The Scotsman has a newish data blog, set up (I’m rather proud to say) by one of my former PA/Telegraph trainees: Jennifer O’Mahony. This is particularly important as so much data covered in the ‘national’ press tends to be English-only due to devolution.

The Department of Education, for example, only publishes English education data. If you want Scottish education data you need to go to the Scottish Government website or Education Scotland. Ofsted inspects schools in England; for Scottish schools reports you need to visit HM Inspectorate of Education. (Meanwhile, the National Statistics site, publishes data from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).

So if there’s any Scottish data – or that of Wales or Northern Ireland – that you want me to help with, let me or Jennifer know. By way of illustrating the process, here’s a post over on Help Me Investigate: Education on how I helped Jennifer collect data on free school meals in Scotland.

A treemap in Liverpool

On the same note of non-national data journalism, here’s a particularly nice bit of data visualisation at the Liverpool Post. It’s not often you see treemaps on a local newspaper website – this one was designed by Ilan Sheady based on data gathered by City Editor David Bartlett after a day’s data journalism training.

I have a confession: I have never liked student projects aimed at students. They tend to betray a lazy approach to creativity: after all, what can be less imaginative than a project aimed at ‘people like me’?

They also don’t generally develop the skills that journalism degrees aim for: original research, for example; flexibility in style; or an exploration of professional context.

And I’m not alone: most journalism tutors, when looking for an assignment to give or weighing up a student’s proposal, will run a mile from anything aimed at students. “Go write for the student newspaper if you want to do that.”

Lazy

But I think my instinctive aversion has been wrong. I think it’s as lazy as the ideas I’ve criticised. And I think it means missing an enormous opportunity.

Traditionally, one of the biggest strengths of the regional journalist was their connection to the communities they reported on. They knew the issues; they knew who to speak to in those communities (and not just who published the press releases); they knew their readers; and they saw the impact of their work.

University students, in contrast, are perhaps at a stage in their life when they are least connected to any community. They are often living in a town or city they have no history in; they are unlikely to run businesses, or belong to any industrial or professional culture; few have children in the local education and health systems. They are inbetweeners.

It is possibly the worst time in somebody’s life to expect them to do journalism.

And the one thing that they are connected to – student life – we steer them away from.

A New Year’s resolution

So I have a New Year’s resolution for 2012: I’m going to change the habit that I’ve acquired from a decade in teaching journalism.

For the first time I am going to assign my students – just one group – a project focused on students.

It will still build those essential skills: original research; flexibility of style; professional context. But those skills will be built upon a knowledge that what they will be doing will have a large audience, and can make a real difference to them.

That means that I will be expecting more. Because they already know the community they are writing about, I will be expecting them to hit the ground running with original leads and story ideas – not trying to hit a story quota with press releases or superficial he-said-she-said conflicts.

Because the project will be online-only, I will be expecting them to be exploring new ways of engaging – and collaborating - with the most connected audiences in the country.

And because they are personally affected by the systems they are reporting on – from employment law and tenants’ rights to student councils and representation – I will be expecting them to research the system itself: where power and accountability lies; where the money goes, and why.

As a result, I’m hoping that students will develop an understanding of how to investigate systems in any field – transferring their experiences of investigating education into investigating the health system, welfare system, local government, or anything else.

I’ll be using Help Me Investigate Education as a space to help them build that knowledge, and those connections, and to collaborate with journalism students and others across the UK. If you have a class that you want to get involved, I’d be happy to help.

And there are plenty of stories to be told. Like any transient population, students are subject to many abuses of power. In 2012 I want to see if, given the opportunity, student journalists can hold that power to account.

The Birmingham Mail has been trying its hand at data journalism with school admissions data. It’s a good place to start - the topic attracts a lot of interest (and so justifies the investment of time) while people tend to be interested in more than just who finishes top and bottom of the tables (justifying the choice of medium).

The results are impressive. Applications data is plotted on a Google map on the main page, while an “interactive chart” page allows you to compare schools across various criteria, and also narrow the sample by selecting from two drop down menus (town and school).

The charts have been made in Tableau, which includes a download link at the bottom. However, you need Tableau itself (free, but PC only) to open it.

A further page features links to tables for each area. Sadly, the pages containing tables do not contain any link to the raw data. This presents an extra hurdle to users – although you can scrape the table into a Google spreadsheet using the =import formula. If you want to see how, here’s a spreadsheet I created from the data by doing just that. Click on the first cell to see the formula that generates it.

I asked David Higgerson, Trinity Mirror’s Head of Multimedia and the man whose name appears on the Tableau data, to explain the process behind the project. It seems the information was a combination of freely available data and that acquired via FOI.

“The Mail took the data available – number of places available, number of first choice applicants and number of total applicants – and worked out a ratio of first choice applicants per place. This is relevant to parents because councils try to allocate places to children based on preference once they’ve decided which schools a child is eligible for. Eligibility varies depending on type of school.

“The figures showed how popular faith schools were, and also how fierce competition was for places at grammar schools. That’s the story which generated most interest.

“As you’ve said on your blog, the hardest part was making the data uniform, and the making it relevant to readers.

“In print, it ran across three days. Day one was grammar schools, day two was all schools and day three revealed how catchment areas for oversubscribed schools which use distance from school to fill their last few places.

“Online, Google Fusion was used to create maps, Tableau for the interactive chart which lets people choose based on town or school, and Tableizer for the quick tables which appear in the section too. We also had a play with Scribble Maps, which we think has real potential for print/online newsrooms.”

It seems education reporter Kat Keogh deserves the credit for spotting the stories in the data, “with the usual support you’d expect in the newsroom – newsdesk etc.”

David and Anna Jeys experimented with the online presentation and others laid out the data for print.

For the last few years, I’ve had a problem. It’s a problem with deadlines, and momentum. Here’s how it goes:

Every year, students in my undergraduate Online Journalism module run a live news website – Birmingham Recycled. Six weeks into the module, students have to submit a ‘snapshot’ portfolio for the first of 2 assignment deadlines…

And this is where I hit my problem. The standard of work in that first portfolio is typically impressive – most of them have gotten to grips with a range of online platforms, are understanding their area, and appear motivated.

But once they’ve submitted, students hit a lull. Their stellar performance until that point stalls – their momentum, interrupted by the deadline, falters.

In a nutshell, I think they enter a ‘business as usual’ frame of mind.

So this year I’m trying something new.

Here’s what the students have been doing until this point:

• In week 1, students set up their newsgathering infrastructure: Google Reader to subscribe to feeds; Delicious to bookmark useful webpages; and Twitter to tweet them and anything else.
• In week 2 students set up their reporter’s blog – also integrated with Twitter and Delicious.
• In week 3 they are introduced to the news site (Birmingham Recycled), assigned to a section, and in some cases appointed Editor.
• They continue to write for the site for the following 3 weeks as they also cover UGC and podcasting.

This is what I’ve changed:

• In week 7, after their deadline has passed, we shake things up. 2 new teams are formed: an elections team, and an investigations team.
• This leaves the previous section teams rather thin, so we merge the 10 website section teams into 4.
• Each of these teams gets a new editor (as the previous editors have generally been ‘promoted’ to the new elections or investigations teams).
• And the class I teach that week is about computer assisted reporting (CAR) and Freedom of Information (FOI).
• Students are told that they don’t have to be in the investigations team to do an investigation, and there is still scope for ‘career development’ within the group: editors can be demoted or moved sideways; correspondents can be re-assigned or promoted. In other words, there’s a career structure there (as an aside, this year I introduced a new criterion to the assignment brief: 10% of a student’s marks are now given for ‘professional context’ – how well they have communicated with others in their team, reliability and regularity of contributions).

And here’s why:

• The shake-up, I hope, gives new impetus to the group. Almost half of the group get new roles with new challenges to grow and improve.
• The rest are now in new, mixed, teams with new editors and a wider range of topics that they can cover.
• They’ve been taught a new set of skills which takes them back to the first stage of journalism: newsgathering.

I’ve no idea whether it will work, but so far the signs are good. The investigations team appear excited about the possibilities of their role – and students who are not in that team have already been sending out FOI requests. The elections team are swotting up on their constituencies, and the new editors are getting to grips with their new roles. With an Easter break coming up to interrupt them, it will be interesting to see whether this does address the recurring momentum problem…

A couple weeks ago I took a group of students away from the classroom for an experiment in teaching blogging and social capital – the Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt.

After a quick briefing and some pointers on using Posterous and Twitter from a mobile phone, the students fanned out across the city, finding people with a social media presence, talking to them, and blogging, tweeting and audiobooing all the while. The idea was to get them to stop thinking about ‘the story’, start building social capital, and think of online journalism as something that can take place away from a desk.

Now some time has passed I wanted to share how the experiment went and how the students found it.

In short: it worked.

Mitchell Jones blogged 4 social media tips he’d learned this year, saying the treasure hunt:

“Added an extra dimension to our learning process by throwing us out into the real world and encouraging us to broaden ourselves beyond good writing of good stories. Social media is more than reporting on stories online with a link posted to a Twitter account; it’s about communities, networking and bridging the gap between the journalist and the consumer.”

Job done.

Rachel Simmonite said:

“I found it a very useful exercise, one that I really enjoyed, as it got us talking to actual people rather than just sitting in front of a computer screen. I also think that we found out more doing it in a more personal way.”

Yasmine Hachani said:

“Today, I have realized how important it was to have an active social life. I always thought about the way to get great social capital but did not know that every little helps and that each person you meet might have useful contacts. For instance the [people] who gave us the contacts we needed for our blogs are not in the [environment] field at all. I was amazed to see that people were happy to help, right now I see the world differently and have another vision of the UK [Yasmine is French].”

For other student blog posts on the outcomes of the session see Jade Rance, Sian Jones and Victoria Elmore.

The one thing that didn’t seem to quite work was the tagging element. The use of the hashtag #bsmth was patchy, and none of the blog posts appeared to use the tag at all (although Mitch’s audioboos were tagged). So the pre-treasure hunt briefing needed to look at the practicalities of tagging blog posts as well as tweets.

Also, if you’re going to need to check the tweets later make sure you archive them within a few days using one of these tools, as Twitter Search only reaches a week or so back.

As an aside, a different group of students last week spent their normal lesson time at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe meeting people from the local social media scene over free coffee. Again, it seemed a useful exercise, and both seem to have made them more confident in attending meetings and events of all sorts in the local area. I’m sure they’ll correct me in the comments if I’m wrong…

If you want to skip the background, go to the next subheading

Last week the BBC Education website published a piece about a report into the use of technology by schoolchildren: “Tech addiction ‘harms learning’”:

“Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned,” the intro led, before describing the results of the study. No one other than the study authors was quoted.

But GP and Clinial Lecturer AnneMarie Cunningham, hearing of the report on Twitter, felt the headline and content of the article didn’t match up: “The headline suggests a causal relationship which a cross-sectional study could not establish, but the body of the text doesn’t really support any relationship between addiction and learning”, she wrote, and she started digging:

“It … was clear that none of the authors had an education background. The 2 main authors, Nadia and Andrew Kakabadse, have a blog showcasing their many interests but education doesn’t feature amongst them. They descibe themselves as “experts in top team and board consulting, training and development”.”

AnneMarie bought the report for $24.99 – the only way to read it – and started reading. This is what she found:

“I expected the report by university academics to follow a standard format but it doesn’t. It is 24 pages long and contains no references and no appendices. The survey instrument is not included.

“No response rate is given … ‘tech addiction’ … seems to have been a self-assessment … With regards to this addiction harming learning, there is no analysis relating to the perception of being addicted to outcomes in learning. In fact very few of the questions are related in any way to learning.

“It is hard to understand several sections of the report because of lack of access to the questionnaire. For example, with regards to plagiarism the authors state that “A high proportion of students (84.3%) openly admitted that they inserted information from the Internet into their homework or projects on a number of occasions.” The tone of this sentence reflects some of the bias which is found throughout the work. The authors don’t seem to be aware that if referenced it is acceptable to insert information from the internet into work, so the students would have no reason to be ashamed and fear ‘openly admitting’ this.

“… It is also reported that 28.5% of students “feel it acceptable to insert information from the Internet straight into schoolwork without editing or making adjustment, recognising that such behaviour is considered plagiarism.” It would help a lot to see how that question was actually worded in the survey, as in the figure it is simply represented as “Ok to “insert” information from the Internet straight into schoolwork- Yes/no”. That’s not quite the same!

“There is no analysis relating amount of time spent online (or perception of addiction) and likelihood to insert internet contents into work without reading it. It may be that those who spend less time online, have less skills in information literacy and are more likely to plagiarise.

“In summary this report tells us very little about internet addiction or learning. Do you think that someone writing for the BBC website actually read the report?”

Her blog post summarising this was passed around by numerous people on Twitter, including BBC journalists, journalism academics, and ‘bad science’ Twitter users like EvidenceMatters. The blog post itself amassed around 20 comments.

AnneMarie emailed BBC Education, and I emailed the BBC News website education editor, Gary Eason. AnneMarie also emailed Cranfield University (who were also criticised). After a week, we had had no response and the article remained unchanged.

But more importantly, people’s opinions of the ‘bad science’ reporting of the BBC remained unaddressed – and this is what this blog post is really about.

UGC and the news brand

Here’s why this interests me. Last year Alfred Hermida and Neil Thurman published a paper (PDF) on user generated content which included the following finding:

“The potential that UGC has to damage a newspaper’s brand remained a prevailing concern among some editors. The idea of publishing a comment without checking it first was described as “very dangerous” (Avery, 2006), while Bale (2006) said that not to moderate content would be an inappropriate brand risk.”

What the discussion around the BBC Education news piece highlights is the risk to a news brand in not publishing comments (as is the case – for now – on most BBC News reports. Indeed, I would add that not having bylines to all reports or contact emails makes the organisation look even more opaque.)

Today I chased up Gary Eason, and this was his response:

“So far as I know our reporter did obtain a copy of the report. I heard her talking to an author/authors.

“I wouldn’t claim it is the greatest piece of original journalism we’ve ever undertaken nor that the study was a groundbreaking one. It’s clear the report was based on a small survey, which feeds into an ongoing debate. We have done pieces in the past presenting a different perspective, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6247853.stm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6241517.stm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7196836.stm.

“I’ve read the blog. “U may fault methodology, results true” is amusing but cuts both ways: it seems to me the results don’t fit her world view so she sets about rubbishing them. Is she seriously arguing that ‘cut-and-paste plagiarism’ is not a problem?”

Speaking to Gary further, he said that he was aware of some of the criticisms but does not tend to address online discussion unless they were libellous towards his journalists, “otherwise I’d spend all day doing something else”. He said he would re-read the blog post.

Of course having comments on the story would have allowed this discussion to take place in public, from the start, and provide readers of the article with some critical context, turning a single-source ‘He Said’ article into a ‘He Said-She Said’ piece at the very least. That’s a technical issue that is being addressed, but in the meantime the BBC brand suffers.

The phrase “A lie travels round the world, while Truth is putting on her boots” in this case applies both to the study that was being reported, and the belief that the BBC journalist hadn’t actually read it. Having and watching comments allows Truth to get her boots on that much quicker.