This document provides an agenda and overview for a digital journalism training in Mongolia. The agenda covers topics such as how digitization is changing journalism, investigating stories online, using social media for journalism, fact-checking information, and adding value through multimedia content. Various techniques are discussed, such as using search operators to find information online, building social media networks, tools for verifying information, and ways to engage audiences through interactive content like timelines and visualizations. The training aims to help journalists adapt to changes in the digital media landscape.

1. Live, multimedia-based,
interactive - the potential
of publishing online
digital journalism training in Mongolia
Ulaan Bataar, April and May 2016
By Brian Solis and JESS3 - theconversationprism.com, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16290038

2. Bernd Oswald
• media journalist and journalism trainer from
Munich, Germany
• 2001 - 2009 politics editor and head of news
department at sueddeutsche.de
• holds a diploma in journalism from unversity of
Munich
• graduated from German journalists school

3. Agenda
1. How digitization changes journalism
2. Investigation online
3. Social media for journalists
4. Fact-checking and verifying
5. Adding value with multimedia content
6. Distributing content online

4. 1. How digitization
changes journalism

5. http://projects.nyujournalism.org/newsliteracy2016/

6. 1. News consumption
moves to mobile
2. Publish where the
readers are
3. Invent new business
models
4. Focus on new products
5. Personalize the flow
of information
6. More intelligent
newsroom workflow
(CMS)
7. Find stories in data
8. Experiment with robot
journalism
9. Let users assist in
news production
10. Build your own niche
11. Excel at explainer
journalism (e.g. VOX)
6

7. 2. Investigation online

8. Focus your investigation
• try to answer the W questions:
• who did
• what
• where
• when
• why

9. Asking questions
• to foster the understanding of your readers try
also to answer the questions
• „HOW“ did somebody do something
• what (person or institution) is the SOURCE
of your information

10. Listen to both sides
of the story
• don’t stop investigating until you have
statements from all involved parties or
stakeholders
• report the full picture: try to discover the
interests each party has and try to probe the
areas where the interests of the parties may
collide
• e.g. If there is a new mining project: ask the
enterprise but also the local government,the
citizens or civic organizations

11. First hand sources of
information
• talk to people and stakeholders (meet them or
at least phone them)
• go to the showplaces and have a look with
your own eyes (take photos and videos)
• you are in control, you ask the questions!

12. Second hand sources
of information
• press conferences
• press releases
• picture and video footage (often supplied via
website)
• the source (enterprise, government) etc. is
in control, they want to transport information
that is in their interest. Scrutinize their
information!

13. Exercise 1:
asking questions
• recall a current project you plan to report about
• write down
• what persons would you ask?
• what questions would you ask them?
• think of different questions for different
people

14. Let the information
come to you
• know the aspects to know and the questions to
ask by being subscribed to all different
stakeholders where possible
• subscribe to their websites, blogs via (web-
based) RSS-Readers, e.g. Inoreader
• to subscribe to an RSS feed, look for the RSS
feed address, copy it, insert it in your RSS
reader - or into your browser
• create alerts

15. Getting better search
results by using operators
• Google (and other search engines) search
their indexes
• if you write two or more search terms, then
google looks for pages that contain ALL of
this words
• you can get better search results by
searching more focused. A good thing to do
this is using operators

16. Advanced search
• https://www.google.com/advanced_search
• combines all sorts of operators
• however, knowing how to use the right
operators might be faster

17. OR
• if you connect two search terms with OR,
google will find pages that use at least one of
your search terms: you end up with more
search results
• this approach may be appropriate at the
beginning of a research

18. Site:
• enter a search term and a site
• „site:“ limits the search to that website only
• the google-site-search often works better
than the internal search
• you can also search for subdirectories

19. Fileytpe
• a lot of (lengthy) documents are stored
as .pdf
• statistics and tables often come as .xls, .csv
or .tsv
• pictures: jpg
• instead of „filetype“ you can just simply type
„ext“ for Extension

20. Inurl:
• if you are looking for a specific word in the URL
of a website, you can use the inurl-operator:
• inurl:mongolia

21. Intitle:
• looks for articles that contain the keyword in
the title (blue):

22. Combine operators

23. Exclude search terms
or operators
• if you tpye „-“ prior to a search term, google
only looks for results without that term
• you can also use the „-“ to exclude
operators: -site:infomongolia.com excludes
this site from the search
• excluding terms or sites can refine your
search

24. Keyword phrases
• if you put a keyword, multiple keywords or
even a hole sentence between phrases, then
Google looks for pages that contain all the
words in exactly the same order you typed
them
• handy, if you are looking for quotations

25. There are several searches
• entire web
• images only
• videos only
• news sites only
• filtering options

26. Google Scholar
• http://
scholar.google.com
• looks for scientific
documents and
books
• has a law section
• also offers an
advanced search
• option to create an
alert

27. Search engines
besides Google
• especially at the beginning of an investigation it might
be useful to try other search engines as well.
• duckduckgo.com (puts more emphasis on privacy)
• https://startpage.com/ (also more privacy)
• https://www.qwant.com/
• http://www.wolframalpha.com/ (Semantic search, you
can ask questions and get facts as answer)
• http://worldwidescience.org/ (scientific texts)
• http://search.creativecommons.org/

28. Exercise 2: research
1. try several operators (e.g. filetype, site, inurl)
and search for a topic you are working on at the
moment: see if you can get better search results
than by just typing in keywords without operators
2. find at least two datasets about mining in
Mongolia

29. 3. Social media for
journalists
Photo: Roy Blumenthal, Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

30. Everbody can publish
• in the past you needed expensive means of production
to produce a newspaper or run a radio or tv station
• today a smartphone with online access is all it takes to
produce multimedia content
• everybody does it: private persons, enterprises,
politicians, celebrities
• thus journalists are facing a much tougher competition
to gain the attention of the audience
• on the other hand journalists can find a bunch of new
stories, if they know how to monitor the web

31. Building a social
media network
• look for profiles of politicians and important
people in the most common social networks
• subscribe to their social media profiles
• build thematically focused lists, e.g. my twitter
list on media journalists.
• Facebook also has lists, where you can add
friends und pages. The Facebook groups can
be helpful for specialized content and the
presence of experts

32. Monitoring social media
• there are two leading clients, that allow you to
monitor your networks in columns. You can
add streams, hashtags, lists, mentions and
searches as columns and display several
columns simultaneously
• Tweetdeck (Twitter only)
• Hootsuite (Twitter, Facebook, Google+,
LinkedIn, Instagram und WordPress)

33. Search via Tweetdeck
and Hootsuite

34. Twitter search
with operators
•
https://twitter.com/search-home

35. Advanced
twitter
search
https://twitter.com/search-advanced

36. Facebook’s
Social Graph Search
• switch your profile in settings/language to
„English (US)“
• now you can use a lot of operators for search,
also in combination, for example:
• „people who live in ulaanbaatar“
• see operators at: http://researchclinic.net/
graph.html

37. Facebook search by
IntelTechniques
• dozens of search
boxes
• works with the
search terms of
FB social graph
search
• immediate
results
• handy usage
https://inteltechniques.com/osint/menu.facebook.html

38. Social media
search engines
• socialmention.com is a meta search engine
that also returns the sentiment of a search
term
• icerocket.com searches blogs and twitter
• or try a Google search, using the term and
adding the site-operator, e.g. site:twitter.com

39. Exercise 3: searching
in social media
1.try the (advanced) searches on
1. Twitter
2. the social graph search on Facebook (or the Intel Technique
Tool)
3. Icerocket
4. Socialmention
2. see if you can spot new blogs, websites, groups or communities
that write about Mongolia or mining in Mongolia
3. subscribe to these sources via RSS (see chapter 2)
4. build thematically focused lists on Twitter and Facebook, e.g. for
Mongolian journalists or politicians or look for existing lists and
subscribe to them

40. Using social networks to
promote own articles
• especially Facebook is good for giving reach to
articles
• check thoroughly what posts perform best and
lead to most engagement (likes, shares,
comments, replies, links to your website)
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/
YOURPAGENAME/insights
• Twitter: https://analytics.twitter.com/

41. Using social networks to
promote own articles
• each network requires its own posting style
(wording, use of hashtags, mentioning people)
• before posting always think of your target group:
what are they interested in, what is useful to them,
what entertains them?
• on Facebook you can (but not necessarily should)
write longer posts
• Twitter limits you to 140 characters
• would a publishing plan (e.g. for a week) make
sense for you?

42. 4. Fact checking
and verifying

43. Information explodes,
professional selection is needed
• there has never been so much content
published than today: lots of good stuff, but
also false reports
• never before has there been such an urgent
need for a professional institution that filters
and verifies the important things from the
ocean of information:
• JOURNALISTS!

44. „Get it first, but first
get it right“
credo of the news agency United Press International

45. Verification in four steps
1. Content
2. Context
3. Code
4. Contact

46. 1. Content
• does the content seem to good to be true?
• does it seem very unlikely or sensational at first
sight?
• be extra careful if a non-journalist is posting
something with „breaking news“, „exclusive“ or
„urgent“
• who else should know? contact them (the
organization or person the „breaking news“ is about)
• is the sender the real source of the information?

47. 1. Content
• is the style and tone of the post appropriate?
• are there embarrassing spelling mistakes?
• are there other reliable sources that spread the same
information?
• renowned news agencies like AP, AFP or Reuters (be
very careful with state-owned news agencies like in
North Korea)
• radio, tv (ditto)
• relying on other sources always maintains a risk of
failure. Even good news outlets sometimes just copy.
You are only 100% safe, if you check for your own

48. Beware of
satire
• in April German journalist Jan
Böhmermann wrote a satirical
poem about Turkey’s
president, which caused a lot
of turmoil
• Kai Diekmann, publisher of
Europe’s biggest tabloid
paper, published a totally fake
interview with Böhmermann
(and picture) on Facebook
• How could one have found
out that this interview was
fake?
https://www.facebook.com/kai.diekmann.77/posts/827840744026758

49. 2. Context
• is the sender an expert in the topic it is reporting about?
• how long has the source been publishing about the topic?
(how old is the account?)
• Social media accounts: to what website is the sender
linking to - and who is linking to the sender?
• How many (known and/or reliable) followers does the
account have?
• are there further websites or social media accounts of the
sender? Do they fit together in terms of content, style and
focus?
• what does the imprint reveal?

50. Misusing pictures
out of context

51. 3. Code
• first have a look at the website address, especially at
the top level domain (country code, .gov, .mil, .edu)
• WHOIS check, e.g. at http://www.whois.com/
• what do the metadata of the post reveal? (date, time,
geolocation).
• Check an image’s EXIF data: http://regex.info/exif.cgi
• are there traces of manipulation? especially images
can be easily manipulated! (wrong or missing
shadows, extremely similar picture parts (might be a
copy)

52. Analyse a website`s
cache version

53. Check the site history
• Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/
web.php
• on Wikipedia site: have a thorough look at the
version history and the discussions on the
quality of the article („talk“)

54. Reverse image search
• upload a picture to see where else it has been
published on the web. See, when it was
published for the first time.
• Tin eye: https://www.tineye.com/ Bonus: Sort
for oldest version and most changed version
• Google: https://images.google.com/

55. 4. Contact
• try to contact the source directly
• via Tweet
• via E-Mail or
• - even better - phone
• best choice: contact the organization or person
the „breaking news“ is about - they have to
know
• if this isn’t possible: call experts and ask them how
they assess the „news“ in dispute

56. Look for reports
about fakes
• search for the questioned information in
connection with „hoax“, „fake“ or „false report“
• beware of websites that are by design fake like
http://nationalreport.net/ or satirical sites like
http://www.der-postillon.com/

57. Fact checking
politician’s claims
• politifact.com rates the accuracy of claims by politicians
• the editiorial staff fact-checks selected claims by
• talking to the politician or his/her staff and asking for
evidence of the claim, which they go on to check
• looking for statistical evidence (studies)
• analysing the context of the claim
• in the end the staff rates the accuracy of the claim on
the so called „truth-o-meter“ with six ratings from „true“
to „pants on fire“

58. http://verificationhandbook.com/

59. verification
• Paul Bradshaw: Content, context and code:
verifying information online
• Craig Silverman: Verification handbook
• Craig Silverman: Verification handbook for
investigative reporting
• Craig Silverman: Verification handbook:
additional materials

60. Exercise 4: picture check
• Have a look at the
image „save
donbass people
from ukraine army“
• Search the web
and find out, what’s
wrong with this
image

61. 5. Adding value with
multimedia content

62. Huge digital tool box
• prior to the internet age paper journalists were restricted to
writing articles, tv journalists to produce tv pieces, radio
journalist to radio pieces
• now every journalist can do everything (in principle)
• write
• record
• film
• take photographs
• visualize
• interact

63. Adding value via
1. Background material
2. Commentaries
3. Being up-to-date, live coverage
4.Acoustical and/or optical impression
5. Documentation, transparency
6. Interaction
7. Visualization

64. 1. Background material
• preliminary events
• Specials, dossiers
• automatic sites for topics

65. 2. Commentaries
• all forms of articles that transport the author’s
personal opinion (this should be clearly
marked)
• commentary
• columns

66. 3. Being up-to-date,
live coverage
• Live ticker, live blogs (written)
• Live stream (Audio, Video)

67. 4. Acoustical /optical
impression
• Video
• You-Tube-Video
• Audio
• Podcasts
• Images and image galleries

68. 5. Documentation,
transparency
• Wikis
• Dictionary
• Glossary
• Original documents (texts, images, emails)
• (Raw-)Data

69. 6. Interaction
• Polls
• Discussion forum
• Let readers pose questions, collect the
questions online and ask them to politicians
etc.
• Crowdsourcing (e.g at fact checking)

70. 7. Visualization
• explainer videos (How To)
• interactive graphics (data visualization)
• timelines

71. Interactive timeline
http://world.time.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandelas-extraordinary-life-an-interactive-timeline/

72. recipe: timeline
• look for an event
• focus on the milestones
• show an development
• look for relevant content: photos, videos, links
• write short headlines and teasers

73. A timeline tool called „Timeline“
• http://timeline.knightlab.com/
• open source software
• able to embed social media content
• able to embed audios and videos
• works with a Google spreadsheet

74. Exercise 5:
building a timeline
1. choose a topic you work(ed) on
2. divide the topic into 5-8 events
3. download the timeline template and make a copy
of it
4. insert the events into the template: one row per
event. Fill in the necessary data (start date,
headline, text, media, media credit)
5. paste the spreadsheet-URL into a timeline box and
get an html-Code for embedding the timeline into
your website

75. Exercise 5:
building a timeline
• see the four steps of making a timeline on:
http://timeline.knightlab.com/
• there is also a preview button
• mail the embed code to post@berndoswald.de
• tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=vAWbm4gF9lU

76. datavizcatalogue.com

77. Infographics with infogram
• http://infogr.am offers a
free basic version
• easy to use service for
creating infographics
• wide choice of chart
types
• you can also add text,
videos, pictures and
maps in one growing
infographic

78. international databases
• Google Public Data Directory: http://
www.google.com/publicdata/directory
• UN: http://data.un.org
• OECD: https://data.oecd.org/
• World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org/
• WTO: http://stat.wto.org/

79. data driven journalism
• Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, Lucy
Chambers: The data journalism handbook
• Claire Miller: Getting started with data
journalism
• Paul Bradshaw: the data journalism heist
• Paul Bradshaw: Finding stories in
spreadsheets

80. Exercise 6: creating an
infographic
1. go to https://www.mongolbank.mn/ and look for the Statistical
Bulletin 2016-02
2. look for the statistic that calculates the net surplus/deficit. Check
the december values for every year from 2011 - 2015
3. go to http://infogr.am, create an account (or login with Facebook
or Google)
4. create a new chart and type in the values for the five years
5. add a title
6. add a text field and fill in a legend for the currency and the data
source
7. click publish

81. Multimedia journalism
with mobile devices

82. Smartphone - the studio
in your pocket
• ever more people are consuming news mobile
(see chapter 1)
• you can create a lot of the additional
multimedia value (chapter 5) with your
smartphone
• there is a lot of equipment to gear up your
smartphone (handles, tripods, microphones,
keyboards), but even without this your
smartphone is a mighty reporting tool

83. Mobile is social
• most users use social networks preferably via
mobile apps: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• messengers are mobile only: WhatsApp,
Telegram, Snapchat

84. Rising star Snapchat
• Snapchat is a trending and fast-
growing messenger, especially
among people under 20
• snaps automatically destroy
after having been watched
• lots of editing features
• gamification through trophies
• look for snapchatters at http://
snapgeist.com/

85. Snapchat stories
• snapchat stories remain online for 24 hours
• a snapchat story consists of all the content you post
within 24 hours. There are three levels of privacy:
public, friends, customized
• you can download your own snapchat stories as
video
• media brands like VOX, National Geographic or CNN
have special feature stories in the „Discover“ section
• renowned media like the BBC have used snapchat
stories to report about serious topics like refugees

86. Going live on mobile
• Periscope was the breakthrough
live-streaming app in 2015 and
soon acquired by Twitter
• Facebook shortly after reacted
by starting Facebook Live
• Facebook Live tips
• journalists use live-streaming
apps like these to report from
events or in breaking news
situations

87. 6. Distributing content
online

88. Fight for reader`s attention
• where do your readers come from?
• direct entries
• social media webites
• search engines
• what is the share mobile users?
sample distribution of referrers
4 %
8 %
31 %
33 %
24 %
Facebook direct entries
search engines remainder
Twitter

89. Giving an incentive to read
• users only spend a few seconds to decide what
they read or don’t read
• in this few seconds the headline and teaser of your
text must catch the user’s attention. The reader
should know
• what the story is about AND
• what might be rewarding to read it
• summing up, giving orientation
• showing useworthyness, benefit

90. Headlines
• should tell WHAT happened, what’s new
• should tell WHO did what
• should show the relevance of the news
• should be concise, no longer than 60
characters
• should use signal words
• example: Pope Francis Takes 12 Refugees
Back to Vatican After Trip to Greece
Matt Thompson: 10 questions to help you write better headlines.

91. Lead paragraph
• the lead should give an essential summary of
the text’s contents.
• should take the message of the headline a
step further and add new information, e.g.
answering more of the W-questions

92. Lead paragraph: DONT’S
• the lead should NOT only repeat the headline
in more words
• leads should be displayed in full length and not
be cut in the middle of the sentence. Negative
example: mongolbeat.com

93. How to write a good
lead paragraph
• Focus on the five W’s: who, what, when, where
and why.
• Before writing, decide which aspects of story
are most important. Emphasize these aspects.
• Be as specific as possible.
• If your lead is too broad, it won’t inform.
• Be accurate, don’t exaggerate

94. How to write a good
lead paragraph
• Be brief. Leads are typically one sentence, often
two, between 160 and 200 characters. Especially
important for display on mobile devices.
• Use active sentences. Strong verbs make leads
lively and interesting. Passive constructions
sound dull and leave out important information,
such as the person who caused the action.
• Context is key.
• Be credible. A lead paragraph is an implicit
promise to readers. Deliver what you promise.

95. Good lead example

96. Social media teaser
• postings should have an own teaser
• this teaser should be different from the teaser in
the preview link
• length and tone of the teaser should suit to your
target group (you don’t have to write „young“ or
colloquially on Facebook in principle)
• however, the teaser should point out, what
makes the link interesting and worth reading or
engaging

97. Example Social media teaser

98. Exercise 7: write a headline
and a lead paragraph
• recall the topic you used for creating a timeline
• write a headline that tells what has happened -
no longer than 60 characters
• write a lead paragraph, showing the relevance
of the news and adding further information

99. Search Engine
Optimization (SEO)
for journalists

100. How a search engine works
• every search engine has a huge database or index
• Programmes (Spider, Crawler, Robots) search the
web for new content by following existing links
• they add the new content they find into the search
engine’s index
• if you do a web search, you aren’t searching the
web but a search engines index of the web
• Google: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/
howsearchworks/thestory/index.html

101. Spiders are searching the
source code for keywords
http://en.mongolianminingjournal.com/content/62241.shtml

102. Important source code:
meta tags
• meta tags are part of the source code. They give robots
information about structure and content of a webpage:
• <title>-Tag: title of a single webpage which can be seen in a
browser window or tab
• headline tags: <h1> ,<h2>, <h3> (often headline or
subheading)
• Description: describes a page’s content in the source code
• URL
• Body = full text
• alt tags for images

103. Anatomy of a snippet
Title-Tag
Description
URL
search term is
highlighted in bold

104. Keywords - the core
ranking factor
• keywords are decisive: the more they are used
in the important parts of a webpage the higher
the page is ranked on a search engine result
page (SERP)
• the answers to the W-questions Who, What,
Where are often keywords
• persons, institutions, products, actions are often
good choices for keywords

105. How does my target group
search?
• put yourself in your reader’s place: What search
terms will he or she type in the search field?
• generic or specific?
• singular or plural?
• are there regional differences? („van“/„lorry“)
• in what order will the search terms be typed?

106. Autocomplete function
• while you are typing, Google automatically
suggests combinations of frequently searched
terms

107. Related search terms…
• …can be found at the bottom of the search
result page

108. Exercise 8: write a seo
title and description
• take the text from exercise 7.
• define 2-3 keywords that are important for the
text
• use this keywords in writing a seo-optimized
title (max 60 characters) and description (max
160 characters)

109. Connect with me online
• Homepage: www.berndoswald.de
• Blog: www.journalisten-training.de
• Twitter: @berndoswald und @jt_muenchen
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/oswaldsbernd
• Google+: https://plus.google.com/+BerndOswald/
• Storify: www.storify.com/berndoswald
• Diigo: www.diigo.com/user/berndoswald
• Slideshare: www.slideshare.net/berndoswald