I’ve written a couple of guest posts for Nieman Journalism Lab and the tech news site Memeburn. The Nieman post is part of a series looking forward to 2012. I’m never a fan of futurology so I’ve cheated a little and talked about developments already in progress: new interface conventions in news websites; the rise of collaboration; and the skilling
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A long, long time ago, I tinkered with a hack called Serendipitwitterous (long since rotted, I suspect), that would look through a Twitter stream (personal feed, or hashtagged tweets), use the Yahoo term extraction service to try to identify concepts or key words/phrases in each tweet, and then use these as a search term on [...]
At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev earlier this year I interviewed four individuals whose work I admire: Stephen Grey (talking about internet security for journalists), Luuk Sengers and Mark Lee Hunter (on organising your investigation), and Bo Elkjaer (on investigating networks). I’ve been publishing these videos individually on the Help Me Investigate blog, but thought I would cross-publish
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In the final of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about the tension between publishing first online, or holding material back for print. Magazine editors worry about topicality. Stories they send to press on Monday may be out of date by the time the magazine appears on Wednesday or Friday. It is no consolation
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In the second of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about dealing with the large amount of information that magazine editors receive. Managing information overload A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and
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I have a confession: I have never liked student projects aimed at students. They tend to betray a lazy approach to creativity: after all, what can be less imaginative than a project aimed at ‘people like me’? They also don’t generally develop the skills that journalism degrees aim for: original research, for example; flexibility in style; or an exploration of
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In the first of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about some basic considerations in drawing up social media policies. If you are aware of any particularly good or bad examples of social media policies in the magazine industry, I’d love to know. Social media policies A policy need not be particularly restrictive
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Last month I invited Tim Ireland to take questions from students at City University about his experiences in SEO and related issues. One particular section, when he spoke of the role of networks in the legend of Paul Revere, and the significance of the Daily Mail’s false Amanda Knox report, struck me as particularly interesting, so I’m republishing it here.
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It’s a few weeks into the Help Me Investigate: Networks project and I’ve been learning a lot about how community management and investigative journalism can support each other. Some of this is building on experiences on the original Help Me Investigate, but one thing in particular is emerging from this project. It’s about how you should write when your
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This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks what journalists want for Christmas from programmers, and vice versa. Here’s my take. Programmers and developers have already given journalists enough presents to last a century of Christmases. Programmers created content management systems and blogging platforms; they wrapped up networks of contacts in social networks, and parcelled up fast-moving updates on Twitter and SMS.
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