Three tools to find firsthand accounts on social media, how to work with local journalists and more in this week's Digital Media Mash Up, produced by the Center for International Media Assistance.
3 tools for finding geolocated posts on social media
Echosec, Gramfeed and Banjo are a few of the free options available to help reporters quickly find eyewitness media on social platforms. (Journalism.co.uk, 9/10)
How J-schools can promote local journalism innovation
Too often when we talk about innovation in journalism we focus on the biggest tech companies partnering with the biggest media companies. This is a troublingly narrow view of what innovation in newsrooms looks like. For those of us working with local journalists, we know there is much more to the story. (MediaShift, 9/10)
Why are news organizations letting journalists go but recruiting technologists?
A single ratio came to capture the fundamental shift taking place in news organizations as I researched my book Innovators in Digital News, the ratio of digital technologists to journalists.
Many have been puzzled by the apparent anomaly of cash-strapped legacy newspapers shedding journalists, yet at the same time hiring expensive digital specialists. (Lucy Küng, The Media Briefing, 9/4)
What I learned from being part of a media startup failure
Circa, a mobile news app where I was the chief content officer for three years, shut down in June. I joined Circa after leaving Spot.Us, a nonprofit I ran for four years that was acquired by American Public Media; the Spot.Us project was left to linger on the vine and eventually die. One of the first major projects I got to work on in my young career, Assignment Zero, was an experiment in the early days of crowdsourcing that was once described as a “highly satisfying failure.”
I know the feeling of being part of a project labeled a “failure.” It has a harsh sting to it, even in an era where failure is accepted as an inevitable result of trying to innovate. But after licking your wounds I can also say this: You learn more on the projects that bomb than the ones that skate by. (David Cohn, Quartz, 9/8)
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Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via Irish Typepad.
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