Ulises 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
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As 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
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UPDATE: 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
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Behind 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
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I 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
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French 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,
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If 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,
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You 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
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Last 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
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Facebook 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
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