HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a computer language computer scientists developed in order to allow the creation of websites. It appeared in the early 1990s and was designed by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), as a system for researchers to share and read documents.

It instructs a web browser how to interpret and compose text, images, and other material into visual or audible web pages. This is accomplished by tags, which indicate to the browser how to display the content. The tags label pieces of content such as "heading", "paragraph" or "table". Browsers do not display the tags, but use them to render the content of the page.

Hypertext is a way to move around the Web, by clicking on specific parts of text, which are named hyperlinks and often appear in a different colour. A hyperlink directs the user to another page on the Internet. The term hyper means that a text is not linear, but a user is able to visit any page on the Internet by clicking on the hyperlinks in no predetermined order.

Markup refers to the HTML tags that mark certain parts of text to be displayed differently by the web browser (e.g. bold text or italic text). Tags come usually in pairs, like this: <title> and </title>. The first tag in the pair indicates where the title begins and the second one marks where it ends.

HTML is a language because it has code words and syntax like any other programming language.

 A basic example of HTML code:                          The code on the left looks like this on the screen: 

<html>                                                  <head>     <h1>Newsreel</h1>                   </head>   <body>     <p>European project</p>   </body> </html>

The HTML specifications are maintained and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded in 1994 by Berners-Lee. W3C constantly analyses and revises the code according to the technological developments and online audience demands. The first set of standardised specifications was published in 1995 as HTML 2.0. Since then, HTML has evolved up to version 5.2 (its most recent set was issued in 2017).

The terms citizen journalism and participatory journalism are often used interchangeably to describe the use of content produce by non-media professionals. Other terminology even refers participatory journalism to the circulation of user-generated content by main stream media. In our view, participatory journalism describes the production of professional journalism content involving members of the audience in the process. This implies a process of co-creation, with both parties (citizens and professional journalists) contributing for example original content or commentary. Most often this means that the content producers react to a call made by a newsroom to produce specific content like videos or pictures from their neighbourhood, to help in journalistic investigations or to support the newsroom in the verification process.

Forms of participation can be brainstorming, monitoring, fact checking, information gathering, document searching, producing original content, mapping, translating, indicating interesting sources like interview partners, financing single investigations, and promotion (share articles, suggest subscriptions). In some cases, the newsroom allows their citizen contributors to check content before publication and to suggest changes. Participatory journalism often evolves over time, but can also include single-project cooperation.

The level of interaction between the newsroom and the citizen contributors can range from low to rather frequent and intense. While some authors underline that this process should be based on a non-hierarchical relationship and a close alignment with local communities, others contend that this is an overly romantic point of view. Challenges for participatory journalism can be the lack of resources like staff, time and money in newsrooms, inadequate preparation of communication channels and work tasks, concern about the (digital) security of audience members as well as the handling of digital vandalism and the risk of bias in the data.

Citizen journalism describes a form of journalism that is driven by citizens without any prior journalistic education or experience, which often is published on dedicated digital platforms, websites and blogs. Citizen journalism often revolves around hyper-local or issue-specific reporting on social issues like homelessness. Citizen journalism projects often aim to empower individuals and communities to share their perspective and invalidate stereotypic mainstream media reporting.

Some citizen journalism projects and platforms are driven by former journalists, which offer guidelines on how to report, or even professional editing and mentoring. Other community based, hyperlocal citizen journalism projects offered workshops and editorial meetings to support their contributors and enhance the quality of their reporting. When asked about their process of professionalization, citizen journalists often pointed to feedback from peers, participation in conferences and workshops and the use of online courses on journalism. In contrast to some forms of participatory journalism, the level of interaction between content producers and the main stream media is usually rather low.

The amount of content produced by citizens is rising. With the advent of high-performance cameras in mobile phones, rising transmission speeds and dropping prices, the amount of (visual) contents that can be a valuable sources for journalistic reporting is constantly rising. Such can be texts, photos or videos deliberately produced to raise awareness to a topic as well as videos of coincidental eye witnesses.

When confronted with crisis situations like terror attacks in urban settings, natural disasters, or civil war, the mass media is increasingly dependent on the use of content produced by non-professionals. Most mass media news rooms today frequently monitor different social media platforms for interesting content to use for their own reporting. Some maintain regular relationships to single non-journalistic content producers in order to have frequent updates from difficult to reach areas such as conflict zones and occasionally support these individuals with journalistic advice or technical devices.

Dependence from user generated content however, may lead to bias in reporting as the material often cannot sufficiently be fact checked. Furthermore, ethical concerns have been raised as citizens often lack resources and knowledge to secure their own safety during reporting, but might feel encouraged to produce more (dramatic) content after seeing their videos, comments or pictures circulated by mainstream media. Some media have used content from social media platforms without consent from its creators, with insufficient credits or inadequate verification. The circulation of UGC by mainstream media should be distinguished from citizen journalism and participatory journalism.

Similar to the Native Advertising System but fully managed by the brand (I.e. The Atlantic and IBM). The biggest disadvantage of advertorials are ethical and deontological issues, because in many countries this kind of content cannot be produced by journalists, since they are managed by a non-news media brand and can be considered promotional or advertising. In the Native Advertising System, because the contents are editorial, the ethical and deontological issues are usually not a problem.

In this system each reader pays a unique and centralized fee for accessing several media outlets’ premium contents.

Each media outlet gets a percentage for its own traffic, and the aggregator gets a commission, e.g. the internationally oriented Piano Media or the Portuguese Nonio.net.

In this business model a company pays a media outlet to have a branded area on the media webpage. The contents are editorial and not advertising, mixing editorial contents produced by the media outlet, the brand and guest authors (often specialists on the subject). The main goal is to target special audiences with purposefully produced contents, boosted by the media brand credibility (i.e. The News York Times and Dell computers). As the media scientist Lucy Kueng wrote in 2018: “Advertising revenues, ideally scaled native advertising revenues, are at the core of their [the news media’s] business model”.

Data analysis describes a method by which data is collected, organised and evaluated, with the goal of discovering useful information or interesting trends. Data is gathered, reviewed and analysed in order to describe a reality or to identify trends in a community. In journalism, very often the results of data analysis are transformed to visuals in order to enhance the interest of the public. One interesting example is Bloomberg’s 2015 analysis of the most dangerous jobs in America.

Data analysis consists of several steps: defining objectives, data collection, data cleaning, data analysis and drawing conclusions. After the set-up of the research objective, raw data can be collected from different sources such as: interviews, observations and documents (qualitative) as well as records or [LINK inside the glossary] databases (quantitative). Before starting the data analysis, the data needs to be sorted and cleaned.

In order to analyse data several open source and paid for software tools have been developed. Examples of open source data analysis programmes are: R Programming and Splunk. Paid data analysis programme are: Tableau Public, SAS, Microsoft Excel, and Rapid Miner. 

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a database, also called electronic database, is any collection of data or information that is specifically organised for rapid search and retrieval by a computer. Databases are structured to facilitate the storage, retrieval, modification, and deletion of data in conjunction with various data-processing operations.

Databases can be classified according to their type of content: bibliographic, full text, numeric and images. There are many different kinds of databases: relational database (items are organized as a set of tables with columns and rows), and object-oriented databases, (which allow for the integration of the data and the programming language in the database), distributed database (two or more files located on different sites) or cloud database (built for a virtualized environment).

Databases evolved dramatically since the early 1960’s. In the 1980’s, relational databases became popular, followed by object-oriented databases shortly after. Object-oriented databases represent data in form of objects and classes. In this understanding, an object can consist of properties (state) or entities (behavior). For example, a student can be represented in their university’s database with properties like name, address or date of birth as well as with their entities or behaviors like going to classes, writing exams or paying their fees. In other words, a data set is combined with an object, thus all information is directly available. Objects are brought together in classes, generating a hierarchy of classes and subclasses. The objects are interlinked and can be easily retrieved after they have been saved. Object-oriented database models have advantages: complex data sets can be saved and accessed quickly and easily and work well with object-oriented programming languages like C++, JavaScript or Python. However, object databases are not widely adopted, and the high complexity can cause performance problems.

Recently, NoSQL (non-relational database that allows unstructured data to be stored and manipulated) have become popular. The most current developments are cloud databases and self-driving databases, a term to describe automatized databases that perform operations such as security, back-up and update management without human intervention.

The freemium model is a mix of the traditional radio and TV business model and print business model. A part of the content is delivered for free to the audience, but is accompanied by advertisements. Another part of the content, usually of superior quality, as exclusive content or with additional information, is only available behind a paywall and can be accessed by subscription or paid by piece.