Self Magazine: The Death of Print

When examining the future of magazines, it is easy to see the power of digital media. While some publications will remain powerful and influential on newsstands, the digital publishing era seems to be just beginning. Modern aged readers are online now more than ever. Undoubtedly, print publishing offers a sensory experience through physical interaction. However,it is clear to see that our reality is digital.

Last week, we got word of another classic publication to be shut down. SELF, a woman’s workout and health magazine owned by Conde’Nast is said to shut down it’s publication following the release of their February issue. As a result of the transition, 20 jobs are said to be cut, including the magazine’s editor, Joyce Chang.

Artistic director Anna Wintour underscored the importance of digital and wellness as a category to the company, offering: “Audiences are more discerning than ever about how they live, and in Self, we have a popular and established brand that speaks directly to the burgeoning health and wellness movement. Carolyn has played a pivotal role in refining and focusing Self and understands how to create content that excites and inspires our audiences.”

A future that is solely digital has its perks when it comes to monitoring interaction and flexibility but a completely paperless world free of books, magazines and newspapers is simply hard to imagine.

 

 

GPB Atlanta: A Source for Mainstream Media

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Home to PBS, NPR and Football Fridays, Georgia Public Broadcasting studio is Atlanta’s leading public media content provider. The long-running GPB provides local coverage of news, sporting and entertainment events across the state as well as issues relating to education, taxes and Georgia’s political issues. According to the GPB organization, their nine public television stations deliver quality and locally produced programming to every county in Georgia as well as significant portions to surrounding states.

Located in Atlanta’s urbanized hub, Midtown, the high-definition facility features five studios completed with their own control rooms, lighting kits and boardrooms. Studio J, the facility’s smallest studio contains a news set that is frequently utilized by Chemistry Matters, a digital news series for high school students and educators. The show outlines various concepts of chemistry on all levels. The series helps students grasp important chemistry concepts while also demonstrating how to apply the concepts to real-life situations.

Recently, the public broadcasting’s radio station partnered with Georgia State University’s station, WRAS 88.5. In an attempt to raise Georgia State’s profile around the state and where GPB hosts broadcasts, the takeover is said to offer public radio programming on WRAS daily from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Public service announcements promoting the university will air during that time. Benefiting more than 150 students, the partnership enables Georgia State to deliver high-quality experiential learning for media students at any given time.

Reddit: A Super-Source for Journalists

Widely recognized as a platform to stay ahead in the journalistic world, Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating and worldwide-web discussion site. According to Digital Trends,The most important part of Reddit is the sharing. Without users sharing links and information and stories and stuff with each other, there’d be no Reddit at all. Whether you’re a reporter, author, content creator or freelancer, the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” is an ideal source for tracking tremendous leads and engaging stories.

Aware of the changing landscapes of newsrooms, the site released its Pressiquette, a guide for journalists using the site for news purposes. Encouraging users to engage with transparency, Reddit offers a series of guidelines the press should follow when engaging with potential sources and researching ideas.

Victoria Taylor, director of communications at Reddit explains how the platform is different from other social sites.“The difference between Reddit and other platforms: Reddit is not about acquiring large numbers of followers and broadcasting to them,” Victoria explained. “It’s a one-to-one platform with the opportunity of it being one-to-many.”

Here are a few tips James Cook, contributing editor for The Daily Dot offers a few tips for journalists wanting to get started on  Reddit:

• Identify yourself
• “Reddit is a very intelligent community, so be honest about who you are”
• Do a standard site search for Reddit to see which content from your site has been posted (site:reddit.com WSJ.com)

Here’s How Newsrooms are Using Instagram

When it comes to engaging with an audience, social media plays a key role in creating a creative platform for projects. Instagram, a mobile platform where users can curate and publish quality photographs is one of the top five downloaded applications of all time, according to DIY Genius. Accessible to just about anyone with a mobile device, it is hard to doubt Instagram’s growing influence.

Like Twitter, Instagram is a community-driven platform to showcase the news. Many news outlets have looked to Instagram to present news in a new format. New York Times magazine’s photo editor Kathy Ryan, explained that she will often use Instagram to capture photographs around the office, or of her desk, “when I see an incredible moment when the light in our building illuminates something.”

Others have found a way to make the most of Instagram by extending their news to short 60 second video clips. BBC News has developed a format called BBC Shorts, and the videos are uploaded to the main BBC News Instagram account in English, but also on BBC language service accounts and their respective Facebook pages in order to reach a global audience.

Maria Grechaninova, senior broadcast journalist with the BBC’s Global Content Hub, said the time constraint of Instagram videos used to be a limitation in the beginning, but the broadcaster has turned this into an advantage, coming up with “a way of turning every news story into a 15-second, self-contained story”. BBC Shorts work with and without sound, providing a text summary or quote alongside the video, in order to still get the message across to the audience.

Despite similar functions as other social media sites, Instagram fits a strategy that pushes both marketers and its users to expand their tactics when it comes to creating visually compelling stories.

Here are a few news organizations are doing just that with their Instagram accounts:

1. TIME 
2. WIRED
3. NPR

How to Use Tumblr for News:

We often think of tumblr as a platform for showcasing photography and art. However, when news oriented, the database Founded and launched in 2007, the blog system is now home to more than 100 million users, according to Poynter. Users have the ability to post photos, video, audio and text to a webpage that has its own URL and can be viewed by non-tumblr users.

Just as with Twitter and Facebook, users must follow a Tumblr blog to keep up with it. Posts from all your followed blogs show up on the Dashboard in reverse chronological order. Tumblr makes it easy to re-blog posts, while adding your own commentary, or not. Users can also Like a post. Though there is a way to leave comments natively, most interaction on Tumblr is remotely through re-blogs and likes.

According to Mashable, any of the media organizations jumping on the simple blogging platform are using the tool to curate content for their audience and engage and attract new readers through a quirkier lens. Because photos and image driven posts are usually what resonates the most with users on the site, news organizations have the opportunity to deliver information through visually pleasing infographics.

Newsweek‘s tumblr is often credited as one of the best tumblr’s for media organizations. Newsweek uses its Tumblr to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the newsroom, as a way of crowdsourcing and looking for interviewees, to promote reader chats and to showcase a few front pages from its archives. BBC uses its tumblr account for an experimental journalism project the company started that sets up impromptu newsrooms in cities across America to capture slices of life in places that normally don’t receive national news coverage.

You might think of the site as a collection  of thought provoking quotes and photographs curated by this generation of teenagers, however, its growing power is tempting organizations to channel their efforts to a new community of viewers.

Here are a few other tumblr blogs to check out:
NPR
The Washington Post
The Daily Show

LinkedIn: More than Just Networking

We all know LinkedIn to be the largest professional networking website of our time. According to the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry report, LinkedIn has now surpassed Facebook as the #1 most important social platform for B2B (Business to Business) marketers.

Undoubtedly, the website can be a powerful tool for helping individuals and companies make connections and build their brand. But many are ignorant to the fact that the database has come a long way from its start as a conduit for creating professional connections.

With the company continuously adding new tools to help its users be more productive in their businesses, journalists are gaining value from the tool by using the platform as a way to strengthen their researching and sourcing techniques.

Here are 3 ways journalists use Linked In:

1. Find an Expert
The advanced searching tool feature is more powerful than we know it to be. You can search a combination of keywords, titles, companies, locations and industries to find users close to you. This is a great way to find experts in any field or subject matter. The advanced search function essentially allows journalists to find and connect with people for stories.

2. Ideas for sources and emerging trends
If you don’t want to post a question, LinkedIn Answers has a search box that allows you to search through the database’s archives. This is a common way journalists use LinkedIn as a tool to search for sources. A search for keyword “Atlanta” will likely find you individuals in the area, a search for “iPhone” will show you some of the buzz around the product. A great way to get ideas for stories is to peruse through the various categories of LinkedIn Answers to find out what people are saying about topics and trends.

3. Sharing Stories
According to PR Newswire, there are 1.5 million publishers currently using the LinkedIn share button on their sites. This includes traditional news organizations and media, such as Mashable, TechCrunch, and Gigaom.

Is Live-Streaming Empowering Journalism?

These days, less is more. In this age, smartphones have allowed the idea of ‘mobile-reporting’ possible. Undoubtedly, mobile driven reporting has its advantages and is possibly the future of communication. From built-in editing tools to compressing clips, mobile applications such as Facebook Live have allowed modern day newsrooms to keep up with local and international events happening around them. The concept sis fairly simple. You broadcast a live video anytime, anyhwhere from your phone. Simply download and lauch thed app to get started.

Its convenience has enabled reporters to live-stream events and utilize leads as they happen. Although most reporters limit their use of mobile reporting to breaking news events, social applications such as Periscope, a live video-streaming app developed by twitter are useful for creating a medium where audiences can interact with the reporter. Instead of web updates and interruptions that come with streaming through online databases, viewers can watch things as they happen instead of continuously refreshing their webpages.

Here are 3 ways Journalists use Facebook  as tool:

1.Report and share news as it happens
2.Engage Audiences
3.Schedule Q + A Sessions

Similarly, broadcasting on the Periscope application is another way journalists use live-streaming to tell their stories. Giving the public access to raw footage creates an authentic experience for the audience. Since launching, there have been over 100 million broadcasts created on Periscope, according to Medium.

Unlike Facebook Live, Periscope allows viewers to comment on what they are seeing and also ask questions. Besides engaging viewers, live streaming applications are a great way to encourage younger citizens to tune in. New York based magazine, TIME also uses Periscope to report on news-related issues. Here’s what senior audience strategy editor, Tyler Borchers had to say about utilizing the applications as a broadcasting tool.

“We see Periscope as a window to the world,” Borchers said. “I think this experience has demonstrated to our newsroom that people want an authentic perspective on the story on the ground,” he told Journalism.co.uk

Here’s How Journalists Are Using Snapchat:

Early last year, we all started experimenting with Snapchat, an application that has been garnering its fair share of attention— and not just from teenagers looking to privately exchange photos that contain explicit content. Curated in 2013, Snapchat is a mobile app that allows users to generate stories through a collection of pictures and videos.

Presenting an unfiltered view of people’s lives, Snapchat has become a news platform for more than 20 major media companies. The Daily Mail and VICE in particular have pioneered the way they use the medium by creating their own distinctive voice.

Companies such as The Washington Post, CNN and and CBS use the application to cover political rallies, share breaking news and offer behind-the -scenes looks at events and operations. Third party tools such as built-in custom features, stickers and text filters exist to make editing fun.

Although Snapchat content isnt that different from traditional reporting, in many ways the platforms is a very convenient, conventional story-telling tool that allows journalists to report and outline events in a compelling new way. If you need inspiration on how you can use your Snapchat Handle better, here are four people and organizations to follow:

1.MTV News

2.Mashable

3.Adam Rappoport

4.DJ Khaled

 

The Growing Power of Twitter – For News

In just seven years, Twitter has managed to transform from a microblogging network to a major platform for the release of breaking news. Research shows that the number of American adults who are using social media to get an idea of what is going on in the world around them is significantly on the rise. According to findings from a new survey presented by Journalism.org, users turn to each of the prominent social networks to fulfill different types of informational needs.

Emphasizing its impact on news with their fairly new feature, Project Lighting, Twitter has emerged to become the coolest, most user friendly way to keep up with the news of the 21st century. Journalists often use twitter to engage with audiences, monitor public opinion and build stories.Not only does Twitter help individuals keep track of local news and events but it can be a medium for seeing what leaders, organizations and networks are saying and thinking about an array of topics. Live tweeting at events or breaking news stories is one way journalists can pick up followers while keeping their audience involved.

One tip to getting a hang of the culture of twitter is to keep everything simple and to let every tweet stand alone.

Here are a few Twitter Handles we all should be following:

1. BBC News 

2. ABC News

3. AJC

4.Mashable