Drone journalism up and flying; Kathmandu’s latest footage
By Robin Ewing This drone footage of Kathmandu does an incredible job of showing the scale of damage done by Saturday's earthquake in Nepal. The only other way to get these kinds of images would be to hire a helicopter. Drone journalism is up and...
The gray zone of plagiarism
by Robin Ewing The Columbia Journalism Review this week published a thoughtful article on plagiarism and the trickiness of defining it in a digital world where "all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources." (That quote...
“Feelings journalism” based on assumptions
An article from the New Republic last week discusses what the author calls “feelings journalism,” which is simply a new way of describing an old kind of writing: assuming we know what another person is thinking and feeling without actually asking. I often see this in...
Virtual reality race has journalists producing content before we even get the technology
By Robin Ewing Nonny de la Peña screened her immersive journalism project, called Project Syria, at Sundance Film Festival last month. Users wear a virtual-reality headset to experience a street bomb in 3D, the visuals meticulously recreated from a video of a real...
Social media chats used in jailing of Chinese news assistant
By Robin Ewing The mainland Chinese assistant to a German journalist was arrested in Beijing in October after taking photos at Occupy Central in Hong Kong and posting them to her WeChat account. She is still being held, almost four months later, for "inciting a public...
Rise of the (journalist) robots
By Robin Ewing In the last three months, Apple made US$18 billion and news agency Associated Press produced 3,000 stories written by a computer program. One of these was the report about Apple's billions, published minutes after the quarterly earnings were released....
The message is Medium
Medium, a blog-publishing platform, has been called (by others and by Medium itself) the "best writing tool on the web." Anyone can publish and it looks good; "elegant" is the word most often used. If you want to read something that clearly explains what Medium is,...
The Hunting of Billie Holiday by Johann Hari
This is the tragic story of jazz singer Billie Holiday and how she was killed, in part, by the man who created the U.S.'s War on Drugs. Though Holiday died in 1959, this article -- adapted from a book and published here in Politico Magazine -- is based on five...
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
So should I scrap my lesson plans and let my students explore the world on the computer during class? It worked in Mexico! Great story in Wired that reminds us not to underestimate people of any age and also challenges the traditional classroom model.
Slate’s list of the best 25 podcasts ever
Surprise hit Serial, with 1.2 million listeners per episode, has everyone talking about how podcasts are the new hot thing, despite having been around for 10 years (and radio dramas since the 1920s). In fact, podcasts apparently confuse so many people that Ira Glass...