Geo optional: One of my earlier qualms with Meograph is that it required the use of a map, making the tool completely unusable for a story that has no significant geo-location elements, but does have the other elements of timeline and multimedia. Now, Meograph is “geo optional,” meaning an increase of potential use cases.

Browser support: Playback of a published meograph, which always worked in all browsers, continues to work. But now you can create a Meograph using the author back-end using any browser as well.

Launch of the journalism page: Meograph’s new journalists page guides news organizations through how to use the tool. The page lists benefits for news orgs.  Soon, they’ll be adding journalism-specific content and hopefully usage examples to this page, so keep an eye on it.

Overall redesign: Since the last time we wrote about Meograph (when it was still in beta), the app has gotten a huge facelift. See before and after screenshots below. Although the redesign is mostly an aesthetic improvement, as a third-party embeddable tool, it’s important that the design you’re embedding onto your news site is clean and elegant. On our wish list (which we’ve mentioned to the Meograph team): the ability for newsrooms to easily customize the colors and theme of the player.

Improvements to the back end: In addition to being more browser compatible, the back end’s interface has seen some improvements. There’s a beautiful drag’n drop interface that lets you slide content around and easily add new elements. It’s extremely easy and intuitive to use.

Engagement stats: We also finally have some numbers about meograph’s effectiveness. According to the company’s CEO, Misha Leybovich, about one-third of viewers watch embedded meographs and spend 2-3 minutes longer engaging with a page that has an embedded meograph.

The tool is still free at this point. You can see more demos of news usages on their demos page.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s a great way of adding context to your comment, but unfortunately, it currently only works in the comment section itself. Discussing the contexts of a particular moment in YouTube videos, however, can also be advantageous for your journalism.

In my searching for other possibilities to add video context to journalism, I stumbled upon TubeChop—I suggest you give it a try.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

(Note: I didn’t say GIFs about journalism, like these news cats. Hopefully you’ve already seen those.)

The success of GIF-infused content in actual news content has some media circles buzzing around a longtime internet graphic capability: “Is this an overlooked tool, or just a fad?, “Are we Buzzfeedifying maintsream news orgs, or is that a silly question now?”, and “should journalists embrace them, or are they somehow detrimental to the craft?”

They aren’t all simple questions, and I don’t have answers. (I actually posed questions here, too.) But I can comfortably say there are indeed reasons the animated GIF can work well to tell a story online.

Likewise, there are reasons it may not.

Putting other debates aside, here are five simpler questions for journalists to consider on a case-by-case basis before using an animated GIF to help digitally tell your story. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Huey talked to 10,000 Words about the collaboration, which was made possible in part by the Knight Journalism Fellowship and the John and James L. Knight Foundation. He first started covering the community when he was doing a larger survey on poverty—Pine Ridge was one of the poorest counties in the nation. Though he didn’t know much about the history of the reservation at the time, he quickly became drawn into its story and evolution, eventually becoming an advocate for the community. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Newsrooms seem to have forgotten about a simple, tried-and-true form of storytelling: the timeline.

We inundate our readers with infographics and Storifies of the news. They are the cool, new kids on the block who are supposed to encourage audience engagement. There’s nothing wrong with these new ways of telling in stories — in fact, I love them. But the only time we hear about timelines nowadays is when it is preceded by the word “Facebook.”

Enter the Knight News Innovation Lab‘s newest tool, “Timeline.” It’s a free, open source tool created by former New York Times staffer and current Medill faculty member Zach Wise. With Timeline, users can tell stories via an attractive, easy-to-use timeline that incorporates the latest tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and even Google Maps. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.