Saturday, July 26, 2008

Injo Program Presented at IAMCR Conference


The first five years of the Innovation Journalism Program were summarized at the IAMCR conference in Stockholm "Media and Global Divides". IAMCR is the worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. The conference this year hosted 950 researchers from 85 countries.

The Injo paper was written by Turo Uskali, running the Finnish innovation journalism research program, Jan Sandred, who runs the Swedish innovation journalism program, and me (David Nordfors, running the Innovation journalism program at Stanford).

The paper summarizes trends among the 410 stories in US news outlets written by the 38 Injo Fellows between 2004-2008. 

The conference draft (the paper is being finalized at this time) sketches some recommendations to innovation journalists:
  • Be innovative.
  • Enjoy mixing business, politics, technology, science and culture.
  • Try to “shop”, and use “enough” time for your work.
  • Use wide variety of sources, not only the easiest (PR) ones.
  • Try to include futures perspectives into the stories by predicting possible scenarios instead of having only one possible. (This could for example prevent different, too enthusiastic new tech or other innovation related “bubble” manias.)
  • Remember that publishing a story in online environment is just only the beginning of the process. Therefore one should create interactive tools, e-mail feedback, and online discussion forums in order to get readers involved in reporting, feedback, and discussions.



IJ-5 Final Conference Documentation

Here is the final website of IJ-5, the Fifth Conference on Innovation Journalism, which took place at Stanford on May 21-23 this year.

All conference documents are available through one portal (here):
  • the program
  • the presentations including summaries, articles and slide presentations
  • speaker bios
  • list of conference participants
The conference website was made entirely with Google Docs and Blogger, which turned out to be very efficient for working interactively in a group in building the conference.