This study explores how journalists in highspeed newsrooms gather information, how gathering activities are temporally structured and how reliability manifests itself in information-gathering activities.
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Depicting news graphically is considered an apt way to deal with challenges of modern journalism: to disclose big data, and present news attractively, visually, and fast to grasp. This study delves into reported obstacles and challenges for the production of news visualizations. It focuses on the question: what are the decisive factors that make news visualizations ‘work’ for the different people involved: journalists, designers and the public? To answer the research question, a threefold approach was taken: a review of both pertinent professional literature and academic studies on the production process of infographics; in-depth interviews with data journalists on their most extensive productions; and case studies around the production of three Dutch media visualizations. Results show that the quality and the use of visualization for news stories not only depends on the availability and the skills of designers and data journalists, but even more so on the willingness of the editors-in-chief to initiate experiments with new concepts and tools and to opt for new ways of news gathering and dissemination.
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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.
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