Archive for the Charles Arthur Tag

2 guest posts: 2012 predictions and “Social media and the evolution of the fourth estate”

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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Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Part 4: Human Capital

This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here. Human capital So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist. Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies
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Why journalists should be lobbying over police.uk’s crime data

Conrad Quilty-Harper writes about the new crime data from the UK police force – and in the process adds another straw to the groaning camel’s back of the government’s so-called transparency agenda: “It’s useless to residents wanting to find out what was going on at the house around the corner at 3am last night, and it’s useless to individuals who
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Where should an aspiring data journalist start?

In writing last week’s Guardian Data Blog piece on How to be a data journalist I asked various people involved in data journalism where they would recommend starting. The answers are so useful that I thought I’d publish them in full here. The Telegraph’s Conrad Quilty-Harper: Start reading: http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F06076274130681848419%2Fbundle%2Fdatavizfeeds Keep adding to your knowledge and follow other data journalists/people who
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Why did you get into data journalism?

In researching my book chapter (UPDATE: now published) I asked a group of journalists who worked with data what led them to do so. Here are their answers: Jonathon Richards, The Times: The flood of information online presents an amazing opportunity for journalists, but also a challenge: how on earth does one keep up with; make sense of it? You could
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Data journalism pt2: Interrogating data

This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (the first, on gathering data, is here). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around ways of spotting stories in data, and mistakes to avoid. UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook. “One of the most important (and least technical)
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Every news organisation should have a Datastore

You may know about The Guardian’s Datastore: a compilation of “publicly-available data for you to use free” that’s been around for a few months now. You know the sort of thing: university tables; MPs’ expenses; tax paid by the FTSE 100. It has already produced some great work from what I once described as the “Technician” variant of distributed journalism.  But a column by
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‘Journalists: learn to code’ says Guardian’s Arthur

Charles Arthur of The Guardian makes his point pretty plain: “If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code” “Let’s be clear that I’m not saying “code” as in “get deep into C++ or Java” … I mean it in the sense of having a nodding acquaintance with methods of
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