Team Recordly demonstrates its prize-winning interviewing tool at Silicon Valley tech firms

The winning team in the 2016 RJI Student Competition took full advantage of their grand prize trip to California last week, demonstrating their Apple Watch/iPhone interviewing tool in five key venues.   Recordly members John Gillis, Zolbayar Magsar, Anna Maikova,Yaryna Mykhyalyshyn and Sintia Radu began their tech tour at Apple world headquarters in Cupertino. They … 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

Kevin Poortinga: Controlled Chaos: The Balance Between Herding Cats and Collaborative Innovation

Kevin Poortinga, USA TODAY Kevin Poortinga leads the USA Today Lab, a department designed to quickly incubate concepts, new businesses and new initiatives for the media network, which consists of more than 100 local news organizations and flagship USA TODAY. When not prototyping or experimenting, the Lab also champions an internal innovation grants program, a hybrid … Continued

Phablets likely to boost responses to ads embedded in news stories and videos

2015 RJI Mobile Media Research Report 3 Owners responded more frequently to embedded ads using large-screen smartphones than with other devices Owners of phablets were much more likely to respond to advertisements embedded in news stories and videos than owners of standard smartphones, tablets and personal computers, according to the latest Donald W. Reynolds Journalism … Continued

Reporting into structure: How journalists, crowds and robots can work together

In previous posts, I’ve written about structured journalism’s potential to improve newsroom economics by rebundling news as networks of structured information, and to provide new value to consumers by giving them more control over the news they consume. But what does structured journalism do for journalists? Will structure merely contribute to the tech-driven weakening of … Continued

WordPress moves news past the printed newspaper

Local newspaper sites have long broken all the rules for building a sticky site. Most still load painfully slowly. They are difficult to navigate and — let’s be honest — often ugly.—Matthew Hindman, Shorenstein Center For centuries newspaper design has stayed about the same. In 1880 printers introduced halftone photographs and in the 1980s the … Continued

The Apple News app is not living up to its hype

The Apple News app launched with much hype on September 15. I’ll always remember that date because the app’s launch was a major determinant for me to pivot Reportory, my news customization platform, from a consumer-facing service to a license play for publishers. The Apple News app hadn’t launched when I first profiled 15 other … Continued

Undergoing the great entrepreneurial pivot

Many entrepreneurs find themselves pivoting at some point during their entrepreneurial journey. Even some of the leading tech companies today pivoted in their early days: Instagram initially was a check-in service called Burbn; Facebook was FaceMash, asking users to rate which person was hotter; and YouTube was a video dating site. Whether pivoting sales strategy, … Continued