions come faster when transparency is prioritized. Hold powerful, influential people to account by asking the “impolite” questions that force them to address possible flaws in logic or policy. No, this often isn’t comfortable for you as the person behind the pad and pen. But please remember: It was never, at any time, in your job description to make powerful people feel warm and fuzzy. You are there, as all great reporters have ever been, in service of the public.

The Global Babel-sphere: Everybody connected to everybody

Today may be the most exciting time to be a journalist since the mid-19th century, when the telegraph and photography brought new speed and power to news reports. Huge opportunities and challenges abound in our new many-to-many (M2M) communication environment. It’s a new world: news at the speed of light, directly and personally to the world’s billions of users.

Throughout history, people could communicate to each other in one-to-one (1-to-1) conversations and in small groups, few-to-one and few-to-few exchanges. In the 15th century, mechanical print technology expanded communication modes to allow one source of information to reach many people via books, newspapers, and magazines. This then-new form of public communicati...