New News: Innovation in Journalism – what might it look like?

The time is ripe for change and innovation in journalism, with the proliferation of new technology, information sourcing devices constantly at punters’ fingertips and widely publicised missteps by media behemoths. David Higgins, News Limited’s innovations editor, Sam Doust, ABC Innovation,’s creative director and Jay Rosen, New York University joined Margaret Simons to discuss their ideas on how to innovate in journalism.

Where did the idea for this session come from? When writing a story on the future of Fairfax for The Monthly, Simons asked a senior executive how they were going to innovate journalism, the interviewee said ‘What do you mean’? Although the media is  changing quickly, the core of the journalistic method hasn’t changed very much since printing press was invented; Simons argued that no other industry can say the core product has stayed so constant.

Is it possible to change the way we tell stories or communicate news? Higgins suggested that it’s possible to vary the presentation of news and reach different audiences through ‘gamification’. During his tenure as website editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and news.com.au, fighting in Sudan was intensifying, yet he ‘couldn’t get people to read these stories no matter how good the journalism was’. MTV, of all outlets, said Higgins,  came up with an idea that cut through this – a computer game called Darfur is Dying.  The difference between this method of storytelling and how a journalist or foreign correspondent would tell the story was startling, and Higgins stressed that he wasn’t suggesting games as the new face of journalism, but  one ‘attempt to get a level of differentiation into journalism – why we’re suffering is there’s so many similar versions of the same stories out there’.

Sam Doust took to the projector to demonstrate some of the new presentation and marketing ideas the ABC is using to showcase its work. Their The Explainer tumblr contains many of these examples. For instance, to complement the Rear Vision radio program on how to get out of Guantanamo Bay, an interactive flash and html animation was created. This was just one way to reach people who might not beading the articles; the Journey through Climate History moving timeline is a visually engaging interface for engaging with the information itself, which, Doust said was of course more important than any visualisation technique.

Jay Rosen agreed with this, saying that innovation doesn’t necessarily involve building new tools or programming machines: ‘The tools I’m interested in are people, ideas, and the will to do things differently’. Rosen called this ‘soft’ innovation – changing the way you do journalism, which often uses new tools but isn’t strictly about that. What kinds of innovations would involve readers working with journalists (‘mutualisation’ in Rosen’s parlance)? Take a look at openfile.ca – anyone who wants to can ‘open a file’; that is, prompt an investigation. Editors then assign a story to a reporter. Stories that come up through this method are five to seven times more visited than those their editors suggested. Another way to do this is covered in Rosen’s blog post, The 100 Percent Solution: decide on what you want to cover, and work out how to cover all of it. How exactly could you do this? Deputise your users in, for example, tweeting comments, scores and images.

Many of the audience members either took this advice to heart or didn’t need it: the #newnews hashtag was getting a thorough workout, with heads bent over smartphones and fingers tapping away on laptops throughout the session.