Younger, higher-income, and more highly educated seniors use the internet and broadband at rates approaching—or even exceeding—the general population; internet use and broadband adoption each drop off dramatically around age 75

Read the full piece at Pew Research Center

“Not everyone has to start their own company—you can Voltron up,” says PandoDaily founder and CEO Sarah Lacy. “If every great journalist peels off and starts their own company, they’re ultimately not writing very much. Five or six really amazing journalists can band together and be worth so much more.”

Read the full piece at PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy on Digital Publishing Startups: Like Chewing On Glass | FolioMag

The process of automatically spotting breaking news events is relatively straightforward. It is based on the idea that if something important is happening now, Wikipedia editors working in different languages will update the relevant pages at the same time.

Wikipedia and its sister site Wikidata publish all edits using the Wikimedia IRC server. This allows all interested parties to monitor edits as they happen. An algorithm by Thomas Steiner at Google Germany simply monitors this feed looking for the simultaneous activity that is the signature of breaking news.

He called this application the Wikipedia Live Monitor and released it last year and it has successfully identified numerous breaking news stories, such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the more recent loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

<p.Now Steiner has added a visual element to this process. This is based on another application that he and others have developed that searches social media for images associated with a particular search term. It then extracts any visual media, removes duplicates and then crops the images so that they fit together in a grid. He calls this application Social Media Illustrator.

via The Evolution of Automated Breaking News Stories | MIT Technology Review

1. Thirty of the largest digital-only news organizations account for about 3,000 jobs and one area of investment is global coverage.
2. So far, the impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience than about building a new, sustainable revenue structure.
3. Social and mobile developments are doing more than bringing consumers into the process – they are also changing the dynamics of the process itself.
4. New ways of storytelling bring both promise and challenge.
5. Local television, which reaches about nine in ten U.S. adults, experienced massive change in 2013, change that stayed under the radar of most.
6. Dramatic changes under way in the makeup of the American population will undoubtedly have an impact on news in the U.S, and in one of the fastest growing demographic groups – Hispanics – we are already seeing shifts.

Read the full piece at State of the News Media 2014 – Overview | Pew Research Center's Journalism Project

Many newsrooms won’t permit writers on the editorial payroll to write sponsored content for their sales counterparts, and vice versa. Gawker and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, won’t permit writers on the editorial payroll to write sponsored content. Condé Nast’s Wired draws a clearer line in the sand in using freelancers for its Amplifi native ad division. Freelancers can’t have contributed to the magazine in the past year and a half, vp, publisher Howard Mittman said.

Read the full piece at Newsrooms freeze out freelancers moonlighting for brands | Digiday

A new study from Deloitte finds that teens and young twentysomethings spend more time watching movies and television shows on their computers, smartphones and tablets than they do on their TV screens… Although viewing habits have been changing as the number of screens in the typical home multiply, this marks the first time these devices have eclipsed TV for any segment of the population, said Gerald Belson, vice chairman of Deloitte’s U.S. media and entertainment practice.

Read the full piece at Re/code

Now, journalists, editors and all other “content creators” will focus “100 per cent on digital” rather than splitting attention between online and print as deadlines loom, said Neil Benson, editorial director of Trinity Mirror Regionals. “Everyone who creates content does so for digital and then a team of experienced, high-quality people who really know print will then turn it into the newspaper.”

Read the full piece at Media news

This lack of differentiation towards sources of news, coupled with our constant need to be informed, is impacting how consume news today and how we will consume news in the future. News will need to be even more social, tailored to personal interests, and delivered along with other content such as weather updates, calendar reminders, or status updates.3  Aggregators such as HTC BlinkFeed, Facebook’s Paper app, The Huffington Post, and Upworthy, will grow in popularity as the desire to stay on top of ‘news’ in all its guises continues.

Read the full piece at HTC Blog

Since Syria Deeply, a news site solely focused on covering the crisis there, went live in late 2012, Lara Setrakian hasn’t hid the fact that she wants to create additional sites that closely cover specific topics. At Columbia’s Tow Center, she’s been engaged in a research project around the idea of news sites that cover a single subject in depth. News Deeply, the media company the former ABC News and Bloomberg TV correspondent cofounded, has considered plenty of topics to focus on, but later this year it plans to launch its next platform: Arctic Deeply.

Read the full piece at Nieman Journalism Lab

“I applaud the increased use of data in journalism. But they can’t just hire graphic designers to make pretty pictures. Making sense out of raw data requires more analytic firepower and more willingness to do independent research than journalists have traditionally been comfortable with. But it also requires a new set of ethics about how to responsibly use data. That conversation hasn’t started yet.

— Michael Mandel, journalist and chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington

Read the full piece at The Problem with Data Journalism — Quartz