Over the weekend thousands of Twitter users boycotted the service in protest at the announcement that the service will begin withholding tweets based on the demands of local governments and law enforcement. Protesting against censorship is laudable, but it is worth pointing out that most online services already do the same, whether it’s Google’s Orkut; Apple removing apps from its
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Terence Eden filmed the above video demonstrating O2′s phone security flaw. He put it on YouTube with the standard copyright licence. And someone at Sky News ignored that when they used it without permission. But what’s interesting about Terence’s blog post about the experience is the legal position that Sky then negotiated from – an experience that journalism students, journalists
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UPDATE [Feb 14 2012]: Full Fact picked up the challenge and dug into the data: “The crucial difference is in methodology – while the TPA used individuals as its basis, the IFS used households as provided by the Government data. “This led to substantially different conclusions. The IFS note that using household income as a measure demonstrates increased gains for
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The Scotsman has a newish data blog, set up (I’m rather proud to say) by one of my former PA/Telegraph trainees: Jennifer O’Mahony. This is particularly important as so much data covered in the ‘national’ press tends to be English-only due to devolution. The Department of Education, for example, only publishes English education data. If you want Scottish education data you need
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Last year I was commissioned to write a report on ‘Social Media and News’ for the Open Society Media Program, as part of the ‘Mapping Digital Media’ series. The report is now available here (PDF). As I say in the introduction, I focused on “the areas that are most strongly contested and hold the most importance for the development of news
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Yesterday saw the launch of the first (surprisingly) international data journalism awards, backed by the European Journalism Centre*, Google, and the Global Editors Network. There are 6 awards – 3 categories, each split into national/international and local/regional subcategories: investigative journalism; visualisation; and apps. Each comes with prize money of 7,500 euros. The closing date for entries is April 10. It’s
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I’ve been updating a newsroom policy guide for a project some of my students will be working on, with a particular section on objectivity and impartiality. As this has coincided with the debate on fact-checking stirred by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, I thought I would reproduce the guidelines here, and invite comments on whether you think it hits
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For the first Something For The Weekend of 2012 I want to tackle a common problem when you’re trying to scrape a collection of webpage: they have some sort of structure in their URL like this, where part of the URL refers to the name or code of an entity: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237521 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237629 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237823 In this instance, you can see that
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