Speaking Moylanguage #5: The News Media Edition
Freelance reporting, ages of journalism, corona and news consumption, amplification, mobile journalism, user-generated content
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the fifth edition of Speaking Moylanguage!
This edition is a thematic edition, focusing on news media and journalism.
This is also a collaboration, with a contribution by Beatriz Ríos - EU reporter, broadcast journalist and presenter - who reflects on her experience as a successful freelance journalist. Many thanks to her for both the contribution and sharing her views on the other pieces!
A quick overview for the uninitiated:
The newsletter is divided into three sections - stories, ideas and skills.
The content is mostly shared in Google Doc format, with comments enabled.
Please leave comments, share more content, elaborate and ask questions - I do reply, read and appreciate them!
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1. Stories
Ten lessons from a freelance journalist
Beatriz Ríos is a successful freelance reporter in EU politics. Building her own brand and working with a range of top-tier news media organisations, she has an impressive multi-modal, multilingual profile - doing everything from broadcast journalism to written reporting, moderation to mobile journalism. In this piece, she shares some reflections on working and making it as a freelancer.
Ages of Journalism
Journalism is undergoing massive transformations - but how should we think about some of these changes? These notes - an update of some thoughts I previously shared - are from a module I taught at Vesalius College on “The New Media Environment: Crisis, Conflict and Communication” (at the kind invitation of Giulia Tercovich). They are the result of a series of interviews with journalists and media specialists operating across the EU and try to hang current transformations in a larger narrative arc.
2. Ideas
Corona’s Impact on News Consumption
Every year the Reuters Institute publishes a report tracking trends in digital news consumption. This year it surveyed over 80 000 participants in 40 markets to look into new attitudes towards new online business models, trust and misinformation, partisanship and populism, and other trends. Of the markets investigated, 6 of them were surveyed both before and after the coronavirus outbreak, giving unique insights into the impact of coronavirus on news consumption.
Oxygen of Amplification
In the wake of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign, there was a period of soul searching in the news media. Mainstream discourse had been accused of promoting and falsely amplifying extremist positions. During this time, Dr Whitney Phillips undertook a series of in-depth interviews to explore these reflections through the eyes of journalists in the US. She produced The Oxygen of Amplification - a report reflecting on better practices for reporting.
3. Skills
Equipment and Skills for Mobile Journalism
Mobile journalism is a method of creating news media that produces quality content in a way that is more affordable, more flexible and faster. Capitalising on advances in portable equipment for capturing, editing and polishing content, a mobile journalist becomes a one-person newsroom in the field. Here are a few reflections on the hardware, software and skills needed.
User-Generated Content for Newsrooms
Last year, I interviewed a series of journalists on the theme of user-generated content - including the excellent Sofia Diogo Mateus, audience development editor at Politico Europe, and Mark Little, CEO and founder at Kinzen. Here I have gathered some of my notes to give a quick insight into the topic of user-generated content in news publishing - how to find it, how to verify it and what to think about before you publish it.
Some recommendations
Igor Celikovic recommends checking out the video-journalism wizard Johnny Harris’s work.
Matteo Salvai recommends looking into Bellingcat, an open-source investigative journalism initiative.
Glen Mulcahy is founder of MojoFest, a festival of mobile journalists.
Enda McNamara shared Embedded, an NPR podcast that “takes a story from the news and goes deep”.
Ana Alegre recommended these reads from the Reuters Institute.