New Media Unit

At The New York Times, multimedia storytelling is becoming more a part of the journalism and less of an afterthought.

Media is changing. In fact, our very concept of what media is is undergoing a transformation as well. I can explain the changes or I can simply show you this video. You'll think it's adorable, but it's sure to make traditional media types' blood run cold. Watch and then we'll continue.

Alisa Miller's TED Talk brilliantly illustrates what news industry observers have been warning for years: Our news diet is distorted. We get very little news about places outside the United States, and that amount dwindles further when we remove Iraq from the equation. If you look at our supply of news from places outside the United States that the U.S. is not directly involved in, the effect is even more pronounced. the Center for Civic Media, under the leadership of Ethan Zuckerman, is embarking on a project to build the tools to empower the individual, and the news providers themselves, to see at a glance what they're getting and what they're missing in their daily consumption. We seek to provide a nutritional label for your news diet.

One thing we kicked up and shared with the group was this takeaway handout on some things we find helpful. It's filled with Twitter accounts to follow, events to attend and places to start.

at the risk of sounding like I'm whistling past the graveyard, I'd like to point out that there are thousands of newspapers that are not just surviving but thriving. Some 8,000 weekly papers still hit the front porches and mailboxes in small towns across America every week and, for some reason, they've been left out of the conversation. So a couple of years ago, I decided to head back to my roots, both geographic and professional (my first job was at a weekly), to see how those community papers were faring. And what I found was both surprising and inspiring.

The way we tell stories in print has been mostly the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, the pressure is on to rethink how we produce and present our stories. Looking into why the broken-narrative experience happens may help us figure out how to prevent it in digital publishing.

Here are five prominent news events that broke on Twitter:

the launch of Twitter for Newsrooms, an official comprehensive guide on using Twitter in the world of news. The guide, also known as #TfN, was developed by the Twitter Media team and aims to be a one-stop shop, from learning the basics up to more advanced ways of using the network in journalism.

The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan-as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it's entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it. We're calling this experiment the "learning lab." It's the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe.

The Economist Online is hosting a debate on the news industry at http://econ.st/p9l5yK and we would like to hear your thoughts on Facebook. Like many other industries before it, the news industry is being disrupted by the internet. Among other things, technology is undermining the business models of newspapers: the news organisations that employ the most journalists and do the most in-depth reporting. At the same time, the internet enables new models of journalism by democratising the tools of publishing, allowing greater participation from readers and making possible entirely new kinds of organisation, such as WikiLeaks. Do the benefits of the internet to the news ecosystem outweigh the drawbacks?

Stanford has used data from the Library of Congress to illustrate the spread of all kinds of newspapers across the U.S. from 1690 to 2011. Users can see which cities had multiple papers and click on them to learn more about them.

The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan-as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media

In the process of adding friends, following people and retweeting things, we have created a mosaic of what we like, which can be used to train Web services. We don't think about it, but it's there. And it's all out there. What you're seeing in these services and many more are early stages of a new layer spreading across the Web - the social layer. It's becoming key to how online content companies deliver information that increasingly flows through Twitter and Facebook. The social layer of the Web is the next phase. It uses our data and social graphs as machinery to power new services that have nothing to do with updating your status, "liking" or retweeting. It's just the Web, transformed into your Web.If you haven't already, take a couple of minutes to try out Intel's Museum of Me. When you log in with Facebook, it creates a stunning video tour of a futuristic museum about your life and friends.

It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like "The Daily Show." But that is only the beginning of how they process information. According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.

News comments are broken. It was a popular topic of last night's Hacks/Hackers Seattle meetup and the driving notion behind one of the Knight-Mozilla News Challenge, which asks, "How can we reinvent online news discussions?". Alex Schmidt, a freelance reporter and producer working for NPR, Spot.Us and other outlets, has dealt with broken commenting first-hand, in a way that has negatively impacted her chances at future reporting for certain communities. This guest piece from her outlines some of those experiences and how they've affected the work she does.

As part of a "social media summit" this week, the BBC posted an overview of how its user-generated content desk handles reports from the field - verifying and curating them in much the same way that Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing for the past few months during the upheaval in the Middle East. As I've written before, there is a growing need for this kind of curation, but there is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product.

News sites are primarily dependent on casual users, most of whom enter from Google. That said, Facebook is one of the fastest growing traffic sources, while Twitter barely registers. These are some of the findings in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducted an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company. The study examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites; how long they stay during each visit; how deep they go into a site; and where they go when they leave.

Jonathan Stray has opened a new conversation about measuring accuracy in news reports. Stray, who works at the Associated Press and blogs on the side, comes at the issue with a refreshingly analytical, data-driven perspective. His in-depth post, which I urge you to read, does a couple of things. It summarizes important research: There seems to be no escaping the conclusion that, according to the newsmakers, about half of all American newspaper stories contained a simple factual error in 2005. And this rate has held about steady since we started measuring it seven decades ago. And it offers some useful ideas: We could continuously sample a news source's output to produce ongoing accuracy estimates, and build social software to help the audience report and filter errors.