At the start of 2012, media organizations and news sites are looking back at the top stories of 2011 (see this CNN list for a good run-down), suggesting new year's resolutions for newsrooms, and even offering a few trends that will "reshape digital news in 2012," as Poynter did.
First on Poynter's trend list is experimenting with the notion of what "story" actually entails -- an experiment embodied by Storify, a platform for curating social media posts into stories. "Storify shifts several paradigms — the audience/public as contributors, not just consumers, of news gathering; the journalist as a listener and curator, not just a broadcaster; and the news story told by the people through a journalist, instead of to the people from a journalist." For example, Storify has been used to track all the journalists arrested in 2011 for covering the Occupy movement.
Poynter's second trend noted is that Facebook is for news and not just social networking. The Facebook subscribe feature, launched in 2011, is just one way journalists can use the social media site. Facebook for Journalists and Facebook's social news app, which allows users to automatically share and see stories they and their friends are reading, also demonstrate the importance of Facebook for news. Also, newspapers have been experimenting with using Facebook's commenting system for their reader forums. On a side note, Media Bistro offers a clever look at what news would like in a world according to Facebook and Twitter.
The final trend that will take off in 2012, according to Poynter, is the mainstreaming of tablet computers and e-readers, which should help generate much-needed advertising dollars for the news industry.
