Here’s my attempt to capture some of the more interesting exchanges about the Leveson Report on Twitter yesterday.
Here’s my attempt to capture some of the more interesting exchanges about the Leveson Report on Twitter yesterday.
http://storify.com/paulbradshaw/yet-another-leveson-pundit-conversation
Image by Mr T in DC
When you start publishing online you move from the well-thumbed areas of defamation and libel, contempt of court and privilege and privacy to a whole new world of laws and licences.
This is a place where laws you never knew existed can be applied to your work – while other ones can come in surprisingly useful. Here are the key ones:
Comparison of time spent on a selection of Live Blogs, articles, and picture galleries at Guardian.co.uk, March to May 2011
In a guest post for OJB, Neil Thurman highlights a new research report that suggests that Live Blogs outperform other online news formats by up to 300% and are seen by readers as more transparent, trusted, and ‘factual’ than conventional online news stories.
The following was written for three:d, the newsletter of MeCCSA, the Media Communications and Cultural Studies Association (PDF, page 9).
Something has happened to self-publishing over the past few years. No longer the last resort for local historians and wannabe poets, it is now a sign of entrepreneurial spirit, an alternative to the limitations of attention-starved journalism, and a way of kicking against the pricks of mainstream publishing. Self-published books have almost tripled in number over the last five years, with a number of authors making the bestseller lists. More than one in ten ebooks bought by UK readers is now self-published.
This year I finally joined that group, as I made a long-planned move away from writing for traditional publishers towards publishing my own ebooks. In fact, I published three. So what’s the appeal? Continue reading
Here’s a meta-Storify with one link: to another Storify, where more is revealed…
http://storify.com/paulbradshaw/community-management-tips-for-journalists-1
Someone, somewhere right now will be writing a thesis, dissertation or journal paper about the very modern moral panic playing out across the UK media.
What began as a story about allegations of sexual abuse by TV and radio celebrity Jimmy Savile turned into a story about that story being covered up, into how the abuse could take place (at the BBC too, in the 1970s, but also in hospitals and schools), then into wider allegations of a paedophile ring involving politicians.
Image by Lasse Havelund
In the second part of this extract from Chapter 10 of Scraping for Journalists I recap the basics before discussing techniques to use in looking for patterns in data, and how regex can deal with non-textual characters such as spaces and carriage returns, special characters such as backslashes, and ‘negative matches’. You can find the first part here.
So Nate Silver won in 50 states; big data was the winner; and Nate Silver and data won the election. And somewhere along the lines some guy called Obama won something, too.
Elections set the pace for much of journalism’s development: predictable enough to allow for advance planning; big enough to justify the budgets to match, they are the stage on which news organisations do their growing up in public.
For most of the past decade, those elections have been about social media: the YouTube election; the Facebook election; the Twitter election. This time, it wasn’t about the campaigning (yet) so much as it was about the reporting. And how stupid some reporters ended up looking. Continue reading
Regular Expressions cartoon from xkcd
The following is the first part of an extract from Chapter 10 of Scraping for Journalists. It introduces a particularly useful tool in scraping – regex – which is designed to look for ‘regular expressions’ such as specific words, prefixes or particular types of code. I hope you find it useful.
This tutorial will show you how to scrape a particularly badly formatted piece of data. In this case, the UK Labour Party’s publication of meetings and dinners with donors and trade union general secretaries.
To do this, you’ll need to install the free scraping tool OutWit Hub. Regex can be used in other tools and programming as well, but this tool is a good way to learn it without knowing any other programming. Continue reading
If people aren’t using data it isn’t just a problem for web developers – it’s a problem for journalists too. If not enough people are looking at information on crime, politics, health, education, or welfare then it makes our work harder.
On that subject, Tim Davies writes about the challenges of ‘getting data used’ and the inclination to focus on data-centric solutions. “Data quality, poor meta-data, inaccessible language, and the difficulty of finding wheat amongst the chaff of data were all diagnosed [at one hack day] as part of the problem,” he reports. “Yet these diagnosis and solutions are still based on linear thinking: when a dataset is truly accessible, then it will be used, and economic benefits will flow. Continue reading
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