Over the past decades, journalism schools and journalism training programmes have been trying to keep up with the constant technological and societal developments. Numerous studies have been done about what knowledge and skills should be taught and several on how they should be taught, to be more adaptive to this changing environment and media landscape. Meanwhile, also media companies are increasingly becoming educators, with their own learning academies to make journalists become lifelong learners. In this study, which was conducted in the Netherlands, we take a holistic approach to understanding the uncertain future journalism education is currently dealing with. We use the method of scenario planning to systematically analyse the current debate on journalism education. By collecting opinions and views of fifty different experts from the broad field of journalism and (journalism) education, we deducted certain and uncertain trends that led to two axes, answering the following questions: What type of journalism do we educate for and Who is in charge of the learning process? Crossing these axes, four scenarios for the future of journalism education appear. With this study, we intend to facilitate the debate on the future of journalism education.
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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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Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.
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