Voor mensen die beroepshalve met communicatie en informatie te maken hebben, is het belangrijk om op de hoogte te zijn van de meest actuele en relevante ontwikkelingen op dat terrein. Het gaat hierbij niet alleen over social media of web 2.0 - ook het zoeken, beheren en publiceren van informatie is voor professionals ingrijpend veranderd. Wie de mogelijkheden van nieuwe media kent en gebruikt, haalt het beste uit zijn organisatie, bereikt zijn doelgroepen en blijft zijn concurrenten voor. Het Handboek Nieuwe Media gaat in 12 hoofdstukken in op de eigenschappen en mogelijke toepassingen van Twitter, communities, blogs, tablets, browsers, foto, video, audio, user-generated content, Google, RSS en databases.
Digital research is taking the humanities by storm. This can be read not only from the many digital humanities programs in education and research in universities around the world but also from the attention for new media practices in humanities and art departments. Famously, and thought-provokingly, media theorist Lev Manovich—strongly rooted in film and media studies—set out to develop a means by which the visual analysis of big data sets of digitized cultural materials could help the study of art and culture transition into the era of big data or, as he calls it, 90the era of “more media” (Manovich, 2009). Often met with scrutiny by art historians, not in favor of a quantitative approach to the arts, Manovich insisted with this “cultural analytics” program on expanding the study of culture by including the vast amounts of user-generated content. As he wrote as early as 2009: “Think about this: the number of images uploaded to Flickr every week is probably larger than all objects contained in all art museums in the world.” Manovich developed the Software Studies Initiative, where he and his team developed software such as Image Plot, for the analysis of large visual data sets. Manovich applies his methods both to digitized materials (such as Time magazine covers) as well as—more recently—to born-digital content (such as selfies on Instagram).
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Journalists in the 21st century are expected to work for different platforms, gather online information, become multi‐media professionals, and learn how to deal with amateur contributions. The business model of gathering, producing and distributing news changed rapidly. Producing content is not enough; moderation and curation are at least as important when it comes to working for digital platforms. There is a growing pressure on news organizations to produce more inexpensive content for digital platforms, resulting in new models of low‐cost or even free content production. Aggregation, either by humans or machines ‘finding’ news and re‐publishing it, is gaining importance. At so‐called ‘content farms’ freelancers, part‐timers and amateurs produce articles that are expected to end up high in web searches. Apart from this low‐pay model a no‐pay model emerged were bloggers write for no compensation at all. At the Huffington Post thousands of bloggers actually work for free. Other websites use similar models, sometimes offering writers a fixed price depending on the number of clicks a page gets. We analyse the background, the consequences for journalists and journalism and the implications for online news organizations. We investigate aggregation services and content farms and no‐pay or low‐pay news websites that mainly use bloggers for input.
