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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
Digital preservation: Why is this important to me?
Journalists are dependent upon access to back files for research and context, but those back files may no longer be there. Almost all news content created in the U.S. today is digital, but digital content is even more fragile than print and might be scattered over a variety of media and storage systems. How long … Continued
How do we engage news consumers in the digital world?
If you operate a nonprofit newsroom, email appeals have likely become an essential fundraising tool. Yet while recommendations for how to grow your mailing lists are readily available, it’s much harder to find good information about retaining subscribers and engaging them as active community members. As a result, many successful efforts to gain subscribers are … 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
Attitudes about news transcend technology and generational divide
2015 RJI Mobile Media Research Report 5 Millennials more likely than boomers to use smartphones for news, but professional journalism and news sources matter to both This is my final report on the results of the 2015 Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute Mobile Media News Consumption Survey. I will use it to explore the generational … Continued
Small paper, small city undergoing big changes in Virginia
For a century, the Culpeper Star-Exponent — whose predecessors date to 1881 — served a small community that changed relatively little. Today, the newspaper is dealing with rapid change in its central Virginia market. Since 1980, Culpeper County has more than doubled its population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, mostly with commuters to the … Continued
How to make online news ‘brain friendly’
Online news can work with or against the brain. When RJI Fellows Alex Remington of The Washington Post and media researcher Paul Bolls applied brain science principles to news design, readers’ comprehension, recall and engagement increased. We interviewed the researchers (audio below) to learn how to make articles “brain friendly.” It’s all about the “reading path,” says Remington. “Classify the … Continued
Screen size and age affect how smartphone owners get mobile news stories
2015 RJI Mobile Media Research Report 4 Owners of large-screen smartphones (phablets) are much more likely than owners of standard-size smartphones to frequently use multiple approaches to access news organization content on their smartphones, according to the latest Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute mobile media poll. The survey also found that smartphone owners between the … Continued