As a lone blogger how much legal protection do you have? No more than anyone else, when it comes to libel, contempt of court law and so on, except that people are more likely to pay attention to large media organisations. But there are many instances where bloggers have lost a lot of time and money over legal disputes. Last
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Today’s Hyperlocal Voices interview is with Julia Larden, chair of the Acocks Green Focus Group blog, which campaigns to make Acocks Green a “better place to live, work and shop”. The group was established in 2004 and the blog followed in 2007. “We are less likely to get confused or get our facts slightly muddled” than professional journalists, says Julia. Here’s
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The following is an unedited version of an article written for the International Press Institute report ‘Brave News Worlds (PDF)‘ For the past two centuries journalists have dealt in the currency of information: we transmuted base metals into narrative gold. But information is changing. At first, the base metals were eye witness accounts, and interviews. Later we learned to melt
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In researching my book chapter (UPDATE: now published) I asked a group of journalists who worked with data what led them to do so. Here are their answers: Jonathon Richards, The Times: The flood of information online presents an amazing opportunity for journalists, but also a challenge: how on earth does one keep up with; make sense of it? You could
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Here’s another hyperlocal voice: Robin Byles set up Sheffieldblog in 2008 when he returned to the city after working for the BBC. The site focuses on “The kind of stuff that may get featured as an aside in the local papers, but actually people are quite interested in and in the context of online, works really well.” More recently he’s
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In another Hyperlocal Voices post, Philip John talks about how The Lichfield Blog was launched to address a gap in local news reporting. In less than 2 years it has taken on a less opinionated tone and more “proper reporting”, picking up national recognition and covering its costs along the way. Who were the people behind Lichfield Blog, and what
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I’ve recorded a 48 minute presentation covering ‘Blogging, Twitter and Journalism‘ for the Henry Stewart series of talks. It’s designed for journalism students and covers How blogging differs from other journalism platforms; Key developments in journalism blogging history; What makes a successful blog What is Twitter and how is it useful for journalists and publishers? and Why RSS is central to
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I’ve tweeted a couple of times recently about frustrations with BBC stories that are based on data but treat it poorly. As any journalist knows, two occasions of anything in close proximity warrants an overreaction about a “worrying trend”. So here it is. “One in four council homes fails ‘Decent Homes Standard’” This is a good piece of newsgathering, but a frustrating
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PriceOfWeed.com is a great example of when you need to turn to crowdsourcing to obtain data for your journalism. As Paul Kedrosky writes, it’s “Not often that you get to combine economics, illicit substances, map mashups and crowd-sourcing in one post like this.” The resulting picture is surprisingly clear. And news organisations could learn a lot from the way this has
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What’s the easiest way of creating a thematic map, that shows regions coloured according to some sort of measure? Yesterday, I saw a tweet go by from @datastore about Carbon emissions in every local authority in the UK, detailing those emissions for a list of local authorities (whatever they are… I’ll come on to that [...]
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