ISSUE

Summer 2010

The Digital Landscape: What's Next for News?

Explore the emerging realms of digital territory where news and information reside—or will soon. It’s a place where game playing thrives and augmented reality tugs at possibilities. It’s where video excels, while the appetite for long-form text and the experience of “deep reading” is diminished, and it’s where the allure of multitasking greets the crush of information. Learn how young people negotiate their journey, and travel inside the brain to discover its capacities in the digital realm. Dig deeper into topics covered in the magazine by clicking on the books in our digital library to reveal selected videos, articles, blogs and Web sites.

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Articles

Technology

Apple’s iPad Meets Hamlet’s Blackberry

History teaches that ‘long-established media technologies, when faced with the prospect of commercial extinction, counter with their own dialectic.’
Peter Cobus
July 6, 2010
Technology

The Future of News: What Ninth-Grade Students Think

RELATED ARTICLES“Journalism: English for the 21st Century”– Esther Wojcicki“E-Textbooks to iPads: Do Teenagers Use Them?”– Esther WojcickiEsther Wojcicki’s ninth-grade students at Palo Alto High School, most of whom are 14…
June 30, 2010
Technology

News-Focused Game Playing: Is It a Good Way to Engage People in an Issue?

‘Ultimately our challenge will be to determine which metrics for successful storytelling turn out to be most important in the digital environment.’
Kathleen A. Hansen
June 29, 2010
Technology

Video Games: What They Can Teach Us About Audience Engagement

‘… we learn differently from content-driven media than we do from media driven by choice and problem solving.’
James Paul Gee
June 29, 2010
Technology

The Tablet’s Mobile Multimedia Revolution: A Reality Check

‘In my opinion, tablets, like the Internet in the past, are fantastic opportunities, not just devices on which to perform the same old tricks.’
Juan Antonio Giner
June 29, 2010
Technology

Revealing the Digital News Experience—For Young And Old

In surveys and analysis, the Pew Research Center illuminates the ever-changing course of Americans’ digital habits.
Amy Mitchell
June 29, 2010
Technology

News in the Age of Now

‘On the Web, skimming is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. That poses a huge problem for those who report and publish the news.’
Nicholas Carr
June 29, 2010
Technology

Digital Demands: The Challenges of Constant Connectivity

MIT professor Sherry Turkle finds the prevalence of PowerPoint in grade school classrooms “distressing,” yet PowerPoint is ubiquitous. It has gained adherents in the federal Office of the Joint Chiefs…
Sherry Turkle
June 29, 2010
Technology

Generational Divide: Digital Technology’s Paradoxical Message

In an interview Sherry Turkle did with Aleks Krotoski for a BBC project, “The Virtual Revolution,” she spoke about how young people think about privacy and how their experiences with…
Sherry Turkle
June 29, 2010
Technology

Lessons for the Future From the First Post-Pokémon Generation

‘Creating interest-driven content and programming that is easily shared, interactive and participatory is key to unlocking the power of networked media.’
Mizuko Ito
June 29, 2010
Features

Thinking About Multitasking: It’s What Journalists Need to Do

Heavy media multitaskers ‘are often influenced by intervening content. News articles are therefore going to require more recapitulations and reminders to help readers pick up where they left off.’
Clifford Nass
June 29, 2010
Features

Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions

‘The reading circuit’s very plasticity is also its Achilles’ heel. It can be fully fashioned over time and fully implemented when we read, or it can be short-circuited …’
Maryanne Wolf
June 29, 2010
Features

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

‘This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists … . The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn…
Jack Fuller
June 29, 2010
Technology

The Future of Storytelling: A Participatory Endeavor

At the Center for Future Storytelling, researchers envision how technology can give people more control over TV programs they encounter and stories they follow.
V. Michael Bove Jr.
June 29, 2010
Technology

Digital Immersion: Augmenting Places With Stories And Information

‘News organizations and start-up entrepreneurs are only beginning to explore the potential of augmented reality.’
Mike Liebhold
June 29, 2010
Technology

Journalism on the Map: A Case for Location-Aware Storytelling

‘Every place has a story, and every story has a place.’
Krissy Clark
June 29, 2010
Technology

The Peril and Promise of the Semantic Web

What is the role of the journalist as computers become more adept at pulling together data from different sources?
Andrew Finlayson
June 29, 2010
Technology

Critical Thinking About Journalism: A High School Student’s View

<Lucy Chen created a quiz to test critical thinking skills learned in the News Literacy Project. Click to enlarge »RELATED ARTICLE“News Literacy Project: Students Figure Out What News and Information…
Lucy Chen
June 29, 2010
Technology

News Literacy Project: Students Figure Out What News and Information to Trust

‘Without a demand for quality journalism (on any platform) from the next generation, what future will it have?’
Alan C. Miller
June 29, 2010
Technology

E-Textbooks to iPads: Do Teenagers Use Them?

 ‘... I didn’t anticipate the heated debates we would have about the impact of these emerging digital platforms or the intensity of our discussions about the future of e-textbooks, journalism,…
Esther Wojcicki
June 29, 2010
Technology

Journalism: English for the 21st Century

‘The two main drives in teenagers’ lives are for independence and acceptance; our approach to journalism supports these drives through favoring freedom of expression and showcasing student work on a variety of…
Esther Wojcicki
June 29, 2010
Technology

Understanding the iGeneration—Before the Next Mini-Generation Arrives

‘As the pace of technological change accelerates, mini-generations are defined by their distinctive patterns of media use, levels of multitasking, and preferred methods of communication.’
Larry Rosen
June 29, 2010
Features

Watching the Human Brain Process Information

‘We measure the amount of brain activity while somebody’s doing something. You can’t generate more activity beyond a certain point. There’s an upper limit.’
Marcel Just
June 29, 2010
Features

Novelty and Testing: When the Brain Learns and Why It Forgets

The orange and yellow regions in the brain’s right hemisphere were more active for a group of individuals when they stopped themselves from making a movement. Image by Eliza Congdon.Russell…
Russell Poldrack
June 29, 2010
A Nation’s Past and Promise: A Shift in the Meaning of American Symbols
Nieman Notes

A Nation’s Past and Promise: A Shift in the Meaning of American Symbols

An Essay in Words and Photographs by Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson
June 15, 2010
Technology

Hacks/Hackers: Bringing Journalists and Technologists Together

‘We’re all trying to figure out what works, and that’s really the key to innovation: a tolerance for failure and embrace of experimentation.’
Burt Herman
June 15, 2010
Opinion

There’s More to Being a Journalist Than Hitting the ‘Publish’ Button

For better or worse, the Internet is ‘biased to the amateur and to the immediate.’
Douglas Rushkoff
June 15, 2010
Technology

Storytelling in the Digital Age: Finding the Sweet Spot

‘Old metrics for credibility and trust no longer guide us, nor does trust emanate exclusively from the power of a brand name or from the overpowering resources of a recognized…
Hanson Hosein
June 14, 2010
Technology

Joining Digital Forces Strengthens Local Investigative Reporting

‘Our goal is to build online tools that the people can easily use to enhance their ability as watchdogs—whether they are citizens or journalists.’
Brant Houston
June 14, 2010
Technology

Playing the News Moves Into the Classroom

RELATED ARTICLE“News-Focused Game Playing: Is It a Good Way to Engage People in an Issue?”– Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen What we learned in our Knight News Challenge grant…
Kathleen A. Hansen
June 14, 2010
Technology

YouTube’s Ecosystem for News

‘Our users innovate at an extraordinary pace and in ways that amaze us, make our world more transparent, and change the way we consume information and are informed.’
Steve Grove
June 14, 2010
Technology

Twitter: Can It Be a Reliable Source of News?

‘I came to understand that there is a science to this quest for creating the right network. It’s an empirical process, one that requires lots of time and thought and…
Janic Tremblay
June 14, 2010
Technology

Establishing a Digital Value for Watchdog Reporting

‘Our impulse as digital journalists is to innovate—and this means finding stories that aren’t being covered by other news media in Baltimore and doing what we can to illuminate them…
Stephen Janis
June 14, 2010
Features

Origins of Edge

RELATED ARTICLE“A Big Question: ‘How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?’” – John BrockmanThe Edge project was inspired by the 1971 failed art experiment entitled “The World Question…
June 14, 2010
Nieman Notes

From Rejection to Success—With ‘Radiohead Journalism’

In a crowdfunding experiment that earned back what it cost to report a story, a writer discovers a fresh, but unproven, path for long narrative stories.
Paige Williams
June 14, 2010
From the Curator

Fairness as an Essential Ingredient in News Reporting

The Nieman Foundation’s Taylor Family Award recognizes journalistic fairness—and we learn from the stories it honors how newspapers achieve it.
Bob Giles
June 14, 2010
Technology

For a Start-up, Machine-Generated Stories Are the Name of the Game

For a partner in a start-up specializing in stories written by machines, the only downside to attracting coverage in Bloomberg Businessweek was the headline: “Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?”“We want to…
Jan Gardner
June 14, 2010
Opinion

A Message for Journalists: It’s Time to Flex Old Muscles in New Ways

‘We’ll learn by trying new ways of doing what we’ve done with news, by putting ourselves visibly in the social media mix, and by using the emerging tools of daily…
Ken Doctor
June 14, 2010
Journalist’s Trade

Categorizing What Works—So We Can Apply Those Lessons to Future Endeavors

As journalism heads into digital territory, an exploration of online news sites reveals 100 that offer promising pathways.
Michele McLellan
June 14, 2010
Features

A Big Question: ‘How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?’

Edge posed this question; discover how a wide range of thinkers responded.
John Brockman
June 14, 2010
Technology

Summer 2010: Introduction

Explore the emerging realms of digital territory where news and information reside—or will soon. It’s a place where game playing thrives and augmented reality tugs at possibilities. It’s where video…
Melissa Ludtke
June 14, 2010
Nieman Notes

Summer 2010: Class Notes

Headliner Awards for Print and Radio Journalism Three Nieman Fellows have been honored by the National Headliner Awards program, which is one of the oldest and largest annual contests recognizing…
Jan Gardner
June 11, 2010