New Media Unit

"The quality and scalability of native advertising means it is filling the gap between brand publishing and banner adverts"

"The line between news and advertising is going, going . . . As newspapers and broadcast stations scramble for new sources of advertising dollars, are old ethical standards getting lost in the shuffle?"

"Since its new publisher took over last summer, The Orange County Register has been praised for being one of the few newspapers in the country that is hiring reporters, and expanding its print edition. But the reaction to one of the Register's new additions has been met with controversy. Depending on who you ask, it's either a smart way to bring in revenue, or a serious breach of journalism ethics."

"From the beginning the story seemed suspect, but that didn't stop the New York Post's report last month of a surgically enhanced, three-breasted woman from overtaking the internet. By the time the story was debunked, just a day later, the tabloid-friendly tale had already made the rounds, generating posts on BuzzFeed, The Week, The Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Together, those stories were shared almost 190,000 times on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. But stories correcting the record, like TMZ's "3-Boobed Woman a Fake," generated about a third as many shares. That's a problem." But new tools like Emergent could help find the answer

"As journalist/programmer Stijn Debrouwere has argued in a persuasive essay about the challenges facing the news business, journalism isn't being disrupted just by different forms of journalism - it's being disrupted by things that don't even look like journalism"

"if Americans are finding a more polarized reality online, they may have just grown more partisan with less knowledge, making it more important for forums like presidential debates to deal with the details of policy. In the Web 2.0 age, when many Americans see hundreds of articles every day, are we more informed than previous generations were?"

"After registering slightly higher trust last year, Americans' confidence in the media's ability to report "the news fully, accurately, and fairly" has returned to its previous all-time low of 40%. Americans' trust in mass media has generally been edging downward from higher levels in the late 1990s and the early 2000s."

"A group of legacy media executives was told on Monday that it has a lot to learn from the likes of BuzzFeed. "You may not approve of their editorial content," said Amy Webb, CEO of Webbmedia Group. "But you must learn from their digital strategy." During a presentation at the ASNE-APME 2014: Fast Forward conference in Chicago, Webb praised BuzzFeed's use of data analysis to predict user behavior based on variables like time of day, which photos are used, and social networks."

"If Gannett's radical newsroom restructuring becomes industry norms, journalism schools need to do two things to better prepare graduates for the job market: (a) offer innovative digital training and (b) prepare students for jobs other than newsroom staff."

"Knight is out with a new report today that looks at the successes and failures of two cycles of the News Challenge, and what lessons might be passed on from them to other inventors and entrepreneurs. (Along with a visual summary, the full report is available as a PDF.)"

"A decade ago, aspiring journalists could just think about journalism and leave the financial side to others. Now, to be a successful journalist you have to think like an entrepreneur and understand something about the business you're in. You have to build your own audience, as distinct from that of your publication. You have to think about what kind of organization can support the work you want to do, with integrity and staying power."

"ASU J-schoolers now have the opportunity to work alongside faculty members and media professionals as they correspond with PIN sources. The newest home of PIN, a thriving digital platform where more than 215,000 citizen experts have volunteered their expertise and angles to reporters across the country, will live in the Cronkite School's downtown Phoenix campus building."

"OK, Glass, it's time to change journalism. That will be the collective mindset of students taking "Glass Journalism," a new course slated for the fall semester at the University of Southern California, where students will be tasked with thinking up new ways for journalists to tell stories using augmented reality and Google Glass."

"In many ways, 2013 and early 2014 brought a level of energy to the news industry not seen for a long time. Even as challenges of the past several years continue and new ones emerge, the activities this year have created a new sense of optimism - or perhaps hope - for the future of American journalism."

"No matter how old they are, people surveyed for a new study by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute were "more than twice as likely to express high levels of trust about what they learn directly from a news organization (43 percent say they trust it mostly or completely) as they are to trust what they discovered through social media.""

"Journalists and news organizations are turning to the crowd's aid for reporting and photography, since the right person with a mobile phone at the right time can often give a good picture of the news sooner than newsroom staffers. In "Accurate, Fair & Safe: The Ethics of Social News" at SXSW, two industry pros discussed the benefits of social news gathering - but the benefits don't come without pitfalls."

"Facebook's News Feed, a homepage built by our friends and organized by our clicks and likes, isn't really a "news" feed. It's an entertainment portal for stories that remind us of our lives and offer something like an emotional popper. In fact, news readers self-identify as a minority on Facebook: Fewer than half ever read "news" on the site, according to a 2013 Pew study, and just 10 percent of them go to Facebook to get the news on purpose, as opposed, say, being assaulted by a breaking news event when you're just scanning baby photos. To see this more clearly, let's compare the BuzzFeed network's most viral stories-i.e.: the stories that go biggest on Facebook-to the top stories on Twitter and the most-searched stories. First, here are the top stories on Twitter in 2013. It's a blend of news, like terrorist attacks and music shows, and evergreen silliness with Ryan Gosling and Kim Kardashian. "

Ezra Klein's new journalistic venture, Project X, starts with the proposition that news organizations focus too much on what's new and not enough on what's important. What will his alternative look like? A "21st Century encyclopedia" as much as a news site. "We want to think really hard about how to connect not just new information, but to bring it together with important contextual information to create a more thorough source and place to understand the world," Klein said.

"In short: Twitter and, within the space of 17 minutes, the Internet-accessing world may have known that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his apartment before his three young children, with whom he was scheduled to spend the day, and his longtime partner, Mimi O'Donnell."