Recent posts in my Journalism Category

In this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Michael Rosenblum asks why journalists can’t get themselves together and charge more for their work, or take on more of a business and entrepreneurial role. I think the desire to do journalism and the desire to make money may well be mutually exclusive.

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London. Markham Nolan was talking about how Storyful sources social media content from accidental citizen journalists.

Headlines today have suggested that the murder rate has gone up by 5%, or that knifepoint robbery has gone up by 10% in England and Wales. The figures also show that crime overall has dropped by 4%. Reporting crime statistics is a data journalism minefield however, and last year I attended a fascinating set of talks on the subject.

An Oregon judge has inadvertently sparked a wider debate about the nature of journalism, as Cleland Thom reported for the Press Gazette. I think a public set of principles is one key way for publishers to set themselves aside from the general hubbub of the internet.

Everybody loves a social media story with a happy ending - by which I don’t mean that PR stunt about that other Martin guy. Here are two that have caught my eye over the last few days, involving a student trying to get an internship, and the Muscatine Journal in Iowa.

I’m hosting December’s “Carnival of journalism” on the Guardian Developer blog, so it would be a bit remiss not to join in myself. As neither a hack nor a hacker, I thought I'd take the liberty of answering both variations of the question...

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, Stephen Grey was talking about the journalistic process behind his work to uncover the CIA’s network of rendition flights. Here are my notes from the session.

I’ve only joined in the Carnival of journalism once this year, back in March, when I wrote “News innovation isn't just about writing code, it is about how we use that code to tell stories.” I'll be much more involved in December though, as I’m helping to host it on the Guardian’s Developer blog.

There are a limited number of letters in the alphabet, and so, with the suggestion that journalists should be using “NT” to demonstrate a neutral point of view when retweeting, I thought we should just go ahead and define the entire alphabet of inept journalistic use of Twitter etiquette all in one go.

I wasn’t able to make last night’s Hacks/Hackers London, which is a shame, as it is always a great night, I’ve always enjoyed seeing Heather Brooke speak, and it would have been brilliant to catch up with the BBC’s George Wright who I used to work alongside in Bush House many moons ago. George has published his slides about the BBC’s R&D department. Seeing all the tweets reminded me that, for one reason or another, I never got round to posting my notes from last month’s Hacks/Hackers. So here they are...

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

I’ll be speaking tonight at the London Hacks/Hackers meeting, and one of the points I’ll be making is that the digital publishing revolution is a perpetual revolution, one that requires constant learning. That section of my talk is partly fuelled by how angry I was made yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.

It is easy to think of “data journalism” as being about automatic computer analysis of large datasets, but good data journalism has story-telling at the centre. Over the coming days, weeks, and months there is a lot of data journalism to be done about the riots and looting in the UK. It is an opportunity for long-form data journalism, and the responsibility of the media to use this data in a way that helps us understand the riots, not in a way that prolongs their negative impact.

On Tuesday I blogged my notes from my colleague Laura Oliver’s talk about news community management at Hacks/Hackers London. The other talk at last week’s event was from Christopher Osborne of ITO World, about visualising big data.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

A Storify looking at the timeline of edits on Toby Young’s blog about Johann Hari yesterday, and what they tell us about “stealth edits” and article metadata

Pride comes before a fall. In the wake of the Johann Hari affair, I boasted that as an amateur blogger I never misattribute quotes. Only, four hours later, to be notified that I had done just that the previous day...

I don’t very often post to this blog just to write “Yeah! What he said”. But this is basically just that...

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

The “Texas mass grave” that wasn’t demonstrates that the rush to get a story on air before it has been fully verified isn’t just something that happens when news is being broken on social media.

Whilst I was taking a break from actively blogging I was still taking notes at the events I was attending, so I thought this week I’d whizz through some of the things I went to in April and May. One of the speakers at April’s London IA event was Michael Blastland. It was the second opportunity I’ve had this year to see him speak, having attended a panel session he spoke at about reporting crime statistics. For London IA, his theme was “designing for doubt”.

A link was doing the rounds today to a thought-provoking blog post by Donald Mahoney about journalism in a “post-content farm” world. Unfortunately, the thoughts it mostly provoked in me were: “You’ve missed the point”.

The final session at news:rewired on Friday was a panel discussing the medium of live blogging, expertly hosted by Marcus Warren from the Telegraph, and featuring my colleague Guardian Blog’s Editor Matt Wells, Anna Doble of Channel 4, and Paul Gallagher of the Manchester Evening News. It was a really good session, with some good natured rivalry between the Telegraph and Guardian on display, and it really felt like the conversation has moved on from “What is live blogging and should we be doing it?” to “How can we use this new uniquely digital media to its best advantage and develop it further”.

On Saturday I spent the day in the Guardian’s offices as a guest at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. As a preamble to the actual brain-storming and designing, there were talks from Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, interactive technologist Alastair Dant, and the BBC’s Jonathan Austin. Here are my notes.

I spent a really good day at news:rewired yesterday. With one track dedicated to data journalism, and another to social media, it was no surprise that I found plenty of things of interest. Here are my notes on some of the things that stood out for me.

I recently appeared as part of a panel session at FutureEverything talking about data journalism. I’ve already blogged the four points I was planning to make. Here are my notes from the talks given by those I was sharing the stage with: Chris Taggart, David Higgerson and Paul Bradshaw

I spent much of today at the BBC Social Media Summit, and thought it worth putting together a few quick notes on the things that stood out for me.

For a while on this blog I had a Venn diagram in the top right-hand corner, which was there to remind me that I was supposed to be writing about stuff in the intersection between IA, digital media and journalism. That is where the professional communities that I belong to collide. So, it was uncomfortable to be sitting in Denver at the IA Summit last week, listening to one of my group of peers laughing loudly at the output of the other.

At the last Hacks/Hackers London, Martin Moore and Ben Bradshaw of the Media Standards Trust were presenting their “Manifesto for transparent digital journalism”. Here are my notes from the session.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about a trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. As well as The Guardian’s reporting having an effect in Cairo via Twitter, we were reporting what was being posted from there - and there was a good debate after Chris spoke about the verification standards that you could put to information collected this way, and how it should then presented to our audience via live blogging and other means.

Nick Petrie on the Wannabe Hacks blog recently asked why news organisations were only getting to grips with the concept of online community now in 2011. In the course of his post, he said: “What I wonder is - why didn't a newspaper invent Facebook or Twitter?”. He’s not the first to wonder that, but personally, I’m unconvinced that this isn’t akin to asking why the Great Western Railway didn’t invent the automobile.

This is the last of three blog posts inspired by attending Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University. So far I’ve published my notes about what he said on news organisations and online communities, and on the problem of ego in journalism. Today I wanted to look at what I think was the most interesting aspect of Paul’s talk. It was the most passionately I’ve seen someone frame the arguments around net neutrality and issues of ISP regulation directly with regard to the tools and practice of journalism.

“Do we want to be Journalists with a capital J and bathe in the glory of our guild, or do we want to support journalism?”. This was one of the more provocative passages of Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University. Yesterday I posted my notes on what he said about news organisations and communities, and in this blog post I want to look at some structural problems he identified with journalism as a profession.

It is a couple of weeks ago now that I attended Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University, entitled “Is ice cream strawberry?”. Paul has made a multi-part essay version of the talk available on his blog, and you can view the slides on SlideShare. Over the next couple of blog posts on currybetdotnet there are a couple of points he made that I’d like to dwell on, and the first is about users and community.

In just over a fornight’s time I’ll be opening the Polish IA Summit, with a keynote presentation entitled “Come as you are”. It is a reference to the Nirvana track, as an anecdote about the band from my days working in a record shop is one of the elements setting up the talk. It is also a look back at the key things I’ve learned through 13 years of working with websites and digital products, and watching and being part of the disciplines of information architecture and user experience design evolving into the established job roles that they are today. As part of the build-up I’ve been interviewed by Artur Kurasińsk

Over the last couple of days I’ve been blogging my notes from a panel about the reporting of crime statistics I attended at the “Data and news sourcing” event co-sponsored by the Media Standards Trust and the BBC College of Journalism. So far I’ve published posts looking at what was said by Michael Blastland, Andrew Trotter and Dominic Casciani. The final talk on the crime panel was from Telegraph data reporter Conrad Quilty-Harper, and here are my notes from the session.

Yesterday I blogged some notes from a session at the “Data and news sourcing” event which had a focus on the reporting of crime statistics. Statistician and self-confessed “semi-detached journalist” Michael Blastland opened the panel, and he was followed by Chief Constable Andrew Trotter who described accurate reporting as “A hopeless quest”. Today's post features my notes of BBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani discussing crime statistics

I recently went to an event entitled “Data and news sourcing” jointly organised by the Media Standards Trust and the BBC College of Journalism. One of the panels I attended looked at the reporting of crime statistics, and featured Michael Blastland and Andrew Trotter amongst others.

The Guardian has a large presence over at SXSW at the moment, indeed I’ve seen it tweeted that if the BBC had sent a team as big, the Daily Mail would have an aneurism. One of the things that appeals to us is that the event features three areas where the paper has very strong coverage: music, film and technology. Rather than only sending journalists, this year we’ve also sent some of our technical development team.

Yesterday I posted my notes from Paul Lewis talking at a panel event discussing issues with crowd-sourcing journalism. It was part of an afternoon entitled “Data and news sourcing” jointly organised by the Media Standards Trust and the BBC College of Journalism, and hosted by the Royal Statistical Society. Also appearing on the panel were Paul Bradshaw and Turi Munthe. Here are my notes on their opening talks.

Last week I attended an event at the Royal Statistical Society looking at data and news sourcing, and one of the panel sessions was about crowd-sourcing using the internet. My Guardian colleague and 2010 Reporter of the year Paul Lewis was one of those appearing, and he has been at the centre of a couple of investigations that have used Twitter extensively as a component of the research and reporting.

Last week I was at the the latest Hacks/Hackers meet up and saw Scott Byrne-Fraser of the BBC talking about how their data visualisations and online interactives have developed.

The louse & the flea blog had a post today entitled “The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism” which, somewhat naturally, rather caught my eye.

In recent weeks at the Guardian there have been a series of talks looking at digital products and services. I've given one myself, and also blogged about a talk on software engineering and datajournalism by my colleague Daithí Ó Crualaoich, and the visit of Dr Sue Black to talk about Bletchley Park. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk, given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

We've been having a series of lunchtime talks in the Guardian about digital products and services, one of which was recently given by Daithí Ó Crualaoich, one of our developers. I've worked with Daithí on data-driven projects like the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in our Open Platform API. He has also worked on some of the high profile datajournalism projects that have appeared on guardian.co.uk in the last couple of years. In his talk he was addressing the software development part of datajournalism, and I though he made some very salient points about the relationship between the two cultures of journalism and programming.

If the main shtick of this blog can crudely be reduced to "stuff news organisations and journalists can learn from digital design", then here is the complete opposite, an article about what web designers can learn from journalism.

If you were at my talk in Leeds today, then here are some of the resources I mentioned during the presentation.

At the end of a talk I was giving the other week, one of the questions was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". I have to say that my answer oscillates, and here is why...

On Wednesday I'll be in Leeds talking at the Leeds Community News Hub. In the run-up to the event I was interviewed by Tom Page, a second year sports journalist currently studying at Leeds Trinity & All Saints University College. Here is the Q&A session we had.

A flurry of blog posts about news sites linking out - or rather usually not linking out - prompted me to rummage around in my archives for the posts I wrote on the subject last year.

A couple of weeks ago Myressa Markham came to visit me at The Guardian. She is studying Electronic Publishing at City University London and is doing a project about the impact of mobile technology on journalism. As part of it she came in to interview me.

There has been a recent thread on the SIGIA-L mailing list featuring Eric Scheid and Stephen Collins asking about "the role of IAs in Data Journalism"

Today is the eighth anniversary of the first currybetdotnet blog post, and in what has become a tradition, here is a list of the ten most popular posts this year.

At news:rewired last week some of 'the wannabe hacks' were providing live blogging, tweeting and coverage with Storify. Catching up with them meant I finally got a chance to chat to them about their site in person.

I love events like news:rewired for sparking lots of ideas and conversations, joining lots of dots within the industry, and generally re-kindling enthusiasm for doing digital news. Over the next few days I hope to be blogging my notes from some of the sessions, including these thoughts on why it doesn't have to be all new, all of the time.

In early November 2010 I gave a presentation at the London UKUPA meeting for 'World Usability Day'. In it, I took the day's theme of 'communication', and examined how twenty years of digital technology had smashed the boundaries between media organisations and their audiences. In this five part series, I've written that talk up as an essay, covering how the media now have to deal with users on a much more personal level, involve them in product design, and build tools to enable story-telling. This is part four.