Tag Archives: conversation

From Chat Apps to Town Halls: Why More Newsrooms are Designing Journalism for Conversation

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” — Arthur Miller

At a panel on “The Hunt for News Products of the Future” hosted by CUNY and the New School last week, Aron Pilhofer, the Interim Chief Digital Officer of The Guardian, said he is fascinated with the intersection of messaging, bots and artificial intelligence in apps like Facebook’s project M, and how that might change how we enter into a conversation with the news. The comment came on the heels of Pilhofer discussing the new mobile app from Quartz, which uses a messaging interface to deliver news via interactions with the user. He said using the Quartz app was “the first time I opened up a news app and felt like it had a soul.”

I felt that too — perhaps not a soul, but a sense of connection.

Continue reading “From Chat Apps to Town Halls: Why More Newsrooms are Designing Journalism for Conversation”

From Journalism’s Five W’s to Journalism’s Five C’s

The five W’s of journalism remain a cornerstone of newsgathering today, but I have been increasingly thinking about five C’s as well: Context, Conversation, Curation, Community and Collaboration.

Below I try to define each, with particular attention to how they intersect, and I link to one good piece of writing on the topic.

Nothing about this is supposed to be comprehensive, nor is it particularly original, it’s just a list of the things I’m thinking about right now and an invitation for you to add your thoughts. Continue reading “From Journalism’s Five W’s to Journalism’s Five C’s”

Building Conversation and Community Around the News

This summer a number of news organizations announced new projects designed to rethink how readers engage with the news. Some will fail, no doubt, and all of them need more testing and development. However, these are all creative responses to critical questions about how journalists relate to their readers. I look forward to following each one.Continue reading “Building Conversation and Community Around the News”