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Summer 2010 | Online Exclusives

The Digital Landscape: What’s Next for News?

Explore the emerging realms of digital territory where news and information reside—or will soon. It’s a place where game playing thrives and augmented reality tugs at possibilities. It’s where video excels, while the appetite for long-form text and the experience of “deep reading” is diminished, and it’s where the allure of multitasking greets the crush of information. Learn how young people negotiate their journey, and travel inside the brain to discover its capacities in the digital realm.  Dig deeper into topics covered in the magazine by clicking on the books in our digital library to reveal selected videos, articles, blogs and Web sites. —Melissa Ludtke, Editor

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The Digital Landscape: What’s Next for News?
Introduction
By Melissa Ludtke, Editor
Brain Power
Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism (18 comments)
‘This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists … . The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them.’
By Jack Fuller
Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions (10 comments)
‘The reading circuit’s very plasticity is also its Achilles’ heel. It can be fully fashioned over time and fully implemented when we read, or it can be short-circuited …’
By Maryanne Wolf
Novelty and Testing: When the Brain Learns and Why It Forgets
By Russell Poldrack
Thinking About Multitasking: It’s What Journalists Need to Do (1 comment)
Heavy media multitaskers ‘are often influenced by intervening content. News articles are therefore going to require more recapitulations and reminders to help readers pick up where they left off.’
By Clifford Nass
Watching the Human Brain Process Information
‘We measure the amount of brain activity while somebody’s doing something. You can’t generate more activity beyond a certain point. There’s an upper limit.’
Conversation with Marcel Just
A Big Question: ‘How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?’ (3 comments)
Edge posed this question; discover how a wide range of thinkers responded.
By John Brockman
Origins of Edge
Digital Youth
Critical Thinking About Journalism: A High School Student’s View
By Lucy Chen
Lessons for the Future From the First Post-Pokémon Generation (1 comment)
‘Creating interest-driven content and programming that is easily shared, interactive and participatory is key to unlocking the power of networked media.’
By Mizuko Ito
Digital Demands: The Challenges of Constant Connectivity (2 comments)
‘We’re becoming quite intolerant of letting each other think complicated things.’
Excerpts from Frontline’s “Digital Nation” interview with Sherry Turkle
Generational Divide: Digital Technology’s Paradoxical Message (1 comment)
Excerpts from the BBC’s interview with Sherry Turkle
Understanding the iGeneration—Before the Next Mini-Generation Arrives (1 comment)
‘As the pace of technological change accelerates, mini-generations are defined by their distinctive patterns of media use, levels of multitasking, and preferred methods of communication.’
By Larry Rosen
Revealing the Digital News Experience—For Young And Old
In surveys and analysis, the Pew Research Center illuminates the ever-changing course of Americans’ digital habits.
By Amy Mitchell
Journalism: English for the 21st Century (2 comments)
‘The two main drives in teenagers’ lives are for independence and acceptance; our approach to journalism supports these drives through favoring freedom of expression and showcasing student work on a variety of public platforms.’
By Esther Wojcicki
E-Textbooks to iPads: Do Teenagers Use Them? (3 comments)
‘... I didn’t anticipate the heated debates we would have about the impact of these emerging digital platforms or the intensity of our discussions about the future of e-textbooks, journalism, and reading in general.’
By Esther Wojcicki
The Future of News: What Ninth-Grade Students Think
News Literacy Project: Students Figure Out What News and Information to Trust (3 comments)
‘Without a demand for quality journalism (on any platform) from the next generation, what future will it have?’
By Alan C. Miller
Curator's Corner
Fairness as an Essential Ingredient in News Reporting
The Nieman Foundation’s Taylor Family Award recognizes journalistic fairness—and we learn from the stories it honors how newspapers achieve it.
By Bob Giles
Nieman Notes
From Rejection to Success—With ‘Radiohead Journalism’ (1 comment)
In a crowdfunding experiment that earned back what it cost to report a story, a writer discovers a fresh, but unproven, path for long narrative stories.
By Paige Williams
Class Notes (1 comment)
Compiled by Jan Gardner
A Nation’s Past and Promise: A Shift in the Meaning of American Symbols
An Essay in Words and Photographs By Derrick Z. Jackson
New News
News in the Age of Now (6 comments)
‘On the Web, skimming is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. That poses a huge problem for those who report and publish the news.’
By Nicholas Carr
There’s More to Being a Journalist Than Hitting the ‘Publish’ Button (17 comments)
For better or worse, the Internet is ‘biased to the amateur and to the immediate.’
By Douglas Rushkoff
Categorizing What Works—So We Can Apply Those Lessons to Future Endeavors (1 comment)
As journalism heads into digital territory, an exploration of online news sites reveals 100 that offer promising pathways.
By Michele McLellan
Establishing a Digital Value for Watchdog Reporting (2 comments)
‘Our impulse as digital journalists is to innovate—and this means finding stories that aren’t being covered by other news media in Baltimore and doing what we can to illuminate them in ways that propel people to act.’
By Stephen Janis
A Message for Journalists: It’s Time to Flex Old Muscles in New Ways (3 comments)
‘We’ll learn by trying new ways of doing what we’ve done with news, by putting ourselves visibly in the social media mix, and by using the emerging tools of daily communication in all aspects of our work.’
By Ken Doctor
Twitter: Can It Be a Reliable Source of News? (1 comment)
‘I came to understand that there is a science to this quest for creating the right network. It’s an empirical process, one that requires lots of time and thought and effort.’
By Janic Tremblay
YouTube’s Ecosystem for News (1 comment)
‘Our users innovate at an extraordinary pace and in ways that amaze us, make our world more transparent, and change the way we consume information and are informed.’
By Steve Grove
Video Games: What They Can Teach Us About Audience Engagement (1 comment)
‘… we learn differently from content-driven media than we do from media driven by choice and problem solving.’
By James Paul Gee
News-Focused Game Playing: Is It a Good Way to Engage People in an Issue? (1 comment)
‘Ultimately our challenge will be to determine which metrics for successful storytelling turn out to be most important in the digital environment.’
By Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen
Playing the News Moves Into the Classroom
By Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen
Hacks + Hackers
Hacks/Hackers: Bringing Journalists and Technologists Together
‘We’re all trying to figure out what works, and that’s really the key to innovation: a tolerance for failure and embrace of experimentation.’
By Burt Herman
Joining Digital Forces Strengthens Local Investigative Reporting (1 comment)
‘Our goal is to build online tools that the people can easily use to enhance their ability as watchdogs—whether they are citizens or journalists.’
By Brant Houston
The Peril and Promise of the Semantic Web (2 comments)
What is the role of the journalist as computers become more adept at pulling together data from different sources?
By Andrew Finlayson
For a Start-up, Machine-Generated Stories Are the Name of the Game
By Jan Gardner
Journalism on the Map: A Case for Location-Aware Storytelling (7 comments)
‘Every place has a story, and every story has a place.’
By Krissy Clark
Digital Immersion: Augmenting Places With Stories And Information
‘News organizations and start-up entrepreneurs are only beginning to explore the potential of augmented reality.’
By Mike Liebhold
The Future of Storytelling: A Participatory Endeavor
At the Center for Future Storytelling, researchers envision how technology can give people more control over TV programs they encounter and stories they follow.
Conversation with V. Michael Bove, Jr.
Storytelling in the Digital Age: Finding the Sweet Spot (1 comment)
‘Old metrics for credibility and trust no longer guide us, nor does trust emanate exclusively from the power of a brand name or from the overpowering resources of a recognized institution.’
By Hanson Hosein
Apple’s iPad Meets Hamlet’s Blackberry
History teaches that ‘long-established media technologies, when faced with the prospect of commercial extinction, counter with their own dialectic.’
By Peter Cobus
The Tablet’s Mobile Multimedia Revolution: A Reality Check
‘In my opinion, tablets, like the Internet in the past, are fantastic opportunities, not just devices on which to perform the same old tricks.’
By Juan Antonio Giner