My attention was drawn this week by David Hayward to a visualisation by David McCandless of the tax gap (click on image for larger version). McCandless does some beautiful stuff, but what was particularly interesting in this graphic was how it highlighted areas that rarely make the news agenda. Tax avoidance and evasion, for example, account for £7.4bn each, while
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“It is frightful that someone who is no one… can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility & with the aid of this dreadful disproportioned means of communication” That’s not a quote from Andrew Marr, but Soren Kierkegaard writing about newspapers in the 19th century. Here’s another: “I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of
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For Argentinians like me, it was Rodolfo Walsh – and not Truman Capote, who published In Cold Blood almost a decade later – that invented non fiction journalism with his famous 1957 book Operación Masacre, a masterpiece of investigative journalism. Twenty years later, on the first anniversary of Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship, he was intercepted by soldiers, murdered, and his remains
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The Birmingham Mail has been trying its hand at data journalism with school admissions data. It’s a good place to start - the topic attracts a lot of interest (and so justifies the investment of time) while people tend to be interested in more than just who finishes top and bottom of the tables (justifying the choice of medium). The results are
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The BBC have just emailed new linking guidelines to their staff. They stipulate that linking is “essential” to online journalism and in one slide (it’s a PowerPoint document) titled ‘If you remember nothing else’ highlight how linking will change: What we used to do… Lists of archive news stories Homepages only on external websites No inline linking in news stories
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I’ve written a post over at Podnosh.com (full disclosure: where I do some training and consultancy) on ‘Making it findable’ – the creed of the hyperlocal blogger, reporting on a discussion berween hyperlocal bloggers and local government officials at Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands. The meat of what I’m saying is in the middle: “I noticed a recurring theme from the
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Teaching has begun in the new academic year and once again I’m handing out a list of recommended RSS feeds. Last year this came in the form of an OPML file, but this year I’m using Google Reader bundles (instructions on how to create one of your own are here). There are 50 feeds in all – 5 feeds in
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A couple weeks ago I spoke at the PICNIC festival in Amsterdam. While I was there I grabbed an interview with Ton Zijlstra, who has been following open data developments across EU governments very closely. You can find the interview embedded below: [audio:http://audioboo.fm/boos/186944-ton-zijlstra-on-open-data-in-the-eu.mp3]
I’ve written a piece on ‘How to be a data journalist’ for The Guardian’s Datablog. It seems to have proven very popular, but I thought I should blog briefly about it if you haven’t seen one of those tweets. The post is necessarily superficial – it was difficult enough to cover the subject area for a 12,000-word book chapter, so
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