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

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 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

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

Sarah Hill: VR Journalism: One Startup’s Collab Culture

Sarah Hill, StoryUP Sarah Hill is the chief storyteller and CEO of StoryUP, a VR journalism startup based in Columbia, Mo. A former interactive news anchor and chief storyteller for Veterans United Foundation, Hill creates with human media, pushing the transition of text-based storytelling to a three-dimensional world. She was the first person to use … Continued

Mark Horvit: The Power and Peril of Collaboration

Mark Horvit, Investigative Reporters & Editors Mark Horvit is the executive director of Investigative Reporters & Editors. He oversees training, conferences and services for more than 5,000 members worldwide, and for programs including the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and DocumentCloud. Horvit also is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where he teaches … Continued