Virtual reality, diversity and subscriptions: Here is your weekly journalism news update

Every Friday, Journalism.co.uk brings you a round-up of our week’s top stories, giving you all the information you need to know, wherever you are.

Here is the latest journalism news from this week:

BBC takes audiences up the Congo River in latest virtual reality experience

The BBC has taken audiences to the Democratic Republic of Congo in its latest virtual reality (VR) experience, offering them an immersive journey through the country.

With the BBC’s Africa correspondent Alastair Leithead as a guide, viewers journey up the Congo River to navigate its rapids, go hunting in the rainforest with an ancient pygmy tribe and enjoy a heart-racing encounter with gorillas.

"We wanted to give audiences a sense of what the Democratic Republic of Congo is all about ahead of their elections," Leithead told Journalism.co.uk.

How the EJC grants support cross-border collaborative health reporting

Saumya Khandelwal

In August 2018, The European Journalism Centre announced ten winners of its Global Health Journalism Grant Programme for Germany.

The programme aims to ‘improve awareness and understanding among diverse audiences in Germany’ on a range of global health topics across developing projects. One of the recipients explained how grant funding made it possible to report on the state of midwifery in Bangladesh, India and the Rohingya refugee camps.

Sky Sports addresses the lack of women, LGBT and BAME people in sports reporting

Inclusion initiatives at Sky Sports are helping raising awareness around diversity in sports media and improving metrics of LGBT content in the process.

"Sports newsrooms echo the sports climate of the time, so when I began there was no real awareness of the lack of female representation in sports media industries or the fact there are very few BAME people in the industry," home page editor Jon Holmes told Journalism.co.uk. "Certainly, LGBT would not have even been discussed."

NYT launches campaign to educate audiences about paying for quality journalism

The New York Times is running a new global brand campaign called 'The Truth Is Worth It.' It aims to show their readers that the time, commitment, and tenacity required by its investigative teams and reporters worldwide is only possible with a sustainable subscription model.

"We’re only able to deliver our particular brand of deeply-reported journalism because we make the investment in the people and resources required to do it at the highest quality level," said David Rubin, chief marketing officer, New York Times, who spearheads the project.

From cabinets to Google Cloud: NYT revisits history with Past Tense series by digitising six-million photo archive

The New York Times looks to the last 100 years of history to produce stories of modern relevance.

In November 2018, NYT announced it is using Google Cloud technology to digitise its six-million image archive, known as ‘The Morgue’.

From physical cabinets to Google Cloud Storage, the publication now uses the digitised historic photos as part of an image-orientated body of coverage called Past Tense. It looks to breathe new life into the images, enabling journalists to revisit history and retell the stories in new ways.

App for journalists: Storyflow, for getting creative with your social media stories

An increasing number of journalists and news organisations are embracing the Stories format as a way to engage with younger audiences, but making their posts stand out on the platform can be challenging.

But with 400m daily users on Instagram Stories alone, the sequences of videos and images, often containing text, gifs and music, are a hit with younger audiences, and we are seeing an increasing amount of news organisations experimenting with the feature.

Free iOS app Storyflow aims to make it easier to create polished content faster, using a variety of templates that you simply customise to suit your brand.

Christmas podcast: Journalism.co.uk looks back on their stand-out stories of 2018

From left: Marcela Kunova, Jacob Granger and Caroline Scott

As 2018 draws to a close, the final podcast of the year sees the Journalism.co.uk editorial team look back on their top stories and talking points.

Tune in as acting editor Marcela Kunova, deputy editor and head of video Caroline Scott, and multimedia reporter Jacob Granger talk about what blockchain means for journalism, the stand-out tech-savvy pieces and the importance of diversifying newsrooms.

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