The best: ONA award winners | Electionland for accountability | Where’s podcasting headed? | 3 TO READ: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week

Sept. 20, 2016: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail.com.

And the winner is: The Online News Association’s award winners: For the latest, very best in online storytelling, there’s no better short list than the ONA award winners. Some terrific reads here, with strong mixes of innovative storytelling techniques married to old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. One (if grim) example, The Globe & Mail’s The Taken, about indigenous women murdered by serial killers.
Electionland: A cooperative effort to track problems at the polls: As newsrooms learn to cope with the new digital landscape, one tactic they are increasingly relying on is cooperation. Now a broad coalition of news orgs, from ProPublica to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, with support from Google, will work together, using technology and data, to look for problems on election day, writes Olivia Ma, Google News Lab’s head of partnerships. Electionland is an interesting experiment. I’m curious to see what comes of it.
What’s the future of podcasting?: Serial made people take podcasting seriously, but it’s still small. Most podcasts are heard by only a relatively few people. On the other hand, but it is growing, and fast. Ken Doctor dissects where podcasting is headed for Nieman Lab.

Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.