Nieman Lab is announcing the launch in July 2011 of Newsmotion, “a new startup platform aiming to cover international events both as they’re happening and over the long-term”:

The site is the project of a collective of award-winning journalists and journalism thinkers: the journalist, producer, author, and professor Julian Rubinstein; the war correspondent (and former Nieman Fellow) Elizabeth Rubin; the artist/engineer/NYU professor Natalie Jeremijenko.

Newsmotion wants to take advantage of the wisdom of individuals around the globe: to create a new organisation of journalists and other witnesses who are used to operating independently. And, in an era that finds raw information proliferating online, it wants to find ways of sorting and contextualising news updates.

Newsmotion’s interface will allow users to toggle between real-time RSS and Twitter feeds, and to sync them according to keywords. The group, and its design team, are also experimenting with ways to bring a kind of permanence to the typical transience of online conversations — and with making delineations among various types of sources. The Newsmotion interface features three vertical columns, broken down by source “category”: Official (governments and international organisations), Unofficial (major media organizations), and Citizen (bloggers and small media outlets).

The site’s ambition is to be “equally good at telling stories in real-time and over the long-term” by offering “a mix of presentations and angles and narrative devices.

The site will also experiment with graphic presentations of data and include “documentaries, longer-form narratives, and serialised content.”

The new platform will also look into ways to bring “cross-disciplinary approaches to the reporting of news”, for example by working with artists and musicians on multimedia projects, “in hopes of rendering information ‘that is both artistic and journalistic.’”

Read the full story.

Links:
Nieman Lab review
Newsmotion Official website
Newsmotion on Facebook
Newsmotion on Twitter

Published: July 11, 2011