Engagement
Hurricane watch: Could coastal storms cost your community?
In the news Hurricane Hermine lingers in the Northeast this week after making landfall last Friday and causing damaging storm surge, strong winds and heavy rain from Florida to the coastal southeast states. As of Tuesday, the storm had taken three lives, damaged property and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of residents. Meanwhile, … Continued
Deep South, deep risk: Region faces climate adaptation challenges
In the news President Barack Obama is to visit flood-ravaged Louisiana today in the wake of inundating high water that killed 13 people and left more than 100,000 seeking federal assistance. The Great Flood of 2016 is being called the worst U.S. natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, with 4,000 people in shelters days … Continued
Dry spell: Covering worsening droughts
In the news A months-long drought has hit the northeastern United States, and while it’s not as dire as the West Coast’s five-year dry spell, it has stressed farms, prompted water restrictions and threatened more wildfires. It stretches from Maine to Pennsylvania and has hit Massachusetts particularly hard, as well as New Hampshire, Maine and … Continued
RJI Fellow’s ongoing e-newsletter personalization experiment yields surprising results
Tracy Clark, a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S. newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform. This is a progress report.
Mobile long-form journalism: The future is (even more) visual
Three RJI Research Scholars spent the past year studying the effectiveness and sustainability of long-form digital journalism. This is the fifth in a five-part series based on 53 interviews with millennials to gauge this audience’s reception to long-form journalism delivered on mobile platforms.
Study: Millennials spent more time on text and video, but gave more praise for photos, infographics
Three RJI Research Scholars spent the past year studying the effectiveness and sustainability of long-form digital journalism. This is the fourth in a five-part series based on 53 interviews with millennials to gauge this audience’s reception to long-form journalism delivered on mobile platforms.
RJI Fellowship team will use technology to bring more citizens, journalists into the council chamber
As newsrooms shrink in size, so does the amount of meeting coverage, says Mike Wheeler, a member of an RJI Fellowship team working to make meeting deliberations more accessible and “on demand” to journalists and citizens. He is a managing partner for Westerly Partners. Local government transparency is crucial to a community’s well-being, he says. … Continued
RJI Fellow to create pipeline of ‘deputies’ in pursuit of news coverage of Alabama communities
One unseasonably warm weekend this past February, I found myself chatting about transportation spending deep in the bowels of a dark, loud motorcycle club headquarters in a warehouse on Birmingham, Alabama’s gritty west side. We were eagerly waiting for the latest Vikings recruits to be doused in water and beer as an initiation into the … Continued
Does structured journalism work? Evaluating the feasibility of structure for consumers and reporters
Does the traditional news article still make sense as the primary unit of news in the age of the Internet and smartphone? That was the question I asked in my first blog post as an RJI Fellow in July 2015. My fellowship has focused on evaluating a proposed alternative unit of news: the structured story, … Continued
Can structured news reinvent archives and reimagine objectivity?
In earlier posts I have reviewed the long-term potential of structured journalism to make newsrooms economically sustainable, empower news consumers and future-proof journalism as a profession. However, journalism is not just another business. Its economic and market success is important not only to its shareholders, customers and employees, but also to society in general. Journalism, … Continued