It’s become a modern catchphrase. When planes are grounded, when cars crash, when computers are hacked, and when the earth shakes. There is, it seems, always a “cost to the economy”. Today, with a mass strike over pensions in the UK, the cliche is brought forth again: “The Treasury could save £30m from the pay forfeited by the striking teachers today but
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I’m holding a one-off training day in August on verifying information online and finding sources, in London at the Royal Society of Medicine. In the context of various straight men pretending to be gay women, it’s quite timely.
The Online Journalism Handbook, written with Liisa Rohumaa, has now been published. You can get it here. I’ve been blogging throughout the process of writing the book – particularly the chapters on data journalism, blogging and UGC – and you can still find those blog posts under the tag ‘Online Journalism Book‘. Other chapters cover interactivity, audio slideshows and podcasting,
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Cross-posted from the BBC College of Journalism blog: Last week my experiment in running a blog entirely through a Facebook Page quietly came to the end of its allotted four weeks. It’s been a useful exercise, and I’m going to adapt the experiment slightly. Here’s what I’ve learned: It suits emotive material The most popular posts during that month were
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It’s that time of year when students get their marks and the usual protests are made. I say “usual” because these tend to follow a particular pattern – and I want to explore why that happens, because I think students and academics often have very different perceptions of what marks mean. So here are four reasons why your mark does
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It’s been a while – here’s a new Hyperlocal Voices interview, with South Norwich News, an 18 month-old site set up by former BBC journalist Claire Wood and her husband Tom when she “wanted to test the hypothesis that people’s interest in local news actually only spans a relatively small area.” In the process they discovered the power of social
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Google have launched a ‘Search by Image’ service which allows you to find images by uploading, dragging over, or pasting the URL of an existing image. The service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about. (For examples where it may have been useful, look no further than this week’s Gay Syrian
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I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge. Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply
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The EFF have an interesting investigation into WSJ and Al-Jazeera ‘leaks’ sites and terms and conditions which suggest users’ anonymity is anything but protected: “Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, AJTU can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose
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Another FAQ: What good examples of mobile reporting have you seen? It’s hard to say because the fact that it’s mobile is not always very visible – but @documentally’s work is always interesting. The Telegraph’s use of Twitter and Audioboo during its coverage of the royal wedding was well planned, and Paul Lewis at the Guardian uses mobile technology well
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