Cover image by Matt Buck at Drawnalism.
“Excel para periodistas”, la versión en español de mi libro “Finding Stories in Spreadsheets”, estará listo en las próximas semanas.
La traducción está a cargo de Bárbara Maseda. Pueden registrarse en la página del libro digital para recibir un aviso cuando se publique.
Cover image by Matt Buck at Drawnalism.
A Spanish version of Finding Stories in Spreadsheets – titled ‘Excel para periodistas’ (Excel for Journalists) – should be available in the next few weeks.
The translation is being done by Barbara Maseda. If you want to know when it’s going to be available you can register to be informed on the book page.
The EFF have an interactive graphic which shows you what information can be grabbed when you’re using Tor or HTTPS
Home secretary Theresa May wants to be able to connect IP addresses (which identify machines) with users (those using it at that particular time).
In a nutshell this means being able to identify whether you were in a particular place at a particular time – only the ‘place’ in question happens to be virtual: a website.
Now clearly this is aimed at identifying terrorists and paedophiles. But then so was RIPA, a law which has been used to spy on journalists and intimidate staff who speak to them and to “pull reporters’ phone records in every single leak inquiry in the last ten years“, including all calls to the Sun’s newsdesk and by their political editor in one inquiry.
In recent weeks we have heard about prison officials monitoring confidential phonecalls between MPs and prisoners, and between lawyers and their clients. Continue reading
This video, from this year’s Google I/O conference, is one of the best explanations I’ve seen on HTTPS with regard to publishers.
It’s worth watching for five minutes or so to get an insight into why HTTPS is so important not just in protecting users, but also in protecting your own reputation.
HTTPS protects users because it prevents others from seeing what sites they visited before and after yours, and what pages they’re looking at on your site.
Imagine a whistleblower checking your site or profile out, or indeed one of your own journalists visiting it using hotel or coffee shop wifi, and you have an idea what I mean.
But HTTPS also prevents hackers from impersonating your site in order to collect user data. I imagine most publishers will be more concerned with their customers than their sources.
For journalists who suddenly realise that their web browsing is public information, I recommend the browser plugin HTTPS Everywhere, which turns on HTTPS by default (where sites support it) in Chrome, Firefox, Firefox on Android, or Opera.
In our Hyperlocal Voices series we speak to hyperlocal publishers about their journey as they seek to build a successful hyperlocal offer. From time to time we also check in again on some of the more established players to see what’s changed and how their operation is evolving.
One such example is Brixton Blog in South West London.
Originally established by Zoe Jewell in 2010, the site has evolved considerably since, launching the Brixton Bugle newspaper in July 2012 (10,000 copies of which are distributed each month) and working with The Carnegie UK Trust as part of their Neighbourhood News initiative by providing structured work placements for local trainees.
In 2013 The Brixton Blog and Bugle were shortlisted in the ‘Innovation of the Year’ category at the British Journalism Awards, alongside Sun Plus, Guardian Witness and Independent Voices in Danger projects. The team are currently in the middle of a crowdfunder campaign designed to raise money for a part-time news editor.
Co-founder Tim Dickens tells Damian Radcliffe what’s changed at Brixton Blog since we first spoke to them in June 2012; alongside some of their plans for the future.
We still get the most traffic from social media. Facebook is highest for referrals followed swiftly by Twitter.
We also have a lot of offline interaction from people who have read the Brixton Bugle who may not be online – we get a lot of phone calls to the office and letters by post.
Photo: Shaun, from Brixton Blog’s The Faces of Cressingham series
In the long term, we’d love to see a weekly or fortnightly edition of the Brixton Bugle newspaper, although that is a long way off. We’d like to expand the opportunities that we can offer local young people by way of training in the media industry and journalism too.
Until recently a journalism trainer in the UK could safely berate a trainee for Writing Headlines Where Every Word Began With A Capital.
It is a style of headline writing common in US publications, but non-existent in the UK, where newspapers have traditionally fit into one of two camps: the SHOUTY SHOUTY REDTOPS and the broadsheets who Only make the first letter uppercase unless there’s a proper noun.
(The mid-markets, as might be expected, took the best of both worlds, reserving shouting for the front pages and lower case for the inside pages).
So a journalism trainee who Wrote Like This had likely never paid much attention to newspapers, or only when they appeared in Hollywood films.
Or perhaps they just read Guido Fawkes, who, for whatever reason appears to have followed the Hollywood style of headline writing:
Guido Fawkes’s headlines adhere to the US style
This post is taken from the ebook Finding Stories With Spreadsheets
“How do I calculate an age in Excel?” Marion Urban, a French journalist and student on the MA in Online Journalism in Birmingham, was preparing data for the forthcoming UK General Election.
In order to do this Marion had downloaded details on the candidates who had stood successfully in the previous election.
“It was a very young intake. But it wasn’t easy to calculate their ages.”
Indeed. You would think that calculating ages in Excel would be easy. But there is no off-the-shelf function to help you do so. Or at least, no easy-to-find function.
Instead there are a range of different approaches: some of them particularly, and unnecessarily complicated.
In this extract from Finding Stories in Spreadsheets I will outline one approach to calculating ages, which also illustrates a useful technique in using spreadsheets in stories: the ability to break down a problem into different parts. Continue reading
On Saturday the social bookmarking service Pinboard experienced some lengthy downtime.
For those who rely on the service – like me – as professional archive, this was a problem. But it was a good example of why archives should always be backed up.
Here, then, are 3 ways you can – and probably should – back up your bookmark archives, whether you’re using Pinboard or another service. Continue reading
The Birmingham Mail is to invite its readers and followers to sign up today to a week-long experiment with the ‘crowdspeaking’ platform Thunderclap.
Thunderclap, launched in 2012, allows users to sign up to send coordinated social media messages around a particular issue or campaign.
Staff at the paper have already started ‘seeding’ the campaign by emailing their own networks. An email from publishing director Marc Reeves explains:
Online Journalism Blog 