New Media Unit

"Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center's analysis of comScore data."

"The social media reporting platform launched six months ago and has recently developed a website, but social is still at its core"

"Feature raises questions about the future of links on the social network"

"Dataminr is a stealthy tool that scours Twitter, looking for tweets that its algorithm considers important and newsworthy."

"At a moment when the network is poised to make a number of changes, the American Press Institute and Twitter, in collaboration with research company DB5, have produced a new study that probes the relationship between news use and the Twittersphere. The study, which involved an online survey of more than 4,700 social media users, finds that Twitter users tend to be heavier news consumers than other social media users. News, indeed, is one of the primary activities that they engage in on the network."

"From reading materials for students to outlines of specific products, and examples of their uses by journalists, the below information can help you get started in structuring your class material. We've also included some suggestions of assignments that may help students get experience in using the tools."

"Frank Sennett tells Romenesko readers that "even before the latest stumbles by the Atlantic and BuzzFeed with sponsored content online, I saw a need for an end to the Wild West moment we're going through." He hoped to work on some industry guidelines as a Nieman fellow, but didn't get the position. Frank Sennett "I have continued to work on them" while editing Time Out Chicago, he writes. "I haven't done an ethics project since Slipup.com back in the 90s, but this one piqued my interest." Here's what Sennett has put together: Proposed ethics guidelines for online sponsored content"

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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"

"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