We have a new Cablegate, in which Vince Cable the Business Minster has revealed that he was not carrying out his quasi-Judicial role in a takeover bid by News Corporation objectively, in the presence of Daily Telegraph undercover reporters.
I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web,
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UPDATE: I’ve created a spreadsheet where you can add information about the various services and requirements. Please add what you can. Delicious, it appears, is going to be closed down. I am hugely sad about this – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes
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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.
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Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by independent publishers which gained widespread attention.
It’s been a good week for followers of that endangered beast objectivity. On Friday Glenn Greenwald reported on factual inaccuracies in Time’s Wikileaks article, and the ‘correction’ that was then posted (reproduced above). Greenwald writes: “The most they’re willing to do now is convert it into a “they-said/he-said” dispute. But what they won’t do — under any circumstances — is
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This latest in the Hyperlocal Voices series of interviews looks at a second Australian hyperlocal blogger: Brian Ward, who runs Fitzroyality, a blog covering Fitzroy in Melbourne – which he describes as “vehemently anti-commercial” – as well as a number of aggregator blogs around the city. He has successfully fought major publishers on inaccuracies and copyright, and the site has
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Plagiarism is an interesting game.
You can either rewrite the piece, find a bit more information, leave other bits out, and – if you’re the Daily Mail – reduce the reading age by a year or three.
Or you can acknowledge that the story came from somewhere else, and give a hat-tip for a nugget, or a small fee for an article.
Or you can try and ride both horses and end up sitting on your backside in the middle.
So, we have Exhibit A, from Dizzy Thinks:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012? Not particular shocking really, but there is an oddity.
According to an FoI release, one of the roles of this civil servant is the development of equalities impact assessment for the Queen’s celebratory bash. Why does a celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment?
Mind you, as an eagle-eyed reader put to to me. Perhaps it’s because she’s (a) a woman, (b) a pensioner, (c) dependent on state benefits, and (d) married to an immigrant?
and Exhibit B, from the Daily Mail:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. One of the roles of the civil servant is the development of an ‘equalities impact assessment’. Why does a Âcelebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment? Is it because she’s a woman, a pensioner, relies on the state for handouts — and is married to a foreigner?
The two are nearly the same, and it’s only an item in a Diary column, for heaven’s sake. A tip would cost about twenty pounds or a gift voucher, and an acknowledgement would cost nothing.
(Hat-tip: Dizzy).
[Update: re-edited]
Here’s a well-produced (even in rough-cut form) documentary on Wikileaks by Swedish network SVT, published on YouTube in 4 parts. It covers quite a bit of the history of the organisation, the lessons it learned and the partnerships it made along the way – all of which provide valuable insights for any student of journalism as a practice or a
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