Amber Healy, Author at It's All Journalism

403. Data journalism in the age of coronavirus

The world of data journalism has opened up and become more user friendly than ever at the exact right moment.

Simon Rogers, a data journalist with the Google News Initiative, says it wasn’t so long ago that graphic designers were still relying on pen and ink for their images. They had to work harder, and on their own, to try to take complex concepts and make them into easy-to-understand visual representations of data.

Simon Rogers data journalism expert — Simon Rogers is a data journalism expert with the Google News Initiative.

“There’s always an assumption that it’s difficult to embark on data journalism,” he says. “It’s never been as easy, in a way, to be a data journalist as it is now, due to the sheer breadth of tools. You’re using free tools that are widely available, you don’t have to be a coder or a developer.”

As journalists around the world are trying to cover more aspects of the coronavirus epidemic every day, tools available through the Google News Initiative are making it easier to take large amounts of data and turn them into visuals that can be used in stories, online or in broadcast. Sharing these infographics on social media is ideal, as most people are scrolling through their timelines looking for the latest information, and dense data graphics are ideally shaped and sized for that format.

Rogers also suggests journalists reconsider how they go about writing Q&A or FAQ pieces on coronavirus by first reviewing trend data via Google Trends. It’s possible to search for area-specific questions to find out what people in a given coverage area are searching for, whether it’s symptoms of the virus or which restaurants are still offering take-out.

“Right now, it’s a particularly powerful tool,” he says. “It won’t tell you who’s going to win a ballgame, but it will tell you what the most searched player is or the moment that resonated most during a game. It changes over time. Look at the searches in Italy a month ago and they’re like searches are here now in the U.S. A month ago, it was when will this end? What does it mean to not go out of the house? It’s the same here now.”

Rogers believes we’re still in the early stages of fully understanding what data journalism can do and how data can be used for journalistic purposes.

“Just going through the trends data, it highlights the importance of data. It’s turned the whole world into epidemiologists,” he says. “It makes it very hard to BS around that. The facts are the facts. Even with the horrible state of misinformation that’s out there, just seeing how much people want to know the facts is really interesting to me. What crises like this reveal is we all need real, true information we can trust. We’ve always known that’s the case, but seeing the importance of that in real time is powerful.”

Simon Rogers, a data journalism expert with the Google News Initiative, joins It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell this week to discuss the ways in which data journalism can help reporters find new ways to cover coronavirus with information gleaned from search engine trends in their communities.

402. Covering coronavirus in useful, trustworthy ways

In reality, there’s only one story in the U.S. these days, and every newsroom is trying to figure out the best way to cover it — the new coronavirus.

“People are consuming news at a much higher rate and relying on journalism more” as coronavirus cases begin to reach double, if not triple, digits in cities across the country, says Mollie Muchna, of the Arizona Daily Star and TrustingNews.org. “It presents a good opportunity (for newsrooms) to communicate their commitment to their community and to provide factual and up-to-date information. We’re doing this reporting for their physical health and the health of their community.”

Instead of trying to relay every last detail and follow every breaking news lead, she suggests newsrooms consider taking a more focused approach, distilling the big events of the day in clear, easy to understand and quick to read bites.

Muchna recently wrote about how newsrooms can demonstrate trustworthiness in their coronavirus coverage for TrustingNews.

“More isn’t always better,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily make people feel safe or informed. It can make them feel overwhelmed. Anything journalists can do to break down the news, whether it’s a newsletter or landing page that tells people what they need to know to get up to speed can be a great solution.”

Some newsrooms are creating and sending out newsletters to provide additional information on how to stay safe. Others are updating a single page with the most important stories, so readers have one place to go to find out the day’s key information.

“Chasing every single lead can be exhausting and can make coverage feel all over the place,” Muchna says. “If newsrooms can develop an overall plan and goals with their cover, centralized around their specific community, and then share that with their community. Let that be your guidepost.”

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Mollie Muchna of TrustingNews.org and the Arizona Daily Star to discuss what newsrooms should be doing to provide useful, beneficial and trustworthy updates on coronavirus without overwhelming their audience.

401. How can storytellers crack writer’s block?

What if there was a way to get around writer’s block?

What if people in creative jobs figured out a way to cultivate a steady stream of ideas and stories to tell?

After all, there’s no such thing as a day where a newspaper doesn’t print, or a broadcast station doesn’t have a newscast.

Melanie Deziel

Melanie Deziel, a friend of this podcast, brand storytelling consultant and founder of Storyfuel, believes this is possible. She’s so committed to the idea of reshaping how people come up with ways of telling stories, she’s written a new book: Content Fuel Framework.

“I think a superpower most journalists have is the ability to always find a story,” she says. “You never don’t put out a paper or don’t update a website. For a lot of adjacent disciplines, if you’re in communications or PR or marketing, that comes a lot less naturally. There’s a tremendous amount of writer’s block, creator’s block, what am I posting today? The book is trying to pull out of my brain and my background how do we do that, how do we consistently find ways to find new stories, say something different.”

She also discusses how different ways of telling stories can help job creativity. Is a story best told in an article? A tweet? A Facebook post? An infographic? Maybe it’s a Tik-Tok video instead.

“There are totally new storytelling formats we’re having to think about in new ways,” she says. “How do we line up different focuses and themes and lenses we can bring our stories through.”

Deziel admits she wonders whether journalists have these same struggles, in addition to those faced by content creators, marketers and other types of writers. She’s facing it herself in trying to figure out the best way — or ways — to promote her own book.

“It’s a huge challenge to feel I have to walk the walk and create this epic content to promote the book. I am trying to explore different ways to promote the book, to talk about the book, but also to create interesting content around it,” she says. “Would it be useful to have an infographic about the book? How many pages it is, when does it come out, making quick facts digestible in a visual format? Maybe a principle guide to the book to follow along with it.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Melanie Deziel, brand storytelling consultant and founder of Storyfuel, to discuss her new book, Content Fuel Framework, about how storytellers have more ways to tell stories than ever and why that can be intimidating.

#356 Branded content and the battle for your audience’s trust

400. The more journalism and social media change, the more journalists are needed

Once upon a time, some bright-eyed and enthusiastic journalism grad students at American University came up with a concept for a podcast and tried it out to see what would happen.

Flash forward six years and you’ve got the 400th episode of It’s All Journalism.

And while everything else in the world has changed, our mission has stayed the same: To talk about all facets of the ever-changing industry, one (or two, or six) storytellers and journalists at a time, week by week.

Our first guest, long long ago in August 2012, was Amy Eisman, director of the journalism program in the School of Communication at American University.

“Things have changed,” she says now of journalism in the past few years. “I don’t like to put everything under the concern umbrella. It brings a lot of blame into the tent. Of course I’m concerned that corporate America hasn’t been able to support a lot of what’s happening to local media and leaving news deserts around the country. We have an evolving technology, we haven’t lassoed it, we haven’t figured out entirely how to pay for it. That’s not a blame game; that’s what do we have to keep trying to get the right information to the citizenry so they can make good decisions about democracy. That goal remains the same.”

New tech tools have come and gone, each one promising, or appearing, to be the next big thing and the next great way to share information quickly. But the problem now, even more than in 2012, is being able to discern truth from falsehoods and to see the difference between reporting and an opinion piece.

“Right now, every single day, journalists are being questioned about why they’re saying what they’re saying,” she says. “They have to be better than ever before. I teach journalism to graduate and undergraduate students. We didn’t have to worry about our digital footprint a whole lot. These students have to think about what have I said, what have I said publicly and could it get in the way.”

The ubiquity of social media has “totally changed” the world of journalism, she notes.

Social media and the proliferation of websites that are backed by “bad actors” has changed the world of journalism in ways that were not unimaginable eight years ago, but to a level that might have been inconceivable.

Disinformation spreads in “milliseconds and it’s impossible to catch and bring it back,” Eisman says. “That’s the number one thing facing us in terms of digital media. It’s also the trolling of people who are trying to put information out there in an accurate format. Look at what’s happening to women on social media. It’s outrageous. News organizations are taking away the ability to comment on the bottom of articles because they don’t want their reporters to be accessible to readers in the comments. The good things about social media quickly became bad things. We’re in the middle of an evolution here and it’s not an easy one.”

For our 400th episode, It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by our first guest, Amy Eisman of American University’s School of Communication, to discuss how things have changed in ways large and small and why real, fact-based journalism has never been more important.

#1 – Amy Eisman leads new program in media entrepreneurship

399. FedNet gathers latest multimedia news from Capitol Hill

When footage from Capitol Hill proceedings appear on local newscasts across the country and around the world, some of that video could very well be the work of The Federal Network, or FedNet.

A business-to-business operation, FedNet provides material to news outlets in terms of video footage, but also nearly real-time text streams from press conferences and transcriptions that can be used to create a more thorough, detailed and extensive broadcast, says Michael Kerby, FedNet’s managing editor.

“In the last few years, words were of just as much interest as people who wanted the video as well as the transcript business,” he says. “We started with video, but video’s just a medium.”

Remember the Mueller Report? Some of FedNet’s transcription work is included in the document.

It’s a service that’s also utilized by movie production companies interested in either archival footage or b-roll for features.

FedNet first offered a searchable video database 15 years ago, where “within 10 minutes of the spoken word,” a video was published and available for anyone who needed it, Kirby says. During the 2012 State of the Union Address, “We provided the first broadcast strictly to mobile devices.”

But Kirby encourages people not to have the highest of hopes for a very exciting web experience if they go to FedNet’s home page. For that, users should dig a little deeper and check out FedNetNI.com, for the new intelligence.

“We’re very excited about this,” he says. “These are live text feeds of press conferences every day. We’ve seen a lot of interest — we had not predicted this at all, but video people, as much as newspaper folk, have been using news intel because it’s live words that are beating the video, beating the broadcast. Someone might be monitoring for logging sound that they might want to quote (in order to cut the video for broadcast packages). That’s where the excitement is, I think, in our operation these days. FedNetNI.com is the place for live words. That’s cutting-edge stuff. That’s the frontier of news gathering.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Michael Kirby, managing editor for the video and transcript production company FedNet, which provides news materials for outlets across the country and around the world in new and innovative ways. With FedNetNI.com, you can access live text feeds of press conference from Capitol Hill.

398. Alaska: More than what you see on reality TV

Alaska is much more than just what’s portrayed on reality TV.

For those who live there, whether by birth or by choice, there’s more to the state than any romantic notions inspired by gorgeous commercials for cruises. In fact, there are three stages anyone who lives there goes through as part of becoming acclimated to the reality of the Alaskan worldview, according to Cody Liska, creator and writer for Crude Magazine and its accompanying podcast Crude Conversations.

“First is the romantic phase. You come here in June and it’s sunny and beautiful. Alaska is the most beautiful place I’ve been to in the summer,” says Liska, who’s traveled around the world and spent five years in Reno, Nevada, for college but who was born and raised in Anchorage. “Then you have phase two, which is this depressive state. You’re facing a little bit of the realities while mourning the death of the romanticism. Phase three is when you truly become Alaskan, understanding and being comfortable and finding solace in both of those things together.”

Crude Magazine focuses each issue on a particular topic or central theme. “The third issue is called Arrogant Minds and it details the hip-hop culture in Alaska. What I did for that one was I contacted all these people that were there from the ground up, the people who are pillars in that community. I had one write the forward. Others wrote pieces that exemplify that culture. Issue four was called Legacy and it followed the snowboard and skateboard history,” he says.

The publication, and its podcast, are both for people who live in Alaska and those who wonder what it’s like to live there.

“Reality TV … is the bane of the Alaskan’s existence,” Liska says. “It exploits a lot of ways of life here and gives a false impression about what it looks like to live here. When I set out to do this, I wanted to give a genuine understanding of the people that live here and the jobs that we do and the lifestyles we live. In that way, it’s for the people here, to look at it and say that’s totally us. For people in the lower 48, or in the rest of the world, (this is for them) to be like oh, OK, that’s what Alaskans are really like, they’re not Ice Road Truckers.”

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Cody Liska, a life-long Alaskan resident who started Crude, a magazine and podcast, to help dispel misconceptions about life in the biggest state.

397. Podcasting with a South American twist

Audiences in South America are hungry for good podcast content, much like their cousins to the north.

Sebastián Payán of 070 Podcasts from Colombia and Tiago Rogero of Negra Voz of Brazil are two of the 18 podcasters and journalists from across Latin America who spent several weeks in the U.S. last fall, describing their own podcasting experiences and meeting with producers from the Washington Post, NPR, Podcast Garage and others.

Brazil is the second-largest podcast production country in the world, second only to the U.S., Rogero says. “For journalism, it’s a good environment. The top 10 podcasts, both in Apple and Spotify, are news shows. For Spotify, it’s a podcast made from a Brazilian newspaper, for Apple it’s from Global TV. It’s an increasing environment. Things are getting better. There’s a lot of room to grow.”

But, admittedly, it’s a smaller audience for podcasts in Brazil than in the U.S., he says.

In Colombia, Payán says, there are new podcasts popping up every day, but there isn’t a lot of narrative work being done.

“It’s mostly talk shows you can hear on the radio,” he says. “You don’t see a lot of difference between radio and podcasts. Most of the podcasts come from outside media. You don’t see a lot coming from big media, they’re coming from independent media and producers. Even a lot of radio shows, they say they have podcasts, but they record the program and upload it without editing everything.”

Brazilian producers are trying to move forward and create different content that isn’t just something found on radio, but it’s a process.

“We have legacy media, legacy radio that are uploading shows as podcasts, but those same media do podcasts,” Rogero says. “They are live. They have sound design. We are kind of in the middle of this transition to figuring out that podcasts are a completely different media, but we already have a lot of good examples of podcasts in Brazil that are seeing these as a different media.”

Another difference they’re seeing on a larger scale: How podcasts are funded, and how that funding is discussed.

“In Colombia, you’d start doing the podcast and then think how are we going to finance,” Payán says. “Here, you see how the public media is investing in podcasting. We have seen here that podcasting has become another opportunity for journalists in times of crisis. There’s a big interest in storytelling podcasts. … You have to really try hard to do something new.”

This week, It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Sebastián Payán of 070 Podcasts in Colombia and Tiago Rogero of Negra Voz in Brazil, part of an group of nearly 20 international podcasters who recently visited the U.S. to share their experiences and learn how podcasts are made in America.

396. Tess Koman’s iconic video journey dining at America’s amusement parks

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Tess Koman has what might be a dream job: she goes to amusement parks and tries all the food possible in the course of a day.

This is not what she thought was possible when she went to a small liberal arts college and studied English while wishing she could be an intern at Cosmopolitan.

“I was wrapped with anxiety that I didn’t go to journalism school. At the same time, I had been obsessed with Cosmopolitan for many years because I wasn’t allowed to read it when I lived at home,” Koman says.

She took matters into her own hands, applying for an internship four times, getting rejected four times, until eventually she was tapped by the new editor of Cosmo’s website to come on board as an assistant. Koman spent the next seven years writing on various topics until Delish.com came to poach her.

Now she travels to amusement parks and eats everything in sight, making brightly colored, engaging, self-deprecating and really fun to watch videos describing what she’s tried and how it all tastes.

“It’s seductive,” she says. “You can say whatever you want to say and people can disagree with you. I can write about how I think a Dole Whip tastes and that will upset people very much. There are certain facets to food that some people are very interested in.”

Her series, Iconic Eats, was pitched as something totally different, it turns out.

“I wanted to be an authority on food. I pitched it as the best venues in New Orleans, the best deep dish in Chicago,” she says. “I did a cheeseburger video in New York City. … I walked away from the idea for a while (until) I was sent on a press trip to Disney and myself and Chelsea, my shooter and director, we had a spare afternoon. With the cooperation of the production team, who happened to be very flexible at Disney, we ate our way through Disneyland, put it on YouTube and it blew up so fast.”

And that’s what put Koman on the fast track to a kind of cult status as the girl who eats things in parks. That brings with it great fun and perks but also, being a person on YouTube can bring out the worst in some people.

“After the Disneyland video, I came back to the office and said I’d never do this again. People were so terribly mean to me,” she says. “As I obsessively scrolled through the comments, I did find these gems in there. People hate things about me I can’t change. They don’t like my voice, they don’t like my nose, they hate my clothes. Plenty of antisemitic things. A lot of oversexualization of what I’m doing there. The job has become to put food in my face. As I combed through the comments, there was productive feedback there as well, people wanted to see the prices of the food or had ambitions to do something similar. We were providing some kind of service.”

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Tess Koman of Delish.com, discussing her video series Iconic Eats, which involves traveling to amusement parks around the country and sampling all their tasty treats.

395. Public Narrative works to help newsrooms find stories they may be missing

Public Narrative has a straight-forward mission: to work with journalists to “balance the narrative about public safety, public health and public education,” according to the group’s president, Jhmira Alexander.

The goal is to make sure important achievements in those three areas are not only recognized by stakeholders but by the community at large, namely, by media coverage .

“If an agency like the Chicago Police Department or public schools makes mention of how, in CPD’s case, how crime decreased between 2017 and 2018. We should be seeing that in the headlines and if not, where is the disconnect,” she says. “The exact same when it comes to testing scores, different situations in public schools. How are we seeing that translated into headlines? We might see organizations share about good things happening in schools and communities, but we may not see that translate across all platforms.”

There seems to be “a total disconnect between what is communicated in meetings and what’s translated in media,” Alexander continues. She’s not calling for only good news, happy stories to be published, but she’s working with stakeholders to identify positive things that are newsworthy and work with media organizations to get those details and achievements out to a wider audience.

Part of that is explaining what a newsworthy story looks like and why. Another part is story choice decisions made by outlets.

“Story choice is so important to make sure all voices are heard,” Alexander says. “I think it’s real easy to be one-sided and push for your perspective without taking into consideration the value-ad there is to engage audiences that might not always look like you or agree with you. We’re at a critical time that forces us to lay our differences aside and find ways to collaborate whenever possible.”

Newsrooms, in turn, need to assess their makeup and see where they’re falling short, in terms of coverage and which communities might be missing.

“Just listening to their audience and understand what they’re interested in and remaining true to that,” she says. “That’s what makes a newsroom effective, if and when their stories can reach and really begin to transform the lives of people. That comes with a great measure of assessing and being honest with oneself about what went right, what went wrong, and where do we need to go from here.”

She also stresses to the community organizations trained by Public Narrative the importance of journalistic integrity.

“Journalistic integrity is so important in an age where everyone is screaming about fake news. It makes it hard to educate people on what to trust and what to disregard,” she says. “The role that journalists have in maintaining integrity for the sake of influencing our culture, it’s a really big one. I would encourage journalists to maintain that, to continue to maintain that, and even more so, be mindful. You make work for an outlet that has its own reputation, but being cognizant of your brand as a journalist.”

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Jhmira Alexander, president of Public Narrative, to discuss the importance of educating community partners on how news works and why story choice in newsrooms can leave big portions of audiences out of the headlines.

394. Improve audience conversations and avoid trolls with Subtext

Imagine an online community where readers can ask reporters any and all questions they might have about their work, free from the insults and ridicule of trolls.

Welcome to The Alpha Group‘s Subtext, an SMS-based platform that allows journalists and news organizations to talk directly with their audience.

“It’s a platform that connects hosts — journalists and media organizations, in this instance — with their most engaged followers,” says Mike Donoghue, one of Subtext’s co-creators. “Think of it as having insider access and a direct line of communication with the journalists who are closest to the stories you care most about, in a medium that feels more engaging and personal.”

Subtext allows reporters and news organizations to discuss stories directly with their audience, or ask for suggestions on topics to cover. It can also offer conversation prompts, like asking what kinds of questions should come up in an interview. When the reporter responds, only the person who submitted the question can see the answer, or the reporter can choose to address it publicly.

“One of the nice things about Subtext is you can solve different problems, depending on the organization’s goals,” says David Cohn, another Subtext creator. “We have seen some people use it as an engagement tool. There’s a lot of free email newsletters out there but the open rate on texting is way better than anything on email. If you think about the voice you can accomplish through text, it’s way better.”

David Cohn

Other organizations have used Subtext as a retention tool, something extra they can add if their publication is behind a paywall.

Subtext, then, is the best of both Twitter and email in a troll-free environment.

“Trolls only succeed and thrive if they feel like they’re being seen,” Cohn says. “A mean person would be sending a mean message to one person. We haven’t had any trolls at all. It really is a service between the reporter and the audience. There’s no point in being mean or rude. We see a much better quality of conversation.”

It also helps build a better quality relationship between reporter and audience.

“If you’re a sports reporter going on ESPN, the moment the lights go on, you deliver your reporting to the camera,” Donoghue says. “When the lights go off, the conversation you have with the crew, those are the ones that ultimately perform well on the platform because it gives your subscribers the sense of having this inside, unvarnished access to the personalities they love. That’s been a successful angle for hosts on the platform and it’s a really unique way to engage with journalists.”

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by The Alpha Group‘s David Cohn and Mike Donoghue. They talk about Subtext, an SMS-based platform the co-created that allows journalists to talk directly with their audience without being bothered by trolls.

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