Archive for the Andy Dickinson Tag

Host your own crowdsourced investigation with the Help Me Investigate plugin

When we open-sourced the code for Help Me Investigate the plan was to move from a single site to a decentralised, networked structure. Now, thanks to Andy Dickinson, it has become even easier for anyone to host their own journalism crowdsourcing platform. Since a conversation a couple of months ago, Andy has been tweaking a WordPress plugin that replicates the
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The New Online Journalists #8: Ed Walker

As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, online communities editor Ed Walker talks about what got him the job, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today. I graduated from the University of Central Lancashire School of Journalism in 2007 with a BA (Hons) first-class in Journalism. I specialised
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The New Online Journalists #5: Nigel Barlow

As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, founder of Inside The M60 Nigel Barlow talks about what led him to launch his own news site, and where it might go next. At the age of 43 I took the momentous decision to come out of finance and business and train to become
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10 Twitter users that every journalism student should follow?

UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden. I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each
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Removing Nofollow on blog links and meta – and invisible comments

A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions. One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was
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Should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn’t want them?

UPDATE (Aug 7 ’08): The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates suggests employment opportunities and salaries are not affected. J-schools are generally set up to prepare students for the mainstream news industry: print and broadcasting, with a growing focus on those industries’ online arms. There’s just one small problem. That industry isn’t exactly splashing out on job ads
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BASIC principles of online journalism: B is for Brevity

In the first part of a five-part series, I explore how and why a talent for brevity is one of the basic skills an online journalist needs – whether writing an article or employing multimedia. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited. It shouldn’t have to be said that the web
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Do you work in newspaper video journalism?

Andy Dickinson is conducting a short survey to gather information about how video is produced in newspaper newsrooms and who does it. The results will be made available on his blog – www.andydickinson.net. Sounds like a great idea – it’s a one-page job so quick to fill out. Fill out the survey here.