Here’s the latest answers to some questions - this time relating to these predictions for 2012: Q: What are the advantages of “stream” as an interface for news website homepages? The main advantages are that it’s very sticky – users tend to leave streams on in the same way that they leave 24 hour news channels on, or keep checking back to
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The following 3 videos first appeared on the Help Me Investigate blog, Help Me Investigate: Health and Help Me Investigate: Welfare. I thought I’d collect them together here too. As always, these are published under a Creative Commons licence, so you are welcome to re-use, edit and combine with other video, with attribution (and a link!). First, Heather Brooke’s tips
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In almost a decade of teaching online journalism I repeatedly come up against the same two problems: people who are so wedded to the idea of the self-contained ‘story’ that they struggle to create journalism outside of that (e.g. the journalism of linking, liveblogging, updating, explaining, or saying what they don’t know); and people stuck in the habit of churning
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Wonderful post by Tony Hirst in which he sort-of-coins* a lovely neologism in explaining how data can be “laundered”: “The Deloitte report was used as evidence by Facebook to demonstrate a particular economic benefit made possible by Facebook’s activities. The consultancy firm’s caveats were ignored, (including the fact that the data may in part at least have come from Facebook itself), in reporting this
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Here’s a great test for eagle-eyed journalists, tweeted by Guardian’s James Ball. It’s a tale of two charts that claim to show the impact of a change in the income tax threshold to £10,000. Here’s the first: And here’s the second: So: same change, very different stories. In one story (Institute for Fiscal Studies) it is the the wealthiest that
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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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One of the easiest ways to get someone started on data visualisation is to introduce them to word clouds (it also demonstrates neatly how not all data is numerical). Using tools like Wordle and Tagxedo, you can paste in a major speech and see it visualised within a minute or so. But is a word cloud the best way of
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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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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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While the public image of data journalism tends to revolve around big data dumps and headline-grabbing leaks, there is a more important day-to-day application of data skills: scrutinising the claims regularly made in support of spending public money. I’m blogging about this now because I recently came across a particularly good illustration of politicians being dazzled by numbers from lobbyists
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