News As User Experience...Or Journalism and Data: The New BFFs

Cindy Royal, Ph.D

Associate Professor

Texas State University

School of Journalism and Mass Communication

croyal@txstate.edu

www.cindyroyal.com

www.onthatnote.com

tech.cindyroyal.net

twitter.com/cindyroyal

facebook.com/cindyroyal

linkedin.com/in/cindyroyal

News as User Experience

Social networks and media having an effect on traditional media

Web 2.0 sites share the characteristic of user-generated content

Increased expectation on part of user as to participation News examples: comments, ratings, blogs, user-generated

photos and videos; news sites on Facebook, using Twitter News sites run the risk of seeming outdated or irrelevant if

you don't give users something to do Rise of participatory culture – Henry Jenkins in

Convergence Culture

News as User Experience

Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.

Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.

Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Digital Natives - more than half of American teenagers have created a blog, posted an artistic or written creation online, helped build a website, created an online profile, or uploaded photos and videos to a website.

Pew – Participatory News Consumer & Digital Natives

News as User Experience

Changing idea of “news” Breaking news Mobile – expectation of receiving news anywhere, on

demand Relationship with community, sources Role of “user experience” Rise of tools available to work with and present data

Examples

New York Times – Rent or Buy

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calculator.html

Examples

New York Times – Mapping the Nation's Well-Being

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/06/weekinreview/20110306-happiness.html

Examples

New York Times – Budget Forecast Compared with Reality

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/02/us/politics/20100201-budget-porcupine-graphic.html

Examples

Guardian – Obama at 50

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/aug/04/barack-obama-50-birthday-interactive

Examples

NYT – Census: Mapping America

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

Examples

NYT Inaugural Words

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/washington/20090117_ADDRESSES.html

Examples

NYT Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/26/sports/olympics/20100226-olysymphony.html

Examples

CNN Money: Best Companies to Work For

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2011/word_cloud/index.html

Examples

ProPublica - The Opportunity Gap

http://projects.propublica.org/schools/

Examples

Stanford – The Growth of Newspapers Across the US

http://www.stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers

Examples

Texas Tribune

http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/

Examples

Stamen Design – MTV Movie Awards Twitter Visualization

http://stamen.com/clients/mtv

Examples

Location collaborations

http://www.statesman.com/business/statesman-teams-up-with-gowalla-for-austin-virtual-724228.html

Examples

Storify

http://storify.com/

Tools

Chartle/Wordle

Google Charts and Visualizations

Google Fusion Tables

Google Maps

Visual.ly

Ruby on Rails or Django

Resources When the Data Struts Its Stuff – NYT -

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/business/03stream.html?_r=1

Teaching with Infographics – NYT - http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/teaching-with-infographics-places-to-start/

Renegades at The New York Times – New York Magazine - http://nymag.com/news/features/all-new/53344/

Data Journalism at the Guardian: What It Is and How Do We Do It? - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/28/data-journalism

The Programmer Majored in English – Nieman Journalism Lab - http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/the-programmer-majored-in-english-a-fascinating-study-of-the-nyts-interactive-news-unit/

Poynter – Data-driven Journalism articles http://www.poynter.org/tag/data-driven-journalism/

Stanford – Journalism in the Age of Data - http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/

Hacks/Hackers – hackshackers.com

11 Journalism Jobs You May Hold in the Future - http://sustainablejournalism.org/future-of-journalism/journalism-jobs-may-hold-future

Course sites:– Advanced Online Media - cindyroyal.com/advanced– Issues in New Media - cindyroyal.com/newmedia– Social Media at Work - cindyroyal.com/social– Web Design and Publishing - cindyroyal.com/webdesign

Other Reading

Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody & Cognitive Surplus Dan Gillmor – We the Media & Mediactive Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do? Max McCombs - The Future of News Douglas Rushkoff - Program or Be Programmed: 10

Commandments for a Digital Age Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture Ian Bogost – Newsgames: Journalism at Play James Surowiecki – The Wisdom of Crowds