Response to Chapter 9 of “Journalism Next”

Clay Shirky’s quote in the beginning of chapter 9 of Briggs’ “Journalism Next” explains the chapter best, “There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.”

With the amount of data that’s being put online, whether it be emails, social networking or anything of the sort, it’s important to know how to sort through this data and find the best bits of it.

To do so, Briggs recommends several basic, but time-consuming tips. these include “organize your email”, “find the right productivity tools” and “develop a strategy” for sorting through the data.

Briggs’ strategy dictates that you manage things like your email, contacts, notes, images among other things. Keeping track of all of this will solve a lot of problems when sifting through the ever-increasing pile of data coming into and going out of your digital life.

With all this data comes an improved form of an already present form of journalism, data-driven journalism.

When you keep track of numbers like receipts, votes, video-views among other things and are able to find a journalistic correlation between them, your knowledge of a situation increases and thus, a story appears.

For instance, when incoming Mason president Angel Cabrera was introduced to George Mason University, the Office of Student Media had a video interview with Cabrera. All the videos were posted, but the video that had the most views was his thoughts on football.

The video received over 1000 views while the others only received under 50. This is a strong indication about what the Mason Nation is paying attention to when looking at this new president.

This is the perfect example of data-driven journalism.



0 comments ↓

There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below..

Leave a Comment