Online Journalism Blog

I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is

• take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘,
• gets rid of duplicate results,
• and spits out a feed.
• UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google News and Technorati searches for local election and the two london candidates
• It also filters out anything with ‘Zimbabwe’ in it, as reports on those elections were coming through.

I’d like to invite you to clone the mashup and make improvements. Or you can just suggest them here.

Some things I’d like to do are: add images; geo information and mapping; other feeds; filtering based on user input (e.g. location).

Meanwhile, here’s how the two mayoral candidates are faring on Twitter mentions according to a search on Twist:

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. (more…)

Image by Sid05 via Flickr

This weekend’s tool-to-play-with is Yahoo! Pipes. Chances are you’ve heard of Yahoo! Pipes (it’s been around for over a year and I’ve blogged about it before) but if you’ve not played with it yet, now is the time to have a go.

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language. (more…)

Just when I thought I’d put the 21st century newsroom to bed, along comes a further brainwave about conceptualising newsgathering in an online environment (the area I covered in part 2: Distributed Journalism). It seems to me that the first stage for any journalist or budding journalist lies along two paths: subscribing to a reliable collection of RSS feeds (and email alerts); and exploring a collection of networks. The first part is passive; the latter, more active. So I’ve called it, tongue-in-cheek, “Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering”. But if that sounds too Woody Allen for you, you could call it “Aggregating-Networking Newsgathering”.

Not quite as catchy, though, is it? (more…)

Part four of this five-part series looks at how interactivity forms the basis of true online journalism, and explores ways to think about interactivity in practice. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism - comments very much invited.

In his 2001 book Online Journalism, Jim Hall argues that, in the age of the web, interactivity could be added to impartiality, objectivity and truth as a core value of journalism. It is that important.

Interactivity is central to how journalism has been changed by the arrival of the internet. Whereas the news industries of print, radio and TV placed control firmly in the hands of the publishers and journalists, online you try to control people at your peril.

It is important to remember that people use the web on devices - whether a computer, mobile phone or PDA - with cultural histories of usefulness or utility, very different to the cultural histories of television, radio or even print.

People go online to do something. Companies that help with that process tend to prosper online. Those that attempt to curtail users’ ability to do things with their content often find themselves on the end of a backlash.

News is, of course, a service. But up until now news organisations have been under the mistaken impression that it is a product. The web is reminding them otherwise.

What is interactivity?

Interactivity is not video, or ‘multimedia’; it is not flashy bells and whistles. At its core, it is about giving the user control. (more…)

Here’s my latest piece for Journalism.co.uk on what I call ‘Passive-aggressive newsgathering’.

Someone recently posted on my Facebook wall: “Paul, I don’t understand, and fear I may be too old for all this already… but… what exactly is the point of twitter?”

I can come up with at least nine answers. I’m sure you can come up with more:

1. It’s a great way to publish to mobile devices;
2. it’s a social networking tool to make contacts and carry on conversations;
3. it’s a way of discovering new information (through tips and leads);
4. it’s a great way to follow what’s happening through your mobile (set Twitter up to send you mobile updates)
5. It’s a way of organising people
6. It’s a great way of reporting from a live event or other occasions when you only have your phone
7. You can aggregate a number of twitter feeds to one collective feed of what a group of people are doing
8. You can push an RSS feed into twitter, creating a mobile/social network update
9. For bloggers, it’s a good place to put thoughts and ideas that are so brief you wouldn’t normally blog them

Any more for any more?

The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.

By clicking on the scissors icon () next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway - but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.

These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights. (more…)

What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups - and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? (more…)

This week’s Something for the Weekend is email tool 9cays. At a basic level it’s a tool to help you improve group email conversations - like a mailing list with bells on. The service makes it easier to copy (cc) in people, and creates a permanent webpage so people can catch up on previous emails if they’ve just joined. But what makes 9cays interesting to me is that it also provides an RSS feed.

Having an RSS feed opens up a number of journalistic possibilities. Here are just some:

• You could carry out an email interview with a public figure - or a number of public figures - and allow people to subscribe directly to the correspondence.
• Or you could display the feed on your news site.
• You could aggregate a number of feeds from different conversations on the same topic
• Likewise you could use it to display correspondence with readers by cc’ing the 9cays conversation email address in your replies (this would however, sign them up to future emails).
• You could ask readers to cc the address in their correspondence with public figures (warning: issues around privacy and ethics here)
• If you don’t have a comments RSS feed you could set up your CMS to forward comments to the 9cays address to create one.
• Alternatively, you could set up your email account to filter comments from your blog and forward them to different 9cays addresses for different feeds (probably too much effort, but an idea nonetheless)