RJI Fellow expands work on mobile news app for smaller news organizations

Push notifications from The New York Times, the Guardian, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post alert us every day to scandal, horror, scientific achievement and grief. However, this capability lies mainly in the realm of large news organizations. Without a 24-hour news desk, smaller news outlets — especially weeklies and investigative centers — struggle to remind users … Continued

Breaking News 4: When real news is fake

For this article I’m defining fake news as “news stories that have no factual basis but are presented as facts” (taken from “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election”), whether a site’s goal is to make money or make partisan political points. Here are several ways real and fake news are the same. … Continued

Monetization of news

In the face of decreasing revenues and increasing costs, news agencies everywhere are exploring creative methods of extracting more funding from their products. Some methods are more suitable to larger organizations and others to smaller ones; each one has drawbacks, and for many, they are a gamble.  However, some of these gambles have become viable … Continued

Why send a newsletter at all?

E-newsletters have become a primary engagement, dissemination and revenue-generating tool for modern newsrooms. With benefits ranging from reader loyalty to audience insights to new revenue, it’s easy to see why. What’s harder to see is the “why not,” though it’s equally important. Email used to be a method for filtering the internet. Far from the … Continued

The rise of messaging is undeniable, and it’s not just text

Mobile messaging was born in December 1992 with a simple SMS: “Merry Christmas.” Today it’s the most ubiquitous form of human communication short of speaking. Any of the 6 billion of us with a phone can do it. And with the advent of apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Line, WeChat and Telegram, messaging is … Continued