Is there a journalism challenge you or your newsroom has wanted to tackle, but haven’t had the time or resources to focus on the idea?
Could the project benefit the industry as a whole in some way and strengthen democracy through better journalism?
If you answered ‘yes’ to both of those questions, then consider applying for a 2020–21 fellowship at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Apply between Dec. 16, 2019 and Jan. 17, 2020.
RJI Fellowship projects typically devise new strategies or models for solving a problem, build new tools, or create a prototype or advance a prototype so it is ready for investment or launch during an eight-month fellowship. This year’s fellows are working on a variety of projects, which include, developing a best practices guide for better gun violence reporting, helping news outlets take advantage of push notifications and developing a platform to produce audio stories on smart speakers that can contrast or expand based on the reader’s interest level in a topic. Read more
If you were to train the perfect local news journalist or publisher, you would make sure they had a good grasp of digital business, used innovative reporting techniques, listened to and engaged deeply with audiences, and understood the value that their community’s many cultural and intellectual differences bring.
Training programs run the gamut from online webinars to in-person boot camps at conferences to fellowships and cohorts that learn together over a longer period of time. And the training programs aren’t just about keeping up with the latest tech tools; they also try to imbue a mindset of innovation, so journalists can be flexible and curious and open to constant change in the industry.
“We see our mission as investing in people,” said Meghan Murphy, senior manager, communities & local journalism initiatives at the Online News Association (ONA). “We can’t fulfill our mission to make the journalism field more innovative without lifting up the people in the industry.” Read more
The annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting honors investigative reporting that best promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government, the making of public policy, or the practice of politics.
Financial support for the Goldsmith Awards Program is provided by an annual grant from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation. The program is administered by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
The winner receives $25,000, and five finalists receive $10,000. Prize money is paid directly to the journalists, not the news organizations. While the subject can address issues of foreign policy, a submission qualifies only if it has an impact on public policy in the United States at the national, regional or local level.
Nominations for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting are open now. Up to two entries are allowed per news outlet and entries are due by January 2, 2020. Read more
Christine Schmidt | Nieman Lab | December 10, 2019
The Connecticut Mirror — Hartford’s nonprofit news outlet, created ten years ago with $1.8 million from residents of the state concerned about layoffs at local news outlets. Now, 90 percent of the Mirror’s revenue comes from reader donations and its journalism is shared in the state’s 12 largest daily papers. The Mirror said it received a $830,000 grant from AJP.
The Mirror is among the first 11 grantees of the American Journalism Project. Each site gets a part of $8.5 million — average grant around $800,000. The grants will fund an organization’s first dedicated revenue positions, or grow an existing revenue team. Most will fund at least two new full-time positions for 24 months dedicated to revenue and fundraising. Read more
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced a new Journalism prize category for the 2020 prize cycle: Audio Reporting.
The new prize will be awarded “For a distinguished example of audio journalism that serves the public interest, characterized by revelatory reporting and illuminating storytelling.’’
The Board invites submissions from producers of radio programs and podcasts that exemplify the excellence the Pulitzer Prizes have honored for more than a century. Competitive entries will reflect the work the Prizes has championed traditionally, from investigative reporting that exposes wrongdoing to dynamic features, and news coverage of major issues or events.
News organizations currently eligible to compete for the Pulitzer Prize — “U.S. newspapers, magazines, wire services and online news sites that publish regularly’’ — will be permitted to enter audio stories in this new category, as will independent American producers and U.S. radio broadcast outlets. Non-U.S. outlets are ineligible. Eligibility rules for the other 14 Journalism categories will remain intact.
The contest for Audio Reporting and all other Journalism categories will open on December 16, 2019, and the deadline for all submissions is January 24, 2020 at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Audio entries must be submitted without preroll advertising. Read more
News industry analyst and author Ken Doctor reports how the 5 biggest newspaper chains could become 2 before the end of June 2020 in his latest Newsonomics article published by Nieman Lab.
Is an end in sight?
The first half of 2020 “will be the final dance of the newspaper industry,” one of my savviest financial sources told me Thursday — someone who’s been right on the money for years. “Everything will get resolved in the first half of 2020.”
By “everything,” he means the consolidation of ownership and control of the United States’ major newspaper companies. What as recently as three weeks ago were five big chains — Gannett, GateHouse, McClatchy, Tribune, and Alden Global Capital’s MNG Enterprises — could well, by the middle of 2020, be two. Read more
John Foust has conducted training programs for thousands of newspaper advertising professionals. Many ad departments are using his training videos to save time and get quick results from in-house training. E-mail him for information: john@johnfoust.com
Tim manages an ad sales team. “When I started my career in the newspaper business, I quickly learned that advertisers can be worlds apart in their knowledge of marketing,” he said. “That’s why one of my favorite sales principles is the old slogan, ‘Meet them where they are.’
“This means we have to recognize that our prospects have different levels of experience. Most of them don’t have our knowledge of the intricacies of newspapers. If we don’t talk to them on their level, they will tune us out. And most of them are too polite to tell us we’re doing a poor job of explaining things.”
Tim comments remind me of the time my wife and I helped her father select a car. He loved his 14 year old car, but it was time for a replacement, because expensive things were beginning to go wrong with it. At the dealership, we found a nice used car with only 12,000 miles – a much newer version of his old model.
Our salesperson was sincere and down-to-earth, but unfortunately, he was hung up on technology. He spent most of the test drive talking about the screen in the middle of the dashboard. He was a walking encyclopedia of Bluetooth and wi-fi and digital programming, but my father-in-law had no interest in those things. He just wanted to see how the car drove and learn the relevant differences between his old car and the new one. His patience with the barrage of comments like “look at this other cool feature” was a clear sign that he liked the car.
In spite of the salesperson’s single-minded focus, my wife’s dad decided it was the right car for him. When the transaction was over, he mentioned that the salesperson was nice, but extremely confusing. The next day, he accepted my offer of a simple tutorial. I sat in the car with him, placed my hand over the dashboard display and said, “The first thing we’re going to do is forget about all of this.” He said, “That’s a good start.” Then we reviewed and practiced some basics until he was comfortable. When we finished, he said he was more confident and even more excited about the car.
Age and experience make a big difference. That car salesperson should have known that a person of my father-in-law’s age wouldn’t care about fancy technology. But he was so blinded by his own interest that he couldn’t see things from another person’s perspective.
“It’s all a matter of common sense,” Tim said. “If a prospect is a numbers person, we should talk in terms of numbers – even if we’re not numbers people ourselves. If someone is an idea person, we should focus on ad concepts. Of course, this means we have to be prepared to talk to about advertising from all angles.”
Meet your prospects where they are. Let that be your guideline and you’ll be on the right road.
(c) Copyright 2019 by John Foust. All rights reserved.
Since changing its social media strategy to drive traffic from social media back to its own pages where people can register and, ultimately, subscribe, the publisher has grown monthly referral traffic from social media platforms by 180%. Now, about a third of its site traffic comes from social platforms, said Kevin Young, head of social at The Economist, although he was unwilling to share specific figures on how many subscribers this is driving. Read more
As digital resources and social media have given all people a public, open platform to communicate, user-generated content has become primary source material and created a trail for open-source journalists to investigate. And by performing investigative research in this way, reporters can more easily connect directly to visual evidence on the web, rather than refer to private sources.
Open-source techniques can also help to restore trust in journalism by improving transparency because they often involve journalists showing the process behind their reporting. Read more
