As many readers of this blog will have received a Kindle for Christmas I thought I should share my list of the free ebooks that I recommend stocking up on. UPDATE [12 Jan 2012]: Now translated into Catalan by Alvaro Martinez. UPDATE [20 Jan 2012]: Dan Gillmor’s We The Media added to make a round 20. Online journalism and community management
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I’m delivering a special day of data journalism training in Birmingham later this month, at the nominal cost to attendees of £25. The course is being organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and Birmingham City University.
In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some topline developments in the hyper-local space during 2011. He also asks for your suggestions of great hyper-local content from 2011. His more detailed slides looking at the previous year are cross-posted at the bottom of this article. 2011 was a busy year across the hyper-local sphere, with a flurry of activity online as well
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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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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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I’ve written a post on the Help Me Investigate blog on a number of different ways to publish data online, from converting Excel spreadsheets into HTML tables, to using Google Docs, or using data-sharing platforms like BuzzData. You may find it useful.
Tim Davies has done a wonderful job of combing through the fine print of the UK government’s Autumn statement open data measures (PDF), highlighting the dynamics that appear to be driving it, and the data conspicuous by its absence. Here are the passages most relevant for journalists. Firstly, following the money and accountability: “The [Data Strategy Board] body seeking public data
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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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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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Network analysis – the ability to map connections between people and organisations – is one branch of data journalism which has enormous potential. But it is also an area which has not yet been particularly well explored, partly because of the lack of simple tools with which to do it. One recent example – AngelsOfTheRight.net - is particularly interesting, because of
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