New York's
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism received $2m from the Tow and Knight Foundations just last month (April 2012) to find out the effects of digital journalism. This money will be given to the
Tow Center for Digital Technology who has been conducting research since 2010 at Columbia. The supporters of the this research suggest that the focus will be on these three aspects of digital journalism:
- “Impact: measuring how new practices and tools affect audiences and newsroom resources;
- Transparency in journalism: focusing on public data – what’s available, what’s not, and what’s useful and relevant to people’s lives;
- Data visualization: examining which visuals work best in informing and engaging readers.”
With so much money invested in the world of digital journalism, it is evident that it may be here to stay. Print journalists may need to get on board quickly and learn the trade of digital journalism.
This is a very pertinent item about how philanthropic foundations are trying to encourage journalism to pursue experiments that might seem risky at the moment. This week we will also be talking about newsgames, some of which also received funding from the Knight Foundation. Here at UCSD's Calit2 there are a number of visualization efforts that use news collections that have been digitized, and students are often encouraged to use these tools in creating their own information visualizations.
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