On Thursday I’ll be hosting Birmingham’s first ‘Data Coffee’. Guests include The Times’ Jonny Richards, Talis’ Zach Beauvais and a whole bunch of MA Online Journalism students. There’s no agenda for the day – just turn up with questions and we’ll pick each other’s brains. I’m bringing my Mac and an intense desire to get to grips with Python. It’s
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The first study (PDF) of magazines and their various approaches to websites, undertaken by Columbia Journalism Review, found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium. There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached. Following the responses
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Hull – GeneralClassifieds – Notices via kwout The Hull Daily Mail’s article accusing a hyperlocal competitor of having a ‘porn business’ has been misfiring spectacularly over the past 24 hours. The article ‘reveals’ that the founder of HU17.net has designed sites for the porn industry. At the time of writing it has over 300 comments overwhelmingly critical of what is
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That’s the question posed by Rednelly, with this screengrab: Curious. Anyone at the BBC got any idea?
The New York Times has combined visualisation with audio to produce a fascinating piece of work on the differences between gold winning times and runners-up across a number of Winter Olympics events. It’s a particularly creative approach to the challenge of communicating a relatively abstract story: what separates gold and silver. Well worth a look. h/t Pete Ashton
…are doomed to repeat it. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group on the revisions to Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill: “Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive ‘copyright attacks’ that could shut them down, just by the threat of action.” “This is exactly how libel law works today: suppressing free speech by the
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There’s a fascinating study on newspaper bias by University of Chicago professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro which identifies the political bias of particular newspapers based on the frequency with which certain phrases appear. The professors then correlate that placement with the political leanings of the newspaper’s own markets, and find “That the most important variable is the political orientation
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In reporting yesterday on the linkspam story covered here last week (*cough*), The Guardian appeared to have opened something of a can of worms, with commenters quickly pointing out that The Guardian itself is publishing text ads without ‘nofollow’ tags. Media hypocrisy? Almost. The newspaper’s SEO expert Paul Roach eventually chipped in to clarify: “We are in the process of
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The following post originally appeared on PhotoActive, but had to be taken down when the site host HostPapa complained about the traffic. I’ve offered to host it here. With photographers about to lose copyright protection on their images, and the Government to curb their rights to take pictures in public, Philip Dunn looks more closely at these outrageous proposals and
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A couple weeks ago I took a group of students away from the classroom for an experiment in teaching blogging and social capital – the Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt. After a quick briefing and some pointers on using Posterous and Twitter from a mobile phone, the students fanned out across the city, finding people with a social media presence,
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