No. 36: Q&A With The OJA20 Immersive Storytelling Finalists

By on October 2, 2020

ONA20 Everywhere, ONA’s global journalism innovation festival, is in full swing! A few emerging-tech themed highlights from the schedule:

Programming is spread out over two weeks, in three-hour blocks through Oct. 16 and all the sessions are recorded — you just need to register for access if you haven’t already.

Register for ONA20 Everywhere

On Oct. 14, ONA will also announce the winner of the 2020 Online Journalism Awards Excellence in Immersive Storytelling category. Join us at 3:30 p.m. ET for the ceremony and come celebrate afterwards in Mozilla Hubs for a Journalism 360 community meetup.

Journalism 360 Program Manager Robert Hernandez talked to the finalists about their projects, including challenges and lessons learned. Give it a read before the big announcement. 🏆

Q&A with the OJA20 Immersive Storytelling finalists→

Noteworthy

Shopping, redesigned. As part of their story on how American shopping malls are evolving in response to the pandemic, Yahoo News built an interactive 3D model of a mall that demonstrates the changing elements.

Privacy concerns. “Any VR/AR headset you use today is likely made by a handful of corporate giants—Sony, Microsoft, HTC, and Facebook. As such, this budding industry has inherited a lot of issues from their creators.”

Zuckerberg on VR. Perhaps in response to the above story, Mark Zuckerberg talked to The Verge about how he’s using VR, how Facebook will manage privacy risks, and why he doesn’t want to build “an Apple Watch for your face.”

Neighborhood tour. The New York Times created a 3D virtual walking tour of Jackson Heights in New York City, encouraging readers to explore the neighborhood and learn about its history.

Yes, filter. In other New York Times news, the paper has launched a multi-year partnership with Facebook to co-develop AR filters on Instagram that help users access and contextualize their journalism.

Visualizing cable news. To better understand who appears on cable TV news and what they talk about, a Stanford study used AI to analyze over a decade of nearly 24/7 cable TV news broadcasts by CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC.

Holographic meetings. According to Recode, the startup Spatial wants to build the “Google Docs of augmented reality,” or a virtual space where groups of people can collaborate on projects.

We always welcome your comments, links and other inputs to future issues. Send tips to karolle@journalists.org. Look for the next edition on Nov. 6.

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