Data journalism in broadcast news and video: 27 examples to inspire and educate

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channel 4 network diagram

This network diagram comes from a Channel 4 News story

The best-known examples of data journalism tend to be based around text and visuals — but it’s harder to find data journalism in video and audio. Ahead of the launch of my new MA in Data Journalism I thought I would share my list of the examples of video data journalism that I use with students in exploring data storytelling across multiple platforms. If you have others, I’d love to hear about them.

FOI stories in broadcast journalism

victoria derbyshire gif

Freedom of Information stories are one of the most common situations when broadcasters will have to deal with more in-depth data. These are often brought to life by through case studies and interviewing experts. Continue reading →

Facebook launch a new safety for journalists initiative – but there’s something they’re not mentioning…

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facebook security

Facebook has launched a new initiative in partnership with a number of journalism organisations to help journalists “protect their accounts and themselves on Facebook.”

The Facebook Safety for Journalists page covers 10 steps that journalists should take, ranging from password protection to abuse and harassment. Continue reading →

The 2nd edition of Scraping for Journalists is now live

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Scraping for Journalists

When I began publishing Scraping for Journalists in 2012, one of the reasons for choosing to publish online was the ability to publish chapters as I wrote them, and update the book in response to readers’ feedback. The book was finally ‘finished’ in 2013 — but earlier this year I decided to go through it from cover to cover and update everything.

The result — a ‘second edition’ of Scraping for Journalists — is now live. Those who bought the first edition on Leanpub will already have access to this version.

The second edition includes new scrapers for different websites, and a new chapter on scraping APIs and handling JSON.

As always, I’ll be continuing to update the book, including any examples from readers (if you’ve used the techniques in the book for a story, I’d love to know about it).

There’s an anonymous chat-to-blogging tool on Telegram – here’s how to use it

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secretgram

A new anonymous blogging and commenting bot has appeared on the encrypted chat app Telegram — and it has some interesting potential applications for journalists.

Secretgram “helps you to create a post with anonymous comments in your Telegram channels and groups.” But it also appears to create a post that anyone can comment on anonymously — if they know the URL. Continue reading →

Do we need a ‘Best Before End’ on trending stories?

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datestamp by wahoo bird

datestamp by wahoo bird

Every so often, an old story finds a new lease of life on a news website thanks to social media and the ‘most read’ stories panel. In the wake of the Paris terror attack, for example, social sharing caused a story about an attack in Kenya to begin trending — many of those sharing it didn’t realise that it had happened seven months earlier.

The problem is a symptom of the permanence of digital information. Old newspaper stories and broadcast bulletins never had to deal with this problem — but those organisations do now.

This week the problem recurred during the UK election campaign, as a video clip of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn from last November began trending on the BBC website too. Continue reading →

How Trinity Mirror’s Data Unit created the 2015 election interactive ‘Find My Seat’

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find my seat election interactive

During the 2015 UK general election the Trinity Mirror Data Unit created a special interactive tool which allowed readers to find out more about their own constituency. The Find My Seat tool was used across all their titles including the national Mirror newspaper as well as the Liverpool Echo, Birmingham Mail, Manchester Evening News, Newcastle Chronicle and north Wales’s Daily Post. The tool has recently been relaunched for the 2017 election. Patrick Scott (now at the Telegraph) was part of the team behind it — in an interview by Antia Geada, he explains how they did it.
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Using Instagram to cover an election: lessons from #wmmayor

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During this year’s mayoral elections one of my MA Online Journalism students, Sam Gould, adopted an Instagram-first publishing strategy during the lead up to the vote, and on the day of the count. The results were impressive, taking in profiles, interviews, explainers, and live coverage. But equally interesting for anyone considering a mobile-first approach to elections this year was the workflow, so I thought I’d share some of the key points here. Continue reading →