It’s the year 2040 and our newsroom is as silent as ever. The proprietary AI we license “GA-Net” does most of the daily grind stories. I honestly forget what it’s like to do the sports score, Wall Street-score, obits and other run-of-the-mill event-based stories. Today our reporters focus only on…

If you want to tell a narrative, you may need a narrator. It’s one of the oldest storytelling tools that exist. As storytelling becomes enhanced through technology so too will our narrators. We’re increasingly comfortable engaging with fictional digital personas like Alexa and Siri to get us real world information…

And the boat they’ll miss if they don’t get over it. — With the price of Bitcoin hitting all-time highs in December 2020, and many saying it will 5x in 2021, there’s a whole new hype cycle for Bitcoin about to burst. This post is not about how Bitcoin will save journalism, because it won’t. This is about how journalists misunderstand the…

In 1961 President Eisenhower’s farewell address included a warning about the “Military Industrial Complex.” While most of us are familiar with his warning, it’s important to remember the ramp-up to this part of his speech. Eisenhower starts by praising our military. …

Roam Research is a productivity tool that could be the main driver of your day, the glue of your collaboration or even your CMS. — An important and often overlooked layer of innovation is about taking our existing products/processes and finding tools that help us do them better and faster. I’d put Slack into this category. The most basic use-case of Slack doesn’t fundamentally change what a newsroom creates, but it does help with efficiency…

Social media is performative — we need to be informative. By now, it’s an old joke. Journalists on Twitter, tweeting media analysis for an audience of other journalists on Twitter. #NotAllJournalists are guilty of this phenomenon. And it’s not all the time. But it is a real phenomenon. …

This week, the Global Editors Network has invited board member David Cohn, senior director at Advance Digital’s Alpha Group, to tell us more about Project Text. The initiative is a collaboration between The Alpha Group, which is the incubator of one of the US’s largest media groups Advance, and San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit, local news organisation. During San Francisco’s mayoral elections in June 2018, the public was able to sign up to receive text messages from a local reporter and communicate with him directly in order get the latest updates. How does this personal direct reporter-to-audience relationship work? Can it improve reporting? How does texting news differ from writing for a website? And how can you use Project Text in your newsroom?

One usage has been politicized. When people use the phrase “fake news” what is often implied is that the content in question can be dismissed as ideologically motivated, or mission driven. Essentially the content isn’t aiming for some kind of “objective voice,” but is intended to be activist in nature. …

I’m at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. One of the first panels was titled “Help define the moral imperatives that should be guiding media and platforms’ decisions” and had Jeff Jarvis, raju narisetti, Indira Lakshmi, Maria Ressa and Janine Gibson. I was going to ask a question, but the…