(Read part 1 here and part 2 here)

The third student to catch the data journalism bug was Andy Brightwell. Through his earlier reporting on swimming pool facilities in Birmingham, Andy had developed an interest in the issue, and wanted to use data journalism techniques to dig further.

The result was a standalone site – Where Can We Swim? – which documented exactly how he did that digging, and presented the results.

He also blogged about the results for social media firm Podnosh, where he has been working.

Andy’s techniques included creating a screen scraper using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Spreadsheets, visualising and mapping opening times, and, of course, some old-fashioned research (a recurring theme in the MA data journalism work).

What is particularly interesting is how Andy shows readers his working – explaining inconsistencies in the data, how it is gathered, and issues with making comparisons. Spreadsheets are embedded.

Instead of ‘not letting the facts get in the way of a good story’, Andy is refusing to let a good story get in the way of the facts: we are invited to build on top of the sterling work that he has done.

His early visualisations, for example, showed that the West Midlands was the worst region for swimming pool provision. Then in a later one:

“By clicking on the visualisation you should be able to see a correlation between demand and supply. In the top left-hand corner click on facility m2/1000 (this shows the amount swimming surface area per 1000 people). Now click on participation rate – and the map looks remarkably similar, with the same dark areas, while the West Midlands is one of the lightest regions. In other words, where there’s the most availability of swimming – in the South West, South East and in East, there are more people swimming.

“Now let’s look at the West Midlands – one of the worst regions for supply and demand … As you can see, it’s Birmingham that’s the worst offender, in fact it’s significantly worse than other regions within the West Midlands.

“Of course there’s a health warning over all of this. The report does point out that, even in Birmingham, supply is able to meet current demand – which sort of contradicts the evidence that superior supply leads to more demand. However, what we can say with reasonable confidence is that with doubts over the 50 metre pool and the only pool to have been rebuilt so far is Harborne, it seems Birmingham does indeed have a long way to go before it has anything like the supply of pools some other parts of England enjoy.”

Video stories, Flash interactivity and mapping the local music scene

Three other MA Online Journalism students developed skills in different areas to add specialist expertise to their broad online journalism toolkit.

Chiara Bolognini refined her Flash skills to produce a website for the Basel Social Media Apero that combined animation, video, and a Twitter feed.

Ruihua Yao explored video and produced a series of video profiles of members of the Chinese community in Birmingham. Ruihua filmed the subject speaking in their native language, then dubbed the video with their stories in English. What emerges is a picture of very highly educated Chinese citizens unable to use their education to contribute to British society.

Natalie Chillington set herself the challenge of creating a live map of upcoming gigs in Birmingham that would automatically update when new entries were added to the Google Doc (which also fed a listings). Both were for a new site covering the music scene in the city, The Music Quarter.

This was a technically ambitious project which hit a number of obstacles along the way. To Natalie’s credit, she overcame all of these to produce something which looks simple, but is actually very complex. This post explains the stages Natalie went through in exploring automatically updated maps.

In the next and final part of this series (live Monday) I’ll be talking about Alex Gamela‘s work, which includes a Google map that has had over 80,000 views, a moving Flash interactive, and a piece of multimedia journalism combining video, visualisation and more data journalism.

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As a new semester begins it seems a good time to finally post about how my second year journalism degree students approached the ‘interactive’ element of their portfolio way back in May (yes, everything they do is interactive, but bear with me).

For the first time I gave them an open brief in terms of what they did interactively (in previous years I asked them to produce Flash interactives). Having been taught how to create everything from audio slideshows and image maps to multimedia interactives, Google Maps and Yahoo! Pipes mashups, I was curious to see what they would pick. Would they all plump for the same option?

Apparently not. In fact, the results are the most diverse and downright fascinating I’ve ever seen from an online journalism class.

Here’s what they did:

• Kasper Sorensen created

  a map of water issues stories in Europe

• Ashley Snape created a

  map of Environmental Activity in Australasia

• Natalie Chillington created a photo slideshow of the top ten endangered animals
• Alice Fanning not only created a

  map of UK environmental protests but also a Yahoo! Pipe mashup of eco news.

• Emma Foster created an audio slideshow – ‘Tescopoly’ – and a map of eco-businesses in the UK
• Hayley Smith created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup of environmental technology news, alerts and photos
• Kat Higgs created an audio slideshow about mistreatment of animals
• Stephanie Grant created an audio slideshow to mark African Liberation Day
• Stephen Nunes set up a YouTube channel and posted 3 mini-videos looking at how environmentally friendly his accommodation was; he also included links to full audio on many of his stories for the website
• Tuuli Platner stole the show with her YouTube video song promoting the site and her reporter blog. Journalists are becoming brands, and Tuuli has understood that brilliantly.

In addition the class submitted stories from their blogs and from the Environmental News Online website; their Twitter tweets and their bookmarks; their rss reader subscriptions and their comments on other blogs.

You could say I’m quite demanding like that.

What was interesting to see was students commenting on each others’ blogs about what they were planning to do – particularly useful when students were reporting on areas that crossed disciplines and other correspondents could see additional leads or angles.

In other words, the blogs became a team management and communication tool, as well as a publishing one.

Many students tried a number of things – a Pipes mashup; an audio slideshow – before settling on what they eventually submitted. They bookmarked, they twittered, and they blogged. They linked. They commented – one noted how her blog hits spiked after she posted a comment on another blog.

I was pretty pleased, all in. The vast scope of possibilities in online journalism is impossible to teach in ten weeks, so I tried to focus on broader issues: experimentation; possibilities. That gave them scope to latch onto what stimulated them, or what the story suited. I only hope they take it further as they begin their final year…

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dispatches is a new current affairs quarterly with a companion website, Rethink-Dispatches.com featuring original content as well as extracts from the magazine.

Virtual Intern Natalie Chillington put forward a few questions to editor and art director Gary Knight about the online side to dispatches.

Why is dispatches not published online?

“Principally [the fact,] that our content is not web compatible in so far as web users don’t respond to 25,000 words and 80 images. The point of dispatches is depth. Having said that we do have a website and it will grow.”

Knight hopes that Rethink-Dispatches.com will be used in addition to rather than instead of dispatches.

“I am currently reading a 700 page book on the Korean War by David Halberstam and I would never do that on the web,” says Knight, “but next to me is my laptop and when I want more background on the players in the book I look them up on the web.”

The fact that dispatches is produced by just four people – three of whom have other jobs – also means that the team has had no choice but to prioritise. “We decided to get the book right first.”

In comparison to other sites

Perhaps as a result of having a small team, the website is rather simple and lacking in interactive features – although effective nonetheless in, as the Mission Statement says, “aiming for the widest possible appeal.”

I asked Knight how he felt the website compared to other magazine websites.

“We have made no attempt to put the whole book online. Most magazines have a staff of over a hundred and come out weekly. We are properly compared with Granta or the Paris Review, both of which have more than one member of staff! I would judge our website in a year.”

It seems Rethink-Dispatches.com is a work in progress and it will be interesting to see how the team chooses to make use of multimedia to enhance their product.

“As time goes by I think our visual presence will be much stronger than our competitors’. I think it will be one of the places to go to for photography on the web, but that takes time and we don’t have too much of that.”

The website contains a lot of requests to “Subscribe to read the rest of this…” So has providing ‘teasers’ of the magazine content online increased sales of dispatches in print? Knight thinks probably not.

“The point is that this is a small operation paying for original content and we have to monetise it somehow. Giving it away on the web would probably not be smart at this stage in our evolution, especially as it is not an appropriate platform on which to read our content.”

Knight’s view on the media landscape

I asked Knight what his perspectives were on how the media landscape is changing.

“I think the media is changing but that is not such a bad thing as long as we have high standards. Delivery methods change all the time, big deal. TV did not, as predicted, kill off the radio and I doubt the web will kill off print or TV either.

“What is important is not the delivery system, it is the content, and when old media understands how to use the web, I think the web content will improve.

“I think MySpace and YouTube are not the media, nor are bloggers. They are the 21st century equivalent of Hyde Park Corner [sic] and youth clubs. The future of news delivery on the web demands better editing and citation so people know where to get reliable well written/filmed material.

“Currently, it’s like walking into a book store the size of a football field looking for a book to read on the beach. It’s confusing.”

Knight feels that publishing dispatches only in print will be sustainable. “We need depth, independence and clarity, not sound bites.”

Perhaps as Rosenblum puts it in the editor’s note, “Subjects as important as the fate of our world deserve the permanence of print.”

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