Bob Woodward, speaking on Tuesday March 15 at Poynter Institute, approached the topics of good journalism and the present digital media world.

From his words, good, old journalism skills still seem to remain the basis in the Internet journalism age.
The Web gives the feeling that information is completely available and can be spread all over, but in the digital age, prepared and accuracy-focused reporters are needed to provide the high quality, probing journalism the world requires. Technology in and of itself is nothing without good journalists seeking out truth and looking for the hidden information that always exists.

"Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn't have a Facebook account. He wouldn't have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk. And the information was not on the Internet. You talk to college students and they say, 'Instead of two years before Nixon resigned it would have happened in a week.' And I say, why? And they say, 'Because, people would have gone to the Internet and found it.' But I say, 'It wasn't there. Even if there was an Internet, the information would not be available,'" Woodward said.

Are we talking science fiction, outer space? Nah, Augmented Reality ("AR") in this context refers to smart phone apps from news sources and their inspired direction toward interactive graphics and illustrations, a kind of layered, enhanced reality made for the user, in this case the news source's demographic.

While journalists might not always be considered "in the know" about what is techy and marketable, The Boston Globe showed last weekend that the use of AR for phone apps can be done "quickly and cheaply, making it an experiment worth trying in the newsroom" according to Poynter.

A perfect test of this was the newspaper's annual Winter Arts Guide, which has schedules and previews of upcoming arts and entertainment events. The idea was to try something more animated this year, where the season comes alive. And so this became the theme of this year's section, and Dan Zedek, The Globe's assistant managing editor for design, asked, "What if we made the page come alive?"

Reginald Chua, the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, has an interesting take on how to extract more value from what journalists produce in a series of posts on the (Re)Structuring Journalism blog that focuses on creating content that can be used over a longer period of time than traditional daily journalism.

In Chua's opinion, journalists need to rethink what they're doing and get beyond just filing a story. This is the idea behind the concept of Structured Journalism: "change the way we create content so as to maximize its shelf-life, as well as structuring - as much as possible - the information in stories, at the time of creation, for use in databases that can form the basis of new stories or information products".

Since readers often come across stories on the web that are written months or even years before they find them, "we should make it easier to understand stories by writing them to be read months after the event. That means changing date references, adding different context, etc.", Chua wrote.

The role of journalism schools is changing, says Geneva Overholser on MediaShift:

"Perhaps the most striking change for journalism schools is the degree to which we have shifted from being learning labs whose actual journalism (if any) was limited in its distribution and impact, to being significant -- even major -- media players in our communities". As Overholser underlines, journalism schools across the United States are focusing on making substantial contributions toward filling the holes left by the hollowing out of local "legacy" media.