Engagement
Bolster your digital safety: An anti-hacking, anti-doxxing workshop
Journalists in all newsrooms, especially women, LGTBQ+ and BIPOC, are dealing with unprecedented levels of online abuse that can take form in publishing of private information, impersonations, hacking and more. In the ONA session, “Bolster Your Digital Safety: An Anti-Hacking, Anti-Doxxing Workshop,” Viktorya Vilk, program director for Digital Safety and Free Expression, PEN America and … Continued
Managing metrics that matter for subscriptions
Managing metrics that matter Mike Denison, audience engagement editor at Science News, sees analytics and metrics as a tool to “cut through the noise and look beyond page views.” This year at ONA20, learning about the importance of analytics and metrics has shown to be of growing interest for the industry at a time when … Continued
Readers can help you plan your next move
The beginning of the coronavirus pandemic brought with it a surge in engagement and traffic to the Spanish materials we publish on our site, Documented Semanal. Within weeks, we had built an ecosystem where our readers, using our WhatsApp app, had guided us to create certain stories which would then draw in more subscribers who … Continued
Building a culture of great visuals
Boyzell Hosey, Deputy Editor of Photography, faces new challenges at the Tampa Bay Times in planning the daily visual report. He directs a significantly smaller photo staff than a decade ago in addition to the added burden of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the plan boils down to the same principle as always, … Continued
‘Unpublishing’ may be a catchy term, but does it accurately encompass the issue?
Most journalists would agree that the words we use to identify important issues are intrinsic to understanding them. New phenomena get labeled through the process of discovery by individuals who, naturally, do not yet fully understand them. I propose we may need a better term for what we currently refer to as unpublishing. The Unpublishing … Continued
What’s Working: Newsletters may be reaching their limits, but there’s hope beyond the inbox
Email newsletters are thriving, but their ascendancy in today’s media brings with it a certain foreboding: Given how successful the format has been the past few years — and how many writers have turned to newsletter platforms like Substack to build their personal brands and possibly earn some real money — it feels almost inevitable there … Continued
Discovering how readers perceive photos and video
The main questions bouncing around my educator’s noggin for the last couple of decades have been about how visuals resonate with audiences — what draws a person’s attention, helps them to parse information, to understand and remember? My goal with this RJI project is to create practical materials to help small newsrooms and non-profit organizations … Continued
Mapping COVID-19 cases in Observable with Vega-Lite
Choropleth maps show how data varies across a geographic region, a visualization technique used often to present a wide variety of data, including economic data, election results and, more recently, the prevalence of COVID-19 cases and deaths. I recently created a choropleth map that pulls live county-level COVID-19 case data from the Missouri Department of … Continued
Unpublishing project advisory board gets rolling
The unpublishing project has gained significant momentum in the last few weeks, including an unpublishing webinar with editors RJI hosted in August. Much of the work has been behind the scenes, cementing the foundation I need to ensure the final result is valuable to newsrooms across the country. There is much work to be done in … Continued
A pop-up newsroom goes digging on Facebook to share its COVID-19 news
When COVID-19 first hit, the Missouri School of Journalism quickly realized local newsrooms everywhere would be struggling to keep up with news about the virus. So the school created a “pop-up” newsroom called the Missouri Information Corps. We spent the summer reporting issues related to the pandemic and distributing stories and information to news outlets … Continued