Feb 25, 2010
February 25th, 2010 by Paul Bradshaw
Last month the first submissions by students on the MA in Online Journalism landed on my desk. I had set two assignments. The first was a standard portfolio of online journalism work as part of an ongoing, live news project. But the second was explicitly branded ‘Experimental Portfolio‘ – you can see the brief here. I wanted students to have a space to fail. I had no idea how brave they would be, or how successful. The results, thankfully, surpassed any expectations I had. They included:
- Dan Davies did a number of experiments around covering cycling collisions in Birmingham that involved mapping, RSS feeds, FOI requests, data, Help Me Investigate, and eventually an idea for a game of sorts.
- Alex Gamela constructed the Hashbrum website, experimenting with mapping plugins and other content management technologies. His series of posts on hyperlocal publishing provide an excellent insight into his processes.
- Caroline Beavon experimented with Google Wave.
- Natalie Chillington experimented with a self-updating gig map. Although she didn’t succeed in achieving what she’d set out to do, the knowledge of web tools and technologies such as KML.
- Ruihua Yao experimented with recruiting members of the Chinese community in Birmingham to contribute to a Chinese community blog.
- Andy Brightwell looked into the ways linked data can be used to uncover political relationships in local councils. There’s a good reason why there’s no blog post to link to, but I’m not telling you what it is…
- Ioana Epure (studying MA Freelancing and Journalism Enterprise, which has some overlap with Online Journalism) looked at music communities and different ways of producing music journalism.
- And Chiara Bolognini launched the map-based social network Blomap.
- Mikel Plana was exploring lifestreaming, but was offered a job before the deadline (congratulations Mikel).
There are a range of things that I found positive about the results. Firstly, the sheer variety – students seemed to either instinctively or explicitly choose areas distinct from each other. The resulting reservoir of knowledge and experience, then, has huge promise for moving into the second and final parts of the MA, providing a foundation to learn from each other. [Read more]
Feb 1, 2010
February 1st, 2010 by Paul Bradshaw
The Future of News gathering first organised by Adam Westbrook has its first West Midlands meetup next week (organised by The Lichfield Blog’s Philip John. I’ll be there, along with leading Portuguese blogger Alex Gamela, Brummie alpha blogger Jon Bounds, Andy Brightwell of Hashbrum and Grounds Birmingham; top journalism blogger Nigel Barlow and Pits n Pots‘ Mike Rawlins, among others.
It’s taking place from 6.45pm on Monday February 8 at Birmingham City University. Places are free but limited – book at http://www.meetup.com/The-West-Midlands-Future-of-News-Group/calendar/12461072/
Apr 24, 2009
April 24th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw
Today is Twitter Cartoon Day 2 – or, for brevity’s sake: Twoonday.
The idea is simple: cheer up the Twittersphere by changing your avatar (picture) to a cartoon character.
Last year was fun, but this year there are more of us on Twitter, and more things we can do.
There’s a Flickr group where you can submit your screengrabs, and @AlexGamela is creating a Google Map of Twooning Twitterers. I’ll also be creating a tagcloud of the words most used with the #twoonday tag (thanks to @psychemedia for help with that).
The image above is designed to fit neatly on Twitter wallpaper. A larger version is available on Flickr.
Tag your tweets #twoonday to join the fun. Follow the tag here.
After all, it’s Friday!
Oct 29, 2008
October 29th, 2008 by Alexandre Gamela
Alex Gamela talks to Dave Cohn, founder of the non-profit, crowdfunding journalism project Spot.us, winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, and a suggested new model for the news business. On the eve of launching the Spot.us official website, Dave told OJB how he is putting his ideas into practice, and his views on the current state of journalism.
Four months after winning the KNC grant, Dave Cohn is a happy man. He started with a wiki where he presented and tested the different sides to his project, and he quickly managed to fund three stories. Now it is on its way to fund a fourth one. All of this even before having an official website. [Read more]
Apr 29, 2008
April 29th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been turning the Online Journalism Blog into a group blog. For our first project we have taken Jo Geary’s news interactivity index, and applied it Europe-wide, creating an ‘interactivity index’ of newspapers across European countries – at the moment: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland…
Not just that, but we’ve made the index itself interactive. Specifically, Nicolas Kayser-Bril has created this PHP object which allows you to compare two selected newspapers or countries.
The team so far is as follows: UK and France: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Switzerland: Nico Luchsinger; Portugal and Spain: Alex Gamela; Poland: Marek Miller; Macedonia: Darko Buldioski; Hungary: Molnar Emil; Netherlands: Wilbert Baan.
If you want to help add information on one or more of your country’s newspapers you can do so here – you’ll need to ask Nicolas for a password: nicolas (at) observatoiredesmedias.com.
More newspapers will continue to be added, and there are other graphical tricks to come.
You can also embed this widget on your own blog with the following code:
<iframe src=”http://tinyurl.com/5c9vmy” frameborder=”0″ height=”605″ scrolling=”no” width=”415″></iframe>
Apr 10, 2008
April 10th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
I’ve been painfully aware of my (and many people’s) ignorance of blogs written in languages other than English. I’m aware of some – Andre Deak in Brazil; Philip Couve in France; Alex Gamela in Portugal (who writes every post in English too); Nico Luchsinger in Switzerland; Beppe Grillo in Italy (also in English); and Adam Javurek in the Czech Republic – but really I could do better.
And I’ve started creating a Yahoo! Pipe which (clumsily) translates three of those blogs into English (sadly Adam tells me there is no online Czech to English translator)
So here’s a call for comments – what are the best non-English blogs, either about journalism specifically or social media generally?
Nov 29, 2007
November 29th, 2007 by Paul Bradshaw
Alex Gamela talks to António Granado, editor of the online edition of Público, a reference newspaper in Portugal, as they relaunch their website.
Público have always been ahead as far as online presence is concerned, and recently the newsroom created a video team, as well as launching a redesigned website. In this short interview, we tried to ask a very busy António about his views on online journalism, a subject he discusses in his blog PontoMedia. Granado is also a lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and is one of the best Portuguese minds dealing with the new media issues. [Read more]
Experiments in online journalism
