As the war in Afghanistan enters its final chapter, Sean Smith's brutal, uncompromising film from the Helmand frontline shows the horrific chaos of a stalemate that is taking its toll in blood
Where journalists have greatness thrust upon them
Online Journalism Blog
Research: the limits of social networks for organising the social
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmUlises Mejias has written a wonderful paper (subscription required) on how social networks don’t just enable participation – but limit them. Or as he asks: “Whether social network services engender publics (where opinion can be expressed freely) or masses (where opinion can be expressed freely but is not realised in action)”. It’s a fascinating counterpoint to the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric (think Twitter and the ‘Iran revolution’) that surrounds so much writing on social networks. If you’re able to get [ ... ]
The New Online Journalists #7: Dave Lee
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmAs part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, Dave Lee talks about how he won a BBC job straight from university, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today. I got my job as a result – delightfully! – of having a well-known blog. Well, that is, well-known in the sense it was read by the right people. My path to the BBC began with a [ ... ]
Let us record what happens in our courts – comment call
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmUPDATE: You can vote to repeal the ban on recording court proceedings here (Thanks to Alistair Kelman in the comments) Heather Brooke is calling for a campaign to allow recording in UK courts. I agree. In the comments below, let’s talk strategy. Meanwhile, here’s some of the background from Brooke’s related blog post: How: “The simple answer is to allow tape recorders for all: no party is disadvantaged and an ‘official’ recording is there for checking. This is how [ ... ]
BBC moves to more structured data in its relaunch
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmBehind the story of the BBC website’s recent relaunch is, among other things, an update to their content management system. In a post on the changes, John O’Donovan explains how the changes mean that webpages will have a more structured and semantic quality: “We will … no longer be using tables to layout the content, instead we will be rendering the pages using CSS layout and only using tables for data. “There are lots of reasons to [ ... ]
News sites based on social media content in Latin America
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmI have to admit I didn’t see this one coming… traditional media corporations in Latin America are launching news sites based exclusively on content originated in social media. First of all, we have 140 – news of Twitter, a new web site lunched by Perfil in Argentina, intended as a site for “people who don’t have a Twitter account but want to find out what’s happening” in the microblogging world. Twitter has had a tremendous growth in [ ... ]
A War Logs interactive – with a crowdsourcing bonus
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmFrench data journalism outfit Owni have put together an impressive app (also in English) that attempts to put a user-friendly interface on the intimidating volume of War Logs documents. The app allows you to filter the information by country and category, and also allows you to choose whether to limit results to incidents involving the deaths of wounding of civilians, allies or enemies. Clicking on an individual incident bring up the raw text but also a mapping [ ... ]
Two online journalism research opportunities
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmIf you’re interested in researching online journalism full time there are a couple of opportunities available at the moment: The first is a fully-funded PhD in ‘Developing a new model for local news provision and addressing the democratic deficit in the digital economy‘. It’s a 3-year award funded by the European Social Fund which “provides for payment of tuition fees, together with a maintenance stipend set at £13,688 per annum (expected to increase annually). The research student [ ... ]
Complaint over attack on hyperlocal blog upheld by PCC
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmYou may remember ‘investigation’ by The Hull Daily Mail into HU17.net, a hyperlocal publisher that was operating on its patch back in March, and the resulting backlash against the newspaper by observers who saw this as a commercially motivate hatchet job. Now the Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint on the basis “that readers would have been misled as to the scale of the complainant’s involvement in adult websites. The result was a breach [ ... ]
Reflections on the Birmingham Hacks & Hackers Hackday (#hhhbrum)
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmLast week I spent a thoroughly fascinating day at a hackday for journalists and web developers organised by Scraperwiki. It’s an experience that every journalist should have, for reasons I’ll explore below but which can be summed up thus: it will challenge the way you approach information as a journalist. Disappointingly, the mainstream press and broadcast media were represented by only one professional journalist. This may be due to the time of year, but then that [ ... ]
Facebook’s tips for journalists and publishers
30 July 2010 - 5:04pmFacebook has launched a Media page offering “best practices for journalists”. It’s a rather breathless creation, filled with ad-speak, but if you can put up with that it’s a pretty useful resource providing both a basic introduction to how the site can be used by journalists, through to tips and case studies for those who already use Facebook. Although the page promotes Facebook’s own ‘Posts by everyone’ search facility that allows you to track the buzz [ ... ]
Embeddable leaking – another step to a networked future for journalism
29 July 2010 - 3:34pmComputerworld reports on plans by Wikileaks to allow “newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an “upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks” form onto their Web sites”. “We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document,” said Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks, in an interview at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It’s a first class [ ... ]
How to filter out Foursquare tweets
28 July 2010 - 8:04pmSue Llewellyn asks if there’s a way to filter out Foursquare tweets. There is. The first thing to do is work out something that all the tweets share. Well, every Foursquare tweet includes a link that begins http://4sq.com – so that’s it. If you’re using Tweetdeck this is how you do it. At the bottom of every column in Tweetdeck are 6 buttons. The second one in – a downward-pointing arrow – is the ‘Filter this column’ [ ... ]
Some other online innovators for some other list
28 July 2010 - 12:34amJournalism.co.uk have a list of this year’s “leading innovators in journalism and media”. I have some additions. You may too. Nick Booth I brought Nick in to work with me on Help Me Investigate, a project for which he doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s his understanding of and connections with local communities that lie behind most of the successful investigations on the site. In addition, Nick helped spread the idea of the social media surgery, where [ ... ]
Ofcom “has abrogated its duty to the public” over copyright disconnection powers
28 July 2010 - 12:34amA forthright post over at Boing Boing accuses Ofcom of copping out of their responsibility to sort out just where the burden of proof would fall in the Digital Economy Act’s proposals to disconnect people accused of breaking copyright laws. It’s based on an analysis by the Open Rights Group of Ofcom’s draft code. “Ofcom’s proposal denies us the ability to check whether the methods of collecting of the evidence are trustworthy. Instead, copyright holders and [ ... ]
The WWTDD Effect
28 July 2010 - 12:34amShould we give readers what they want? I’m reminded of my time at the student newspaper, a couple of years ago. In an attempt to get any sort of clue on what our readers wanted to read, and why students in some fields of study didn’t care about the paper at all, we organized a survey. Y’know, one of the most boring, but also one of the most effective ways of getting quantitative insight into whatever [ ... ]
The New Online Journalists #6: Conrad Quilty-Harper
28 July 2010 - 12:34amAs part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, The Telegraph’s new Data Mapping Reporter Conrad Quilty-Harper talks about what got him the job, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today. I got my job thanks to Twitter. Chris Brauer, head of online journalism at City University, was impressed by my tweets and my experience, and referred me to the Telegraph when they said they were looking [ ... ]
The New Online Journalists #5: Nigel Barlow
27 July 2010 - 11:34amAs part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, founder of Inside The M60 Nigel Barlow talks about what led him to launch his own news site, and where it might go next. At the age of 43 I took the momentous decision to come out of finance and business and train to become a journalist starting a 3 year course at UCLAN. I think I quickly realised that journalism was [ ... ]
Investigate your local election campaign expenses
27 July 2010 - 11:34amLast week Channel 4 and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism “raised questions” over the election campaign expenses of Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, specifically the practice of claiming partial expenses on the grounds that ‘not all material was used’. The response from Goldsmith and the Conservative Party seemed to argue that this was standard practice. “The examples raised could be seen in the returns of other candidates.” (see video above) So I decided to obtain the expenses receipts [ ... ]
Using news stories on Facebook: what the BBC found
27 July 2010 - 11:34amGreat post by Claire Wardle and Matthew Eltringham on some research they conducted into how social network users use news. Here are the highlights. Firstly, news as a social object: “They all saw comment and discussion as a key component of enjoying news on Facebook. They shared and posted stories they were interested in, sure, but also so they could make a point or start a conversation. But the vast majority really only wanted to have [ ... ]
Guesstimating the Times’s online readership: 46,154
26 July 2010 - 4:34pmSeveral people have tried to work out how many people are paying to get into the pawalled Times website. My estimate (first published here) is: 46,154 a day. Update: Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times, says in the comments on the original that this figure “*spectacularly* underestimates” the actual number of visitors to the new site. To come up with this figure, I compared how many people commented on two stories – one on the Times [ ... ]
