Internet

For many news organizations, a common approach to producing online video is that shorter is better. There is no industry standard for how to create news videos that are guaranteed to grab viewers’ attention and keep an audience glued to a website. Media leaders have been experimenting with video for years, trying to figure out what viewers like and want while also trying to understand the success of videos posted on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms.

Since the end of the Cold War and the rise of global communications networks, there has been an ongoing debate about the “flattening” of world markets and cultures and the degree to which integration among nations may or may not accelerate.

While youth bullying is as old as humankind, digital media have introduced new bullying practices and amplified the impacts. In response, schools and lawmakers have enacted a variety of preventative measures and punishments for offenders.

The time when heavy appliances dominated home energy use seems almost as remote as the era of gaslights and streetcars. Today our homes’ electric outlets have never been more sought after — computers, printers, modems, set-top boxes, and endless chargers all clamor for power — leaving refrigerators and washers as small players in the utility bill we receive.

As part of our ongoing collaboration with Nieman Journalism Lab, we’ve rounded up the latest in digital- and media-oriented scholarship — picking highlights from disciplines such as computer science, political science, journalism research and communications. (Note: this article was first published at Nieman Lab, and is now archived here in full.)

Data can make a story. It can be the backbone of an investigation, and it can lead to new insights and new ways of thinking. Unfortunately, the data you want isn’t always readily available. It’s often on the web, but it isn’t always packaged up and available for download. In cases like these, you might want to leverage a technique called web scraping to programmatically gather the data for you.

Online harassment and threats are not a new phenomenon, but the degree to which these are directed at women and girls has begun to receive increased attention from news media, academia and law enforcement.

How we communicate has changed rapidly over the last few years, and some of the greatest changes in behavior have been seen among teenagers, who are often “early adopters” of technologies. New applications and gadgets, though, can now quickly become commonplace and mainstream.