Online Journalism Blog

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video A few months ago I was asked what sort of mobile phone I would recommend for a journalism student. Knowing how tight student budgets are, and that any choice should have as much of an eye on the future as on the present, [...]

Journalism.co.uk have a list of this year’s “leading innovators in journalism and media”. I have some additions. You may too. Nick Booth I brought Nick in to work with me on Help Me Investigate, a project for which he doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s his understanding of and connections with local communities that lie [...]

Last week I spent a day playing with the screen scraping website Scraperwiki with a class of MA Online Journalism students and a local blogger or two, led by Scraperwiki’s own Anna Powell-Smith. I thought I might take the opportunity to try to explain what screen scraping is through the functionality of Scraperwiki, in journalistic [...]

(Read part 1 here and part 2 here) The third student to catch the data journalism bug was Andy Brightwell. Through his earlier reporting on swimming pool facilities in Birmingham, Andy had developed an interest in the issue, and wanted to use data journalism techniques to dig further. The result was a standalone site – [...]

Following on from the previous post on serious music journalism using data, here’s some more detail on how MA Online Journalism students have been exploring multimedia journalism. Using data to shed light on dangers for cyclists Dan Davies explored video and mapping audio before catching the data bug – in this case, around cycling collisions. [...]

This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (part 1 looks at finding data; part 2 at interrogating data; part 3 at visualisation, and 4 at visualisation tools). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around tips and tools. Mashing data Wikipedia defines a mashup particularly succinctly, as “a [...]

This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (the first, on gathering data, is here). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around ways of spotting stories in data, and mistakes to avoid. “One of the most important (and least technical) skills in understanding data is asking [...]

RSS and mashupsView more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. This was the final session in my undergraduate Online Journalism module (the other classes can be found here), taught last May. It’s a relatively brief presentation, just covering some of the possibilities of mashups and RSS, and some tools. The majority of the class is taken up [...]

Here’s another tutorial on the mashup platform Yahoo! Pipes, showing how you can use it to create a meta-search that will push any search term by the user through a number of search engines, and present you with a combined result (and RSS feed). A finished version of the pipe can be seen here. This [...]

I was recently given a task where my job was to create a calendar holding around 50 events. Each event also needed to be mapped, and have a corresponding blog post. Mapping calendar entries made me think, if this could be used for other stuff than simply putting events on a map, – which is [...]