In the final of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about the tension between publishing first online, or holding material back for print. Magazine editors worry about topicality. Stories they send to press on Monday may be out of date by the time the magazine appears on Wednesday or Friday. It is no consolation
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In the second of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about dealing with the large amount of information that magazine editors receive. Managing information overload A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and
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I was very excited recently to read on the Scraperwiki mailing list that the website was working on making it possible to create an RSS feed from a SQL query. Yes, that’s the sort of thing that gets me excited these days. But before you reach for a blunt object to knock some sense into me, allow me to explain…
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During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is. In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it
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I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge. Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply
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If you are working with data chances are that sooner or later you will come across XML – or if you don’t, then, well, you should do. Really. There are some very useful resources in XML format – and in RSS, which is based on XML – from ongoing feeds and static reference files to XML that is provided in
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I’ve been enjoying The Independent’s individual Facebook feeds for journalists, football teams and other ‘entities’ of their news coverage. So much so that I wanted the work of journalists on other news organisations to be brought to me in the same way. But other newspapers are not offering the same functionality, so I thought I’d do it myself. Here’s how
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The Independent newspaper has introduced a fascinating new feature on the site that allows users to follow articles by individual writers and news about specific football teams via Facebook. It’s one of those ideas so simple you wonder why no one else appears to have done it before*: instead of just ‘liking’ individual articles, or having to trudge off to
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I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web,
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Teaching has begun in the new academic year and once again I’m handing out a list of recommended RSS feeds. Last year this came in the form of an OPML file, but this year I’m using Google Reader bundles (instructions on how to create one of your own are here). There are 50 feeds in all – 5 feeds in
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