Being a New

Media Journalist

ANOOP KUMAR, PH.D.

Assistant Professor
Amity School of Communication
Amity University, Noida
Contact: akumar56@amity.edu
What is New Media?
• New media: Connotative word
▫ Addresses the inadequacies of old media (radio,
television, newspaper, etc.).
• Products & services enabled by the advantages of
computer and internet technology.
▫ Catch-all phrase for Social media, blogs, video games,
online news outlets, online video/audio streams, email,
online communities, online forums, blogs, Internet
telephony, Web advertisements, online education.
According to Robert Logan, author of Understanding
New Media:
• New media refers to “those digital media that are
interactive, incorporate two-way communication and
involve some form of computing.”
What is New Media?
• New media is “very easily processed, stored,
transformed, retrieved, hyperlinked and, perhaps
most radical of all, easily searched for and accessed.”
• New media is interactive.
• Users are active consumer or producers of content in
new media landscape.
Professor and new media theorist Lev Manovich:
• New media is native to computers or rely on
computers for distribution: websites, human-
computer interface, virtual worlds, virtual reality,
multimedia, computer games, computer animation,
digital video, special effects in cinema and interactive
computer installations.
What is New Media?
• New media reflects societal values and societal
transformation.
• New media as Remediation: Bolter & Grusin
• Old media has found new ways of representation
in digital forms.

Who is a new media journalist?

Making of a
New Media
Journalist
Make the most of your mobile
• Using smartphone to capture, process and publish rich
media content.
• Using your smartphones in breaking-news situations.
• Using smartphones for live-streaming.
• Mojo thinking and mindset.
SEO
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process
of affecting the visibility of a website or a web
page in a web search engine’s unpaid results –
often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or
“earned” results.
• Given the touch competition, SEO is an essential
skill.
Content Curation
• Content curation is the process of gathering
information relevant to a particular topic or area of
interest, usually with the intention of adding value.
• Helping the audience understand the topic in a
comprehensible manner.
• Helping them cruise through the vast knowledge base.
• Like the curator in museum.
• Social media content curation: Sifting through
millions of posts/shares and finding out relevant
items.
Audience Engagement
• Merely production & publication of stories is not
enough.
• You need to engage with audience.
• Pay attention to comments & reactions on your
story.
• Build the conversation surrounding your story and
participate in the same proactively.
• Understand the limits of your story.
• Find needs of your audience.
Web Analytics

• Understand the analytics of audience

engagement with your content.
• News consumption practices.
• Use the same for making editorial strategies.
• Process, package and publish your content in the
best possible ways to meet the needs of users.
• Find a balance between wants and needs.
• Do not let the editorial strategy solely driven by
web analytics.
Web Analytics Chartbeat
Multimedia Storyteller
• Journalists need to be equipped with skills
to tell stories using a combination of
multimedia formats such as photo, video,
text, audio, graphics, animation, etc.
Coding and Programming

• Web-scarping
• Creating Flash visualization and interactives
• HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, ActionScript3 and
Python skills.
Online Security
• Securing the digital assets (website, social media
accounts, etc.) from hacking or any potential
sabotage.
• Being safe in online communication.
• Knowing the privacy issues and protecting from
violations.
Mastering Data Journalism

• Data savvy: Being able to read the data-sets.

• Skills: Finding, cleaning, simple graph,
interactive visualizations, etc.
• Core competencies: Web Scraping, Data
Cleaning, Analysis and Interactive Data
Visualization.
Social Journalist and Community Builder
• Engaging with your audience, promoting content and
building personal brands.
• Virtual beat & personal brands: Building,
communicating and engaging with communities online.
▫ Keep your social networking accounts updated.
• Utilizing the social media network to source news stories
▫ Crowdsourcing
▫ Twitter List, TweetDeck
• Circulating published content.
• Social media sense.
• Using social media analytical dashboards to manage the
network and turn it into useful journalistic means.
Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing is the act of collecting services,
ideas or content through the contributions of a
large group of people.
• The term “crowdsourcing” first appeared in a
Wired article by Jeff Howe in 2006.
• It highlighted a new way of connecting with
people willing to work collaboratively on a
project.
• Crowdfunding involves outsourcing the
financing of a project to the general public.
Tools for Self Management
• Read it later: Pocket / Instapaper.
• Evernote: It allows you to save notes, voice
recordings, photos and more by using its
smartphone and web app.
▫ Google Keep
• Cloud-storage: Dropbox, OneDrive, Google
Drive.
• Web-based docs & spread sheets: Google,
Microsoft.
• Social bookmarking: Pinboard, Chrome.
Validation and Online Fact-checking
• Validation information from multiple sources.
• Being able to check the veracity of misleading
information spreading online and through social
networking sites.
• Adept of using digital tools to debunk digital
falsehood.
• Examples: Google, TinEye, InVid, Snopes,
RevEye, WolFramAlpha, etc.
Grounding in Fundamentals of Journalism
• Digital skill-sets should work in tandem with the
traditional skills of quality journalism.
• News sense / judgment
• Writing ability
▫ Longform/immersive, tweet, post, witty top-ten
• Spirit for enquiry
• Due space/time to all stakeholder of a news-
event.
• Verification from sources
• Getting the claims/facts accurate.
▫ Online fact checking in an extension of this role.
INK Formula

• Information + News + Knowledge = INK

• Information:
Entrepreneurial and Business Savvy

• Business model of mainstream or legacy media

is becoming unstable.
• Experienced as well as budding
journalist/communication professionals are
finding out new ways to do journalism.
• Online-only: Websites, Social Media
Pages/Channels, etc.
• Understand the value of your content and
pursue the commercial opportunities.
A Culture of Continuous Learning

• Poynter News University

▫ https://www.poynter.org/newsu/

• Journalism.co.uk
▫ https://www.journalism.co.uk/
A Culture of Continuous Learning
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk//

• Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

• https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/
A Culture of Continuous Learning
• Nieman Journalism Lab (Harvard University)
• https://www.niemanlab.org/
Multi-skilled Journalist
Open-minded Experimenter
• Shift in mindset.
• Not being any obsessed with any
platform/medium.
• Being open to present and potential tools &
platforms.
• Being able to understand the strengths and
weaknesses of different media so that the best
one may be utilized for each story.
References

• https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/10-key-
skills-for-digital-journalists-to-hone-in-
2014/s2/a555503/

• https://mashable.com/2009/12/09/future-
journalist/

• https://googletrends.github.io/icfj/