The Conversation is a popular Australian online news site that uses academics to cover breaking news and analyze current debates. The idea behind the model is to team up university researchers, who know a lot about many things but can’t necessarily write for a mainstream audience, with editors, who can. The combination of “academic rigour with journalistic flair” (the site’s slogan) has proved a roaring success and The Conversation now attracts nearly 20 million reads a month.

Largely funded by partner universities, the articles are free to read, there are no limits to the number of articles people can read and there is no advertising. In an interesting twist, articles are also free to republish under a Creative Commons license. And in an era where news organizations are continually slashing budgets and laying off staff, the not-for-profit has managed to export its model beyond Australia’s shores to the United Kingdom and the United States.

OnMedia spoke with The Conversation’s founder, Andrew Jaspan.

OnMedia: Why did you think there was a need for The Conversation?

Andrew Jaspan: I’d been working as an editor at The Age newspaper in Australia and The Observer in the UK, and every year I had to lead a redundancy round, which I didn’t like because the good people tend to walk out and into new jobs. There’s a move away from expensive specialist or expert journalists towards general reporters, who tend to be younger and cheaper. So when I left The Age in 2009, there was one nagging problem: if one continued hollowing out the newsroom – leading to poorer service – where were citizens going to get credible information to help them understand what’s going on in the world, particularly around complex issues?

I wanted to answer that question for myself. The vice-chancellor at Melbourne University, Glyn Davis, said “Why don’t you talk to ten of my smartest people?” So I did. While talking to them, I had a Eureka moment: how can I connect these truly smart people who really know their stuff – the very specialists in a sense who’d been lost in the newsroom – and help them translate their knowledge into readable copy freely available to a wider public?

So the combination of expertise within the university research sector with journalists gave us this different and revolutionary model. Our content is now getting nearly 20 million reads a month – and we’re only three years old – so we expect to grow at a fast rate.

How did you dream up the funding model?

Well, the unique funding model followed from the idea. We didn’t want to have a paywall around the information. We wanted to make the content freely available to as many people as possible, including the media. And we don’t take advertising, so we had to come up with a new business model.

We asked each university to make a contribution, as members, and we now have 33 universities who fund us. Ninety percent of our running costs are our editors – we have a team of 32 in Australia. Much the same model operates in the United Kingdom where we have a team of 18 in London funded by nearly 40 universities. In the US (which launched in October 2014), we have a start-up team of 10 based in Boston funded initially by foundations. The universities then get this free service back to them – the commissioning, editing and curating that we do on their behalf. The site has real integrity because there aren’t any advertisements for McDonald’s next to a story about a crisis.

The media can use our content for free under the specific Creative Commons license as long as they don’t re-edit it, which would run the risk they’ll introduce the error we’ve worked hard to avoid. Now we have 13,000 websites around the globe using our content, which is brilliant because we wanted to put high-quality content back into the public arena.

Do you think journalistic commentary takes on a different meaning because of The Conversation’s model?

Authors have to sign a disclosure statement which is published alongside their articles

Our 16,000 writers have to be registered, vetted and authenticated. This has brought a level of expertise and trust that what our audience reads in our pages is not being spun by ideological, commercial, public relations or marketing reasons. What we do has more depth than what you’ll see on most sites.

You also exported your model to the UK in 2013 and the US in October 2014. Would you have done anything differently in retrospect?

Not much, it’s gone well with each of our launches. One of our team went over and trained up the UK team about how the platform works and how we work as an editorial team. We sent four people to the US in two batches for a four-month period so they were really able to train and help support the launch. Wherever we launch, we’ll do a similar thing. The quality of the content has to be consistent so that we can move copy around and share it with other countries. We can’t have some countries being weak because they don’t operate to the standards we expect.

Which countries do you hope to spread to soon?

We have a few more to launch so we’ll have about six or seven sites. Our aim is to set up in different languages including across Europe – in Germany, France and Spain – but that involves our being approached by local journalists. We wait until they contact us and ask us to partner with them.

But before we work with journalists in another country, we need to see if we agree on a set of values around serious journalism, such as getting things right, checking facts and adhering to our code of conduct and our charter.

We’re not seeking to launch lots of sites just for the sake of it. We’re not McDonalds or KFC, trying to sell many franchises. We want locally employed editors who can collaborate with academics and researchers in that country. This means we can work across different territories as one global virtual newsroom, which allows us to tackle global issues, such as food, water, health, energy, human rights, migration issues and so on.

Can you talk more about your goal of creating a global newsroom?

If you take something like Ebola, for example, most of the reporting is done globally by news organizations from first-world countries. To a certain extent, they define the scale of the problem and report back to their domestic audiences about whether they should be concerned or not. We want to make sure that researchers explain why there has to be more of an African approach to the way we work with tackling [Ebola or other big problems] and how we might work towards solutions by engaging local people, rather than having people rush in and see if they can quickly fix the problem and then move out. So it’s a kind of re-balancing of the way in which we understand problems and their range and complexity. That is often not characterized in the reporting from the western media.

What advice would you give to people who want to also start up an innovative media project?

You need to have clear differentiation between what you do and what others do. You have to have a clear message and what you do must resonate. The second thing, it’s all in the quality of the execution, so quality, reliability and adherence to standards are important. The third thing that’s really worked for us is social media – a lot of people help get our message out. And the last reason it’s taken off for us is that we are free, and – through Creative Commons – that has allowed us to move content in a very fast way around the world.

So, you have to: get a good idea, execute it well, tell people about it, and be very focused on what you do.

For more about innovative digital sites or news services, take at look at onMedia’s interviews with Syria Deeply’s founder Lara Setrakian and with with Mark Little from Storyful, a social media news service. 

Interview by Lesley Branagan, edited by Kate Hairsine

(The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity).

The show was inspired by a reporting trip novelist Daniel Alarcón made to his native Peru on assignment for the BBC. While investigating migration there, Alarcón travelled across the country recording personal stories from a wide range of people. But when he later heard the final mix, he was disappointed that the producers had largely highlighted the English speakers he talked to, leaving out much of the compelling material in Spanish. He wondered what the result would be if there was a place where Spanish-language voices could be heard.

In 2012, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Radio Ambulante was born. Programs have featured a transgender Nicaraguan woman living with her wife in San Francisco, a Peruvian stowaway describing his frightening journey to New York, and an Argentine who was jailed during that country’s dictatorship and given the choice to either work or to die. “Ambulante” can mean traveling or itinerant but also refers to “ambulantes”: street vendors who sell all kinds of wares in many Latin American cities.

While Radio Ambulante has a growing list of terrestrial stations that carry it, the show is largely distributed digitally. In early October, Radio Ambulante was awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award in the innovation category. onMedia put a few questions to Radio Ambulante’s co-founder and executive director, Carolina Guerrero, about how the show’s format has been received in Latin America and where the show wants to go to from here.  

Carolina Guerrero (photo: Radio Ambulante)

onMedia: It’s been said that Radio Ambulante’s goal was to produce long-form audio stories, a format that largely didn’t exist on Spanish-language radio. Is it too simplistic to say you wanted stories along the lines of the popular and critically acclaimed US radio program “This American Life”, but in Spanish?

Carolina Guerrero: We are huge fans of This American Life, and that program was certainly one of the inspirations for Radio Ambulante, but we’ve created our own style, and our content is different too. Some people have called us, “This Latin American Life”, which is very flattering, but we hope our listeners now see the complexity of having created a transnational podcast in a different language, and how Radio Ambulante is still a unique podcast.

How has this new form been received in Spanish-speaking countries and communities across the Americas?

We are thrilled with the positive response we have received from our listeners. Our audience keeps growing, as more Spanish-speakers learn about podcasting and audio storytelling. Obviously, it has taken time for us to build an audience, since radio in Latin America has been mostly used to listen to music or news, and Radio Ambulante’s stories are long-narrative pieces that require time and concentration. We have around 100,000 monthly listeners, and 84 percent of those listeners are between 18 and 45 years old – 45 percent of them are in Latin America. Young Spanish-speakers are digitally savvy and interested in podcasting and in these new forms of audio storytelling.

Your audience target area is enormous. How can you be sure that all your listeners can relate to the stories you produce? Are you worried the cultural differences are too large?

Our target area is enormous since the number of Spanish-speaking people in the world is almost 400 million – but of course we don’t need to reach all of them to be successful! We hope to reach as many as we can with quality, well-reported, impeccably produced stories. That’s universal. Everyone loves a good story. And so, yes, there are cultural differences among Spanish speakers, but we believe that our stories are capable of moving audiences anywhere Spanish is spoken.

How have you found your producers over such a large area? How big is your network of contributors now?

At the very beginning we reached out to journalist friends from Latin America to find stories, and a few months later we opened a Call for Pitches that brought us many more stories from independent radio producers in the US as well. It’s the kind of thing that becomes easier as time goes on: now we have a body of work that we can point potential contributors to and people come to us with great ideas all the time. During the last two years, we’ve seen our network of producers and contributors grow and expand all over South, Central and North America, and some other countries in Europe or Asia.

Novelist and Radio Ambulante Co-Founder Daniel Alarcón (photo: flickr/Esther Vargas CC:BY-SA)

The Gabriel García Márquez prize committee praised the collaborative nature of the project, saying its strong journalistic guidelines had given the stories a distinctive voice. Is there a common sound that you’re after?

The common sound we are after is that of great storytelling. Our editors work closely with our producers for long periods of time and we have a very distinctive format where, most of the time, we have a narrator alternate with the characters telling the story. That gives the stories a dynamism that we are always looking for since listening to the same person speak for a long period of time could be boring. We try to find a balance in the way we tell the story. Ambient sound, music and sound effects are also key elements.

The committee also pointed to the economic model of Radio Ambulante. I know you got Kickstarter money at the beginning. How are you financed now? Do listener contributions make up a significant percentage of that?

We still receive support from our listeners, and expect to launch another Kickstarter campaign early next year. But most of our funding comes from different foundations in the United States. We’re also starting to get underwriting and hope to find a few sponsors now that our audience is much bigger.

You have several methods of distribution – broadcast on radio stations, your internet site, SoundCloud, etc. Which is the most popular?

SoundCloud is the platform where we upload our content, and from there it is distributed to other platforms. So every time someone listens to our story on our website, via iTunes or via Stitcher, they actually listen to us in SoundCloud. We receive specific stats and metrics from them. But we also have a partnership with BBC Mundo, and they have their own platform and analytics, but bring half of the listeners to most of our episodes as well. We are also growing in terrestrial radio stations around Latin America. In essence, however, we’re a digital project. From reporting to production to distribution, we rely on the most current digital tools to do our work. Our very nature is transnational. So without them, we could not exist.

You’ve experimented with different formats, including live shows, multimedia and English-language specials. Are there other ways you are looking at to expand your audience and interact with your listeners?

We are always looking for new ways to grow our audience and engage our listeners. Earlier this year we launched an interview series in English with PRI (Public Radio International) called Radio Ambulante: Unscripted, where Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón interviews Latino and Latin American artists, thinkers and innovators. With this series we hope to reach those listeners who are interested in topics related to Latino and Latin American art and innovation, but who might not have the Spanish-language skills to access that information through Spanish-language media.

We also hope to expand our presence on the radio dial by distributing our content to more terrestrial radio stations in the US and Latin America. KALW, the local public radio station from the San Francisco Bay Area, just starting broadcasting our content in Spanish – which is huge! We’d love to see more radio stations around the country follow KALW’s bold move. Live shows are a big part of our mission, too. We have the forth one coming up in San Francisco, and we know it will be a success. It’s all part of our mission to bring diverse, complicated, moving stories from Latin America to the audiences that crave them. With that goal in mind, we’re willing to try every avenue available.

Interview conducted by Kyle James

CC image courtesy of victoriapeckham on Flickr

Many traditional newspaper publishers have completely restructured their newsrooms so that their print and online departments now work together. The way that they have done though varies enormously. In some, print and online journalists work side by side; in others, there is no distinction between the two departments at all.

Klaus Meier is a German media expert who has been closely observing exactly how media organizations are integrating their newsrooms. Together with researchers from Spain and Austria, Meier first published a detailed analysis of newsroom convergence in 2008. The team have done a follow up study this year.

DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel talked to Klaus Meier about what newsrooms look like today and what these changes mean for the journalism of the future.

What are the main differences you found in how newsrooms are converging?

The fully integrated newsroom model completely brings together print and online as well as other digital platforms. It is also very strongly section orientated which means the sections determine the content for the various platforms. As such, the sections function as a type of central desk – they control the work flow, produce content across the various media and determine what goes online. An additional central desk is only for breaking news and news prioritizing.

In the cross-media model, online and print are strictly separated but cooperate closely. This cooperation is ultimately controlled by a highly integrated unit – which has various names such as the newsdesk, the multimedia manager or the multimedia editor. Their function is to see where and print and online can work together and how can they benefit from each other.

Social media tends to be used differently in the two models and this can help understand the difference. In the integrated model, it is the journalists themselves who use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to distribute their stories, collect comments and start discussions. In the cross-media model, it is very much the social media editor who coordinates this. Online journalists will be more likely to use social media and print journalists less likely but it is the social media editors who will have more say in this area.

In this day and age, does it make any sense to still differentiate between print and online journalists?

In the fully integrated model, distinctions between print and online are deliberately avoided and all journalists produce content for all platforms. That means journalists have to keep all of the possible platforms in mind when they are doing their stories and some of this content is then used to for the newspaper.

However, there are also good arguments for keeping a distinction between print and online. Online is a new medium that is rapidly developing and these developments require continuous innovation. It can be difficult to innovate though if staff are tied to meeting daily multiple deadlines. And therefore you could argue that you need to have online journalists who are not only on top of the latest developments but also have the time to stay on top of them so it is better for them to be able to act independently. If a newsroom doesn’t have an online unit, it at least should set up a research and development unit.

What skills do journalists need so that converged newsrooms function well?

It really depends on what kind of newsroom model you have. In the integrated model, ideally all journalists should know how to tell stories online, how to use all of the digital platforms and be proficient in using social media. In addition, journalists also need to be familiar with new technologies and software – for example, print journalists need to know how to use a video camera or how to tell stories using slideshows. In practice though, not all journalists have to be able do everything. Really what is important is finding a team that can cooperate to produce such stories.

So an integrated newsroom means more cooperation and more teamwork?

It’s been obvious for a long time that these new newsrooms require more teamwork. Previously, journalists were so-called “lonely riders” who researched stories and published them under their own byline. This idea of individual authorship is now being superseded by the idea of teamwork and openness. Newsrooms are becoming transparent in that journalists put all their materials into story folders that can be accessed by every other journalist in the newsroom. This idea that it’s a team which researches and exchanges ideas about stories is changing the work culture of journalism.

You’ve been involved in teaching journalism at university for many years. What do all these changes mean for journalism education and training?

That is something we’ve been discussing for many years. In the 1990s, for example, journalism students learned how to do radio and television but they learned these as two separate skills and not in cross-media projects. I think at the very beginning it is still necessary to learn the basic skills of each platform independently from other platforms. But then journalism training needs to incorporate a second step where students practice using these skills cross-medially – for example by telling a complex story in different ways. Because it is only by actually doing it that they get a sense of how to tell a story on various platforms and what type of content is appropriate for each platform.

Journalism schools seem to offer everything though at the moment, from data journalism and VJ training to social media management and community management. Do you have any tips for young journalists trying to decide what they should study?

I think students should know how to do a bit of everything but they have to decide for themselves what they would like to specialize in. There are still students out there who only want to work in TV. If that is the case, then we should make sure that they also know to write a good story for online and radio. So my advice would be to generalize at the beginning of your studies, have a go at everything and try to be proficient in all areas. But then decide where your speciality is and go deeper in story-telling for one platform.

What direction do you think the media is going to take in the future?

I think mobile journalism will develop rapidly in the next two to four years. For example, in Germany, one in five Internet users now has a tablet computer and two out of three have either a smartphone or a tablet, or both. This is an enormous potential market for innovative journalism products. And perhaps this will lead to new business models where users are prepared to pay more for media content. At the moment I am still skeptical about the apps on the market because most of them don’t offer a great deal of additional benefit to users compared to the open web. But I think there is great potential and we’ll see many new technical developments for new kinds of devices that are even easier to use, cheaper and more suitable for the mass market.

Technology is becoming increasingly important but media organizations are finding it difficult to have these kind of technology skills in house. What kind of difference is this making?

Newspaper publishers always used to have their technology – the printing press – under their roof. Now technology is outsourced and it’s the Internet providers and computer companies that are earning money with technology. That is a huge problem and I don’t have a solution. But newsrooms should have some kind of innovation or development department which is removed from the daily production schedule and which spends its time exploring the new devices coming out on the market and the kind of technology these devices use. So my advice is to bring journalists and technical developers together. And secondly, media organizations need to redevelop or renew their content management system so that they can use new media and diverse publication channels in a more flexible way.

Dr Klaus Meier holds the chair for “journalism studies I” at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany. His research explores editorial management, innovations in newsrooms, convergence, online journalism, science journalism and journalism education.

Dan Sinker by Daniel X. O’Neil (Flickr: danxoneil) under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

New media is pushing the boundaries of journalism by introducing new technologies. But the question is how newsrooms and journalists can innovate without having to dive into the programming world themselves. This is where the Knight-Mozilla Fellows come in.

The Knight Foundation has long supported quality journalism and journalistic innovation. In 2012, they teamed up with the Mozilla Foundation, which actively promotes an open internet and open source software. The two created the OpenNews partnership with the idea of bringing journalism and technology together.

In 2013, Knight-Mozilla Fellows are hacking newsrooms at the prestigious media organizations such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, the Boston Globe, ProPublica and La Nacion.

DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel met with the head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Dan Sinker. They talked about why hackers are interested in working with journalists in the first place, how journalists can tap into the world-wide community of hackers and a revolutionary new piece of software for data scraping.

What is the Knight Mozilla OpenNews about?

We are dedicated to building and strengthening the community that is helping to rebuild and rethink journalism for the web. A lot of what we do is help support technologists who are interested in the journalism space and help them move towards making tools for journalism. The core of what we are doing is a fellowship program where we embed developers in newsrooms around the world for ten month stints. This is so the developers can really understand journalistic problems whilst doing experiments and open source development on projects and ideas that they have during this time. We also do some small funding of journalism codes bases, something we call Code Sprints grants.  We also run a website called Source which is really the hub of this community and helps document what is happening in code and journalism. We also sponsor journalistic-themed hack days around the world as well to really bring developers in to spend some time hacking on journalistic problem sets.

Why is it important for developers to work together with journalists?

I don’t think that anyone would argue that journalism’s future is on the open web. We are now at a point that it is not simply about taking content that existed in some other medium and putting it on the web. We really need to build content that is of the web. In order to do that we need to engage a lot more people to make things for journalism on the web. Right now, there are not a lot of programs that are thinking about that and who are able to really speak to developers in the language that they are used to speaking and getting them to engage in ways that they want to engage. That is really what we are trying to do – build the community of people that are able to build the journalism on the web.

Many journalists don’t seem to be so interested in the digital possibilities of journalism. Why aren’t they embracing technology?

Historically, folks that are attracted to journalism are storytellers and investigators and people like that. Expecting them to suddenly become high-end developers is an impossible expectation. We are talking about a completely different skill sets and completely different areas of expertise. What we need to do is to get those journalists to really think about how do they collaborate with developers. Traditionally, it has been quite alienating for developers to have journalists simply say, “I need you to build me this”. It’s like, “Wait! What you want is not actually that interesting. If we were collaborating, I could really help you think about what this could potentially be instead of you telling me what it should be”. So we need to get journalists to think about collaboration and we need to get developers to really think about the fact that journalist problem sets are very interesting problem sets for developers right now.

Which kinds of problems are you talking about?

We are talking about a number of things. Some of them are pure data questions. You have developers who are very interested in open access to information. Being able to liberate data sets, being able to dive into that data and get information out of it, is a really compelling thing for a lot of people. Journalism is an excellent outlet for that. You are also talking about some of the fundamentally engaging development questions on the web. How do we present information on the web? How do we build frameworks that are agile and adaptive and able to do x on this day, and y on another day? Those are problems of journalism that actually help push the whole web forward.

One of the things I find very interesting is if you look at the building blocks of the web we have today, especially in the area of frameworks. Two of the leading frameworks that people develop on the web on are Django and Backbone. They came out of newsrooms and there is a reason for that. There is a reason why Jfree which is a visualization library has also come out of newsrooms. Because these things are widely used beyond the newsroom itself. If we can get developers interested in journalism, no only does journalism move forward but the whole web moves forward.

You are talking about a community of developers. How do journalists find them?

One thing that has changed fundamentally in the last decade and has really accelerated in the past five years or so is the ability of developers and hackers and engineers to self-organize around code. A lot of that is thanks to the maturing of the open-source community. But it is also thanks to the introduction of tools such as GitHub which have really made it incredibly easy for communities to form around code bases. I think that is a key part of engaging in developer communities. These folks are already organized. And so you need to go to where they are organizing and say, “look at this awesome stuff you are doing. We want to help with that. And we also want you to help us with this”.

Are any countries where you are especially engaged?

We are involved with global news. One of the first ways we approach the community is if someone there wants to organize a hack event around some kind of journalistic theme. We’ll give them some sponsorship money so they can get food or rent a space or whatever it is they need to make that happen. One of the places that has been working amazingly is Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires. We have really found an incredible community of developers who are really engaged – especially in open information and open data. They want to build tools and want to work with journalists and want to get information out there by any means necessary.

Why Argentina?

My theory is Argentina has a very vibrant startup tech culture. But also most of the people driving that came of age during the past financial crisis there. They, at a fundamental level,  know that data is power. Being able to liberate that data, being able to give anyone access to that data, is a really powerful motivating factor. To me, it is the only explanation that makes sense. To me, that is why you see it in Argentina and not in Europe or the United States.

Can you give us an example of where a hacker is working successfully in a newsroom.

We have a fellow who is actually working at La Nacion in Buenos Aires this year, Manuel Aristarán.  Prior to working with us, he was working on a satellite project. He has always been interested in open data and he was even interested enough to start an open data portal for his town. He was the lead programmer for La Nacion on building a census portal for Argentina, with census data, maps and that kind of thing. But in his spare time he has built a tool for pulling data out of PDFs. Which is an incredibly hard problem and is a big bump in the road towards open governmental data is that a lot of that data is inside PDFs and not in tabular data that you would want to be able work with. Getting the data out of that has been a problem for ever. And he developed a system for pulling that out that is simple as can possibly be. Once he was at La Nacion, he was able to spend more time developing it, and we were also able to pair him with our fellow who is working at ProPublica with a team of people to get it done and now it is in alpha. It is an application called tabular and it is revolutionary.

What lessons have you learned in the two years since Open News started up?

We are seeing that we have an incredible potential for being a conduit for collaborative newsrooms across borders by having these fellows in newsrooms and also by being this third party that is interested in solving shared problems. Newsroom organization are in their nature not collaborative entities. Because we are an external party, we are able to be a collaboration broker between folks who are not naturally inclined to collaborate. This is interesting because the open source software world is all about collaboration. So especially as you have newsrooms that are beginning to build sophisticated software teams, New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian, La Nacion, you actually begin to see internally a want to collaborate because they understand that sharing code bases are natural to a developer. And to horde that information is anti-ethical to a hacker. So for us, being able to help those kinds of collaborations have been a great lesson.

Are you targeting media organizations in developing countries as well?

The first year, we were working exclusively with big news organizations in the United States, England and Germany as well as Al Jazeera English. In our second year, we included La Nacion. We are hoping to be able to continue to expand to other developing countries. The trick is to have partners that don’t just see us as a free developer. Our developers are not staff members: they are internal/external entities. They are as much researchers as they are anything else. What they are researching is the culture of the newsrooms so that research can influence the developments and the experiments and the kinds of things that they want to do.

Many of the tools are in English. Is language then a problem in some developing countries?

Historically, it has been a problem but it is rapidly fixing itself. As more and more developers and their own cultures begin to build up in these countries, they begin to translate the tools and they begin get the information out. In South America, the Data Journalism Handbook has been translated into Spanish and not just translated but also localized. So they are beginning to address the fact that this was mainly written by US and European data journalists and different problems apply in South America.

Does this mean journalists need to learn programming?

I don’t believe journalists need to transform to a highly functional developer. There are some that will traverse that path but it is a long path. What journalists need to be able to do, and they need to be able to do it quite desperately at this point, is to understand how to talk to developers, how to engage them and understand how to collaborate with them. This is really about having a shared knowledge base. It’s not about, “I know how to program as well as you”. You don’t expect a programmer to write a story as completely as a journalist. But you need to be able to collaborate and that means being able to converse in a way that is conscious of each other’s cultures.

DW Akademie’s interview with Dan Sinker took place during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where he was taking part in several panel discussions.

A secure password is one of the first steps towards more digital security. If your password has been cracked, hackers can get access to valuable personal information, steal your money and damage your reputation by distributing harmful content in your name. DW Akademie’s Natalia Karbasova offers some basic rules to help you create secure passwords and checks out selection of tools for password management and security check.

How to create a secure password

1. Your password must be complex. There’s no need to say that such passwords as QWERTY, 1234 or “password” can be cracked in a couple of seconds. And you don’t want to see you password on the list of worst passwords of the year. So don’t use passwords which are easy to guess, such as names or dates of birth of your relatives and friends. Your password should contain lower as well as upper case characters, numbers and punctuation marks. The rule of thumbs is: the longer your password is, the better. Eight characters are the minimum requirement for a good password. To remember your passwords more easily, also read these suggestions from Microsoft.

The Diceware Passphrase website also offers a good method which can help you construct a strong password.

2. Don’t use the same password for multiple websites. You should follow the rule of “One password – one website”. By doing this, you will prevent hackers from easily accessing other services and accounts for which you use the same password.

3. Don’t reveal your password to anybody else. If you still had to share your password with a third person, make sure to change it immediately afterwards.

4. Don’t write your password down. If you have to, then never place the paper at your desk for everyone to see. Also, avoid writing down the website for which the password should be used.

5. Change your passwords regularly. By doing this you will avoid problems if you password was revealed by a third person.

Check the strength of your password

After you have created a password, you can use a number of online services to check how secure it really is. Microsoft suggests checking your password’s strength – all you need to do is to type in your password and see the rating below. You can also try this online tool to check the security of your password.

Also, the website howsecureismypassword.net not only lets you check the security of your password, but also tells you how much time it would take to crack it. The website also provides comments on your password such as its length and character variety or if there are repeated patterns which make the password easy to guess.

Password generators

To create sophisticated passwords, you can also resort to specialized websites.

• WolframAlfa is actually an answer engine, but the scope of tasks it can cope with is truly impressive. Type in “password” and it will generate a random combination for you.
• Password generator – you can choose between different types of passwords, such as Internet or server passwords.
• Secure password generator by Symantec allows you to create random passwords.

Password managers: Tools to keep track of your passwords

Password managers help you keep track of your passwords without having to remember them all. Mashable offers a list of useful tools for password management. Let’s have a look at the tools that have proved to be effective and can be used free of charge:

• KeePass and KeePassX are a free, open-source password managers which can also be used in a portable mode and run off a USB drive. At the moment, they seem to be the most popular free tools. They allow you to save passwords using only one primary password to unlock them.
• LastPass is a free tool for Windows and Mac stores all of its data in the cloud. It can automatically save your logins, help you generate passwords and automatically fill in your passwords when you visit a site.
• Firefox Sync syncs and protects your passwords, bookmarks and browser tabs.
• Firefox users can also resort to a browser add-on Keefox, for which you only need to remember a master password.

More to read:

• Five tools journalists can use to protect their privacy
• Probably the Best Free Security List in the World
• Journalist Security Guide by the Committee to Protect Journalists: Chapter on Information security