Yesterday’s News
The future of long-form journalism and archives
Summary
Moreover, this book focuses on platforms and their practices as influential factors regarding long-form journalism and archival production, distribution and consumption. Assessing the shared features of these two entities – long-form journalism and archives – this book investigates how they can be re-imagined and re-used within the contemporary digital landscape.
Using a combination of multiple approaches, such as digital methods, text analysis as part of critical discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews, this book identifies common traits between longform journalism and archives. It aims to satisfy the need for novel approaches in the analysis, organization and output of digital news content, identifying novel connections and pathways which can be adopted in order to establish a fuller comprehension of contemporary digital news production.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The Digital Landscape and Journalism
- Chapter 1
- The Digital Landscape
- Defining the Digital Landscape
- The Digital Landscape and Its Main Actors: Individuals, Crowds and Platforms
- Individuals, Crowds and Platforms Interactions within the Digital Landscape
- Main Features of the Contemporary Digital Landscape
- The Digital Landscape as Constant Flux
- The Digital Landscape as a Disruption Enhancer
- Chapter 2
- The Media Industry and Archives in the Digital Landscape
- Digital Media: A Non-creative Destruction
- The Media Industry’s Failed Adaptation to the Digital Landscape
- New Practices within the Digital Landscape: The Long-Tail Model and the Role of Filtering
- The Digital Landscape as a Digital Public Sphere
- Long-Form Journalism and Archives
- A Functional Definition of Long-Form Journalism
- The Common Ground between Long-Form Journalism and News Archives
- Part II Long-Form Journalism, Two Case Studies
- Chapter 3
- ‘Snow Fall’: A Landmark in Long-Form Journalism
- The New York Times ‘Snow Fall’, a Turning Point
- An Introduction to ‘Snow Fall’
- The Production Process and Reception of ‘Snow Fall’
- ‘Snow Fall’s’ Structure and Writing
- Long-Form Journalism Production in the Digital Landscape
- ‘Snow Fall’s’ Legacy in the Development of Long-Form Journalism
- The Influence of the Digital Landscape in the Evolution of Long-Form Journalism
- Chapter 4
- The Future of Long-Form Journalism: ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’
- ProPublica and The Marshall Project’s ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’
- An Introduction to ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’
- The Production Process and Reception of ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’
- ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’s’ Structure and Writing
- Part III Archives in the Digital Landscape
- Chapter 5
- Archives, the Long-Term Memories of the Digital Landscape
- Archives in the Digital Landscape: Memory and Use
- Time in the Digital Landscape: Continuous Present and ‘Feed Fruition’
- Archives in the Digital Landscape
- Different News Outlet Archives in the Digital Landscape
- Differences in News Outlet Archives in the Digital Archive
- Early Media Production and Optical Character Recognition– Based Archives
- Digitisation in Newsrooms and News Archives
- Digitally Native Publishers and Archiving
- Part IV Present and Future of Long-Form Journalism and Archives
- Chapter 6
- The Shared Trajectory of Long-Form Journalism and Archives
- Common Traits between Long-Form Journalism and Archives
- Long-Form Journalism and Archives: Relevance Over Time andAccessibility
- Digital News Outlet Archives as Distribution Sources in the Digital Landscape
- Long-Form Journalism and Aggregators: Longform.org
- Longform.org as an Example of Long-Form Journalism Curation
- Longform.org’s Activity in 2016, a Case-Study
- Chapter 7
- The Future of Long-Form Journalism and Archives: Digitisation, Datafication and Curation
- Long-Form Journalism Aggregation and Curation as a Template for News Archive Fruition
- Curation by News Media Outlets and Aggregators
- Digitisation, Datafication and Curation
- References
- Appendices
- Index
Figure 5.1Percentage of online time between mobile and non-mobile (Source: Comscore)
Figure 6.1The Guardian unique visitors (numbers in millions) from 2016 to 2019 (Source: UKOM)
Figure 6.2Single-story entries on Longform.org in 2016 divided per first publishing date
Figure 6.3All Longform.org’s 2016 single-story entries with first publication date prior to 2016, divided per decade
Figure 6.4News media outlets featured in Longform.org single-story entries in 2016, per number of entries
Figure 6.5Top twenty-five news media outlets per single-story entries in 2016 and the respective data regarding overall production sourced from Longform.org’s website
Figure 6.6Number of entries per news media outlet type in 2016 on Longform.org
Figure 6.7The top ten news media outlets in 2016 and the first publishing dates of their long-form stories divided per decade and in the year 2016
Figure 6.8All New Yorker entries on Longform.org divided per publishing era
Figure 6.9New Yorker single-story entries in 2016 per first publishing date
Figure 7.1Articles featured in 2016 tweets by @NYTArchives account divided per decade
Figure 7.2A comparison between Longform.org’s 2016 single-story entries and @NYTArchives tweets with a direct article reference
Table 3.1Facebook Graph URL API results for ‘Snow Fall’s’ URL <http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/> obtained on 4 March 2016
Table 4.1Engagement data on ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’ series (source: ProPublica)
Table 4.2Definitions from Google Analytics Help Center
Table 4.3Facebook Graph URL API results for ProPublica’s version of ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’ as of 3 October 2016
Table 4.4Facebook Graph URL API results for The Marshall Project’s version of ‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’ as of 2 October 2016
Table 6.1The five objectives in connecting users to archives after a datafication process
Table 6.2Longform.org’s entries in 2016, divided by type
Preface
This book is essentially about how journalism combines with the digital. As a student, journalist, editor and researcher, journalism has been a constant presence in many of my recent years. I have tried to remember and use all the different perspectives that I experienced to create Yesterday’s News. However, this book does not begin by talking about journalism, rather by focusing on what currently defines and surrounds contemporary experience: the digital. Reflecting on and attempting to assess the landscape which has so profoundly changed journalism appeared to be an obligatory starting point. By describing long-form journalism and archives, their relation and development, this book tries to assess and explore the possibilities around the past, present and future narratives. By combining different methods, it suggests that a multidisciplinary approach is best suited to assess the nature of these two entities. Finally, it suggests a possible avenue for long-form journalism and archives, connected to digitisation, datafication and curation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tobias Blanke, without whom this book would not exist. I feel profoundly grateful and lucky to have met him and to have had the chance to work with him. He has not only led me through this work but has also been a constant reference at each and every turn. I owe my gratitude to Mark Coté, for all the confidence and support he has always expressed towards me. His help has come across in many ways and countless times over the years. I would like to thank Joe Sexton and Andy Rossback for agreeing to be interviewed and allowing me to use their words in this work.
There are many other individuals who have helped me to conceive, start and finish this book. I am indebted to every one of them.
List of Abbreviations
AMPAccelerated Mobile Pages
APIApplication Programming Interface
CARComputer-Assisted Reporting
CDNContent Distribution Network
CMS Content Management System
CSVComma-Separated Values
GBGigabyte
INIinitialization file format
JSONJavaScript Object Notation
OCROptical Character Recognition
PDFPortable Document Format
PNGPortable Network Graphics
SaaSSoftware as a Service
TIFFTagged Image File Format
URIUniversal Resource Identifier
URLUniform Resource Locators
XMLeXtensible Markup Language
Introduction
Long-form journalism and archives, the two entities that this book focuses on, sit at the intersection between journalistic production and the digital. Through a number of different methods, this book aims not only to establish a connection between these two entities but also to assess and describe how and why their nature is directly connected with the digital. This book starts with focusing on the digital itself, which we define as the ‘digital landscape’. By investigating the nature of the digital landscape and its main actors – which we identify in individuals, crowds and platforms – this book builds an ad hoc framework to assess and examine long-form journalism and archives. Finally, we look at the possible future interactions of long-form journalism and archives with the digital landscape, identifying an ongoing process of digitisation, datafication and curation which potentially opens up future avenues for these two entities.
Details
- Pages
- XX, 230
- Publication Year
- 2021
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781789979428
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781789979435
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781789979442
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781789979411
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17411
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2021 (May)
- Keywords
- digital journalism archives platform studies Yesterday’s News Marco Braghieri
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2021. XX, 230 pp., 12 fig. b/w, 7 tables.
