Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I’ll admit that I’ve previously been skeptical about ideas of digital detoxes and media fasts. Instead, I’ve subscribed to Clay Shirky’s maxim: “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.”

But, last week, whilst attending the 2017 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, I began to change my mind. Sitting in a beautiful, cool, stone courtyard, sipping espresso and surrounded by promotional material for a local Slow Food festival, I began to sketch out some thoughts for a panel on Slow News that I had been asked to contribute to.

Ensconced in this relaxing environment, I quickly identified several reasons why news consumers, content creators and managers, could all benefit from taking their foot off the gas… Just a little bit....

Guardian digital development editor Joanna Geary answers some questions about GuardianWitness....

...First up: this was built in two months. The sponsorship pot from EE gave them a budget and time to get the job done, but not necessarily have everything they wanted at launch. She says it's a complete, working system that can be built upon. I suggest the phrase "minimum viable product" to Jo but she suggests that it's a full product - one that will be built on.

Do they have aspirations for more integration with social media? Yes, they do. And it's something they're looking at as the system develops. The key part of the development which is invisible to us right now is that the Guardian Witness system is deeply integrated with the Guardian's CMS. Once the content has passed through verification, it's available to the journalists, and they can insert it into a story or liveblog just by inserting an URL, which creates an embedded version of the contribution that links back to the contributor's profile.

"The really exciting thing is not what you see now, but what you see when Witness is included in a story," she says. It's a tool to facilitate genuine collaborative working between the journalist and external witnesses. Jo says they'll collaborate with people on the ground, or with expert knowledge, in any way they can - and already do, via phone and other traditional methods. This adds another tool for doing that....

A little more than a year ago, BuzzFeed made the leap into the realm of serious journalism. It hired some known journalists and a lot more hungry young writers, expanded its verticals, and announced a plan to create serious content to go alongside the site’s trademark clever lists. Now, with BuzzFeed creating a home for its long reads, building a business vertical and trying to figure out how to expand into breaking and international news, it’s a good time to assess....

As if the newspaper business didn’t have enough trouble already, the position of “newspaper reporter” has been named the single worst job in the United States – again.

The extremely dubious honor was conferred on the beleaguered industry by CareerCast, which offers job listings in local and niche job markets. While it’s probably not much comfort, a number of other traditional media careers are also in the doghouse.

According to CareerCast’s list of the 400 best and worst jobs, newspaper reporter came in at the very bottom with a median salary of $37,200 for a print reporter, plus a negative growth outlook for the industry of -9%....

Natural disasters, airline crashes — and yes, terrorist bombs — undercut the normalcy of everyday life by bringing death’s whammy to an unexpected place at an unforeseen time. In the hours and days following such catastrophes, journalists work to restore normalcy to the panicked population by explaining how and why the bad thing happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

Reporters have been normalizing the abnormal for so long that they’ve created well-worn catastrophe templates to convey their stories. Yesterday, while covering the Boston Marathon bombing, journalists leaned hard again on those templates. First came the sputtering dispatches over radio and television about the calamity. Next up were the on-the-scene broadcast reports, frequently marred by confusion and contradiction, as the press held out hope for survivors but prepared audiences for the worst. Video of the catastrophe was converted by the cable news networks into a perpetual loop, giving the talking heads a wallpaper background to talk over (and giving new viewers just tuning in something graphic to watch)....