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Wellcome photography prize 2020 shortlist: focus on mental health

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The 2020 prize has five categories: social perspectives, hidden worlds, medicine in focus, and two categories on mental health, which is the special theme for this year. With the 2020 prize, the Wellcome Trust hopes to transform public perceptions of mental health

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Now, let's take a look at this year's grantees.

The photograph at the top of this article is from the Women Photograph + Getty Images Scholarship. This year, that distinction went to Tami Aftab of the United Kingdom. The project documents Aftab's father's struggle with hydrocephalus, which causes a buildup of fluid deep within the brain. Here's what Aftab said about the project:

"About 25 years ago, he went in for an operation to put a hole in his head that would allow the liquid to drain easier. However, during that operation, his short-term memory was accidentally damaged, permanently leaving him with a unique difficulty with short-term memory. I began working on this story in 2018, as an interview project through videoing conversations between Dad and our family, capturing how his short-term memory affects his daily life. These became the foundation and primary research of this project, as it led me to realise the importance in the humour projected from my Dad, his charm and strong spirit despite illness. Therefore, I decided to restart this project as a photographic collaboration, with lightness at its core. We use a playful tone through visualising memories and notions of familial care. The project discusses a father-daughter relationship, intimacy, and how one family deals with illness."

The following are the five winners of the Women Photograph + Nikon Grants, in no particular order.

Puerto Rican photographer Gabriella Báez's project focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, but in an incredibly personal way. Here's what Báez said about the project:

"In the year following Hurricane María, approximately 279 suicides were recorded. On July 11, 2018, just two months before the first anniversary of the hurricane, my father committed suicide. Later that year, after receiving the objects he left behind, I photographed each of them and began looking for vestiges of him around Puerto Rico. 'Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar' is a photographic documentation of the psychological undercurrents of trauma that provoke suicides in the aftermath of Hurricane María. It looks closely at the challenging emotions of grieving in ravaged, altered, sometimes unrecognizable environments, and the role of crisis in mourning. The project explores these manifestations of trauma in the landscape and through intimacy in interpersonal relationships."

Photographer Sahar Coston-Hardy's project, "The Spaces in Between," was inspired by the "Green Book." According to Women Photograph:

"Sahar will follow the itinerary of Alberta Northcutt-Ellis - a savvy Black businesswoman who advertised in the Green Book and built a network of businesses that supported her family - and document the family's descendants and the remnants of their businesses. Along with collaborator Jennifer Reut, Sahar will build a multimedia map to allow others to trace the same journey, revealing the landscape the Northcutt-Ellises created for themselves and others during Jim Crow."

The next grantee is photographer Peyton Fulford of Georgia.

Fulford's project uses narrative portraiture to document queerness in the American South. Fulford's work is inspired by growing up queer and in a religious family in Georgia.

Here's more from Fulford about the project:

"As a result of the strict beliefs I had been taught since birth, I did not feel comfortable coming out as queer until I was 21 years old. ... As I came to terms with my own identity, the photo series 'Infinite Tenderness' came to fruition. In 2016, I began exploring the notion of intimacy and identity among the LGBTQ+ community in the American South. ... Through this ongoing project, I am documenting the exploration of one's body, sexuality and gender that comes along with growing up and identifying oneself. ... My intention is to empower others and create an accepting space for queer kids that grow up in small towns and rural areas."

Up next is photographer Roopa Gogineni, who's from Kenya and France. Gogineni says the project, "Let the Record Show," is "a photographic investigation into the ways histories are created, or erased, in the American South."

Here's a more in-depth description of the project, from Women Photograph:

"Most of what is documented in this project is not available online, as many of the historians guiding this work acquired and pass on information in the oral tradition, and because much of the relevant archival material has not been digitized. The systems of knowledge and power in our society today are indelibly linked to slavery, and it remains necessary to interrogate this past and how we remember it. In digital form, the catalogue will live on a website, where Roopa will invite others to submit images and histories of unmarked sites. She will also print low-cost photo books to serve as a tool for teaching antebellum history and historiography."

Last up is a project from photographer Sandra Mehl of France. Mehl's project focuses on the relationship between Ilona and Maddelena, two sisters living in a working-class area of France. Mehl tells us more about the project:

" 'Ilona and Maddelena' tells about what it means to be a girl and a teenager in an underprivileged environment, in a developed country like France. It's also the story of my neighbours, since I live across the street from her, and in a way, it's the story of my life. The first time I met them, I knew that I would follow them and not others: Immersed in my past, I remember myself at their age."

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Perspective | Nearly 1,300 people applied for this year's Women Photograph grants. Here are the winners.

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Now, let's take a look at this year's grantees. The photograph at the top of this article is from the Women Photograph + Getty Images Scholarship. This year, that distinction went to Tami Aftab of the United Kingdom. The project documents Aftab's father's struggle with hydrocephalus, which causes a buildup of fluid deep within the brain.

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The replies to Jareen Imam's tweet were a hundred deep by the time she got home, 14 hours after a gunman attacked The Capital Gazette newspaper.

They wanted her dead. Knew where she lived. Where her mom lived, they wrote.

Active shooter 888 Bestgate please help us

- Anthony Messenger (@amesscapgaz) June 28, 2018

Then came the hate.

Imam spent the day covering the fatal shooting and checking in to make sure her weary team of "digital first responders" stayed afloat. She stopped to take a walk. Grief for fellow journalists was a constant.

"This isn't the first time we've covered a horrible mass shooting situation, but it was different in that it was journalists being attacked," Imam said in a recent interview.

Like first responders, journalists need to ensure their own well-being to be effective in their jobs. Coping strategies are crucial in the face of persistent pressures.

And more and more, journalists are being open about mental health.

hi hello? *taps mic*
This is a ~mental health~ thread. As journalists we talk a lot ab the work we do but not about the recovery time we need. So I am about to take 3 weeks off, and I'm going to tell you why, in case it helps other people take time off without feeling guilty. /1

- Sonali Kohli 🙆🏾 (@Sonali_Kohli) March 7, 2019

CNN's Anderson Cooper led national discourse around suicide . Well-known journalist, correspondent and author Sebastian Junger has been open about his post-traumatic stress disorder .

I heard from almost 20 journalists via Facebook, email and phone, all willing to share how they've coped or wanting to hear more about how others do.

Here is a roundup of how they look out for themselves and their teams.

Don't underestimate the power of a good therapist. There's a reason this is first on the list. If you had a chronic illness, you'd treat it regularly. Our brains need care and attention, too.

"If you're finding yourself changed in ways that are interfering with life or work, don't wait for it to go away," Shapiro said. "Talk to a qualified counselor or therapist."

Find out if the company you work for has resources. If you haven't gotten training on handling trauma, ask about it.

If your newsroom hasn't communicated safety protocol, ask about it.

Many news organizations also have employee assistance programs that can connect you with mental health resources before, during or after the fact.

There's more to life - and us - than news. Too often, we breathe, eat and sleep journalism and the news. It's part of our identity, the fabric of who we are.

It is relentless, this steady diet of often-toxic social media content, notifications, images, crises, competition and platforms in an industry shifting under our feet.

In its own way, the work sustains us, but it can also blind us to its true impact on our health, said Thomas Curwen, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.

So what can you do beyond work? What can help you breathe?

It's yoga, guided meditation and getting lost in Bravo reality shows for Katy Huggins, digital content manager at FOX23 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Think about an outlet that works for you.

"If you look out for yourself, you'll be a better watchdog for the folks you cover," said Heath Druzin, Boise State Public Radio's Guns & America reporter, who has covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Lean on your village. Conflict or crime might not be your beat, but sooner or later you'll be involved in covering a traumatic story.

Have a few trusted colleagues with whom you can decompress and talk about how you're feeling. If a friend is covering a difficult story, check in to see how they're doing.

"Reporters need to rely on one another to help them through difficult assignments," said Curwen, a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.

Having a friend tell her when she's acting out of character has been helpful for Kim Bui, director of audience innovation at The Arizona Republic.

We hold the powerful accountable, let's do the same for each other, too.

Pay attention to your body. Tension is real. Try exercising to tap into those mood-lifting endorphins. It doesn't have to be intense.

Even using a standing desk, going for a short walk, holding walking meetings, stretching or taking deep breaths helps.

As elusive as a healthy meal, sleep and staying hydrated can seem in the thick of it, remember that your body needs fuel and rest when it's in distress.

But pay attention to your mind, too. The mind and body are connected. When you don't take care of the former, the latter shuts down.

Multiple journalists I talked to felt that their own trauma almost didn't seem legitimate compared to what the people in their stories went through.

And yes, it's hard to step back and really think about the personal impact a story or consecutive stories may have had. But don't fall into the trap.

Your stress levels, your feelings and your trauma are real and they need to be addressed. Do a quick self-check-in for burnout or depression.

Are you isolating yourself instead of connecting with friends or family?

Are you not enjoying the things you usually do?

Is your rest fitful?

Do you spontaneously cry?

Is it hard to concentrate?

Has your productivity slipped?

Do you dread going into work?

Do you feel disillusioned about work?

What's your body telling you?

If putting it in a work context helps, here's a gem from Druzin: "Figuring out how pain and trauma affect you means you'll have that much of a better understanding of how it's affecting the people you cover."

All coping mechanisms are not created equal. It's easy to reach for readily available donuts and newsroom pizza or fall into overindulging in alcohol or other stimulants just to feel - or not feel - but it's no good for your physical or mental health in the long run.

Look out for your team. "You wouldn't send a reporter to cover Congress who doesn't know how a bill becomes law," said Shapiro with Dart. "Why would we cover a crime or disaster or war with no knowledge of trauma ?"

Boise State Public Radio's Druzin recommends laying the groundwork when someone joins the organization so they're trained in trauma, they know their wellbeing is important and they understand where to get help.

It's not just for journalists who cover harrowing assignments or mass shootings, he added. "Ordinary" beats that involve car wrecks or courts or social media take their toll, too.

Acknowledge difficult situations as well as your team's hard work. Check in. Point employees to the right resources. Make it clear that getting help won't affect their professional standing. Consider being flexible with hours and time off after tough breaking news.

And acknowledge coverage that inevitably impacts certain groups in your newsroom as they process emotions to produce fair, accurate stories that serve the community.

They could be facing gendered and racial attacks or attempts to discredit their reputations because of the topics they cover, said Dr. Michelle Ferrier, dean of the School of Journalism & Graphic Communication at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University.

The cultural environment itself also can be emotionally draining.

"It's a double whammy," said Ferrier, who also founded TrollBusters, a service that supports the targets of online harassment and combats trolling.

Overseeing story progress is just part of the job. Taking time to listen and speak to team members' personal concerns is important, too, Curwen said.

"Your job isn't to diagnose," Shapiro said, "but you can encourage folks to get confidential support if they need it."

Rotate heavy assignments whenever possible. Look out for changes in newsroom performance in the aftermath of traumatic assignments like missed deadlines, more people calling out sick or conflict among team members.

Druzin said he remembered reporting on a series of tragedies as a cub reporter covering night cops in Boise, Idaho.

He was hurting and he didn't say a word. But his editor knew and she made sure he got a break from tragedy for a while.

"I needed it and as a guy in my mid-20s who fancied himself emotionally bullet-proof, I wouldn't have asked," said Druzin, a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.

Managers, be the change. Be mindful that you're setting an example. Are you taking care of yourself, too? Are you emailing staff at odd hours?

It's OK to talk openly about your own self-care and supporting your team's mental health.

After the shootings at two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand, Radio New Zealand's head of digital content Megan Whelan was open about how hard it might be to cope and told her team she'd be going to counseling.

"I try to speak to everyone individually when covering stressful or traumatic news, just to hear how people are doing and remind them they can always come to me for help or just to connect," said Imam of NBC News.

You are not immune. My social feeds are full of self-care conversations, mostly from women and LGBTQ journalists.

And it could just be who I'm connected to, but Shapiro said male news professionals are socialized to avoid expressing emotion or showing vulnerability.

"That adds a layer of challenge in facing up to the need to take care of ourselves," he said.

But Shapiro also noted that many respected male journalists like Cooper, Junger and other local or regional editors continue to show real leadership in trauma awareness.

"It shows courage to ask for help," Druzin said.

Make small changes. Think of self-care as a mental and emotional exercise. It doesn't have to be fancy or take up a lot of time.

Bui at The Arizona Republic keeps a folder of cute photos and GIFs. A Slack channel for adorable animals works for Rachel Wise, regional editor of video and audio for McClatchy.

What's one thing that makes you happy? Try to do that thing for an extra 10 minutes every day, especially on hard days.

"There will always be more journalism to do and the world needs us to focus on problems and uncover 'bad' things, but the world also needs solutions and light - and we have needs to tell those stories as humans, too," said Kelsey Proud, managing editor of digital at WAMU 88.5 in Washington, D.C.

Additional help: Resources for journalists
Kari Cobham is the senior associate director for The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism at The Carter Center. She's an award-winning journalist who has spent the past several years at the intersection of product and content for Cox Media Group newsrooms. You can follow her @KariWrites and fellows' mental health reporting @CarterFellows

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How journalists can take care of themselves while covering trauma

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The replies to Jareen Imam's tweet were a hundred deep by the time she got home, 14 hours after a gunman attacked The Capital Gazette newspaper. They wanted her dead. Knew where she lived. Where her mom lived, they wrote. Active shooter 888 Bestgate please help us - Anthony Messenger (@amesscapgaz) June 28, 2018 Then came the hate.

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Nieman Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2018

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Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Here's what they had to say.

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It's no secret that journalism is at a bit of a crossroads. With technology and media consumption habits changing constantly, the industry has been thrust into a state of near perpetual turmoil. Journalists everywhere are figuring out what to take from traditional practices, what to leave behind, and what they need to invent. They must - to quote Brad Pitt in "Moneyball" - adapt or die.

Much of this work, of course, will need to be done by young reporters. Those entering newsrooms now and in the near future will play a huge role in deciding what journalism will become. From that truth, a natural question arises: How should journalism schools prepare these future industry leaders for what lies ahead?

After reading through Nieman Lab's "Predictions for Journalism in 2019," we identified four areas of emphasis - data, local news, social media and business models - that will be crucial for journalism students to spend time on. We interviewed five journalism educators across the country who lead especially forward-looking programs and courses within those areas.

Establishing data fluency

With 12 years of data journalism under her belt at The Seattle Times, including a stint as the outlet's data innovation editor, Cheryl Phillips had done everything from breaking investigative stories to training her colleagues on the potential of data work. But when the opportunity arose to join the journalism faculty at Stanford University, she saw a chance to do even more.

"Their focus was on lowering the cost of accountability journalism and increasing the capability of computational journalism. That's really what interested me, because I felt like I could have more of an impact trying to innovate [at Stanford] than continuing the work I had been doing," she said.

Phillips has worked on various projects to enhance data journalism since starting at Stanford in 2014, including serving as a founding member of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab. But her creation of the Open Policing Project might be the best example of how journalism schools can prepare their students for a data-driven world while also creating real-world results.

Data on police interactions is theoretically available to journalists, but if someone wants to compare data across state and city lines, it can become difficult to deal with all the different agencies and systems in charge of the data - if they're even collecting it. The Open Policing Project hopes to address that by collecting and cleaning data from across the nation and compiling it into one accessible database.

"You're always trying to hold officials and organizations accountable, but that can be hard to do when negotiating data becomes difficult," Phillips said. "If we could make that part easier, we could facilitate more journalism."

To help accomplish that, Phillips had her students join the mission directly. She tasked her class with assembling and cleaning public records from across the country, essentially serving as the front lines of the Open Policing Project. By the time they finished, they had amassed more than 130 million records for the use of journalists everywhere.

"I think this is a keen example of how journalism can use students for good while also teaching them something," she said. "The students who learn advanced skills in terms of data work and data collection have a better chance of being hired to do great journalism. Schools are investing in their students and the future of the field."

Reviving local news

When Tim Franklin left his post as president of the Poynter Institute for a job at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, how to improve local news was fresh on his mind. After familiarizing himself with the university's resources, an idea came to him: What if he could address the issue by combining the capabilities of the Spiegel Research Center with the product development of the Knight Lab?

Out of this relationship, the Local News Initiative (LNI) was born. By focusing on digital innovation, the LNI hopes to help revive an industry of immense civic importance. And local news could certainly use the assistance.

"The bottom has fallen out," Franklin said. "There have been historic reductions in local news staffs across the country. The number of news deserts around the U.S. is truly frightening."

At the classroom level, the LNI is looping in students to help come up with creative solutions. In one course, "Design for Local News," teams of design and journalism students work together to prototype new approaches to local journalism. Students start with a user research brief created through LNI grant funding, and the best ideas that arise in the class can be implemented in real local news outlets affiliated with the LNI. Another course in the engineering school brings together data science students to come up with recommendation systems for local news organizations.

Franklin hopes that by focusing students on local news, Northwestern will be able to generate more youth excitement towards the field. "There are definite possibilities for job opportunities for students. Regional outlets are looking for people who can analyze readership trends and audience analytics, so there is an absolute craving for students who have those skills."

"Regional outlets are looking for people who can analyze readership trends and audience analytics, so there is an absolute craving for students who have those skills."

He also believes that colleges can help fill the vacuum created by staff and budget cuts. "We are seeing more and more that journalism schools should harness the best traditions of a teaching hospital. They can be story suppliers for local news organizations, [which is] a great way to get experience and get some visibility for their work while also helping the community."

Who will pay for local journalism?

Here at Northeastern's School of Journalism, Dan Kennedy has been studying new ways of paying for local journalism by looking at the strategies and realities of nonprofit, for-profit and corporate chain-owned news organizations.

This work has been ten years in the making. In 2013, after four years of visits to the New Haven Independent - a pioneering nonprofit, online-only community website that became the news source of record in that city - Kennedy wrote " The Wired City," which examined new forms of nonprofit and for-profit digital news projects that were filling some of the gaps created by the decline of legacy newspapers.

He followed that up last year with " The Return of the Moguls," which looked at how wealthy newspaper owners like Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post and John Henry of The Boston Globe are working to revive their newspapers and perhaps show a path forward for other newspaper owners. One takeaway: papers like the Post and the Globe will need to continue to invest in great reporting while also keeping their platforms state-of-the-art, Kennedy says. "If newspapers are going to make a successful transition from advertiser-supported print products to reader-supported digital platforms, they must continue to invest in news coverage and technology. Customers will not pay more for less."

Meanwhile, Kennedy sees nonprofit journalism as an increasingly important part of local news. "It solves the key problem facing local newspapers: Who will pay?" he says. "With advertising income continuing to drop and with efforts to extract digital subscription revenues from readers succeeding better in some places than others, foundation leaders and philanthropists who understand how crucial quality news is at the local level are absolutely vital."

So who's he watching now? "Earlier this month, The Salt Lake Tribune announced that it would seek to reorganize as a nonprofit - the first large regional newspaper to do so. I'll be watching that closely."

The need for new business models

The "Changing Business Models" course at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism has been around for years. But when Jim Flink, who teaches the graduate-level version of the course, inherited it four years ago he immediately began making changes.

Previously, the course had been built around reading spreadsheets and making sense of quarterly earnings reports. Flink, fresh off of several years as an executive at the start-up Newsy, decided to shake things up.

"I felt like we weren't serving our students best in that way," said Flink. "Immediately, I started adapting the curriculum to talk about things like workflow, product life cycles, adaptability, and brick-and-mortarless operations."

Traditionally, there has been a divide between the business side of a newsroom and the reporters. Flink's course hopes to help bridge that divide. "It's about silo busting," he said. "Any good media organization is doing that these days, and there needs to be an understanding of what works, what doesn't, and why it's important."

"It's about silo busting. Any good media organization is doing that these days."

Some of the most innovative business models these days are coming from smaller, less prestigious digital organizations, a point that Flink emphasizes strongly. " Civil is a great example of innovation, [being] based on blockchain technology and good journalism," he said. "Traditional organizations have been a little slower to change, so you can't only look at them."

Looking ahead, Flink is optimistic but believes that the business of journalism will need constant reevaluation. "There's never been a better time to be a journalist. But to survive today, you have to be adaptive and efficient. Are you operating as if your lives depend on it?"

That question will need to be posed to young journalists and professors alike. "It is very difficult to remain in academia and stay current," Flink said. "You have to be exposed to what's really happening. Academia has to be immersing students in real-world scenarios, then extracting from that back into the classroom, and it has to be imbued in start-up culture."

Understanding the power of social media

Love it or hate it, social media has become a fundamental aspect of modern journalism. Nearly every reporter has a Twitter presence these days, and publications are pouring more and more resources into their social teams. And yet, the industry has struggled to figure out its true value. With new platforms falling in and out of popularity, it has proven difficult to instill industry-standard practices.

These challenges are very familiar to Anthony Adornato, professor of the " Mobile and Social Media Journalism" course at Ithaca College and author of a textbook of the same name. That's why he uses his class as a laboratory of sorts, with students trying out promising platforms and technologies in almost real time. "This is a space where if something new comes out, we take it to the classroom and try it out. You have to be willing to do that sort of testing," he said.

Now a required course for journalism students, Adornato started the course in 2014 with a clear mission: Prepare students for what they would face in professional newsrooms. "The use of mobile and social media tools for gathering info, distributing stories, and engaging with audiences, that's just what multimedia journalism is now," he explained.

In his syllabus, Adornato suggests staying up to date on social media changes with these resources.

Given how uncertain the social media world is, Adornato stresses a careful monitoring of the landscape, rather than a full dedication to any one tool. "A lot of [the class] is looking at audience's news consumption habits. We need to figure out what they're doing now, and take that info and turn it into lessons for the course."

Adornato also emphasizes that social media should be taught as more than a storytelling tool. "In general, journalists haven't always done a great job at being transparent. Social media can be leveraged to show the audience what it takes to get the job done. Building that relationship with social media can lead to more trust and more connection," he said.

And, especially pertinent in this age of fake news, Adornato teaches students how to vet user-generated content. After all, with deepfakes and other creative forgeries popping up all the time, social media is already proving to be a minefield for reporters.

Ultimately, Adornato hopes that social media knowledge becomes a core tenet of journalism curriculums. Past students have already told him how useful the course is, based on their application of its content in newsrooms.

"They point to it as one [class] that stands out because it's really how journalism is being done now," he said. "There's all sorts of opportunities out there, and these students already have the experience to handle them."

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Alex Frandsen is a fourth-year journalism major and sociology minor. His primary interests include politics, pop culture, and social issues, and he is big into using data to explore them all. He has recently dove into the world of text analysis in R, and is always looking to add tools to his journalism repertoire.

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Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are. - Storybench

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It's no secret that journalism is at a bit of a crossroads. With technology and media consumption habits changing constantly, the industry has been thrust into a state of near perpetual turmoil. Journalists everywhere are figuring out what to take from traditional practices, what to leave behind, and what they need to invent.

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Who controls the news?

Over the years, journalists have become sensitized to the way wealthy owners can influence a newsroom by pressuring reporters and editors in their employ or by behind-the-scenes maneuvering and subtle hints. But, noted the Columbia Journalism Review recently, it's not just rich capitalists and venture investors who bring such influence.

"[E]very form of funding, however well-meaning, shapes the kind of journalism that gets done, and that includes funding from foundations and nonprofits," noted CJR. "While their motives may be pure, the fact that they hold the purse strings inevitably changes the way newsrooms that rely on that funding do their jobs. And with more media outlets turning to alternative sources of financing as advertising revenue dries up, the issue is likely to get even more acute in the future."

Those are the takeaways from a new report from a team of researchers in the UK based on interviews with 74 representatives from the foundations that are the most active in funding international non-profit news, as well as interviews with the journalists they support.

The researchers found that funding from foundations affects what issues are covered and how they are covered. One of the researchers, Martin Scott of the University of East Anglia, told CJR, "[W]e are concerned that the nature of this journalism-and the role that it plays in democracy-is inadvertently being shaped by a handful of foundations, rather than by journalists."

Scott says some of the problems foundation funding creates come not from outright meddling - but, ironically, as a result of foundations trying not to meddle in the work of journalists. "Because they are so leery of infringing on the autonomy of the non-profits they fund, he says, many foundations aren't very transparent about what their goals are," noted CJR. "That means newsrooms have to spend a lot of time creating relationships with foundations and getting to know them well enough to start having those kinds of discussions-and all of that takes time and money many smaller nonprofit newsrooms don't have."

Another effect comes from the goals foundations bring to the effort - they don't expect the journalists they fund to simply investigate and document, but to show tangible results from their work. "Coming up with that kind of evidence takes time and resources away from the actual journalism," notes CJR.

Here are some of the other photo stories we spotlighted this week:
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1. Fran Antmann Among the Maya Healers of Guatemala
2. How Felice Frankel Translate Science Into Art at MIT
3. The Legacy of George Platt Lynes
4. Cars Bathed in the Lights of Piccadilly Circus
5. Photojournalist Says Trump Wrongly Used Her Photo
Benjamin Paul, known as the father of medical anthropolgy, wrote on a variety of subjects in the field of Mayan ethnography. His daughter, Janie Paul, told her college roommate, photographer Fran Antmann, about the Guatemalan village of San Pedro la Laguna, where her father worked for 60 years. Beginning in 2005, Antmann began her own project in San Pedro. The result is her book " Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams." Antmann's work, we noted, was also named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 7 competition.
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For the mathematically minded, the clean lines and pleasing logic of equations can be lovely things to behold. But for the uninitiated, even the most elegant math might as well be gibberish. The same holds true for concepts in physics, biology, and other sciences. At MIT, photographer Felice Frankel is on hand to help students find ways to visually depict their ideas, noted National Geographic. Her new book, "Picturing Science and Engineering," is full of examples of complicated research and data sets rendered in compelling photographs.
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In the 1930s and 1940s, George Platt Lynes was known for his commercial and fashion photography. His images appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and were included in one of the first photography exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. But, we noted, very few people knew of his personal work - photographs of nude men that, after his death in 1955, were stashed away in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, hidden from view, as they had been in his lifetime. Recent books and a new exhibition have revealed how influential that work was.
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Street photographer Nick Turpin knows London's streets: His series "On The Night Bus" observed London commuters as seen through foggy, rain-spattered bus windows. For his newest project, "Autos," Turpin photographed cars at night in Piccadilly Circus, their shiny surfaces illuminated by the 785-square-meter (about 2,575 square feet) advertising screen that sits above the famous junction, noted It's Nice That. "I wanted to find a way of exploring the omnipresence of advertising in the public realm," Turpin says.
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On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, celebrated on Monday, President Donald Trump tweeted an iconic image taken by photojournalist Yalda Moayeri showing an unidentified protester in Tehran during demonstrations in 2017. "40 years of corruption. 40 years of repression. 40 years of terror. The regime in Iran has produced only #40YearsofFailure," Trump tweeted. Moayeri told The New York Times that Trump had wrongly used her image. "I felt cheated and abused, it causes me great sorrow to see the man who is inflicting so much pain upon me and my compatriots to use my image for his own agenda," she said.
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At top: From Fran Antmann

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AI-AP | Pro Photo Daily " What We Learned This Week: How Foundation Funding Affects Journalism

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Who controls the news? Over the years, journalists have become sensitized to the way wealthy owners can influence a newsroom by pressuring reporters and editors in their employ or by behind-the-scenes maneuvering and subtle hints. But, noted the Columbia Journalism Review recently, it's not just rich capitalists and venture investors who bring such influence.

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Journalist Fellowship - applications open | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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The Reuters Institute, based at the University of Oxford, offers a limited number of Journalist Fellowships each year.

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To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

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Sony is looking for five female creatives to kick off their Alpha Female program, which is aimed at helping to level the playing field in this male-dominated industry, and applications opened today. Selected photographers or filmmakers will receive a $25,000 grant to support their work, $5,000 to spend on Sony gear, plus mentorship opportunities from Sony Artisans, access to networking events and have their work displayed in exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles.

There appears to be no limitations on the type of photographers or filmmakers that Sony is interested in for this program, and there is a wide variety of styles represented by the Artisans that will be providing the mentorship. You do, however, have to shoot with Sony gear. (But if you currently shoot with another camera brand you can still apply.)

The application is free, but there are many components to it-which makes total sense for the amount of grant money that we are talking about.

Interested photographers and filmmakers will need a one-minute video intro, work samples, an essay about their biggest career challenge, a pitch explaining how they were utilize the program and a high-level budget detailing how they would spend the grant money.

Applications to the program are open through October 7. The five winners will be announced in October.

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Sony wants to give five female photographers or filmmakers a pile of money and free gear. Here's how you apply.

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Sony is looking for five female creatives to kick off their Alpha Female program, which is aimed at helping to level the playing field in this male-dominated industry, and applications opened today.

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When the government has thousands of noncitizen children somewhere in its custody, how do you find them? You report on it - together.

Eight - make that nine - news organizations are working together across four countries, trying to determine where these children have been taken and, exactly, how many there are. "Help us make sure that every single child is accounted for," The Intercept's explanation of the project to readers says.

ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, Univision News, The Intercept, Frontline, the Texas Tribune, Animal Político (in Mexico), El Faro (in El Salvador), and Plaza Pública (in Guatemala) are involved in the major initiative. They're seeking information from their readers on the facilities where these children are housed - with check boxes for "I was held there," "I worked or currently work here," and more - and who the children are - "What is the child or children's name (s)? What age(s)?" - in forms available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This particular project began with ProPublica publishing a map of all known facilities housing immigrant children - children separated from their parents at the border, and minors who crossed the bordered unaccompanied - to help readers understand their actual proximity to the issue and to hold accountable the government agencies that are involved.

"It was one of those quintessential ProPublica moments. We came together [a week ago] and said, 'Okay, we're going to refocus what we're doing and continue to chase this story of zero tolerance,'" said Adriana Gallardo, engagement reporter at ProPublica.

This is the most quickly that ProPublica has spun up a major collaborative project like this; while the organization has done international collaborations before, this is also the first time it's embedded a map and engagement questionnaires simultaneously in multiple countries.

Gallardo said ProPublica is maintaining the data and sharing relevant tips with the partners, who are free to pursue stories at their will and are committed to sharing the map and the forms with their audiences. A dozen people from the ProPublica newsroom, among the news apps, research, and engagement teams, are focusing on this project. "As we get more tips, there will be more reporters involved to produce journalism from this, which is the ultimate goal," Gallardo said.

News organizations have been covering the crisis, which has echoes in the Obama administration and has worsened and gained public attention since the Trump administration began separating children from their parents at the border. ProPublica's obtained recording of crying young children in one of the shelters drew even more attention. The Texas Tribune added 78 tweets over nine days to its thread tracking the situation started the afternoon of that same day. With that has come critiques of the media coverage, from Time magazine's cover photo of Trump and the Honduran girl ( who wasn't actually separated from her mother) to the diversity of weekend political talk show guests - leaving out the voices of the people actually involved. Meanwhile, a Facebook fundraiser to raise money to help separated immigrant families went viral and has now surpassed $20 million (from an original $1,500 goal).

Now, these news organizations are digging in to do something more about it.

We found and mapped 97 shelters holding immigrant children.

We did it to:
-show readers where these facilities are
-increase transparency & accountability
-ask for more tips about them https://t.co/vSZw1jtoE1

- ProPublica (@ProPublica) June 27, 2018

Gallardo said that most of the tips coming in so far (in the one day that the forms and the map have been live) are related to the facilities rather than the children themselves, but she's optimistic the international collaborators and other partners will help spread the word. "This is the beginning of the reporting on this for our newsroom," she said. "We are being transparent about what we know and what we don't know and what we need help with."

"Our readers are very enthusiastic about the possibility of helping spread the reach of the map, particularly because our government's reaction to the crisis has been very shy, clumsy and yielding toward the U.S. government," said Enrique Naveda, the editor at Plaza Pública, which has partnered before with international coalitions like ICIJ. "Our highest expectation regarding this alliance is to offer a service to migrants above all, and secondly, to have a direct political impact that gives way to more humane policy in the U.S. and Central America."

ProPublica spearheaded another major collaborative project during 2016's Election Day, called Electionland, though they obviously had more time to prepare for that newsy situation. Then, 450 journalists from about 250 news outlets in 47 states (and the District of Columbia) monitored voting aberrations, but they had months to prepare for it. ProPublica is also working on Documenting Hate, a nationwide effort to track hate crimes, with partners like Univision, the New York Times' opinion section, Meedan, PBS NewsHour, and many more, including local outlets.

At Poynter, David Beard pointed out that other news orgs like the Texas Tribune and the Washington Post are trying to crowdsource information on the issue, too, as well as a group of researchers using library science.

We are partnering with other news organizations, including @propublica, @BuzzFeedNews, and @univisionnews, to gather vital information about the children in immigration detention facilities and shelters. Help us find them. https://t.co/Bp0a1kZ1jK

- The Intercept (@theintercept) June 27, 2018

| Mapa interactivo |
¿Dónde están los niños separados de sus padres? https://t.co/NvOCdr1vWU

- Plaza Pública (@PlazaPublicaGT) June 28, 2018

El medio estadounidense @ProPublica encontró 97 instalaciones con niños migrantes, incluidos refugios y centros de acogida. Medios latinoamericanos nos hemos asociado para recopilar información vital de los menores separados de sus padres 👇🏽 https://t.co/tiNMWsrget

- elfaro.net (@_ElFaro_) June 28, 2018

.@ProPublica, @BuzzFeedNews, @theintercept, @UnivisionNews, @_ElFaro_, @PlazaPublicaGT y @Pajaropolitico se asocian para recopilar información sobre los niños inmigrantes separados de sus padres https://t.co/pgkOBM67zX

- AnimalPolitico.com (@Pajaropolitico) June 28, 2018

Do you know a family separated at the border? We're looking for information about the children held by the US government https://t.co/ZYhDqkjudP

- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) June 28, 2018

FRONTLINE is investigating family separations at the U.S. border - and you can help. https://t.co/SbFDyav7uI pic.twitter.com/uYEr7oY8j2

- FRONTLINE (@frontlinepbs) June 28, 2018

If you have direct knowledge about a separated immigrant family or a facility where children are being held, we want to hear from you.

Information can be submitted anonymously or with names. It will not be made public without permission. More here: https://t.co/supAYPFc3R

- Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) June 28, 2018

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Nine newsrooms, 4 countries, thousands of kids: ProPublica launches a project to find immigrant children

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When the government has thousands of noncitizen children somewhere in its custody, how do you find them? You report on it - together. Eight - make that nine - news organizations are working together across four countries, trying to determine where these children have been taken and, exactly, how many there are.

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This year marked a sea change in our attitude toward tech's largest players - and not for the better. Facebook, with a user base twice the size of the Western Hemisphere, seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis: CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent much of 2017 on a national tour that The New York Times billed as a "real-world education." Meanwhile, the platform has become embroiled in a national debate that started with fake news and has evolved into an investigation into how the Russian government weaponized the network to influence the 2016 presidential election. Next week, the company will be brought to testify in front of Congress on the matter.

Amazon made considerable headway in its quest to serve every part of our lives, from acquiring Whole Foods this summer to rolling out a plan to get keys to our front doors just this week. Apple continues to amass a vast reserve last valued at $260 billion, but its top-tier devices have lost their luster, and it's been years since the company released a truly game-changing product. Twitter has come under increased scrutiny for harassment and bot armies of nefarious origin, which may explain its tepid user base growth despite becoming the new unofficial platform for American politics. And there's a growing sense, underlined by this summer's $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling against Google, that the entire cabal of big tech companies have turned the corner from friendly giants to insidious monopolies.

Big tech companies have turned the corner from friendly giants to insidious monopolies

We wanted to know how you felt about these companies. So late last month, The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a wide-ranging survey on the public's attitude toward some of the biggest names in tech. This is the first in what will be a series of semi-annual Verge studies tracking the public's attitude toward the companies we're increasingly dependent on.

This survey, conducted from September 28th to October 10th, included 1,520 people nationally representative of the US, based on 2016 US Census estimates. The margin of error is ±3 percent, with a confidence level of 95 percent.

The findings are fascinating: respondents trusted Facebook less than Google, and "trust" was a primary factor for individuals who abstained from using Facebook overall. Respondents trusted Amazon almost as much as their own bank. Of all the companies named in our survey, respondents were most likely to recommend services from Amazon to their family and friends. Twitter sits on the opposite side of the spectrum: a quarter of respondents said they are probably, or not at all likely, to recommend the service.

Read our breakout reports or scroll down to see our full deck of findings below
Correction, 11:09 a.m.: This article originally included a slide that asked respondents about Facebook's business model. Due to an error in the wording of the question, the slide and corresponding analysis have been removed.

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How Americans really feel about Facebook, Apple, and more

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We wanted to know how you felt about Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. So earlier this month, The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a wide-ranging survey on the public's attitude toward some of the biggest names in tech.

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What The Economist learned in its first year on Snapchat Discover

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What The Economist learned in its first year on Snapchat Discover

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Our editors reveal how they crunch smart analysis for a young audience

Printed copies of The Economist have been landing on doormats every week since 1843. For the past year, our sharp analysis has been appearing on a certain yellow smartphone app once a week too.

Having launched on Snapchat Discoverin October 2016, we have published more than 50 editions, on everything from the threat posed by North Korea to the possibility of alien life to the legalisation of drugs.

Snapchat gives The Economist something most publishers are hungry for in today's media environment: an audience of young, mobile-first consumers of news and analysis. The Snapchat audience is also large: each month an average of 7.1m users visit The Economist 's Snapchat channel.

The most popular edition so far, "How Well Do You Know Your Presidents?", which coincided with Donald Trump's inauguration, reached more readers in a week than Economist.com does in a month. Overall, launching on Snapchat has resulted in "the biggest step-change in the audience of The Economist since 1843," says Tom Standage, deputy editor and head of digital strategy.

The edition pegged to Trump's inauguration embodied much of what The Economist 's Snapchat team hopes to achieve, says Lucy Rohr, the paper's Snapchat editor. One aim is to be what Ms Rohr calls a "trusted filter" that provides analysis and context around a news event. The edition on the inauguration focused not so much on Trump, but on the institution of the presidency and on previous holders of the office.

Choosing a topic for the weekly edition requires careful consideration as Ms Rohr has to be sure that The Economist has enough analysis on a subject to be able to fill an edition - and smartly. "Plenty of what we do can't be readily translated into a 'Snappy' format. We have to take the time to really think about each edition and each snap and how to do it best," says Ms Rohr. That can also mean creating original content, specifically for the platform.

Striking the right tone is one of the most difficult tasks for the Snapchat team, whose five members are on both sides of the Atlantic. "It's something we think about in every edition," says Ms Rohr. Balancing the rigorous analysis of The Economist with the playfulness of Snapchat takes time and is "definitely a challenge", according to Ms Rohr. Her team must condense large amounts of reporting from the paper into a medium that is not only finishable, concise and elegant - like the paper - but also fun and interactive.

Once the topic is chosen, how does a Snapchat edition come together? After gathering material from the archives and doing more research where needed, a script is written. A Snapchat script is broken down into at least 14 snaps, with words and visual ideas for each, plus links to the articles that might be added as content that the user swipes up to read. Editors, designers and animators then build all the visuals to produce the edition. Articles are fact-checked by the research department and updated where necessary, consulting with other editors when needed to ensure consistency with the paper's editorial line.

Snapchat's audience is young. But the idea of giving young people what we think they want is not the guiding philosophy of Ms Rohr's team. Publishers who talk down to the audience, she says, will be punished by poor engagement. "The readers are smart, they are interested and they always want to know more, so it's a really amazing opportunity as a producer and journalist to serve this group," she says.

People familiar with The Economist are often surprised to hear that the paper is on Snapchat. But is it really so surprising? The team has found its audience to be forward-looking, globally curious and highly engaged with liberal causes. "So The Economist is actually pretty well aligned," says Ms Rohr.

is a social media fellow at The Economist.

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What The Economist learned in its first year on Snapchat Discover

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What The Economist learned in its first year on Snapchat Discover Our editors reveal how they crunch smart analysis for a young audience Printed copies of The Economist have been landing on doormats ...

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After spending years making do without measurement, the podcast space is suddenly swimming in it. In June, the medium's largest platform, Apple, announced it would begin giving creators consumption metrics. Weeks later, the Slate-owned podcast producer Panoply announced a partnership with Nielsen to offer audience targeting for the ads it dynamically inserts into podcasts using Megaphone.

Measurement has been one of the big missing pieces in the podcast space. With the medium growing steadily and measurement improving, we asked attendees at the 2017 IAB Podcast Upfront to assess the impact of this increased measurement.

Sandro Roco, director of strategic initiatives, Bombfell
In general, Apple is going to give you as little as they can on the publisher side and the advertiser side. That said, I think it could help accelerate things. [Podcasting] still does have a measurement problem. We talk to our agencies about being among the first couple [ad] spots because we don't know about [podcast] completion rates. Right now, at least for our buying strategy, we're going with the greatest hits. We're being a little more aggressively cautious.

Janine Venturini, media buyer, Wieden+Kennedy
We have a battle, always, with buying podcasts because you can't measure them. I think it's a stepping stone. I don't think they're going to release every detail. You're not going to know that a 29-year-old from Staten Island who likes dogs is listening to a podcast.

Will Flaherty, head of growth marketing, Rent the Runway
Measurement probably benefits some advertisers, but some it doesn't. The ones that have succeeded with it have realized the arbitrage opportunities. It will benefit the space largely, but some [direct-response] advertisers will see those arbitrage opportunities dry up.

Russell Lindsey, president, Ad Results Media
There's a lot more advertisers here than there were last year. It verifies what we're seeing. Almost all our clients are direct-response. Some of the places brand advertisers are going [to invest in podcasting] are not the same place that direct-response advertisers will be going. Sure, it's going to make the space a little more crowded, but I think it's going to be a very narrow set of podcasts.

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'It's a stepping stone': What increased measurement opportunities mean for podcasting - Digiday

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After spending years making do without measurement, the podcast space is suddenly swimming in it. In June, the medium's largest platform, Apple, announced it would begin giving creators consumption metrics. Weeks later, the Slate-owned podcast producer Panoply announced a partnership with Nielsen to offer audience targeting for the ads it dynamically inserts into podcasts using Megaphone.

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Quartz adds augmented reality to its app, now with 780k downloads - Digiday

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Quartz adds augmented reality to its app, now with 780k downloads - Digiday

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Quartz is finding there's reader appetite for augmented reality. In the week following Apple's Sept. 19 iOS 11 update that included augmented reality capabilities, the Quartz app was downloaded 10,000 times, according to the publisher, which claims a total of nearly 780,000 app downloads across devices.

The Quartz app, which launched in February 2016, takes inspiration from messaging apps with a bot delivering roughly half a dozen daily news stories from its own site and elsewhere around the web. Since the update, news items are now interspersed with AR objects that users can interact with. So far, the app has featured AR objects like the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, an image of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the Rosetta Stone, the Tesla Model 3 and the Berlin Wall. Not all of Quartz's news stories warrant the AR treatment, but showing readers the size and scale of the Cassini-Huygens probe or an analog Roland drum machine adds to the in-app experience.

"AR can be really good, or it can be absolutely horrible," said Quartz creative director Michael Dolan. "If it serves the story, then it's an interesting place to experiment. It's an addition to the app, so it's not interrupting the experience."

After figuring out whether a story calls for AR, the object receiving the treatment must be identified, then scanned. In some cases, the scan already exists, like the one of the Cassini-Huygens probe, which was obtained via NASA. Part of the process is striking the balance between making an object look real while also making it look good.

Two-thirds of people who've had the opportunity to view an AR object in the app have continued through to the AR viewer, according to a Quartz spokesperson. Quartz was unable to specify absolute figures but did share that on average, daily active users check the Quartz app twice a day, spending about three minutes inside the app. By comparison, Bleacher Report gets people to spend five minutes in its app each day. According to Quartz, 35 percent of the app's daily active users get to the end of the app, reading all of the content available to them.

As with all new technologies, the metrics for AR need to improve. Quartz can track the number of object rotations, when people pinch to zoom and AR interactions, but it's still understanding how useful this information is to brands.

Dolan said Apple's update has interested brands, particularly in the luxury and auto space. "We're seeing a lot of interest from the U.S. and [Europe, the Middle East and Africa]," he said. "We're talking to clients about what would be a good AR experience; we're at the stage where we're integrating brand work into this."

Joy Robins, Quartz's svp of global revenue and strategy, said it's advising clients on what makes a good AR experience and helping to train agencies on the tech. Quartz adopted this role as an adviser on bots, too, running client tours and speaking at events about how brands can use bots. "AR gives us the opportunity to have the same level of authority," said Robins.

Two developers built Quartz's AR capabilities, with additional support from designers, testers, researchers and product managers, as well as the editorial team. By the end of 2017, the company head count will be 200.

Quartz is among one the first apps to use Apple's ARKit tech. The Washington Post is running an AR series as well. Publishers have devoted more attention to virtual reality, which, when creating experiences for VR headsets, is more costly, requires more development work than AR to create experiences and reaches a smaller subset of people. "We see them as two very different experiences: AR enhances the story, whereas VR is the entire story," said Dolan. "We haven't yet had any conversations about doing VR."
Images: courtesy of Quartz.

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Quartz adds augmented reality to its app, now with 780k downloads - Digiday

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Quartz is finding there's reader appetite for augmented reality. In the week following Apple's Sept. 19 iOS 11 update that included augmented reality capabilities, the Quartz app was downloaded 10,000 times, according to the publisher, which claims a total of nearly 780,000 app downloads across devices.

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Welcome to The Podcast Payoff, our series on how marketers are taking advantage of the audio revolution. In the coming weeks we'll roll out episodes that tackle how brand marketers are reaching new audiences, building new content, and measuring results through podcasting.
Episode One - The Audience Episode Two - The Content Coming Soon Episode Three - The Metrics Coming Soon

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Welcome to The Podcast Payoff, our series on how marketers are taking advantage of the audio revolution. In the coming weeks we'll roll out episodes that tackle how brand marketers are reaching new audiences, building new content, and measuring results through podcasting.

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FT Labs - the publisher's four-person experimental unit - has been converting its text articles into audio to figure out its readers' appetite for listening to articles.

The publisher has been using Amazon Polly to convert the text articles into audio, read by artificial voice named Amy. Written articles take between one and three seconds to convert into audio. Both short news items and long-form, evergreen pieces are converted, like a profile on U.S. boxer, Jake LaMotta or a feature on why Lisbon is so popular with tourists.

The publisher has opened up audio articles to 10 percent of its subscribers and is considering opening it up to the remaining 90 percent by the end of the year, according to the company. These are also available in Listen FT, the publisher's progressive web app.

Head of FT Labs, Chris Gathercole, said it was too early to share any results on how people behave with audio articles, but early evidence shows that people are coming back regularly.

In the next few months it will smooth out some rhythmic and tonal hiccups. For instance, Amazon Polly used to treat the word "Trump" as a verb, so when it was read out as a verb, rather than as a name, the cadence was jarring. The FT fixed this by programming an extra full stop during the conversion process each time the word "Trump" appeared in a text article. According to Gathercole, the Amazon Polly team has corrected this since his team had raised it with them. Equally, the FT uses the abbreviated "m" for "millions," which Amazon Polly took to mean "meters."

"These tiny adjustments need to be done constantly across the board. The providers are also fixing these, so we're confident that in the next few months we can open this out to all subscribers," he said, speaking on Sept. 27 at a We Are Social event.

Another sticking point: Much of the useful content - stock prices and market data - is in list-form and not packaged up to be read out loud. "That's the main gap within the system; it sounds like an audio car crash when read out," he said. "We have a lot of back-end work to do there."

Gathercole said there's no reason why eventually all the FT's 300 daily articles can't be converted into audio when users want to listen to them.

With data from research firm Mintel finding that 62 percent of Brits are happy to use voice commands to control devices, it's critical the FT is working out how to deliver in on these devices too. On Amazon Alexa and Google Home there are a number of media companies who read out daily headlines, which makes sense for open-access publishers. Giving away content for free would challenge the assumption that the FT is worth paying for, said Gathercole.

"We need to make it so these devices become more useful for subscribers," he said. "Some people use us for entertainment, or to be informed, or when they are in research mode. We need to support all these different mindsets through voice controls. Passive listening is not the future."

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Why the Financial Times is converting text articles to audio - Digiday

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"We need to make it so these devices become more useful for subscribers. Some people use us for entertainment, or to be informed, or when they are in research mode. We need to support all these different mindsets through voice controls. Passive listening is not the future."

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Google is to abandon its controversial policy of forcing news providers to offer free articles in order to appear on its search engine as part of a collection of measures designed to support the growth of digital subscriptions.

The US company will replace its so-called "first click free" policy, which requires publishers to offer three free articles a day before readers come across a pay wall.

Instead Google will offer a flexible sampling model that allows news organisations to decide how many, if any, articles it offers for free.

The "first click free" model has been described as "toxic" by publishers such as Axel Springer and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, which publishes the Times and the Sun, revealed at a conference last month that Google was considering getting rid of "first click free", adding that it would "fundamentally change the content ecosystem".

He said: "If you don't sign up for 'first click free', you virtually disappear from a search. Given the power of that Google platform, that is disadvantaging premium content of great provenance."

Google is making the move after feedback from publishers and readers and after tests with the New York Times and the Financial Times. It is also a recognition of the growth of subscription services and the fact a "one size fits all" approach was not appropriate.

In a blog, Richard Gingras, vice-president of news at Google, said: "Journalism provides accurate and timely information when it matters most, shaping our understanding of important issues and pushing us to learn more in search of the truth. People come to Google looking for high-quality content, and our job is to help them find it. However, sometimes that content is behind a paywall.

"While research has shown that people are becoming more accustomed to paying for news, the sometimes painful process of signing up for a subscription can be a turn off. That's not great for users or for news publishers who see subscriptions as an increasingly important source of revenue.

"To address these problems we've been talking to news publishers about how to support their subscription businesses."

As well as dropping "first click free", Google will make it easier for users to subscribe to services. For example, people will be able to subscribe to news providers with one click through Google's existing payment technology.

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Google to ditch controversial 'first click free' policy

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Google is to abandon its controversial policy of forcing news providers to offer free articles in order to appear on its search engine as part of a collection of measures designed to support the growth of digital subscriptions.

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A cooperative organisation has been launched to advocate for and raise money for independent media free from state or corporate control.

The Media Fund has launched days after the BBC's Today programme presenter Nick Robinson said alternative news sites were part of a "guerrilla war" against the BBC and other mainstream media outlets. It aims to give way to digital platforms to counteract an "old media system" dominated by broadcasters and newspapers, which it says displays a rightwing bias. It has so far partnered with 21 outlets, including Novara Media, the New Internationalist, Open Democracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

To partner with the fund, these outlets have to sign up to the National Union of Journalists' code of conduct, demonstrate a commitment to factual and accurate reporting, and within a year of joining become fully unionised workplaces. New partners must be approved by existing partners, suggesting that rightwing outlets are unlikely to be selected.

"The idea is that any media organisation that's a partner with us is one you can trust in an age of understandable caution about your sources," said Thomas Barlow, the fund's strategic director. "We're going to try and be that stamp of respectability for independent media."

Last week, leading alternative news site the Canary was accused of peddling fake news after it published an article about Laura Kuenssberg, Robinson's successor as BBC political editor, that was swiftly debunked.

The press regulator, Impress, had received 48 complaints about the article by Thursday. The left-of-centre website was criticised on social media because Kuenssberg has faced hostility on and offline in her role and was reportedly accompanied by a security guard at the Labour conference after receiving threats.

The Canary is not currently partnered with the Media Fund, but "discussions will be had" at a future stage, Barlow said, adding that the tabloid press, including the Mail, the Sun, and the Express, "openly disrespect and attack the BBC on a regular basis".

"Paul Dacre has had three times more upheld complaints against him than any other editor," he said. "It's funny that someone like Nick Robinson won't openly discuss their factual inaccuracies.

"We know why: Robinson's not as afraid of the independent media as he is of the Murdoch press, and he shares more political and personal affinity with the tabloid press. It's not just that he's a Conservative, it's that the BBC's news agenda is largely set by the tabloid press."

There has been a growing trend in Britain of leftwing activists setting up their own news and media sites to take on the established press, after what they saw as unfair coverage of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour party. While their subject matter and approach varies, most if not all of the outlets distrust the "MSM" and use social media to deploy their message. Barlow, who was the business and social media manager at Real Media, said their reach of about 50,000 went up to 1.5 million during the general election.

Similarly, Novara, once labelled Momentum's "armed police", has 200 contributing writers, 700 supporters and 10,000 committed viewers and listeners. Its creator, Aaron Bastani, has said Novara's Facebook content reached 3 million people during the general election.

Momentum itself had massive networks to distribute its content and used new technologies to help mobilise Labour members, which was fundamental in winning many marginal constituencies.

"People were being dragged into cultural wars around race and immigration, but only so many people are motivated by that," Barlow said. "After a while you're really going to have to address some underlying problems and issues. The media and politicians aren't doing that. And the ones who are aren't given a fair shake at all."

The established press, he added, not so much censors but curtails certain types of discussion. "Certain ideas are new in public discourse and need time to be discussed. For instance, Labour's economic programme. It's relatively middle of the road for a European democracy and a developed democracy, but in Britain, where we've had liberal discourse for 35, 40 years, and it's become the established norm, talking about something like nationalising railways requires a bit of time."

Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara Media, said the traditional media had failed to recognise a change in politics. "Establishment media don't understand it because fundamentally, their idea was that the centre of power and the centre of parliamentary politics was the same thing."

The Media Fund, made up of nine people, began accepting donations on Sunday when its website launched, before a hard launch in November - one year after it crowdfunded £10,000 to get off the ground.

Barlow argued that the media, including the BBC, needed to "get with the times" and recognise that huge changes are happening. "If we don't get a Corbyn, we could get a Trump," he said. "At the moment they seem to be egging on a Trump."

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Fund launched to create independent media free from rightwing bias

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A cooperative organisation has been launched to advocate for and raise money for independent media free from state or corporate control. The Media Fund has launched days after the BBC's Today programme presenter Nick Robinson said alternative news sites were part of a "guerrilla war" against the BBC and other mainstream media outlets.

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Support the Media Revolution Help us fund the media that really makes a difference. Own The Media Donate with us and become a member and co-owner of The Media Fund

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How do you talk about impact in a grant proposal and what aspects of your project do foundations expect journalists to focus on?

At the Journalism Funders Forum in London earlier this month, representatives from foundations and journalists gathered to discuss philanthropic funding in the UK and abroad, providing examples of one-off projects and innovative initiatives that have received financial support.

But when you are competing with thousands of other projects, how do you make your grant proposal stand out? How do you talk about the impact of your story, how it's going to be distributed and who your audience might be?

In this week's episode we speak to Nienke Venema, director of the Democracy and Media Foundation in The Netherlands, about how to make the most of your application, with tips for what you should and shouldn't include when applying for funding.

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Applying to get funding for a journalism project? Here are some helpful tips

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How do you talk about impact in a grant proposal and what aspects of your project do foundations expect journalists to focus on? At the Journalism Funders Forum in London earlier this month, representatives from foundations and journalists gathered to discuss philanthropic funding in the UK and abroad, providing examples of one-off projects and innovative initiatives that have received financial support.

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Virtual Reality and Journalism Ethics: Where Are the Lines?

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Virtual Reality and Journalism Ethics: Where Are the Lines?

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I magine if you could spend a morning climbing a skyscraper, running with the bulls in Spain, or even walking on Pluto. As news outlets experiment with immersive content like virtual reality and 360-degree video, a smartphone and simple cardboard headset can make that happen.

According to Graham Roberts, director of Immersive Platforms Storytelling at the New York Times, the goal of journalism produced using these new tools is the same as it has always been: to transport readers into the story. But as The Times and other publications experiment with virtual reality to transport viewers into less innocuous situations - say, to the middle of a war zone or a jail cell in solitary confinement - new ethical considerations arise, not only about how these stories are produced, but also about the ways in which audiences experience and remember them.

The concerns accompanied The Times' famous roll-out two years ago of a virtual reality experience delivered directly to readers' homes, complete with a cardboard viewer. While praise for the foray was widespread (the immersive video took readers inside the plight of refugee children), some journalists immediately raised pointed questions. The Times was experimenting with a process "that will often be based on tricks and deceptions by photographers/cameramen," Robert Kaiser, the former managing editor of The Washington Post, complained to the paper's public editor at the time.

In the two years since, many other publications have begun experimenting with virtual reality and immersive storytelling - and the debate over where to draw lines continues. Roberts likens the rise of virtual reality journalism to the period of time between the invention of movies and movie theaters: The technology is there, but we don't yet know what the rules and conventions of the medium should be.

Meanwhile, the Society of Professional Journalists, which publishes a Code of Ethics that journalists are encouraged to follow, doesn't provide any specific guidelines for reporting in virtual reality. "It's difficult because within SPJ, we're resistant to creating different standards for different media," says Andrew Seaman, the chair of the ethics committee within SPJ. "The standards that you apply to print, online, broadcast should be the same regardless of the medium."

But how do the principles of fair and accurate reporting apply when the camera setup doesn't simply depict an event, but exploits human perception to place audiences directly in the scene? How are editing choices amplified in such contexts? How to shoot 360-degrees without capturing the journalist and his or her equipment in the middle of it - and are efforts to remove them fair? And how does experiencing a story in virtual reality affect how viewers remember and respond to the story at hand?

One potential risk, according to Jennifer Talarico, a psychologist at Lafayette College who studies the many flaws to our memories, comes down to something called source-monitoring error. Source memory, she explains, is our way of remembering how it is that we came to know something. "This can be very general - did I read this, did something tell me this?" says Talarico. "Did I take my vitamin or did I just think about it? Did that really happen or was it just a dream?" Beyond that, source monitoring is our ability to remember whether we lived an experience or if it we adapted it as our own from a story someone told us.

"One would imagine that the more similar the narrative context is to an experiential context, the more likely someone is to make a source monitoring error," says Talarico. She suspects that an immersive virtual reality experience could make it easier to mistake a fictional narrative experience with something from the audience member's real life.

Even without source error, Talarico points out that an emotionally-potent, immersive experience can really stick with people. Without proper care, this can give people the wrong idea. "To the extent that any of these forms are more memorable than others, and to the extent that all media are adapted for good and evil, they have a greater potential to either mislead or educate," says Talarico. One oft-cited example along these lines: a 2011 study out of Stanford suggesting that subjects who experienced cutting down a redwood tree in a virtual, immersive environment used 20 percent fewer napkins to clean up a planned, post-experiment "accident" with a glass of water than subjects who only read about cutting down trees.

To Robert Hernandez, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's School for Communication and Journalism and a pioneer in the realm of virtual and immersive media and a self-proclaimed "mad scientist" of journalism, that's the power and allure of virtual reality. "I can put you in a situation where your brain knows it's not real, but it still feels like it's real," he says. "That can invoke trauma, that can invoke bad memories. And as a journalist I have to ask what's my job? Is my job to hurt you? It's to inform you, and sometimes it's a little in the middle. I need you to understand what that little refugee kid is going through."

Hernandez explains that this narrative - that a new medium will inevitably lead to misinformation - has emerged every time there's a new way to tell stories. "You don't cease being ethical as a journalist just because there's a new piece of technology," he says, pointing out that any good story, photo, or video will invoke an emotional reaction that some would decry as manipulation. "You have to think about it, you have to test it."

Roberts says his newsroom at The New York Times hasn't formally weighed the psychological impacts of stories shared this way, but noted that there are rules journalists can lay out in advance to make sure that virtual reality is used in a responsible, ethical manner. Namely, they need to remind the audience of exactly what they are seeing and how it fits in the context of the broader story. The Times' virtual reality film " Fight for Falluja," for example, which brings viewers to the front lines of a battle between American troops and ISIS, was embedded within a broader story about the same conflict - though there's no guarantee that people will actually read it.

In that sense, providing context within the virtual-reality, or VR, experience may also be beneficial. The broader the scope, the less likely those people are to incorrectly assume that they've seen the whole picture. "What's great about VR is you can put text, you can add subtitles," says the SPJ's Seaman. "I think there are opportunities to blunt the force of VR."

S till, even simple discussions of context raise issues of what some critics would call manipulation, Hernandez says. One basic example: Although a 360-degree camera can capture virtually every bit of a scene - this would normally includes the journalists themselves and, inevitably, the tripod or other rigging on which the camera itself is mounted. Publications have long disagreed on whether and how to edit these production artifacts, which a viewer can plainly see by "looking" or panning around the immersive environment.

It gets much more ethically complicated than editing out the tripod. The Times' 2015 refugee film, called "The Displaced," received some criticism when viewers realized that certain scenes, including one in which a young boy pedals his bicycle down a sunlit street - a moment of joy in an otherwise stark exploration of refugee life - was at least partly an artificial construction. "Obviously, he doesn't spontaneously ride down the street with a VR rig on his bicycle every afternoon," Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, told The Poynter Institute, the journalism ethics nonprofit, last year. "He had to wait to let us mount the VR rig on his bicycle, which was complicated and difficult and required a little trial and error. But once he did, he was riding his own bike down the street that he typically rides his bike down."

Jeffery DelViscio, director of multimedia and creative at STAT News, a digital publication covering biotechnology, health, and medicine, says it's important to think about these sorts of situations ahead of time. "Once you put the headset on, it's really meant to be like you're the one standing there and you're the camera," he said, "so you have to be careful with how you handle them."

Hernandez noted that the Associated Press the is among those media organizations that have opted to leave the image of the tripod intact, to avoid any charge that they've manipulated the experience. For his part, though, Hernandez sees no problem with this sort of tweaking to improve the immersive experience - something technology is making it increasingly easy to do. "We've produced this experience, so we want to optimize it," he says.

Of course, just how far such optimization can be pushed without violating basic journalistic principles - if you can subtract elements, you can also add them, after all - is something that the industry continues to actively debate. Using sound journalistic judgment is a good starting point, Hernandez suggests, though he also hopes that immersive storytelling will be greeted by an audience that lends a critical eye towards the media it consumes - and the technology used to create it.

"It could be used for good or ill," Hernandez says, "but that statement could be applied to any media type in our history."
Dan Robitszki is a neuroscientist-turned-journalist based in New York. He is a recent graduate of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) at NYU, and his freelance work has appeared in Scientific American and ScienceLine, among other publications.

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Virtual Reality and Journalism Ethics: Where Are the Lines?

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I magine if you could spend a morning climbing a skyscraper, running with the bulls in Spain, or even walking on Pluto. As news outlets experiment with immersive content like virtual reality and 360-degree video, a smartphone and simple cardboard headset can make that happen.

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This year, the iPhone turned 10. Its launch heralded a new era in audience behavior that fundamentally changed how news organizations would think about how their work is discovered, distributed and consumed.

This summer, as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I've been looking at another technology I think could lead to a similar step change in how publishers relate to their audiences: AI-driven voice interfaces, such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home and Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Apple's upcoming HomePod. The more I've spoken to the editorial and technical leads building on these platforms in different news organizations, as well as the tech companies developing them, the more I've come to this view: This is potentially bigger than the impact of the iPhone. In fact, I'd describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they'll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn't even know it's standing on.

This wasn't how I planned to open this piece even a week before my Nieman fellowship ended. But as I tied together the research I'd done with the conversations I'd had with people across the industry, something became clear: As an industry, we're far behind the thinking of the technology companies investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Over the past year, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other global tech giants have all said, in different ways, that they now run "AI-first" companies. I can't remember a single senior news exec ever mentioning AI and machine learning at any industry keynote address over the same period.

Of course, that's not necessarily surprising. "We're not technology companies" is a refrain I've heard a lot. And there are plenty of other important issues to occupy industry minds: the rise of fake news, continued uncertainty in digital advertising, new tech such as VR and AR, and the ongoing conundrum of responding to the latest strategic moves of Facebook.

But as a result of all these issues, AI is largely being missed as an industry priority; to switch analogies, it feels like we're the frog being slowly boiled alive, not perceiving the danger to itself until it's too late to jump out.

"In all the speeches and presentations I've made, I've been shouting about voice AI until I'm blue in the face. I don't know to what extent any of the leaders in the news industry are listening," futurist and author Amy Webb told me. As she put it in a piece she wrote for Nieman Reports recently:

Talking to machines, rather than typing on them, isn't some temporary gimmick. Humans talking to machines - and eventually, machines talking to each other - represents the next major shift in our news information ecosystem. Voice is the next big threat for journalism.

My original goal for this piece was to share what I'd learned - examples of what different newsrooms are trying with smart speakers and where the challenges and opportunities lie. There's more on all that below. But I first want to emphasize the critical and urgent nature of what the news industry is about to be confronted with, and how - if it's not careful - it'll miss the boat just as it did when the Internet first spread from its academic cocoon to the rest of the world. Later, I'll share how I think the news industry can respond.

Talking to objects isn't weird any more

In the latest version of her annual digital trends report, Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker revealed that 20 percent of all Google search was now happening through voice rather than typing. Sales of smart speakers like Amazon's Echo were also increasing fast:

It's becoming clear that users are finding it useful to interact with devices through voice. "We're treating voice as the third wave of technology, following the point-and-click of PCs and touch interface of smartphones," Francesco Marconi, a media strategist at Associated Press, told me. He recently coauthored AP's report on how artificial intelligence will impact journalism. The report gives some excellent insights into the broader AI landscape, including automation of content creation, data journalism through machine learning, robotic cameras, and media monitoring systems. It highlighted smart speakers as a key gateway into the world of AI.

Since the release of the Echo, a number of outlets have tried to learn what content works (or doesn't) on this class of devices. Radio broadcasters have been at an understandable advantage, being able to adapt their content relatively seamlessly.

In the U.S., NPR was among the first launch partners on these platforms. Ha-Hoa Hamano, a senior product manager at NPR working on voice AI, described its hourly newscast as "the gateway to NPR's content."

"We're very bullish on the opportunity with voice," Hamano said. She cited research showing 32 percent of people aged 18 to 34 don't own a radio in their home - "which is a terrifying stat when you're trying reach and grow audience. These technologies allow NPR to fit into their daily routine at home - or wherever they choose to listen."

NPR was available at launch on the Echo and Google Home, and will be soon on Apple's HomePod. "We think of the newscast as the gateway to the rest of NPR's news and storytelling," she said. "It's a low lift for us to get the content we already produce onto these platforms. The challenge is finding the right content for this new way of listening."

The API that drives NPR made it easy for Hamano's team to integrate the network's content into Amazon's system. NPR's skills - the voice-driven apps that Amazon's voice assistant Alexa recognizes - can respond to requests like "Alexa, ask NPR One to recommend a podcast" or "Alexa, ask NPR One to play Hidden Brain."

Voice AI: What's happening now

Flash briefings (e.g., NPR, BBC, CNN)

Podcast streaming (e.g., NPR)

News quizzes (e.g., The Washington Post)

Recipes and cooking aide (e.g., Hearst)

The Washington Post - owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos - is also an early adopter in running a number of experiments on Amazon's and Google's smart speaker platforms. Senior product manager Joseph Price has been leading this work. "I think we're at the early stages of what I'd call ambient computing - technology that reduces the 'friction' between what we want and actually getting it in terms of our digital activity," he said. "It will actually mean we'll spend less time being distracted by technology, as it effectively recedes into the background as soon as we are finished with it. That's the starting point for us when we think about what voice experiences will work for users in this space."

Not being a radio broadcaster, the Post has had to experiment with different forms of audio - from using Amazon's Alexa automated voices on stories from its website to a Post reporter sharing a particular story in their own voice. Other experiments have included launching an Olympics skill, where users could ask the Post who had won medals during last year's Olympics. That was an example of something that didn't work, though - Amazon built the same capability into the main Alexa platform soon afterwards itself.

"That was a really useful lesson for us," Price said. "We realized that in big public events like these, where there's an open data set about who has won what, it made much more sense for a user to just ask Alexa who had won the most medals, rather than specifically asking The Washington Post on Alexa the same question." That's a broader lesson: "We have to think about what unique or exclusive information, content, or voice experience can The Washington Post specifically offer that the main Alexa interface can't."

One area that Price's team is currently working on is the upcoming release of notifications on both Amazon's Alexa and Google's Home platforms. For instance, if there's breaking news, the Post will be able to make a user's Echo chime and flash green, at which point the user can ask "Alexa, what did I miss?" or "Alexa, what are my notifications?" Users will have to opt in before getting alerts to their device, and they'll be able to disable alerts temporarily through a do-not-disturb mode.

Publishers like the Post that produce little or no native audio content have to work out the right way of presenting their text-based content on a voice-driven platform. One option is to allow Alexa to read stories that have been published; that's easy to scale up. The other is getting journalists to voice articles or columns or create native audio for the platform. That's much more difficult to scale, but several news organizations told me initial audience feedback suggests this is users' preferred experience.

For TV broadcasters like CNN, early experiments have focused on trying to figure out when their users would most want to listen to a bulletin - as opposed to watching one - and how much time they might have specifically to do so via a smart speaker. Elizabeth Johnson, a senior editor at CNN Digital, has been leading the work on developing flash-briefing content for these platforms.

"We assumed some users would have their device in the kitchen," she said. "This led us to ask, what are users probably doing in the kitchen in the morning? Making breakfast. How long does it take to make a bagel? Five minutes. So that's probably the amount of time a user has to listen to us, so let's make sure we can update them in less than five minutes. For other times of the day, we tried to understand what users might be doing: Are they doing the dishes? Are they watching a commercial break on TV or brushing their teeth? We know that we're competing against a multitude of options, so what sets us apart?"

With Amazon's recent release of the Echo Show - which has a built-in screen - CNN is taking the "bagel time" philosophy to developing a dedicated video news briefing at the same length as its audio equivalent.

CNN is also thinking hard about when notifications will and won't work. "If you send a notification at noon, but the user doesn't get home until 6 p.m., does it make sense for them to see that notification?" Johnson asked. "What do we want our users to hear when they come home? What content do we have that makes sense in that space, at that time? We already consider the CNN mobile app and Apple News alerts to be different, as are banners on CNN.com - they each serve different purposes. Now, we have to figure out how to best serve the audience alerts on these voice-activated platforms."

What's surprised many news organizations is how broad the age range of their audiences are on smart speakers. Early adopters in this space are very different from early adopters of other technologies. Many didn't buy these smart speakers themselves, but were given them as gifts, particularly around Christmas. The fact there's very little learning curve to use them means the technical bar is much lower. Speaking to the device is intuitive.

Edison Research was recently commissioned by NPR to find out more about what these users are doing with these devices. Music was unsurprisingly at the top of the reasons why they use these devices, but coming in second was to "ask questions without needing to type." Also high up was an interest to listen to news and information - encouraging for news organizations.

While screens aren't going away - people will always want to see and touch things - there's no doubt that voice as an interface for devices is already becoming ingrained as a natural behavior among our audiences. If you're not convinced, watch children interact with smart speakers: Just as we've seen the first Internet-connected generation grow up, we're about to see the "voice generation" arrive feeling completely at ease with this way of engaging with technology.

The NPR-Edison research has also highlighted this trend. Households with kids that have smart speakers say engagement is high with these devices. Unlike phones or tablet, smart speakers are communal experiences - which also raises the likelihood of families spending time together, whether for education or entertainment purposes.

(It's worth noting here that there have been some concerns raised about whether children asking for - or demanding - content from a device without saying "please" or "thank you" could have downsides. As San Francisco VC and dad Hunter Walk put it last year: "Amazon Echo is magical. It's also turning my kid into an asshole." To curb this, skills or apps for children could be designed in the future with voice responses requiring politeness.)

For the BBC, where I work, developing a voice-led digital product for children is an exciting possibility. It already has considerable experience of content for children on TV, radio, online and digital.

"Offering the ability to seamlessly navigate our rich content estate represents a great opportunity for us to forge a closer relationship with our audience and to serve them better," Ben Rosenberg, senior distribution manager at the BBC, said. "The current use cases for voice suggest there is demand that sits squarely in the content areas where we consistently deliver on our ambitions - radio, news, and children's genres."

BBC News recently formed a working group to rapidly develop prototypes for new forms of digital audio using voice as the primary interface. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.

Rosenberg also highlights studies that have found voice AI interfaces appeared to significantly increase consumption of audio content. This is something that came out strongly in the NPR-Edison research too:

Owning a smart speaker can lead to a sizeable increase in consumption of music, news and talk content, podcasts, and audiobooks. Media organizations that have such content have a real opportunity if they can figure out how to make it as easily accessible through these devices as possible. That's where we get to the tricky part.

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The future of news is humans talking to machines

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This year, the iPhone turned 10. Its launch heralded a new era in audience behavior that fundamentally changed how news organizations would think about how their work is discovered, distributed and consumed.

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Parachuting vs local journalism

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When Donald Trump was elected president, many media outlets in coastal cities were in disbelief. They sought electoral reasoning in the Rust Belt, the South, the Midwest and Mountain West - basically everywhere they weren't. That meant putting a bit more emphasis on areas that hadn't gotten as much coverage before.

"We are still the same place we were in November," said Anne Trubek, the publisher of Belt Magazine, which focuses on cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. "The audience has just changed."

Editors' perspectives are changing, too. Fusion features editor Nona Willis Aronowitz published a call to action on February 23 to writers in Texas, the Rust Belt, and the South. She wrote that she is eager "not to parachute in and report on those communities but to recruit writers who are already there. This network will be our longterm eyes and ears in forgotten pockets of the country and will ensure that we coastal journalists don't miss the zeitgeist hiding in plain sight."

Since February, Willis Aronowitz has traveled - she went to Texas and last week returned from the Rust Belt. She is working with local writers who have either lived in cities like Presidio, Texas, their entire lives, or came there in search of untold stories. Whether individuals are experienced journalists or just movers and shakers with "really amazing sources and access," Willis Aronowitz met with them in person to ideate and assign stories from the ground up. She's pairing reporters with more established journalists from the same city or, in one case on an upcoming story, with a Fusion staff writer for a double-bylined feature.

Willis Aronowitz has a loose goal of getting a dozen or so stories assigned per trip in the short term, "but we're really playing the long game with this project - the point is to build lasting relationships with writers across the country," she said. "And features take while to develop, so 'short term' could mean six months after I meet the writers." She's published seven pieces from her Texas trip, with five more to go, and on her Rust Belt trip, she assigned and published two pieces while on the road ( here's one).

"I had been thinking about a project like this since I became an editor. I went from being an itinerant reporter to an editor who sits at a desk all day. It was a shock to the system," she said. "If editors are the gatekeepers of coverage, how are they going to assign important stories if they are sending their staff writers to parachute in? It struck me as wrong."

Equally disturbed by the state of post-election coverage, Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Jessica Reed, features editor at the Guardian U.S., put their heads together. ( Here's more about The Guardian's initiatives in this area.)

"73 percent of media workers are located between Virginia, New York, Boston and the West Coast. The rest of the country, 'flyover states,' has about 27 percent of the country's media workers," Quart said, citing statistics from a recent Politico report. "So the question becomes: How do we get these unheard voices amplified?"

The answer is a joint project with Reed, who helps local reporters from flyover states develop longform stories. She is eager to collaborate with their local newsrooms, so that reporters are published both internationally in The Guardian and within their own communities.

"We are really keen to unlock stories that can be read on a micro level in your small town, all the way up to an international level. We think there are tons of topics, like the public land grab that is currently happening in Montana," she said. "We think these stories merit an international audience and a local audience. So we want to work with local editors without being patronizing. It's not journalistic tourism, it's about collaboration."

Like Willis Aronowitz, Quart and Reed believe the local talent is already there. They are eager to work with these writers, who Quart says have "a modesty that you don't find in New York City."

Anne Helen Petersen, a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, left her home in the Mountain West to pursue a Ph.D., then launched a successful media career in New York City. But now she's going back.

"I grew up in Lewiston, Idaho," says Petersen. "It's like a passcode. It's the way I get people to talk to me, because they know I understand. I get frustrated how where I'm from is misrepresented. I want it to be defined as a nuanced, educated place."

Since the election, Petersen has taken on news and political coverage of the Mountain West. Next month, she will relocate permanently to Whitefish, Montana, as BuzzFeed's Western correspondent.

"The West, like most of the country, lives in the imagination of America," she said. "I want to define what the West is now, as one of the many identities in the U.S. where you often need to be ingrained to tell the whole story."

Nico Gendron is a Boston native who currently works on creative strategy for The New York Times and freelances.

Photo of the Chinati Mountains by Charlie Llewellin" used under a Creative Commons license.

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"An international audience and a local audience": How Fusion and The Guardian are changing their coverage of underreported areas

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When Donald Trump was elected president, many media outlets in coastal cities were in disbelief. They sought electoral reasoning in the Rust Belt, the South, the Midwest and Mountain West - basically everywhere they weren't. That meant putting a bit more emphasis on areas that hadn't gotten as much coverage before.

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The DJI Spark is a tiny new drone aimed squarely at the selfie generation. DJI are touting it as a personal drone designed so you can literally take it anywhere to capture video and stills. Not only can it take off and land in the palm of your hand, but Spark has also been designed to interact with the user by using simple hand gestures.

Handy

According to DJI, Spark is the first drone that users can control by hand gestures alone. DJI are also claiming that even if you've never flown a drone before, flying Spark is easy because the only remote controller you need is your hand. This is true in some regards, but the hand gestures still have a limited range and if you want to fly Spark further away than you will need to do it through either a smartphone or optional remote controller.

When Spark takes off from your hand, it automatically enters Gesture Mode. In Gesture Mode, you can also send Spark up and away from you, take a selfie, and call it back with just your hands.

Spark is small enough to fit in a bag and weighs 10.6 ounces (300 g). To put that in perspective a Mavic Pro weighs in at 1.62 lbs (734g). The Spark will be available in five different colors: Alpine White, Sky Blue, Meadow Green, Lava Red, and Sunrise Yellow.

QuickShot

A new QuickShot Intelligent Flight Mode lets the Spark fly along a preset flight path while recording a short video and tracking a subject along the way.

Four QuickShots are available:
RocketAscend with the camera pointing downward.
DronieFly backward and upward, with the camera locked on your subject.
CircleCircle around your target.
HelixFly upward, spiraling around your subject.

For each QuickShot, Spark will automatically create a 10-second video from your flight, intended for you to share on social media.

Intelligent flight modes just like the Mavic Pro

Previously introduced Intelligent Flight Modes such as TapFly and ActiveTrack can also be found on the Spark. Developed based on DJI's vision technology, a new TapFly sub mode called Coordinate allows Spark to fly to a location you tap on the screen of your mobile device. TapFly's Direction Mode lets you keep flying in the direction you tap on the screen. Using ActiveTrack, Spark will automatically recognize and track an object you choose, keeping it at the center of the frame. Whether you are using TapFly or tracking a subject, Spark's 3D Sensing System will actively sense obstacles in front of the aircraft.

Sport mode

With the remote controller accessory, operators can switch to Sport Mode where the drone can reach a claimed maximum speed of 31 mph (50 kph). Sport Mode sets the gimbal to first-person view (FPV) by default, so the camera moves with you as you fly. Spark will also be compatible with DJI Goggles.

Video recording is limited to 1080 30p at just 24Mbps

Spark uses a 1/2.3" CMOS sensor that captures 12-megapixel photos and shoots stabilized HD 1080p video. The two-axis mechanical gimbal is claimed to reduce shake and rolling shutter effects. Spark's camera has an f/2.6 wide-angle lens with a 25 mm equivalent focal length. The 1080p video you can capture can only be done at 30fps though and in a bitrate of just 24 Mbps. If you are expecting the Spark to capture footage that is as good as your Phantom 4 Pro you might be in for a shock.

Perfect for the selfie generation

Spark includes many previous DJI drone shooting modes with two new additions: Pano and ShallowFocus. In Pano Mode, the camera creates horizontal or vertical panoramas by automatically adjusting its gimbal and heading, taking a series of pictures and stitching them together. ShallowFocus allows you to put part of a picture into sharp focus while the rest of the image is softened, creating photographs with a shallow depth of field. An array of filters and automatic editing templates are available in the DJI GO 4 app.

Autonomous flight

Spark's FlightAutonomy system consists of the main camera, a downward-facing vision system, a forward-facing 3D Sensing System, dual-band GPS and GLONASS, a high-precision inertial measurement unit, and 24 computing cores. These features allow Spark to hover accurately with vision system assistance at up to 98 feet (30 meters) and sense obstacles from up to 16 ft (5 m) away.

Like all recent DJI drones, Spark can return to its home point automatically with a strong enough GPS signal. While using the remote controller, if the battery gets too low, connection is lost, or the operator presses the Return to Home (RTH) button, Spark flies back to the preset home point while sensing obstacles in its path. Spark also integrates DJI's GEO System or NFZ geofencing to provide you with up-to-date guidance on areas where flight may be limited by regulations or raise safety or security concerns.

Spark is powered by a high-energy density LiPo battery and has a maximum flight time of up to 16 minutes. When flying with the remote controller accessory, Spark allows for 720p real-time video transmission from up to 1.2 miles (2 km) away.

How much is it and when can I get one?

The US retail price of a DJI Spark, including an aircraft, a battery, a USB charger and three pairs of propellers, is $499 USD. The Spark Fly More Combo includes an aircraft, two batteries, four pairs of propellers, a remote controller, propeller guards, a charging hub, a shoulder bag and all necessary cables, with a US retail price of $699 USD. Pricing and availability of other accessories for the Spark will be announced at a later date. Spark will be available for pre-order at store.dji.com, four DJI Flagship Stores, and authorized dealers. Spark pre-orders will start shipping in mid-June. Color options and Fly More Combo availability may vary at different sales channels.

DJI Care Refresh for Spark

DJI Care Refresh for Spark, a new one-year coverage plan, will enable Spark customers to obtain up to two full replacements that are new or equivalent to new, for a small additional charge. DJI Care Refresh for Spark is currently available in a few countries, including China, Hong Kong, the United States, Canada, 28 European Union countries, and Australia.

DJI Spark: final thoughts

The DJI Spark looks to be a novel idea and it will be interesting to see if the convenience factor alone makes it worth buying for filmmakers. It's clearly not being aimed at professional shooters with the limited 1080 30p frame rate and 24 Mbps H.264 codec, but nonetheless I think we may well see them being used by filmmakers to create unique shots that few other drones are capable of achieving.

To me the Spark is almost like the action camera of drones. You can deploy it quickly and use it in places where other drones couldn't possibly go, although just how well the hand gestures actually work in the real world remains to be seen. At $499 US though, it could be worth a try - that's not that much more than a GoPro Hero 5 Black, and that doesn't even fly.

What do you think about the Spark? Would you buy one? Do you think the quality will be good enough for filmmakers? Let us know in the comments below.

DJI Spark Specifications:
Max Ascent Speed 9.8 ft/s (3 m/s) in Sport Mode without wind
Max Descent Speed 9.8 ft/s (3 m/s) in Auto Landing Mode
Max Speed 31 mph (50 kph) in Sport Mode without wind
Max Service Ceiling Above Sea Level 13,123 feet (4,000 m)
Max Flight Time 16 minutes (no wind at a consistent 12.4 mph (20 kph))
Max Hovering Time 15 minutes (no wind)
Operating Temperature Range 32° to 104° F (0° to 40° C)
Satellite Positioning Systems GPS/GLONASS
Hover Accuracy Range Vertical:
+/- 0.1 m (when Vision Positioning is active) or +/-0.5 m
Horizontal:
+/- 0.3 m (when Vision Positioning is active) or +/-1.5 m
Transmitter Power (EIRP) 2.4 GHz
FCC: 25 dBm; CE: 18 dBm; SRRC: 18 dBm
5.8 GHz
FCC: 27 dBm; CE: 14 dBm; SRRC: 27 dBm
Operating Frequency 2.400 - 2.483 GHz; 5.725 - 5.825 GHz
Takeoff Weight 300 g
Dimensions 143×143×55 mm
Diagonal Distance (propellers excluded) 170 mm
3D SENSING SYSTEM

Obstacle Sensing Range 1-16 ft (0.2 - 5 m)
Operating Environment Surface should be larger than 20×20 cm and enable diffuse reflection, with reflection rate >20% (eg. wall, tree, people)

CAMERA
Sensor 1/2.3″ CMOS
Effective pixels: 12 MP
Lens FOV 81.9° 25 mm (35 mm format equivalent) f/2.6
(shooting range: 2 m to ∞)
ISO Range Video: 100-3200
Photo: 100-1600
Electronic Shutter Speed 2-1/8000 s
Image Size 3968×2976
Still Photography Modes Single Shot
Burst Shooting: 3 frames
Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB): 3 bracketed frames at 0.7 EV bias
Interval: 2/3/5/7/10/15/20/30/60 s
Video Resolution FHD: 1920×1080 30p
Max Video Bitrate 24 Mbps
Supported File Systems FAT32 (≤ 32 GB)
Photo Format JPEG
Video Format MP4 (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264)

REMOTE CONTROLLER
Operating Frequency 2.412-2.462 GHz; 5.745-5.825 GHz
Max Transmission Distance 2.412 - 2.462 GHz (unobstructed, free of interference)
FCC: 1.2 mi (2 km); CE: 0.3 mi (500 m); SRRC: 0.3 mi (500 m)
5.745 - 5.825 GHz (unobstructed, free of interference)
FCC: 1.2 mi (2 km); CE: 0.18 mi (300 m); SRRC: 0.7 mi (1.2 km)

Operating Temperature Range 32° to 104° F (0° to 40° C)
Battery 2970 mAh
Transmitter Power (EIRP) 2.4 GHz
FCC: ≤26 dBm; CE: ≤18 dBm; SRCC: ≤18 dBm
5.8 GHz
FCC: ≤28 dBm; CE: ≤14 dBm; SRCC: ≤26 dBm
Operating Current/Voltage 950 mAh @3.7 V
Supported Mobile Device Size Thickness range: 6.5-8.5 mm
Max length: 160 mm

INTELLIGENT FLIGHT BATTERY
Capacity 1480 mAh
Voltage 11.4 V
Max Charging Voltage 13.05 V
Battery Type LiPo 3S
Energy 16.87 Wh
Net Weight Approx. 0.2 lbs (95 g)
Charging Temperature Range 41° to 104° F (5° to 40° C)

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DJI goes small with tiny Spark drone for the selfie generation - Newsshooter

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The DJI Spark is a tiny new drone aimed squarely at the selfie generation. DJI are touting it as a personal drone designed so you can literally take it anywhere to capture video and stills. Not only can it take off and land in the palm of your hand, but Spark has also been designed to interact with the user by using simple hand gestures.

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Engagement study

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Facebook and Google may suck up the majority of audience and digital advertising share, but they're not the only social platforms showing growth. Here's a look at how and where people spend their time, across a range of countries.

Facebook dominates worldwide
Facebook is the leader in 119 of 149 countries analyzed by social media strategist Vincenzo Cosenza, using traffic data from Alexa and SimilarWeb. That leaves plenty of other countries where other platforms (albeit some that Facebook owns, like Instagram) and homegrown social networks dominate. In Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Iran and Indonesia, Instagram is now the most popular network. In China, where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are blocked in most areas, Qzone is the top social network, with 632 million active users, according to the same analysis. Japan is the only country where Twitter is the most popular platform, according to Cosenza.

Meanwhile, VKontakte (known as VK) and Odnoklassniki (OK.ru), which are both controlled by Russia's Mail.Ru Group, have gained ground, Cosenza said. QQ and WeChat, China's favorite messaging apps, have even more users than Qzone, according to Statista.

Germans favor Amazon for content
Amazon's push into media and advertising continues to make headlines. It's already a favorite in Germany as a platform on which to buy digital content and services, according to eMarketer. More than half of internet users in Germany buy digital content or services on Amazon, while 39 percent purchase on Google Play; 30 percent buy across other websites and 25 percent purchase on iTunes, according to the same report.

Amazon is also focused on kids in Germany, where watching movies, videos and TV series was the most common digital activity among 6- to 7-year-olds, according to a survey by Forsa for Bitkom in December 2016. Amazon is now aiming to extend its lead over paid digital content platforms in the country by expanding the mobile distribution of its child-focused content app FreeTime.

Brits spend the most time on Google
In the U.K., Google and Facebook account for 1 in 3.5 minutes of Britons' time spent online, according to measurement firm Verto Analytics, which analyzed the internet activity of 5,000 U.K. adults.

Brits spend more than 1 in every 6 minutes (17 percent) of U.K. internet time on Google properties - primarily search, YouTube and Gmail. Around 11 percent of their time goes to Facebook-owned properties, which include WhatsApp and Instagram, according to the same report.

Oath, the newly combined offering of Yahoo and AOL, ranks seventh in where people spend their internet time in the U.K., accounting for 1.9 percent of their time.

The 10 most dominant companies in the U.K. - all of which are U.S. firms, except for the BBC - account for half of internet time, according to the report. Sky is the only other U.K. company besides the BBC in the 20 most-used sites in the U.K.

"The implications of a handful of dominant companies - particularly just two - go beyond simply which sites we surf. You have fewer sites increasingly controlling not only what you see and hear, but where advertising revenue goes," said Hannu Verkasalo, CEO of Verto Analytics.

YouTube outpaces Facebook-owned apps in global active users
Only YouTube held its own against Facebook and its WhatsApp and Messenger apps for the highest number of active users this month, according to a report from Statista. In August, YouTube had 1.5 million active monthly users, compared to Facebook's 2 billion, WhatsApp's 1.2 billion and Messenger's 1.2 billion. WeChat ranked fifth with 938 million, and Instagram had 700 million.

Facebook reaches the most 18- to 29-year-old U.S. users
In the U.S., Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have the highest shares of 18- to 29-year-old users, with 86 percent, 58 percent and 71 percent, respectively, according to Statista data from February. Twitter is next in line with 47 percent of that age group, and Snapchat follows with 45 percent of that age group.

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How people spend time on social platforms globally, in 5 charts - Digiday

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Facebook and Google may suck up the majority of audience and digital advertising share, but they're not the only social platforms showing growth. Here's a look at how and where people spend their time, across a range of countries.

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Social media giant working with local news

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Last month, a group of local newsrooms began working with Facebook as part of a project by the social media platform to establish stronger ties to local news.

Six newsrooms are part of the first six-month pilot program, with another six to follow. Those newsrooms, Berkleyside, Honolulu Civil Beat, Texas Tribune, QCityMetro, Philadelphia Public School Notebook and Homepage Media Group, are members of Local Independent Online News Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Each organization is working on their own project during the six months, building a direct relationship with Facebook, undergoing training and learning best practices for using the social network.

The results of their projects will be shared, said Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University's Center for Cooperative Media. The Center for Cooperative Media is coordinating the Knight Foundation project for the program's work with LION, INN and the Detroit Journalism Cooperative. ( Disclosure: The Knight Foundation helped fund my position.)

Members of the project, who come from both editorial and business ranks at their organizations, have several goals.

"One, we want to help them have a direct relationship with people at Facebook," Murray said. "That's something that sounds simple, but for many, many news publishers, trying to get ahold of someone who works at Facebook is nearly impossible."
Want more on the transformation of local news? Join the conversation in our weekly newsletter, Local Edition.
David Beard, who previously worked at The Washington Post and PRI, is working as a consultant with the newsrooms to get a sense of what they need, what they need to do and what Facebook needs to know about them.

They're all very different organizations with very different needs, he said. But they do have one need in common.

"I think in some ways it's something as simple as a mechanism for an answer back," he said. "Just to be able to say, 'We've had success in a dealing with Facebook,' it's not just 'go see my links for certification' or 'go to the FAQ page.' It's something beyond that."

The projects each outlet is working on vary. For instance, at Philadelphia Public School Notebook, email lists have been an important tool. Does Facebook have tools that will help those lists grow? Could they alter those tools to help grow subscribers or members?

Murray hopes to work with other platforms as part of the project as well, including Instagram, Twitter, Google and YouTube.

In May, Facebook began testing new products to help better connect users with local news by helping people find local groups, linking people in community-focused groups to local news and offering a badge that lets locals identify as such when commenting on local publishers' pages.

The Facebook Journalism Project met with local publishers at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Phoenix, and the meetings were encouraging, Josh Mabry, the strategic partnerships manager for local publishers at Facebook, said via email.

"One common refrain we heard is that they are keenly interested in more education on products like Instant Articles and how their peers are using them successfully," Mabry said. "Our intention with this project, and the Facebook Group we've created for these publishers, is to provide more resources and a more direct conversation along with opportunities to learn from one another in the process."

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Last month, Facebook launched a pilot program with 6 local newsrooms. Here's how it's going

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Last month, a group of local newsrooms began working with Facebook as part of a project by the social media platform to establish stronger ties to local news. Six newsrooms are part of the first six-month pilot program, with another six to follow.

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Innovations

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When you're reporting on a trip through four continents with countless dialects and local guides along the way - how on earth do you communicate with people both for interviews and for sharing the stories?

That's something that former Visiting Nieman Fellow Paul Salopek is trying to find out, as he has been literally walking across Earth for the past four years in a project called the Out of Eden Walk. Chronicling the global migration of humanity step by step, from the basin of Kenya to the sacred lands of Israel and the West Bank, to, currently, the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, Salopek is in the midst of a multi-year journey that started in 2013 and is scheduled to conclude in the Patagonia region of South America in 2023.

"We want to share the storytelling with the people whose lives I am walking through," Salopek explained in an email from Tajikistan, "where flying ants attracted by my headlamp are rocketing up my nose."

Logistical obstacles aside, Salopek and the Out of Eden team - the project is led by National Geographic and has support from the Knight Foundation (which also supports Nieman Lab ) - have recently been exploring the digital challenges and opportunities that modern technology has developed. These include condensing his reporting backpacks into the latest iPhones and also building out software for a community of volunteer translators to share Salopek's stories in languages across the world. This translator tool has since allowed the 20-plus volunteers to publish more than 200 translations across 16 languages (the tool currently supports 26 languages).

"We have seen strong representation of languages prevalent in the regions Paul has walked through and written about in his dispatches from the field - Russian, Arabic, and Turkish, for example," said National Geographic intern Andrea Vale. "But at the same time, some of our most prolific translators are working in languages with little direct geographic connection to the walk route - Polish, Kannada."

The Out of Eden team examined existing software to adapt for the tool, but decided to build its own interface and user experience to fit with the longform narrative nature of the project and its varying audiences. "Both the translation effort itself and the community aspect are important objectives of the tool," Kasie Coccaro, the director of impact initiatives at the National Geographic Society, said. "We hope this will continue to grow and become a valuable forum for some of the project's most ardent followers to connect with one another, trade ideas, and share their enthusiasm for the walk's mission."

Salopek shared some of his thoughts on the necessity of the translation ability and provided an update from the field - or rather, from the mountains of Tajikistan. (You can see where he is in real-time here.)

Christine Schmidt: In general, how has the walk been going, as it relates to digital production? What are some of the tools you've found most useful, digital and otherwise?

Paul Salopek: This is by design a project that promotes what might be called 'contemplative international reporting.' It is also 95 percent or more a digital project. To say that these two facts coexist without friction would be understatement.

Thankfully, my main distribution partner, the National Geographic Society, has supported this global experiment. We've stayed true to the "slow journalism" ethos of the walk, a literary style of reportage that strives to grow attention spans online, rather than shrink them through microblogging, etc. We ask readers to wait. The reward, hopefully, is storytelling that evokes some nuanced sense of wonder at our shared world.

I started out in Ethiopia completely against social media as an interactive or promotional tool. I thought it would be too intrusive for my process, which is solitary. But as you'll see, we have an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It became clear early on that this was an organic way to sort of subvert the shallowness of the medium, by maintain an interlinked, lyric heartbeat for a project that - again, by design - produces meatier dispatches only every week or two. I'm lucky to have a wise social media editor, Camille Bromley, to manage that. And the social media interactivity with readers has turned out to be a pure delight - and sometimes a good source of stories.

On the non-digital front, a long, immersive project like this one that rambles through dozens of cultures and languages benefits, too, from in-person interactions. I lecture at schools along the way, offer free journalism workshops to colleagues in the countries I walk through, open museum exhibits, do media appearances, and otherwise engage in public diplomacy for the journey. Somewhere in there I also have to walk and write. A lot. Like right now, at night in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, where flying ants attracted by my headlamp are rocketing up my nose.

Schmidt: What has surprised you about the digital advances in our civilization while you've been walking alongside the origins of civilization?

Salopek: I've walked through all the good and bad platitudes about the digital revolution. They're true. They're real. The explosion in mobile connectivity has empowered isolated Ethiopian pastoralists to find better market prices for their camels. These same herders, wearing skirts with big daggers jammed in their belts, were even seeing my stories on their phones before I did. In Djibouti, I walked with a guy who was running his parliamentary candidacy from the trail - a phone perpetually clamped to his ear. (He lost.) And the ability to interact live - almost at will - with students across the planet is great.

But like everyone else who uses this technology, I've seen the dystopian side, too, at foot level. I was detained by security forces 34 times in Uzbekistan. It wasn't the secret police who were stalking me for walking while being foreign. It was ordinary people calling the cops because they'd been indoctrinated from kindergarten to report alien-looking people. Digital technology deployed in infantilizing cultures of fear. Sounds like it's a spreading phenomenon.

Schmidt: Are there any other digital tools for connectivity, community-building, or other purposes planned for the walk? What can we expect next?

Salopek: A lot is in the works, including "walking academy" slow journalism workshops, where colleagues or students join me on the trail. We're also starting a citizen-journalist civic walk program in Chicago, thanks to a grant from the McCormick Foundation.

Schmidt: You're four years into the project - why introduce the translator tool now?

Salopek: The walk is global. Journalism covers a polyglot world. So as a matter of philosophy, it fits with our mission to share the storytelling in the regional languages that I'm walking through. It's a question of access, but it also keeps us grounded. As any foreign correspondent knows, letting the people you're writing about read what you're writing about them is the best tool for ensuring reportorial honesty.

Photo of Salopek crossing the remote Kyzyl Kum desert of Uzbekistan en route to China by John Stanmeyer/National Geographic. Map of Salopek's route by Ryan Morris/National Geographic.

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An update from 'Eden': Paul Salopek's epic walk introduces a tool for translators to share the stories in 26 languages

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When you're reporting on a trip through four continents with countless dialects and local guides along the way - how on earth do you communicate with people both for interviews and for sharing the stories?

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New video channel

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Facebook's big push into more professional video "shows" has finally arrived. Will it work?

Today, the social network announced "Watch," the long-awaited update to its video section where people can go watch short, episodic video shows. You'll also be able to watch some live video here, including live sports that Facebook has the rights to stream, like Major League Baseball games.

Facebook already had a video tab. But now that tab has been redesigned, and will include short episodic "shows" that Facebook didn't have before. Facebook is paying publishers* like BuzzFeed, ATTN and Group Nine Media to make these shows, and will retain the rights to some of them. The majority of the shows, though, will be posted on Facebook free of charge. Some publishers plan to run mid-roll video ads, a.k.a. commercials, during the shows to make money.

The redesign and focus on episodic shows has been a long time coming. But it also comes with a number of unanswered questions - some of which won't have answers for a long time.

Does anyone actually want to watch "shows" on Facebook? CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made clear his desire to create a place where people "watch episodically week over week." But most videos on Facebook seem to work because they appear organically in peoples' News Feeds, and people watch them - or scroll past them - just because they're there. Does anyone actually want to head over to Facebook to kick back and watch things on a regular basis? For long periods at a time? And sit through ads? We'll see.

Will Facebook's open "platform" approach ruin the experience? Facebook says that eventually this tab will be an "open platform" where anyone with a video camera and an idea can create a show, much like YouTube or Vimeo. (That's a lot cheaper than trying to actually compete with Netflix or Hulu!) But the premise behind "shows" originally felt high-quality - Facebook would pay or partner with professional video creators to make stuff exclusively for Facebook. Opening the tab up to anyone could flood the system with mediocre stuff that nobody actually wants to see. Will that dilute the effort? Or might some of those actually become the platform's breakout successes?

Will Facebook compensate media publishers enough that they keep making shows? Facebook has not yet proven that it can be a place where video creators can make big-time money, even though a lot of publishers are counting on Facebook video to drive revenue growth over the next couple of years. Its mid-roll video ads are very new, and Zuckerberg doesn't like pre-roll ads, which people have to wait through (or skip) before they can watch a video. If the business part doesn't work, will publishers stick around and keep making shows? Facebook already experienced this issue with another one of its media products: Instant Articles, a format that publishers flocked to but have become less excited about, in part because it's harder to make as much money there as on a normal web article page.

Will Facebook offer better search and discovery? YouTube has succeeded with an everyone-does-video approach, but it also has a much better search feature than Facebook does. If Facebook wants to eventually host thousands of shows, will people be able to find them? (Will Google index them?) Will Facebook make publishers pay for better placement in the new tab? Or can the News Feed actually serve as the killer "inbox" for Facebook shows you subscribe to?

It's also interesting to see that while Facebook has spent the past year trying desperately to copy Snapchat, its video tab strategy is very different.

In Snapchat's case, the company is very exclusive with what it allows inside its Discover section - the part that's not messages or Stories from your friends. As a result, it only has about one short video show per day, but it ensures that those shows are relatively professional quality. They're filmed exclusively for a mobile phone, and exclusively for Snap's audience.

Facebook is taking a different approach, one that should lead to a lot more videos, but possibly a bunch of amateurish ones. It's much more like YouTube than anything else. But there's already a YouTube.

For now, the new video section is only available to a small test group of users, but Facebook plans to roll it out to all U.S. users in the next few weeks or months. Facebook plans to have a few hundred shows when it rolls out to all U.S. users, and will eventually get to thousands of shows, according to Facebook's VP of News and Video Fidji Simo.

* Vox Media, which owns this site, is also working with Facebook, according to Reuters.

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Facebook now has video 'shows' - but does anybody want to watch TV on Facebook?

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Facebook's big push into more professional video "shows" has finally arrived. Will it work? Today, the social network announced "Watch," the long-awaited update to its video section where people can go watch short, episodic video shows. You'll also be able to watch some live video here, including live sports that Facebook has the rights to stream, like Major League Baseball games.

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Funding

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What if you got so fed up with the problems of funding journalism that you just got a bunch of people together and decided to fund it yourself?

That's what Phillip Smith, a senior fellow at Mozilla focusing on misinformation, did with other journalism benefactors in British Columbia. He and a group of eleven other people with ties to the journalism industry recently launched the Uncharted Journalism Fund. A group of trustees commits to each chipping in CAD $100 (USD $78.62) a month for a handpicked project proposed by a local journalist that otherwise wouldn't be published; chosen projects receive up to $3,000.

The projects that get funded may be tricky in terms of logistics, finances, or content: the first grant went to a project sharing the narratives of transgender people traveling from Canada to Alaska, and the second to an effort to visually capture the treacherous conditions oil tankers face during the region's stormy season. The latter had never been covered before, Smith said, because no one with experience in high seas filmmaking had enough resources to do it. Both projects are clear examples, he added, of the "uncharted" territory the fund is trying to reach. (Heads up: The next deadline is September 11.)

"If I would encourage anybody else to do this, it isn't because you'd become famous for funding the next drone investigative journalism story or something zany like that," Smith said, "but because people would have an opportunity to come together and discuss important journalism and storytelling. What stories are underrepresented in a community? What ways of telling them could be new and novel?"

Emily McCarty, who is working on the documentary about transgender people in Canada's sparsely populated North, said there isn't anything else like this for journalists like her. "My project's heart was in the people living in rural communities in the Yukon, where not many people are telling stories," she aid. "Unfortunately, it takes money and time to fund great stories, and many don't get told because freelancers and students can't undertake them without support."

Smith, who frequency consults in the journalism industry on digital products and and helped to launch MisInfoCon earlier this year, noticed some lamentations in a Facebook group of journalism professionals. "There was a thread that talked about how little financial support would be needed to get ideas off the ground," he said. "British Columbia is being acutely hit by the downsizing of media. There were lots of people interested in telling the stories in new and innovative ways." He said it was a matter of "hearing one too many gripes and saying 'Okay, I need to do something about this.'"

Smith relied on the model of the Awesome Foundation and Awesome Journalism, initiatives that similarly sprung up with trustees pitching in some amount of money each month toward a project selected by the group. For the Uncharted Journalism Fund, however, he wanted to retool the grants so that they are larger, awarded less frequently, and "chosen with an eye for the uncharted waters of tomorrow's journalism," he wrote in the post announcing the Fund's launch last October. Applicants can be journalists, students, academics, or just ordinary citizens who want to creatively tell a story through a project like this.

"Small grants like Uncharted really help out burgeoning journalists, because we don't have enough experience for the large grants, but can't complete any larger projects without funding," said McCarty, who was finishing her master's degree in journalism when she heard of the fund. "It's a catch-22 that Uncharted helps to find a way through."

The decision-makers for the fund are the dozen or so trustees - individuals familiar with the journalism market specifically in the British Columbia area. Among them are journalism professors, a documentary filmmaker, a digital product manager, and a leader of a media startup. Becoming a trustee means committing to contributing CAD $100 a month for one year, for a total pot of around CAD $12,000 to be split among the chosen projects. "I thought, how will I convince other journalists, who are typically underpaid anyway, to invest their own money?" Smith said. But it wasn't difficult to find enthusiastic volunteers: the fund secured six trustees in its first two or three months of existence.

Trustees are donating not just their money, but also their time. They review the applications and debate about the selections. "Being in the room with senior editors and people who have worked on big successful documentary funds and people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, sitting in a room to deliberate over an idea and its merits and its risks was eye-opening," Smith said.

Geography also matters in this situation. Smith devised the Uncharted Journalism Fund specifically for the British Columbia area so that the trustees and applicants would share an understanding of the existing local media landscape and of the context behind the proposed projects. (The fund doesn't lay any claim to the projects once they are completed; the reporters are encouraged to find media partners to publish them with.) Plus, the trustees can actually meet face-to-face with the recipients, host them at an annual event announcing the grant winners, and get to know them and their stories.

If you want to want to start up your own Uncharted Journalism Fund in your area, Smith is all for it. "It's really just a logo, a model, and a website. If people would like to replicate it elsewhere, we would be happy to support people in exploring that idea," Smith was quick to note. That would be another extension of the Awesome Foundation, which now has city-specific chapters in 17 countries.

The current application cycle's deadline is September 11. Smith and the trustees plan to spend a month reviewing the submissions. Three grants will be awarded each year.

If this sounds like a lot of legwork, Smith says it's a labor of love.

"The idea that we've been able to catalyze these projects that really might not have happened otherwise generates a really good feeling in the heart and the soul," he said.

Image of a boat in British Columbia waters by Karen Mallone used under a Creative Commons license.

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"OK, I need to do something about this": The Uncharted Journalism Fund is funding stories that wouldn't be told otherwise

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What if you got so fed up with the problems of funding journalism that you just got a bunch of people together and decided to fund it yourself? That's what Phillip Smith, a senior fellow at Mozilla focusing on misinformation, did with other journalism benefactors in British Columbia.

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Innovation and business

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Three years ago, Davide Mancini was trying to make it work as a freelance journalist, after studying war and conflict reporting in graduate school.

"Many times, I found myself wanting to ask the same question to a large number of people, all at the same time - for example, during political demonstrations or catastrophes," he said. "So I started wondering how I could multiply a question to get a greater number of answers."

Mancini, with economist Fabio Capoferri and developer Sirio Marchi, is a cofounder of Media Vox Pop (from the broadcasting term), a Google Digital News Initiative-funded Italian media startup that wants to give newsrooms who don't have broadcast-level experience or resources a simpler way to collect and present video feedback from readers.

"In many cases, newsrooms do not have a clear strategy on how to engage their audience using user generated content," Mancini said. "It's still a new kind of content for editors, and it takes a long time to find, license and use."

For a monthly fee ( starting at €100 for outlets with fewer than 250,000 monthly unique visitors), newsrooms get unlimited use of the Media Vox Pop service, which allows them to pose questions in a video format, push the call out to social channels, and organize and publish video responses from the audience. (The fee includes video storage and streaming.)

Questions can range from opinions on political issues to calls for story ideas or advocacy campaigns. Users can record their own answers from any browser and send it back to the newsroom. Newsrooms can then reorder and curate audience responses directly on a dashboard.

In Italy, similar companies like VTTP.co already exist that help media organizations incorporate mobile-friendly video into their websites or apps, though VTTP.co is more focused on marketing and branding, Mancini argues. (The audience engagement component of Media Vox Pop also recalls the U.S.-based Hearken, whose tools allow audiences to participate in newsroom reporting processes from the ideas stage.)

"We have not steered away from placing our emphasis on the journalistic video-question," Mancini said. "As a young startup, we are still collecting case studies so that we can have concrete numbers to work on."

One outlet that's tested out Media Vox Pop is Long Island's Newsday. Earlier this year, users were asked to offer advice to President Trump as part of Newsday's first-100-days coverage (the campaign was paired with another interactive where users could give Trump a progress report). In the coming months, an Italian-language digital news site will start a trial, as will a German public broadcaster, according to Mancini.

Newsday had been looking for a way to let its audience submit video responses directly for some time, according to Samuel Guzik, multimedia editor for Newsday's editorial board. It once tried out soliciting video letters to the editor about red-light cameras on Long Island (a hot topic at the time), but "it was a cumbersome experience that involved some long phone calls between our producers and the readers who wanted to film themselves," Guzik said. "Media Vox Pop reduces a lot of the friction to collecting that kind of content."

Audience participation was disappointing on the Trump-related experiment, Guzik said, but that could have been in part because fewer readers were willing to put their faces to opinions on Trump. He's interested in experimenting again on a different topic: "Our goal is to use a local issue that might animate our readership."

Other Media Vox Pop testers include institutions like the European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy, which this past summer promoted its REIsearch initiative to connect scientists and with the wider public. Amnesty International has used Media Vox Pop in video campaigns, using it to collect reactions from followers that it then edited into a video for Facebook. The video performed better than the average Amnesty International video, Mancini said, and "the staff expressed satisfaction with the stats as their effort...was much lower than that required for their other videos."

While Media Vox Pop is slowly growing its client base, as with most startups, its financial stability is still an open question. Mancini is transparent about its situation. "We are generating low revenue, coming mostly from services we offer together with the platform," he said. Since early 2015, it's made €133,000 that's gone largely towards developing the tech; the startup is "getting close to the 'cliff,'" he said, and will need to reach profitability by October or November.

What lies ahead for a product that organizations appear to enjoy using but might be hesitant to pay for?

"Most of them have not appeared willing to pay for a product that will also require some extra curation within their newsrooms - watching and selecting incoming video content. It's not easy to introduce a tool that requires some extra effort on the client side, when they are at the same time being charged for the service," Mancini said. "Such a shift of mentality is not easy. That's why we have recently started looking into new ways of encouraging newsrooms to adopt our system."

For instance, it's been testing taking on that editorial task - curating the video responses that come in after a newsroom posts a question. It's also considering opening up to more free trials to collect more feedback. Down the line, Media Vox Pop might offer features like embeddable interactive maps that allow audiences to explore how responses varied by geographical location. It's also looking at ways to develop the service to allow for more fluid debate, rather than just a single call-and-response interaction.

"At the moment, we are still at the first level: getting people to answer," Mancini said. "We want to help newsrooms pull content in, which is exactly the opposite of what newsrooms have been doing: pushing content out."

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Want more audience engagement in video form? This startup is betting there's a business in there

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Three years ago, Davide Mancini was trying to make it work as a freelance journalist, after studying war and conflict reporting in graduate school. "Many times, I found myself wanting to ask the same question to a large number of people, all at the same time - for example, during political demonstrations or catastrophes," he said.