While the journalists of today operate in an ever faster-paced industry, and netiizens have access to a cornucopia of sources of news and information, the journalist of the future now need a new media skillset and a new media mindset to become digitally savvy with the ability to THINK digitally in order to be relevant

1. DDIIGGIITTAALL JJOOUURRNNAALLIISSMM
WWeebbssiitteess,, bbllooggss && MMaappppiinngg
Achi Celestine
PPrreesseenntteedd @@ NNIITTDDAA
CChhaalllleennggeess ooff RReeppoorrttiinngg
IICCTT IINN AA DDIIGGIITTAALL AAGGEE
Chief Digital Marketing Strategist
Cihan Group
Twitter: @cihangroup
celestine@cihangroup.net

2. INTRODUCTION
The last seven years have seen the phenomenal growth
and expansion of not only online journalism but also social
media journalism in Nigeria. In this session, we shall look
into the following:
AT A GLANCE: Past, Present and Future
News Gathering and Dissemination
Media Convergence
Impact

3. At A Glance
PAST: how journalism was
empowered by the newsroom and
existed through one-way
communication

4. Remember?
The Hypodermic Needle Theory
Journalism in the past used the hypodermic
needle theory which suggests that

5. “The audience passively
accepts the message, injected
by the mass media”
•…the audience play a passive
role.

6. At A Glance
PRESENT: how the barriers of
journalism were taken apart by the
borderless Internet and how
citizens had a say in the daily news

7. At A Glance
FUTURE: how journalist and
audience became one and how
multiple media will integrate into a
seamless flow of information

8. AT A GLANCE
• The defunct Post Express, under the direction of the late Dr. Stanley
Macebuh, is widely acknowledged as the first Nigerian newspaper to
migrate its content to the Internet in 1996. Like many newspapers at
the time, the Post Express merely recycled its print content to the
Web.
• By the close of the 1990s, a few other newspapers, notably the
(Nigerian) Guardian, Punch, Vanguard, and ThisDay, had websites
where they episodically republished selected contents from their print
editions.
• By the early 2000s, almost all the legacy newspapers in Nigeria had
some Web presence, aided in part by the aggregation and distribution
of their content, along with those of other African newspapers, by the
AllAfrica.com, the Washington DC-based multimedia content service
provider widely recognized as the world’s largest Africa centered site.

9. INTRODUCTION
There are two momentous developments that defined the Nigerian
journalistic landscape in the last ten years.
The first is the migration of all major Nigerian newspapers to the
Internet (while actively sustaining their print editions) in hopes of
reaching a wider audience and the highly educated Nigerian
migratory elite in the diaspora
The second development is the robust growth and flowering of
transnational, diasporan citizen online news media that have
vigorously sought and captured the attention of Nigerians both at
home and in the diaspora (Elendu Reports, Sahara Reporters, the
Times of Nigeria, the Nigerian Village Square, HuhuOnline,
PointBlankNews and many others.

10. How was news gathered previously?

11. A typical newsroom involved:
A typical newsroom involved:
• Reporters
• District correspondents
• Sub-editors & Story writers
• Cameraman
• Assignment editors
• Desk editors
• Engineers
• Reporters
• District correspondents
• Sub-editors & Story writers
• Cameraman
• Assignment editors
• Desk editors
• Engineers

12. Public Public
Assignment
editors
Reporters
Cameraman
District
correspondents
Get news from
their network
of sources
(PR
professionals,
locals etc.)
Write &
publish
article
Public Public

13. News will then be disseminated
Magazines Newspapers
Radio
Television
through…

14. The Change to Today
Interactive journalism, slowly moving to a
transactional horizontal model  i.e. now the
news readers will give feedback to the news
source / agency
Audience were commentators; they are
slowly becoming watchdogs & newsmakers
Changing definitions of “the press”
-PAST: It refers to print, radio, TV
-NOW: now it is broader  it encompasses social media +
anyone with access to publishing technology

15. Features of online Journalism
There are three dominant features that are fundamental to the
possibility and vitality of online journalism.
The first feature is interactivity, the ability for readers or
audiences of online content to react to or interact with and even
adapt news content presented to them. The comment section of
online content is a key element of this attribute.
The second feature is multimediality, which is the technical
capability for news content to be delivered in multiple platforms—
text, video, audio, and animated graphics.
The third feature that defines the exceptionality of online
journalism is hypertextuality, which is the ability of news sites “to
connect the story to other stories, archives, resources and so forth
through hyperlinks.

16. Stages of online Journalism
mainstream
newspapers merely
recycled their print
content to the
new online platform.
The second stage
improved on the first and
involved some measure of
interactivity with the
news content posted on
news Web sites. At this
point, content ceased to
be dull and static; it
became periodically
updated as news broke.
So news appeared on
news Web sites first
before it appeared in the
print editions.
The third, and in his reckoning
current, stage is the convergent
phase. This phase features :
-Dynamic content that has a lot
of multimediality and
hypertextuality.
-Possibility for the audio and
video files upload and for
exclusively video- and audio-based
or photographic reports
that cannot possibly be
captured by the print medium
to be featured on websites.
The next stage, which is already
unfolding in many fascinating
ways, will be networked social
and mobile journalism, or what
we now know as citizen
journalism.
Online journalism evolved
from textuality to
hypertextuality and then to
multimediality and is now
inching toward an amorphous,
citizen-led, networked, social-media
and mobile phase.

17. Nigerian online Journalism
 The websites of Nigerian homeland newspapers fail the requirements of
multimediality and hypertextuality and seem to be stuck in the first stage in the
evolution of online journalism.
 They seem to be leapfrogging to the networked social journalism phase. Since
Post Express first migrated its content to the Internet in 1996, subsequent
Nigerian newspapers that appeared on the Web, for the most part, also merely
repurposed static shovelware from their print versions. There were exceptions,
though. The Nigerian Guardian, which prides itself on being “the flagship of
Nigerian journalism” fairly interactive, although it was always lacking in
multimediality and hypertextuality.
 A recent notable case of a Nigerian newspaper that could be said to have
graduated to the second stage of online journalism is the Abuja-based
Leadership newspaper. The paper’s website provided a robust platform for
readers to react to and interact with its stories.
 Other Nigerian newspapers that currently experiment with some form of
interactivity on their websites are Daily Trust (based in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal
capital), P.M. News, Vanguard, Punch, and the Nation (all based in Lagos) and
the up-and-coming multi-media news platform called NEXT, which is led by Dele
Olojede, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nigerian journalist who served as the foreign
editor for Newsday.

18. How is news gathered today?

19. • Monitoring
online websites
• Newsrooms
• Event tipoffs

20. In other words…

21. It’s the age of the Internet!
Government
information
Search engine &
Indices
Difficult-to-locate
information
Identify potential
sources

22. How is news reported today?
 it’s a change from the past.

23. Assignment
editors
Reporters
Cameraman
District
correspondents
Get news from
their network
of sources
(PR
professionals,
locals, blogs,
Internet etc.)
Craft
multimedia
news
package
Audience
Get news
from their
network of
sources
(other
eyewitnesses
etc.)
Post on
social
media/
blogs

24. But survival requires understanding all these new
technologies so journalists and news organizations can
make informed decisions about why and how to utilize
them.
This session covers the major digital online tools and
trends that are disrupting the news industry and
changing the way journalists do their jobs.

25. And because the audience are no longer passive,
the newsroom has to adapt accordingly and
disseminate News through…

26. +

27. Present Journalism Mediums
ONLINE JOURNALISM
Forms bulk of news
consumption by audience
Traditional news agencies use
online mediums as secondary
publishing platforms
Several news organisations are
online-only platforms
(e.g. The Huffington Post)

28. Present Journalism Mediums
CITIZEN JOURNALISM
 User-generated reports
through blogs, podcasts &
videos
 Highly supported by social
media
 Development of pro-am
partnerships
(e.g. Ohmynews, Off The Bus
by The Huffington Post)

29. Style Of Reporting in Journalism Today
Aggregation of
information from
numerous
individuals or
organizations into a
single news story
• Makes no claim of
objectivity
• Subjective
viewpoint
• E.g. Newspaper
columns, Editorials
Opposite of
watchdog
journalism
Agencies that
break stories and
sell them to other
publications for
post

31. the transition to digital journalism
the transition to digital journalism
A change in the news model: “Everyone creates & consumes news.”
A change in the news model: “Everyone creates & consumes news.”

32. It will be an age of personalization.
The importance & relevance of a news piece is
determined by the people, not the news
agencies

33. How will news be gathered tomorrow?
Socialisation Of News
• a.k.a. The Information Divide
• Accuracy VS. Immediacy
Occurrence Of
Occurrence Of
Event
Event
Published
story/report
by Journalist
Published
story/report
by Journalist
GAP
Social Media

34. How will news be reported tomorrow?
Firstly through Curative Journalism
Secondly, news in the future will be reported via
Hyperlocalisation.
Web 2.0, podcast, videocast and photo slideshows, social
networks and blogging, map mashups and mobile devices.
The list seems endless
“We all have access to pretty much the same information
sources, aside from the investigation and journalism that
people at news agencies perform. There’s enough out
there for someone who simply wants to be a helpful
“We all have access to pretty much the same information
sources, aside from the investigation and journalism that
people at news agencies perform. There’s enough out
there for someone who simply wants to be a helpful
guide, to plant their flag and be a good resource for
whatever it is they’re interested in. You can use RSS,
Twitter, Storify, Storyful and any number of other tools to
stay on top of what is happening and be a human filter
guide, to plant their flag and be a good resource for
whatever it is they’re interested in. You can use RSS,
Twitter, Storify, Storyful and any number of other tools to
stay on top of what is happening and be a human filter
for what I should be looking at.”
for what I should be looking at.”
Anthony DeRosa, proposition leader at Reuters
Anthony DeRosa, proposition leader at Reuters

35. Editors
Distribute
news
Newsdesk
Exchange
information
Eyewitness

36. • The journalism of tomorrow.
MEDIA CONVERGENCE

38. Media Convergence

39. How will news be disseminated
tomorrow?

40. web 2.0 and social media
 For news organizations, Web 2.0 means moving away from
using the Internet to draw a passive audience to a static
publishing platform, and instead embracing the broader
network, where communication, collaboration, interaction
and user-created content are paramount.
 Practically it means everything from engaging people on
blogs, online forums and social networks, to promoting
user generated content and providing more personalized
content for mobile devices such as cellphones.

41. The Web 2.0 Approach
 Many news organizations are now embracing the Web 2.0
approach. The Bivings Group, in a 2008 survey of the
websites of the 100 largest newspapers, found that:
 58 percent accepted user-generated photos
 18 percent accepted user-generated videos
 15 percent accepted user-generated articles
 75 percent allowed for comments on articles (up from 33
percent in 2007)
 76 percent provided some form of a "most popular" list of
stories, based on what readers were commenting on or
emailing or blogging about
 92 percent allowed readers to tag stories for inclusion on
social bookmarking or aggregation sites like delicious or Digg
(compared with only 7 percent in 2006)
 10 percent utilized social networking tools

42. Blogs
The rise of weblogs in the early 2000s helped define the
concept of Web 2.0.
Live Blogging is a synthesis of traditional journalism and
contemporary digital technologies that is changing the
way news is produced, presented, and consumed online.
The format has been adopted by news publishers
worldwide, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera,
and the BBC.

43. Blogs
It is increasingly the default format for covering major breaking news
stories, sports events, and scheduled entertainment news.
Guardian.co.uk alone publishes an average of 146 Live Blogs a month.
Despite the increasing prevalence of the format, the production,
consumption, and material form of Live Blogs has been under
researched.
Live Blogging combines conventional reporting with curation, where
journalists sift and prioritise information from secondary sources and
present it to the audience in close to real time, often incorporating
their feedback. Beckett has suggested that the deployment of Live
Blogging by mainstream news organisations demonstrates that news
consumers have “an appetite for a more complex form of coverage”
during fast moving, multidimensional news events, going as far as to
call the format “the new online ‘front page’”

44. Blog Evolution
The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States brought to
the fore two more aspects of blogging - the ability of people
to post first-person accounts of news events and provide
commentary on political issues. People who were eye-witnesses
to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers
in New York City posted what they saw on their blogs. Other
bloggers engaged in debate over how the U.S. should
respond to the attacks. The term "warbloggers" was coined
to describe them.
Blogging then took off and by 2002 several thousand
weblogs were being launched every day, according to an
estimate by David Sifry of Technorati, which tracks weblogs.

45. Blog Evolution
By 2008, the number of weblogs was estimated to be well
over 100 million, according to Technorati(although many of
these blogs are dormant).
But at least among teens blogging may now be in decline.
While 28 percent of teens blogged in 2006, only 14 percent
said they did so in 2009, according to a
survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Younger people are gravitating instead to social networks
like Facebook or Twitter (see this New York Times story).

46. Journalism and Blogging
News organizations initially were very reluctant to have
their reporters or editors set up weblogs, and many viewed
bloggers with suspicion or contempt.
Bloggers were derided as "pajama-clad" amateurs writing
late at night from the comfort of their bedrooms or
basements, or "parasites" who did no original reporting and
instead were just pundits feasting on the reporting labors of
traditional media organizations.
For reporters who like blogging, it can be an invaluable form
of personal branding - establishing themselves in an online
community, connecting and engaging with the public,
getting feedback and story ideas, and participating in the
larger conversations going on all over the Internet.

47. Blogging Software
 There are many software programs for easily setting up a weblog,
either hosted on the blog software company's website or on a web
server at your news organization or at a private hosting service.
Blogging software even can serve as a basic content management
system for many publications.
 Blogger, which helped touch off the blogging revolution, provides
simple blogs hosted for free on its website.
 Another popular site that provides a simple-to-set-up-and-use
blogging service is Tumblr.
 Two other popular and more versatile and sophisticated blogging
programs are WordPress and Movable Type.
 If you pick one blogging program and decide later you'd prefer a
different one, check out Google's Blog Converters, which allow you to
transfer your data, such as postings, from one blogging platform to
another.

48. RSS - Syndicating Content
 RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is just that - a very
easy way to distribute news content to people, rather than requiring
them to visit a news website.
 RSS software, created in 1999, lets a website set up a feed of its
content such as news stories that people can download and read
using an application called an RSS Reader.
 RSS feeds also are a way to distribute your audio or video to mobile
devices like the iPod or iPod Touch.
 News organizations increasingly are offering RSS feeds of their news
stories.
 Blogging applications such as WordPress and Movable Type also make
it easy to provide RSS feeds of postings to a weblog. For journalists
who have their own blogs, RSS is yet another way of extending their
personal brand by providing a feed of stories they produce.

49. Aggregators - Selecting and Sharing Content
 Some of the most popular news sites on the web are aggregators that
pull together news stories produced by a wide variety of other news
organizations.
 The aggregators usually do a better job of packaging and presenting
the stories than the original sites. And they take advantage of social
media to extend their reach to people and dissseminate their
content.

50. Social Media Aggregators
 Some aggregators are citizen journalism based. So rather than having
professional editors at news organizations determine the important
stories of the day, people are taking on this role themselves at
aggregation sites where users select and share what they deem the
most important news or websites.
 Users submit stories or websites to be listed on the aggregation sites,
and other users then vote on or help rank the importance of the
stories or sites and how prominently they should be displayed.
 Examples of these social media aggregators include:
Reddit - a news stories aggregator that was purchased in 2006 by magazine publisher Conde Nast.
Mixx - Their motto: "So why should some faceless editor get to decide what's important? But now you're in charge. You find
it; we'll Mixx it."
Delicious - people submit bookmarks of their favorite websites to share them with others. The bookmarks are arranged
topically and are ranked by the most popular submissions. You also can find the personal bookmarks of the person who
posted them.
Digg - a news stories aggregator, at which a vote for a story is called a "digg" (Digg was sold in 2012 and is being relaunched
as a different service)
StumbleUpon - another site for sharing favorite websites.
Publish2 - this site is designed for news organizations that want their journalists to share links on news stories and have
those links aggregated on the publication's website.

51. Social Media Aggregators
 Aggregators also have widgets people can use to embed story feeds
on their blogs, websites or personal pages on social networks.
 And news websites can place icons for the aggregation services at the
end of stories, so readers can click on the icons to submit the stories
for inclusion in the listings by the aggregators.
 See for example, the CNN website. Click on a story there, scroll to the
end and click on the Sharebutton.
 Aggregators also have developed applications for tablet computers or
cellphones, such as Flipboard,Pulse, news360, Zite (owned by CNN)
and Google Currents.

52. Journalists and Social Networks
 For journalists and news organizations, social networks provide an
opportunity for connecting with people, distributing news stories and
complementing news coverage with feeds from social media.
 Reporters can join the networks, converse with people and showcase
their stories. It's yet another way for reporters to develop personal
brands for their work.
 News organizations can create their own pages on social networks,
such as a fan page on Facebook, and use that to alert people to
important news stories the news organization has published or post
other items of interest to its followers. Or they can set up their own
social networks, using third-party software like Ning or their own
homegrown platforms.
 Social networks are great for generating conversations among people
about stories. Many news media have found that the volume of
reader comments on a story posted on Facebook can exceed
comments posted on the news organization's website.

53. Journalists and Social Networks
 News organizations can develop widgets that provide feeds of news stories
that can be displayed on the personal pages of social network members. See
for example the New York Times Widgets page that people can used to
embed news feeds from the Times on their personal profile pages or on
blogs or other websites.
 News sites can use an application like Storify to pull together postings to
Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites on a particular topic in the
news, especially a breaking news story.
 News media can tell first-person stories using Facebook postings, such as
the Washington Post's A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's
sorrow, which published a mother's Facebook postings about giving birth
and her subsequent medical complications. Read also this Poynter
article describing why and how the Washington Post story was done.
 Journalists also can use social networks like Facebook to find sources for
stories. See for example Facebook's Graph Search that can be used to locate
people who work at particular companies or organizations, live in specific
towns or cities or have particular interests. You also can create Interest
Lists in Facebook to create a custom feed of postings by people around
specific topics.

54. Journalists and Social Networks
• Storyful scours social media postings, uses human editors to evaluate the validity of
the postings and then aggregates them into topical news feeds.
• RebelMouse takes postings you've made to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other
social media and puts them together on a personal page or pages. You also can
embed the RebelMouse page on another website, such as a blog.
• News organizations also are using RebelMouse to aggregate social media postings by
members of the public on particular topics or breaking news stories.
• Pluck provides a suite of tools for websites that want to create social networks, as
well as blogs, forums and comments.
• Twitter: When Twitter was publicly released in August 2006 there were plenty of
skeptics. The idea was to give people an easy way to post very short - 140 characters
or less - notes about what they were doing in their daily lives. Postings from people
saying they were about to go to lunch or board a plane seemed trivial.
• Twitter can be particularly effective on breaking news stories, according to surveys
(see, for example,NPR's survey of its Twitter followers).
• Twitter feeds on breaking news can be a mix of postings by reporters and by citizen
eye-witnesses:

55. User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing
Many news organizations are inviting citizens to co-produce the news and contribute to
the news organizations' websites, a practice referred to as crowdsourcing.
Blogs, mobile devices, social networks, microblogging and other digital tools have
allowed people to publish their own stories and cover their own communities.
YouTube, which was purchased by Google, is a wildly popular site where people can
post videos. It's motto is "Broadcast Yourself."
Flickr is a site owned by Yahoo! where people can upload and share photos.
This proliferation of user generated content (UGC) represents yet another challenge
and opportunity for news organizations.
Citizens can bypass mainstream media entirely and produce content and
communicate directly with others. Many journalists have decried this rise in "citizen
journalism" as the triumph of amateurism over professionalism.
It also can lead to inaccuracies or worse in citizen reporting, such as when members
of the Reddit social media new site claimed they had identified suspects in the Boston
Marathon bombing case in April 2013, but the men were completely innocent. Reddit
apologized and, in fairness, professional media also made egregious mistakes in
reporting.

56. Maps on news websites – an overview

57. Hyperlocalisation

58. Hyperlocalisation
• Hyperlocal News:
– Community-based news
– Intended primarily for consumption by residents
of that community
– May / may not be created by a resident of the
location

59. Hyperlocalisation Tools
• Blogs
– Individual, networks, aggregators
• Wikis
– WikiCity Guides partnered with Wahoo
Newspaper
• Websites
– Everyblock.com
– Patch.com

60. Maps on news websites – an overview
Maps have become a familiar part of the news language online due
to a number of advantages:
They provide an easy way to grasp a story at a glance
They allow users to drill down to relevant information local to
them very quickly
Maps can be created very easily, and added to relatively easily by
non-journalists
Maps draw on structured data, making them a very useful way to
present data such as schools tables, crime statistics or petrol prices
They can be automated, updating in response to real-time
information
More recently, however, as there has been an increasing move
towards publishing public data and increasing use of the Freedom
of Information Act to obtain public data, types of data have
broadened.

61. Geotagging and the semantic web
 Both the rise in mapping and a rise in people accessing news on
mobile phones has created a demand for ‘geotagged’ (or
geocoded) news. Geotagging a news article means adding
geographical information to it – usually, latitude and longitude –
in a way that makes it easy for search engines and news
distribution platforms to understand what area that news article
refers to.
 In practice this means that if you are on a mobile phone with GPS
technology you can search for ‘restaurant reviews near me’ or
‘crime stories near me’. Likewise, if you were looking for a new
house you could easily find stories about the local schools, or
plans for new buildings. Many search engines take into account
the searcher’s own location when bringing up search results – so
including geotagging in news stories would also increase the
likelihood of your content being found by a local searcher.

62. Geotagging and the semantic web
 Most news organisations are exploring geotagging in some
capacity – in many cases, changing their content management
systems so that journalists can add such information when
publishing a story.
 Some have used this information to launch ‘hyperlocal’ parts of
their news websites that allow users to read stories specifically
about a particular postcode.
 At the same time, organisations like Reuters have developed
technologies that add geolocation data to stories after they have
been written

63. IMPACT

64. Impact 1: New Business Model

65. New Business Model
• Revenue decreases in media with
broad coverage
• News sites need to realise their “social
capital”
– Build targeted communities of discourse
with layer of journalism on top
– Market targeted communities to sponsors
& advertisers to create similar discourse
• Mixture of revenue channels
– Government funding towards new
reporting technologies
– Government can no longer fund as much
for news agencies that will not be the
purveyor of breaking news
– Advertisers will pump more money if they
can market to targeted communities as
opposed to a cross-section market
– Crowdfunding for investigative stories
Pew State of the News Media
report, 2010

66. Impact 2: Traditional Mediums

67. ?
Newspapers

68. The Future: Technology. On Paper.

69. ? Mere citizens who may not have had any substantial and professional
media training can supply TV/radio broadcasts with photos/videos taken
by handphone
However, broadcast journos need to accept this status quo and share news
ownership with everyone: audience need to create news, journos need to
supplement news. The fast pace of news has made broadcast technology
somewhat dated with its clunky BBrrooaaddccaasstt
nature and complicated operations. This is
about to change.

70. The Future: Broadcast. On Mobile.

71. Impact 3: Publications/News Organisations

73. News Organisations Today
 Newsrooms shrinking
 The death of beats
 The “hyperlocal” correspondent
 The rise of radar & community
desks
 Increasing importance in visual
journalism
 Instability of journalism careers
 Multiple-platform storytelling
 Multiple-timeframe storytelling

74. “We'll no doubt see a change in the mix of whether
news is produced by the professional, the pro-am, or the
random passer-by who happens to be at the right place
“We'll no doubt see a change in the mix of whether
news is produced by the professional, the pro-am, or the
random passer-by who happens to be at the right place
at the right time once with a cameraphone. From
at the right time once with a cameraphone. From
chronicle to broadside, from broadsheet to iPhone app,
the format and delivery of news has always changed as a
result of technological change and innovation, but the
basic human behaviour of wanting to uncover, tell, and
share stories of common interest always remains.”
chronicle to broadside, from broadsheet to iPhone app,
the format and delivery of news has always changed as a
result of technological change and innovation, but the
basic human behaviour of wanting to uncover, tell, and
share stories of common interest always remains.”
- Martin Belam, Information Architect, Guardian.co.uk

75. Q&A