By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>
Sept. 7, 2016: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail.com.
- How cartoons are changing the rules of journalism: Perhaps you’ve read the number of full-time editorial cartoonists has dropped. But that story is not complete — cartoons have jumped from a single-frame, political box to evolve into a long-read, sophisticated story-telling tool. It’s exploded in directions that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Some examples: Stories about kids with drug-addicted parents and an investigation into narco-terrorists. An interesting take by Shan Wang for Nieman Lab.
- Alexa, give me news: Amazon’s Alexa, the voice-powered speaker, is a huge hit. How newsrooms are figuring out the best ways to work with the AI software and provide news to listeners. From Joseph Lichterman at Nieman Lab.
- The cool story behind a newly-famous NYT crossword puzzle: Something a little lighter — I’m not a crossword person, but I love a good puzzle, and this is damn cool. The Times published a crossword puzzle in which certain answers could be read in two different ways (eg: “Black Halloween animal” could be either BAT or CAT.) It’s obviously a difficult accomplishment to create a puzzle like this, but even cooler is that the general theme fit perfectly with the ambiguous answers: “GENDER FLUID.” A nice story-behind-the-story piece by Oliver Roeder for Slate.
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Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
