Documentary class in session at RJI with Professor Spike Lee

A highlight of my RJI stay happened last week, 30 feet from my office. Spike Lee gave a master class to documentary and photojournalism students. He was in Columbia, Missouri, to premiere “2 Fists Up: We Gon Be Alright,” a new ESPN documentary on racial unrest at the University of Missouri that uses footage from 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

Stan Silvey: Launching the SEC Network: The Mizzou Story

Stan Silvey, University of Missouri Department of Intercollegiate Athletics Stan Silvey is assistant athletic director of broadcast operations at the University of Missouri Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. In this position, Silvey is primarily responsible for producing SEC Network television and multimedia broadcasts for Mizzou Athletics. In addition, he leads teams that are responsible for the content … 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

Models for preserving news archives that long served the industry leave digital content in peril

Edward McCain, digital curator of journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, spoke about the growing loss of born-digital content at Dodging the Memory Hole: Beyond NDNP, a meeting of concerned archivists, journalists and other stakeholders held on Sept. 16 in Washington, D.C. Below are his remarks. How many of you read George Orwell’s novel … Continued