#23 - A Notebook for the Digital Age

Any newsroom nowadays is filled to the brim with new technology and smart systems. But strangely enough, most journalists still?use a very basic set-up to do research and reporting.?Of course, every reporter nowadays has a smartphone, but?few use its potential of new tools and techniques.?A new Reuters Journalist Fellowship Paper?explores different ways in which journalists and newsrooms can?reinvent the reporter's notebook for the digital age.

This and more in this week’s Wayfinder!

IN FOCUS

According to the latest?Reuters Digital News Report?news avoidance is one of the biggest challenges facing the news industry.?In?a new article, senior strategist Nic Newman, argues that?innovative technology can help positively reshape news products?in three important ways: enhancing relevance through data, new formats to engage young audiences and news products that go beyond web and app.

Jodie Hopperton, product initiative lead at INMA tackles the same topic.?People want to stay informed, but they don’t want to be depressed.?She wonders how we can?build a daily news habit if we know that so many people are actively avoiding it??A proper rant about what product thinking for journalism is and is not.

NEWSROOM

The AP team has created?a guide about their new push alert strategy, documenting what they learned along the way to share with others in the news industry.?The guide draws from analysis of their own push alerts,?research studies, surveys they conducted and a consumer focus group they commissioned.

Simon Ownes tackles?content repurposing and mentions a good number of ways that you can?take your already-existing content and wring more value out of it?by repurposing it into other formats.

And 8 investigative journalists share their favorite reporting tools.

VIDEO

Video podcasts are booming.?(A?study by market research firm Cumulus?found YouTube is already the most popular platform for podcasts).?The Guardian takes a look how video podcasts are changing user habits?and pitting video giant YouTube against audio-native Spotify.

YouTube has published a new,?31-page overview of YouTube Shorts. With over 1.5 billion YouTube users now?engaging with Shorts content every month?it’s worth considering whether Short video clips may be of benefit in your YouTube strategy.

SHORT

• A look at how Facebook is planning to win back Gen Z.
• After a brutal week CEO Evan Spiegel explains how Snapchat aims to turn the company around.
• Apple launched?a series of new products. Here’s a longer?analysis of Apple’s move from a devices company to a services company.
• UK publishing giant Reach is considering to expand the Mirror and Express sites into the US.
• Meta is setting up a product organization to identify and build “possible paid features”.
• Disney is considering bundeling every aspect of its entertainment ecosystem in one big membership program.
• And a new proposed law in the US might change?how?media companies can join together to negotiate with big tech platforms.

AI

The landscape of AI image generation systems is getting beter and more crowded every day. Since this summer?more than one million people are using DALL·E, the AI system that generates images from a natural language description. DALL-E just?added a new feature?which helps users to extend an existing image.

Meanwhile Stability.ai has released its own AI generator to dream up images. You can?try it out online at beta.dreamstudio.ai?(currently for free).

Related:

• Lexica is a search engine for AI image generation prompts.
• Google is working on?a new AI that will make your photomontages.
• Want more? Bookmark this growing collection of AI image generation tools.

But the rapidly growing market of AI image tools also requires a journalistic reflex. We know they were trained on images pulled from the web, but which ones? And what does AI know about us and how is it used in training models?

OPPORTUNITIES

The Reuters Institute has announced?new dates for their newsroom leadership programmes. An excellent idea if you interested in?developing skills and strategies to better manage a newsroom.?

And?WAN-IFRA's is looking for?input for the?2022–2023 edition of the World Press Trends Outlook survey.?The survey features questions about what?revenue streams?are driving publishers' strategies, what?cost allocations?look like, as well as?financial and strategic forecasts for 2022 and 2023.

LEARN

If you feel like checking?social media leaves you feeling angrier and more outraged, that's not your imagination. Max Fisher has covered the impact of social media around the world for The New York Times, from genocide in Myanmar to COVID misinformation in the U.S. And in his new book,?"The Chaos Machine,"?he describes how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up.

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As always?feel free to share the newsletter with friends & colleagues?who might be interested.

Ezra