Innovation in perspective

This week we find out what it takes to expand into podcasting successfully.

This week we visit BuzzFeed to find out how the staff creates Internet-friendly content that ricochets across social media.

This week we see how Al Jazeera is targeting a young mobile audience with its new smartphone app AJ+, and we learn how two journalism industry organizations are partnering to foster new engagement ideas that encourage more diversity.

In this week's Futures Lab update, the Reynolds Journalism Institute brings you up to speed on the fast-moving digital landscape with a report from the annual conference of the Online News Association, held last week in Atlanta, Ga.

This week we look at three crowdfunding platforms to help you decide which to use; then we see how an app called Shuffle gives users stories the people around them are reading.

In this week's Futures Lab update, the Reynolds Journalism Institute looks at online subscription models that are actually working, and explores the possibilities and limitations for computer-generated stories.

Electome is a new tool from the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab that uses data to help capture and analyze social media conversations around the 2016 presidential election.

The system uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze hundreds of millions of tweets every day. It then sorts them into categories – from issue to candidate to civility of language – to enable journalists to compare and contrast the prevalence of issues over time.

This week we look at two startups that make the audience a central part of the journalistic process.

This week we look at a pair of mobile video apps with a streamlined interface and we report on a micropayment system for news content that is already up and running in the Netherlands.

This week we see how aerial drones are being fitted with 360-degree video cameras, and we learn how an anonymous social platform might help with news coverage.