News Impact Summit: Methods and tools for digital journalism

Being a journalist in 2017 does not come without challenges. From risks on the field to audience’s distrust, from hostile governments to broken revenue models, the forces putting journalism under pressure are many and diverse. How can innovative digital methods and tools help journalists navigate in this rough sea?

The transition from print to digital, and from there to further innovation, has been and still is a bumpy road. As a member of the Innovation Team at Spiegel, Christina has witnessed it firsthand and in this session she will share some of the secrets she has learnt on the way.

With the disruption of traditional revenue models, many media are trying to experiment with new solutions in order to succeed. Denník N in Slovakia and 444.hu in Hungary have taken two very different approaches, while at the same time finding innovative ways to collaborate. Tomás and Balázs will tell us more about it and with them we will discuss the key elements to make new media projects financially sustainable.

With the support of Google’s DNI funding, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and partnering organisations around Europe have recently launched NewsMavens, a project that aims to find out how much gender matters to the current events narrative about Europe. Zuzanna will tell us more about the project and will also explain how you and your media can contribute.

Stolen passwords, phishing and other e-mail attacks, data breaches, digital attacks against media website in the form of DDoS: these are just some of the most common, and tough, global security challenges, faced by journalists and media organizations worldwide. There is much that can be done to enhance digital security at the personal level as well as at the organization level, both by making sure our settings are appropriate and by using tools and technology designed to protect us, our work, our sources. Technology can do a lot, although the first step is to be aware of the risks and to start facing them with the appropriate responses. The workshop will focus on some of these tools, showing how to access them, to set them up properly and to build a safer working environment for us all.

The contribution that the audience can give to reporters is often overlooked, but most investigative outlets know well its value and some of them are developing specific tools to enable citizens to collaborate and benefit from their inputs. Tamás, editor of atlatszo.hu, will share some tips and tools on how to engage the audience in watchdog journalism and actively involve them in the reporting process.

Has the "transgender tipping point" really reached European media? Media coverage on trans issues has seen an increase in the past few years, especially in the United States and some European countries. But is the media amplifying trans voices or only appropriating stories to give a sense of superficial diversity? Tina and Charlotte, two community activists from Hungary and the UK will explore these questions from their point of view as a non-binary person and a trans woman working for trans rights in different corners of Europe.

With less and less jobs available within newsrooms, many journalists move to freelancing or start a media project on their own. Media Lab Bayern has a strong track record of supporting these media entrepreneurs and in this session Lina will share some tips and tricks that can help your project to succeed in the digital media sphere.

Today’s journalists can take advantages of social media to detect early signs of breaking news. But it’s not an easy task to scan through a high volume of contents and verify them within a short period of time. In this hands-on session, Amandine will share best practices on verification and tools that can help reporters to verify user-generated content (UGC), as well as some of the dos and don’ts learnt by AFP during the coverage of the French presidential election earlier this year.

The Panama Papers have shown with unprecedented clarity the value of collaboration in the development of impactful investigative journalism. Direkt36 has been actively contributing to this and many other investigative projects, both locally and internationally. András will explain how a small non-profit investigative journalism center in Hungary is contributing to such international projects and he will be joined on stage by Gabriela, who will share some insights on the work that the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) is doing to develop and expand an international network of investigative journalists.

Thanks to a wide array of tools, today it’s much easier than ever to create beautiful data visualizations and many of those tools are open-source and free and available online for anyone’s delight. David and his colleagues are behind some of the best visual storytelling projects created at SME.sk and in this workshop David will share some of his favorite tools and explain the importance and value of developing tools open-source.

“You can’t fact-check everything you see online. So it is easy to become misinformed.” The WorldBrain project is trying to tackle this problem by developing a tool that enables you to “quickly find and identify quality content and get diverse perspectives for any given topic.” Intrigued? Don’t miss Oliver’s presentation and find out more about WorldBrain and its mission.

Very few media outlets in Europe can compete with Czech Radio when it comes to wild experimentation. From sensor journalism to innovative #ddj formats the examples abound, but experimenting means accepting success and failure in equal measure. In this session, Jan and Adam will showcase some of their most forward-thinking cross-platform experiments, as well as some useful tips on how to avoid small and big mistakes they have done, so you don’t have to.

There has never been such sharp competition for people's attention as today. Every reader is overflowed with information through their mobile phones, social media channels and emails - just to name a few. It too often makes us unable to connecting the dots and understand the real meaning of a story. Here is where digital storytelling tools, Prezi and infogram can help.

How to turn a traditional TV news programme into something that works for digital? Cordelia’s main task as Digital Editor of BBC Newsnight is to try to find an answer to this question. To do so, Newsnight has experimented widely with different platforms and has developed new formats like Viewsnight, an opinion strand created specifically for the online audience.