New Media Unit

If traditional media was all about broadcasting - distributing a one-size-fits-all message to a wide audience, usually via a platform controlled by the media - new media is more about personalization and customization. In other words, the quest for a "Daily Me." But it's still unclear how exactly we're going to get there. Two new entrants - a service called Trove and an iPad app called News.me - have joined the horde of players who are trying to answer that question, and they have taken very different approaches.

Saying that journalism is at a crossroads is a great understatement and certainly no secret to RTDNA members. For the pessimist, dwindling newspaper circulations, smaller TV audiences and thousands of lost jobs reinforce the idea that the traditional American media may be dying. But to the optimist, new media platforms and fresh developments in technology present boundless opportunities for growth with virtually endless chances to reach a growing, more demanding news audience. A common theme among all RTDNA members is that we want to know where journalism is going and, more importantly, we want to know how to get there. Archived webinar available here.

Over the coming days, we will be talking to publishers, editors and entrepreneurs about the myriad challenges facing the industry and focus on solutions that can point the way to a revitalized, sustainable model for journalism in the 21st century.

Google has been experimenting with personalizing Google News, and MediaPost got a look at the proposed layout Friday. The Mountain View, Calif. search engine has been running tests on the design of Google News for the past several months.

I'm trying to show you that Twitter is a growing tool that student media should be using. After all, our readers are online and living in the social networking world. Instead of fighting that, we need to embrace it. Go to your readers. Don't make them come to you.

Not having a draconian Twitter policy has helped The New York Times thrive, according to a panel of reporters speaking at an Online News Association event in New York. The panelists said they use the social media platform for a variety of pretty common reasons: breaking news, garnering pageviews, connecting with readers and reinforcing the brand.

The Annenberg Innovation Lab, announced Nov. 17 by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is positioning itself as a kind of MIT Media Lab 2.0, i.e. not just as a showcase for cutting-edge digital tools, but also as "a bridge" to outside businesses that can apply its work directly.

An optimistic look at where the news might go in the future.

Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year-an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost-meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000. Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future. News organizations-old and new-still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity-and a new set of players-in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers. In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

Which media sectors thrived in 2010? Which ones faltered? How has technology changed how people get their news? Test your knowledge about the news industry with this quiz from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Questions are based on PEJ's State of the News Media 2011 report.

Twitter and Facebook have been conduits of information throughout the protests in the Arab world. But that news has been atomized, second by second accounts coming from hundreds of unknown sources. Into that relentless stream has stepped NPR's Andy Carvin, who's become a one-stop clearinghouse of news by vetting sources and trying to verify individual tweets. Carvin explains how Twitter's political utility has also created a new kind of journalism

When it comes to the news of the day, newspapers, websites, bloggers, cable networks and aggregators all trip over themselves to be the fastest and the first. The competition has always existed, but technology has ramped up the rivalries. At this increasingly accelerated pace, is it inevitable that noteworthy events - and the news they engender - will rush lickety-split into each other? What happens when things just cannot occur any faster? What if the rapidity of the newscycle outpaces the news itself and we wind up in some form of warp speed - living life in a wormholish, time-wrinkled world?

To close out 2010, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2011 will bring for the future of journalism.

But it's not just news organizations and individual journalists doing that. You can also find noteworthy coverage on Tumblr's Egypt page. It's a real-time example of Tumblr's curated tag pages, a new feature the company rolled out about a month ago. The feature lets a group of editors (Tumblr users) select the choicest cuts from their feeds for public consumption. The pages originally broke down into areas like fashion, design, long reads, and a general news page. The Egypt page is a step beyond that, an on-the-fly means of developing a news channel from the minds and links of users. With no overriding editorial "vision," at least in the traditional sense, what you get is a collection of breaking updates, stories providing desperately needed context, and, naturally, one of the things Tumblr is best at: photos.

What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk.

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Jeff Jarvis video on Citizen Journalism