Monthly Archives: October 2016

I’m organising a data journalism conference – you should come

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Data Journalism UK 2016In just over 4 weeks I’ll be holding a day of workshops and industry panels for aspiring and working data journalists across the UK. Want to come?

Data Journalism UK 2016, in Birmingham on November 22, will be focusing on the latest wave of regional data journalism projects, from the data journalists at Trinity Mirror and BBC Scotland to startups like Northern Ireland’s The Detail and winners of Google Digital News Initiative funding Talk About Local’s News Engine and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

I’m particularly pleased to have one of the most experienced data journalists in the country, Claire Miller, speaking too.

claire-miller

Claire Miller, author of the book Getting Started with Data Journalism

The event will mix industry speakers and experts with practical sessions: there’ll be drop-in sessions on getting started with data journalism, an information security ‘surgery’, and some speakers have been asked to focus on practical skills too.

On top of all that, attendees will have the opportunity to nominate skills they want to learn – we’ll put on workshops for the most popular topics!

You can sign up for the event here, and tell me what sessions you want covered on Twitter @paulbradshaw

The event is being jointly sponsored by the University of Stirling and Birmingham City University.

Embedding is the new linking

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Every web journalist knows that linking is one of the most fundamental qualities of online journalism: a web article without links is like TV without moving images.

But in the last couple of years something else has become equally important: I’m talking about the embed.

Two years ago I noted how publishers were finally getting to grips with linking – and how embedding was a major factor in that.

As material from social media has become increasingly central to news stories, content management systems have finally been adapted to allow journalists to embed the very elements they were talking about: that controversial tweet; the Facebook reaction; the damning Instagram snap; the viral YouTube video.

Now, one report has noted that almost a quarter of 1 million news articles in a study included embedded media. Continue reading →

How I did it: filming video at the Calais migrant camp – videographer Alastair Good

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Alastair Good was a solo video journalist for The Telegraph for a decade before recently going freelance. As part of work on the forthcoming second edition of the Online Journalism Handbook, I interviewed Alastair about his experiences of filming video at the Calais migrant camp. I’m republishing it in full here.

The refugee/migrant camp in Calais had been growing steadily for some time. Estimates varied between five and ten thousand people who had travelled from the southern part of the globe to escape war, persecution and poverty. They were all hoping for just one thing: the chance to make a dangerous journey across the Channel to Britain.

One of my contacts in an aid agency working in the camp called me to say that bulldozers were due to move in to clear the camp the next day. I pitched the story to my editor and was on the Eurostar by the afternoon. Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing investigative journalism at Convoca: “Our aim is create a community network not just in Peru, but global”

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convoca

After winning two prestigious data journalism awards since launching in 2015, the Peruvian medium Convoca has launched its first crowdsourcing campaign to build a global community around its investigations. Nuria Riquelme spoke to founder Aramis Castro about the project.

Convoca has become a reference point for data journalism in South America. With a team of around ten people including system engineers, computer technicians and journalists, led by Milagros Salazar, a professional with over 15 years journalistic experience, they have pioneered data journalism in Peru. Continue reading →

Do faro ao furo: um modelo para jornalistas encontrarem suas histórias

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Do faro ao furo Como jornalistas encontram suas histórias Explorar Retransmitir Reagir Cobrir Buscar Investigar

Como jornalistas encontram suas histórias? Como testamos se uma história é tão boa quanto poderia ser? De que maneira podemos fazer melhor como jornalistas?

A imagem acima (original, em inglês) é minha tentativa de responder a essas perguntas. Ela mapeia as seis atividades que os jornalistas realizam em suas rotinas de trabalho, por ordem de valor: desde a exploração de um campo ou assunto, passando pela retransmissão da informação para uma audiência mais ampla, reação ou cobertura de eventos noticiosos, busca de novas informações e experiências, e investigação. Continue reading →

How journalists manage information: from leads to stories

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Venn diagram: Feeds, contacts and archives

Tools for managing feeds, contacts and archives are merging

5 years ago I wrote about a network infrastructure for journalists working online. I explained how RSS readers, social networks and social bookmarking were being increasingly used to improve on the roles that newswires, contacts books and archives played in the traditional newsroom.

Well here’s an update: not only is that infrastructure now a reality, but it has become much more complex. And as these tools have become more widely adopted it has shifted the focus on information management from the institution to the individual journalist. Continue reading →