Today sees the UK’s biggest strike in decades as public sector workers protest against pension reforms. Most news organisations are covering the day’s events through liveblogs: that web-native format which has so quickly become the automatic choice for covering rolling news. To illustrate just how dominant the liveblog has become take a look at the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Guardian’s ‘Strikesblog‘ or The Telegraph. The Independent’s
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There’s a fascinating case study going on across some skeptics blogs on dealing with legal threats from another country. The Quackometer and Rhys Morgan have – among others – received emails from Marc Stephens, who claims to “represent” the Burzynski Clinic in Houston, Texas, and threatens them with legal action for libel, among other things. What is notable is how
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A recent provisional data release from the Ministry of Justice contains sentencing data from English(?) courts, at the offence level, for the period July 2010-June 2011: “Published for the first time every sentence handed down at each court in the country between July 2010 and June 2011, along with the age and ethnicity of each [...]
If you thought you couldn’t use the Google Maps API any more as a journalist, this update to the Google Geo Developers Blog should make you reconsider. From Nieman Journalism Lab: “Certain web apps will be given blanket exemptions from charging. Here’s Google: “Maps API applications developed by non-profit organisations, applications deemed by Google to be in the public interest, and
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I’ve just stumbled across Neurobonkers’s blog post The worst piece of drugs reporting I have ever read and wanted to share it here. The post uses an animated Prezi presentation to take the reader through 10 errors in an article in the Hull Daily Mail on the dangers of a “cheap new drug” (notably, the article is no longer online). I
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@aendrew sent me a link to a StackExchange question he’s just raised, in a tweet asking: “Anyone know how to find what terms surround a Twitter trend/hashtag?” I’ve dabbled in this area before, though not addressing this question exactly, using Yahoo Pipes to find what hashtags are being used around a particular search term (Searching [...]
Yesterday I chaired a panel on ‘UGC and Social Media’ at Birmingham’s Hello Culture event. Determined that it did not descend into the all-too-common obsession with tools that often characterises such discussions, I framed it from the start with the questions “Why should we care? Why should users care?” The panellists were grateful – and the tactic seemed to work.
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In the final part of the research underpinning a new Help Me Investigate project I explore the qualities that successful crowdsourcing investigations shared. Previous parts are linked below: Part 1: Investigative journalism; conceptualising Help Me Investigate Part 2: Building the site Part 3: Reflections on the Proof of Concept phase Part 4: The London Weekly case study Part 5: What are the characteristics of
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In the penultimate part of the serialisation of research underpinning a new Help Me Investigate project I explore the qualities that successful crowdsourcing investigations shared. Previous parts are linked below: Part 1: Investigative journalism; conceptualising Help Me Investigate Part 2: Building the site Part 3: Reflections on the Proof of Concept phase Part 4: The London Weekly case study Part 5: What are the
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Since I wrote about the need for more data journalism around sentencing in August, the Manchester Evening News have been beavering away keeping track of riot sentencing data on their own patch with stories on the first 60 looters to be sentenced and the role of poverty. Last week the newspaper finally made a splash on the figures. The collected data
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