Monday, March 1st, 2010...3:54 pm
Help readers make sense of the world
A concept that gets bandied about a great deal is that news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.” I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by this concept, but it doesn’t have a clear definition.
Last week, I encountered a situation that clearly illustrates what I think it means for a news organization to help its readers/viewers make sense of the world.
At 5:30 a.m. on day, I got a text message from one of my local television stations alerting me that my kids’ school was closed because of an impending snowstorm. This was a valuable bit of information. Getting it by text was incredibly convenient. My phone buzzed on my bedside table, alerting me to the text. I didn’t even have to get out of bed. I turned off my alarm and slept in, a rare luxury in my frenetic life.
Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
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I'm Gina Masullo Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communications. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
2 Comments
January 4th, 2011 at 8:41 pm
[...] As of Romania, there is still no sign that media outlets will dive in the new era of journalism. Maybe, as Cosmin Alexandru says here, 2011 will be the last shot they have. At this moment, Hotnews.ro, one of the best news websites in the country, has only two Twitter accounts: one for the most important news, the other for news in English (this one having only 99 followers). Evenimentul Zilei, another top newspaper and news website has only one Twitter account. Only Adevărul has +10 Twitter accounts, covering its major regional editions. Not to mention the lack of using other new media tools for covering news like Google maps (example from NYT), and even the old SMS. [...]
January 4th, 2011 at 10:50 pm
[...] As of Romania, there is still no sign that media outlets will dive in the new era of journalism. Maybe, as Cosmin Alexandru says here, 2011 will be the last shot they have. At this moment, Hotnews.ro, one of the best news websites in the country, has only two Twitter accounts: one for the most important news, the other for news in English (this one having only 99 followers). Evenimentul Zilei, another top newspaper and news website has only one Twitter account. Only Adevărul has +10 Twitter accounts, covering its major regional editions. Not to mention the lack of using other new media tools for covering news like Google maps (example from NYT), and even the old SMS. [...]
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