New Media Unit

Curation seems to be the big buzz word in journalism and online content these days. It's also an area that's generating a lot of product innovations. New services such as Keepstream, Storify, Storyful and Qrait are jumping into the space, aiming to offer new tools to help people curate web and social media content. Curation is a way for journalists and bloggers to help the public make sense of the overwhelming amount of information out there by carefully selecting the interesting bits and pieces and by providing context. In this new information environment, the thinking goes, we need fellow humans to make sense and filter for us. For me, curation is part of the all-important process of telling stories and connecting people around these stories. Storytelling is about involving people, finding out new information and providing context so people can find out why that particular story is meaningful to the

In a makeover that took shape in late spring, according to head brass, Fox29 has revamped its news approach, with a brighter look, a harder edge (some call it editorializing), ramped-up audience outreach (some call it pandering), and a new stress on commentary and discussion that makes it look somewhat more like 24/7 cable news. But a range of viewers and journalists interviewed for this story say they're uneasy about the degree to which it encourages reporters like Keeley to mix viewpoint with reportage.

A humorous commercial for a Newsday ap for the iphone.

Students use social media in their daily lives, with Facebook an almost permanent fixture on the computer screen. Yet they tend not to think about social media as part of their professional toolkit as journalists. This post looks at how J schools are trying to incorporate social media in the curriculum.

The nastiness index keeps on rising, and all of us are getting sullied in the process. Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks.

New York magazine's Web site nymag.com has linked up with Foursquare, becoming the latest in a rash of traditional media companies to hook up with the location-based social networking service.

Poynter will cultivate and incubate new entrepreneurial media models in the digital space; deepen its understanding of how citizens are consuming news in the digital era; create case studies that analyze and help the public understand the workings of the nontraditional news sector, known as the Fifth Estate, and train those nontraditional journalism practitioners in a variety of journalism areas, including ethics and accuracy.  Poynter, a school dedicated to serving journalism in the interest of democracy, aspires through this project to influence -- for the good of a democratic society -- the news values that are emerging among those who are contributing news and information to this rapidly changing media landscape.

 my head, the Fifth Estate includes the Fourth Estate, the idea and value of a professional press corps as a way of informing and engaging the populace, and holding the powerful accountable. This vision of a Fifth Estate sees the Fourth Estate as necessary but insufficient for democratic life. The Fifth Estate could express what Jay Rosen has described as a "pro-am" model for the future of news, a frame that sees that the freedoms and responsibilities of the First Amendment empower not just a professional caste of news gatherers and distributors, but potentially every citizen.

Survey of news media consumption.

PBS MediaShift has written an excellent series looking at the way that journalism education and training are shifting. "Beyond J-School" examines how journalism education has had to change with the times, and includes two audio podcasts (with journalism profs/innovators), a video show, a post on teaching social media, a story about a "Journalist Law Program" and a look at how some students created their own mini-media empires while studying at college - no J-school necessary. Here are all the features in the series

For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos, for the majority of users, Twitter is indeed mostly a broadcast medium. After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction - that is, a reply or a retweet. According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet

Google is testing a new feature that lets you connect your Twitter account to Google News. Some people are seeing a "Friends" box on the right hand side of Google News inviting them to do this. The friends box asks you to enter your Twitter username and click "Save." When you click save, Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow.

In this week's journalism educators chat, Aaron Manfull, the Journalism Education Association's new media committee chair; Sara Nichols, journalism teacher at Whitney High School in Rocklin, Calif.; and Wendy Wallace, director of Poynter's High School Program, will lead a conversation about how to help journalism educators and students understand the importance of interacting with people on Web sites outside of their own

Yes. You know the conventional wisdom: long-form journalism doesn't do well on the web. Our attention spans are too short and sentences are too long and and we're too easily distrac - oooh, Macy's is having a sale! - and, anyway, complex narratives are inefficient for a culture that wants its information short, sweet, and yesterday. Slate has defied that wisdom.

From making use of social media tools to create and store content (ala YouTube and other video blogs) to tracking down sources (via Facebook) to publicizing stories and interacting with readers (by logging into Twitter), social media tools have opened up a whole new realm to today's journalists. Here are some great resources that can teach you everything from how to use YouTube to conduct man-on-the-street interviews to how to keep up with other journos on Twitter.

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.

More and more people are using Twitter to get their news and to share the news that touches them. Our Twitter editions are a mash-up of breaking tweets and HuffPost stories that are attracting interest on Twitter, a combination designed to bring you the most important information and liveliest discussions -- in real time -- for each of our sections. The speed and immediacy that Twitter provides -- along with its great variety of voices -- is a great addition to what we are already doing: delivering a unique blend of news, opinion, and community... served up with our distinctive attitude and point of view, and super-charged for Twitter users. This is also a natural extension of something else we've always done: help curate the news. The more information there is out there, the more important it is to have gatekeepers you can trust to bring you the news and fresh takes you need to stay informed. We are launching Twitter editions for each of our 19 sections -- with a front page version slated to go live soon. In every section, our editors have hand-selected the most interesting Twitter accounts for that subject -- Comedy, Politics, Entertainment, Sports, etc, etc -- so you can be sure to get breaking news and on-target analysis as it comes in.

Spoof of the media's fascination with social media

here's the list of the Top 25 U.S. Newspapers ranked by the number of Facebook Friends ('Likes') each newspaper has (click the link to visit the newspaper's Facebook Page):