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Middle East brain drain shows signs of reversing
“From Libya to Lebanon there is a “reverse brain drain” among young workers, with individuals returning from abroad. Others have decided not to leave in the first place.”
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College Newspapers Go Digital-First, Innovate To Stay Relevant
This fall, the University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald — a print publication for more than 90 years — will ditch the daily for digital, publish a twice-weekly magazine, and launch a mini-tech start-up called The Garage.
It’s a digital-first strategy similar to one adopted at the University of Georgia, which killed the daily Red & Black last year in favor of a weekly publication. Meanwhile, student newspapers like UCLA’s Daily Bruin aren’t giving up the daily print edition, but are planning to churn out thousands of apps for every aspect of student life to help supplement lost print advertising revenue.
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Oped: The Trouble With Online Education
Internet courses are monologues. True learning is a dialogue.
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Mobile Technology Transforming Classrooms, Empowering Young Women in Jordan
“Technology in classrooms often seems like an add-on, an extra luxury for developed education systems. But, as Edith Saldivar explains in today’s Digital Diversity, IT can help students all over the world learn in entirely new ways. The company Edith works for, Qualcomm, has been helping students in Jordan use IT to transform their education – in particular young women. This work is carried out through their Wireless Reach™ initiative, a program that brings wireless technology to underserved communities globally. To date, Wireless Reach has 64 projects in 27 countries. Edith explains the surprising effects it has had in Jordan’s schools, below.”
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The iPad Is Quickly Becoming Our Primary Computer
“As you can see, after just three years, the iPad is becoming the primary computer for users. When we first ran the survey, only 29.1% of people said it was a primary computer. Today, it’s 46.7% of users.
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In the last three years, the iPad has gotten lighter and more powerful. Additionally, developers have built a variety of applications to make it more useful. Imagine what’s going to happen in the next three years.” -
NYTimes: Seeking a Laptop? What You Need to Know
TOOL KIT: Seeking a Laptop? What You Need to Know
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A step-by-step consideration of the features to think about in choosing a new laptop. -
Daily tablet newspaper’s future in doubt after huge first-year losses
Bosses at Rupert Murdoch’s embattled tablet-only newspaper, the Daily, have hit back at rumours of its demise, dismissing doom-laden reports as “misinformed” and “untrue”.
Staff at the Daily were said to be fearful of the product’s future after the loss-making venture was reportedly put “on watch” by parent company News Corporation.
Yet in an email to staff on Friday, editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo said they should “ignore” reports in the press.
News Corporation is said to be weighing the value of maintaining the app as it prepares to separate its publishing and film wings, and will assess whether to shut down the app later this year.
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Tiny Camera to Rival the Pros
This is a review of the best pocket camera ever made.
The Sony RX100 has a huge one-inch sensor — the biggest ever stuffed into a pocketable zoom camera. More Photos »
But first, a history lesson.
For years camera makers worried about competition from only one source: other camera makers. But in the end, the most dangerous predator came from an unexpected direction: cellphones.
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Websites Illuminate Unknown Artists
ArtistsWanted.org is not a charity but a business, one that hopes to make a profit identifying artistic talent and connecting it to an audience.
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Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?
When did the ripe, bulbous, and gibbous newspaper bubble pop?
It was probably in the 1990s, when the business better resembled a cruising blimp than it did the dotcoms like Pets.com, Boo.com, and TheGlobe.com, which all went kerblewy around the turn of the century. Unlike the bombing dotcoms, the high valuation of newspapers was based on real, not imaginary profits, and the belief that the profits from these deals would extend for years, if not decades, into the future.
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Apple Updates Laptops and Mobile Software
Apple Updates Laptops and Mobile Software The company’s high-end laptop computer, the MacBook Pro, will have a high-resolution “retina display” like the one on the screens of new iPads and iPhones.
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Forty years after Watergate, investigative journalism is at risk
Investigative reporting in America did not begin with Watergate . But it became entrenched in American journalism — and has been steadily spreading around the world — largely because of Watergate.
Now, 40 years after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office building, the future of investigative reporting is at risk in the chaotic digital reconstruction of journalism in the United States. Resource-intensive investigative reporting has become a burden for shrunken newspapers struggling to reinvent themselves and survive. Nonprofit start-ups seeking to fill the gap are financially fragile themselves, with their sustainability uncertain.
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Real Reporters on the Screen? Get Me Rewrite!
All the News That’s Fit to Screen is a film series about journalism at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
BACK when paper and ink still mattered, I fell into a job as a nightside reporter at The Providence Journal, in the habitually newsworthy state of Rhode Island. This was many years ago, before exercise, sobriety and good hygiene had ruined the misanthropic bonhomie of the typical newsroom — or so the romanticizing journalist in me likes to think.
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Technology in Our Lives, and How to Make It Work Better
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but it often comes with layers of jargon, settings and hardware adjustments. Here are answers to some tech questions.
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Is Technology Fostering a Race to the Bottom?
In the West, a new informal economy is in the making – a peculiar byproduct of the digital revolution that has freelancers doing tasks rather than workers holding jobs.
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Three Varied Tools for Blogging With a Hand-Held
Being a dedicated blogger once meant accepting life as a laptop nomad or being shackled to a desktop workstation.
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Now, with a mobile device and the right apps, bloggers barely need to touch a conventional keypad to keep readers sated. Popular blogging services like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress have free apps for Android and Apple, and while those apps are sometimes flawed, they’re generally good enough to download.
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What Journalists Need for the Future
In a guest post Alexandra Stark, Swiss journalist and Head of Studies at MAZ – the Swiss School of Journalism, argues that it’s time for journalists to take action on business models for supporting journalism. Stark proposes a broadened set of skills and a new structure to enable greater involvement from journalists, while also fostering further teaching of such skills.
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App of the week for journalists
Byword, a great text editor for iPhone/iPad.
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What is it? A text editor that allows HTML and syncs with Dropbox and iCloud.
How is it of use to journalists? It allows journalists to write text articles on an iPad or iPhone and easily export.
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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube
Two not-for-profit news organisations in the United States have teamed up to launch a new channel on YouTube dedicated to investigaive reporting. The channel, which is due to launch in July, aims to become a “hub for high-quality, high-impact investigative videos” and is backed by $800,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation.It is a partnership between the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative News Network, who will work together to promote the channel and to engage users through social media and online chats.
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Want to Broadcast Live? Livestream Makes It Easy
Free apps and webcam-based streaming services make putting live video on the Internet accessible to just about anyone with a connected device. Streaming broadcast-quality live video, however, still requires expensive equipment that most people don’t have on hand. Livestream, a site for streaming live events, is aiming to lower this barrier of entry with its first hardware product.Read more
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A Chicago start-up developed software that writes
In a few short years, we’ve learned to delegate all manner of tasks to computers. For music recommendations or driving directions or academic scouring, we readily turn to our clever machines. They do it better most of the time, and with much less effort.
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Now computers have proven competence—no, fluency—in yet another aspect of human life: writing. Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports. But the underlying logic that drives the process—scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts—is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data, Narrative Science founders say, their software can generate a prose analysis that’s robust, reliable, and readable -
How open journalism helped us get better
It came up this week with this map on poverty and deprivation in London, part of our London: the data series. Recently we’ve been using the colour scale on the map below, which is a variation on the famous traffic light collection of colours – for the Guardian, this tends to go from green, meaning good, or low – up to red, meaning bad or high. It’s used by map makers and newspaper designers all the time. But is it any good?
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UK galleries join Google Art Project’s virtual tours
Google, the company that has already made it possible to explore our planet from above and discover cities street-by-street, has announced a global expansion of its Art Project site, which allows users to go on a cultural grand tour without ever leaving their computer.
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Screw Your Analysis to the Sticky Point
Via Mark Thoma, a new paper from the San Francisco Fed offers stunning evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity, a topic I’ve written about before. What the paper shows is that many, many workers are getting precisely zero wage growth in dollar.
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Bulletins from the future
The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage. Read more
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