The new order of news and social media enterprises: visualisations, linked data, and new methods and practices in journalism

ABSTRACT

Various data methods used in newsgathering and news production require knowledge of software to create visualisations and to work with social media apps. Many changes that are redefining news and journalism are also due to data methods at the back end of media systems. This paper introduces data journalism and progresses to important points about linked data and strategic social media news partnerships. It shows how data centric and entrepreneurial shifts in news media have also contributed to the fragmentation of journalism. At the start of the twenty-first century, Tim Berners-Lee envisaged linked data, known as Web 3.0, as a base for semantic search engines and sharing resources. However, linked data are now used in unimaginable ways, especially across social media news enterprises, media corporations, and advertising. The use of data in newsgathering also extends to smartphones, streaming media, and unmanned aerial vehicles, which add to the complexities and tensions in contemporary journalism and news media.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital journalism
• news aggregation
• geospatial
• social media
• semantic Web
• data journalism

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jonathon Hutchinson for the inspiration and invitation to present at ‘Digging the Data’ at the University of Sydney in 2015 leading up to the ANZCA Digital Methods panel in NZ. Thanks also to Amara Aguilar for a tour of Annenberg’s New Media Center at the University of Southern California in October 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cate Dowd

Cate Dowd is a media studies lecturer at the University of New England in NSW, Australia. She specialises in digital and social media, online journalism, digital film and media, the Semantic Web, UAVs, and the Internet. She has a Master of Information Management and Systems from Monash University, and taught Information Systems at the University of Melbourne for four years. Her PhD (Charles Sturt University) between media and computing was on crisis communication, intersecting with journalism, social media, and public relations. In 2012, Cate conceived the Turing Arts Symposium in Birmingham in the UK. In August 2015, she was embedded with ABC news in Ultimo. Since January 2016, Cate is also a qualified UAV controller with a Civil Aviation Safety Authority licence.