MASTERCLASSES

Tuesday 1 March 2016

Five masterclasses: in data journalism, writing for Buzzfeed, live reporting with Snapchat and Periscope, creating mashed-up RSS news feeds, and how to bring gaming into your reporting


There are now five masterclasses to accompany the new, second edition of Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide

You can find all that tuition here, or read on to explore individual topics.

But please note that these masterclasses are designed to complement the tuition in the MMJ textbook, and not as stand-alone explorations of new developments in journalism. So you'll need the book to put them in context, and you can buy it here for the UK and here for the US and Canada.

Data journalism: new practical projects
In this masterclass we offer a new range of data journalism projects, with step-by-step instructions on completing them. Tuition here

How to write for Buzzfeed: the art of the listical 
This masterclass offers a practical demonstration of how to create features in the listical style used widely on new journalism platforms such as Buzzfeed. Tuition here

The journalism of now: using Snapchat and Periscope for reporting 
I’ve called this masterclass the journalism of now simply because both these platforms are designed to carry live news and information. It typically disappears within 24 hours, although there are ways to keep it live for longer. We look in detail at the particular demands of  live reporting on these platforms. Tuition here

Creating a mashed-up RSS feed of news or information 
 This tuition explores ChimpFeedr. ChimpFeedr lets you add a series of individual RSS feed urls to a list, and then – at the click of a button – it generates a new RSS feed which combines all the posts going to those individual feeds in your original list. It's a great way to create a news feed from a wide range of sources which you can then republish. Tuition here

How to bring gaming into your reporting and compete with Candycrush
We’re not talking about games for diversion in this tuition, but rather games that are part of the news offering of a media company.
The idea is that games serve to illustrate the impact of given events or actions much more powerfully than if a story is told through text and other media that do not directly involve the reader.
Gamifying a news story enables readers to interact with the information presented, entering into the story, exploring it and discovering its complexities.Tuition here