Author Archives: Paul Bradshaw

What do you do? Ben Ayers, Social Media Manager, ITV.com

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I’m always interested in the new jobs that are being created to deal with the rise of the web and social media. So when I had the opportunity I asked Ben Ayers, Social Media Manager for ITV.com, what his job involves. Here’s his reply:

“I manage social media for ITV.com but also oversee social media strategy for ITV as a whole, working closely with colleagues in marketing and sometimes third parties like agencies and production companies who create content for us.

“Over the last couple of years I have eased ITV towards a semi-coordinated social media strategy – both on and off ITV.com – developing communities and engagement around programme brands.

“This has worked really effectively for the likes of the X Factor and I’m A Celebrity and to some extent our ‘evergreen’ programmes like soaps and daytime shows This Morning and Loose Women. I also work with my editorial colleagues to try new ‘social’ features around programmes. Most recently I have been working with ITV news to make our election coverage as engaging as possible.

“Although I work within the ITV.com team, I also work closely with colleagues in marketing, PR and sales. I manage community on ITV.com and have been working on the implementation and adoption of a new community platform introduced at the end of last year. I also oversee moderation and chair the ITV digital group that includes colleagues from PR and marketing.

“I was a journalist on local newspapers in the South before going into PR, starting at Comic Relief. I have worked in communications at the BBC, Science Museum and more latterly ITV. I moved from programme publicity at ITV to manage PR for ITV’s website. It was from there that I moved into social media activity for the website. In the first year the focus was on traffic generation using social media channels but increasingly it’s about community and engagement.”

I also asked what were the 3 most important lessons he has learned in the job:

  1. “The devil’s in the detail – although it can be a bore, reading the small print is actually very worthwhile
  2. “Don’t be afraid to try new stuff – in the UK we are too hard on ‘failure’. There’s a different culture in other countries like the US and we can learn from that.
  3. “It’s really not all about traffic.”

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 3: Hypertext

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

In the third part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on hypertext in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized in online journalism. The general assumption of researchers interested in hypertextual online journalism is that if hypertext is used innovatively it would provide a range of advantages over print journalism: Continue reading →

Kay Burley. Discuss.

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Some say that journalism students should simply be taught how to ‘do’ journalism rather than spending time analysing or reflecting on it. On Saturday Sky’s Kay Burley showed why it’s not that simple – when she berated someone demonstrating in favour of electoral reform (skip to around 2 mins in):

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELJh2bTK1ew%5D

This, and the copious other clips from a career history of walking a fine line (many say crossing it), are a goldmine for lecturers and journalism students – particularly when it comes to discussing broadcast journalism technique, ethics, and regulation.

It helps students to look at their own journalistic practice and ask: in trying to please my bosses or meet an idea of what makes ‘good television’, am I crossing a line? How do the likes of Jeremy Paxman manage to dig behind a story without losing impartiality, or becoming the story themselves (do they manage it?) What, indeed, is the purpose of journalism, and how does that carry through into my practice?

Journalism is easy. You don’t need to study it for 3 years to do it. You don’t need a piece of paper to practise it.

But professional journalism is also the exercise of power – “Power without responsibility,” as the quote has it (which continues: “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”). We expect to scrutinise politicians and hold them to certain ethical standards yet cry foul when the same scrutiny is applied to us. Studying journalism – while doing it – should be about accepting that responsibility and thinking about what it entails. And then doing it better.

So: Kay Burley. Discuss.

UK general election 2010 – online journalism is ordinary

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Has online journalism become ordinary? Are the approaches starting to standardise? Little has stood out in the online journalism coverage of this election – the innovation of previous years has been replaced by consolidation.

Here are a few observations on how the media approached their online coverage: Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 2: The assets

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog.

In the first post in this series I argued that technology may not play such an important role to the development of journalism in new media as people seem to believe. In this post I will look at the three assets of new technology that are generally portrayed as the most significant for journalism in new media: multimedia, interactivity and hypertext (see for instance this article by Mark Deuze for arguments on why these three assets have been considered the most important for online journalism).

The general assumption of the “techno-researchers” has been that an innovative approach to online journalism implies utilizing these three assets of new technology. There are, of course, lots of other technological assets and/or concept related to technology that keeps popping up in the discourse on online journalism: Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 1: The revolution that never happened

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog.

Who would have thought, back in the 1990s, that by 2010, online newspapers would still be mainly about publishing written text to a mass audience?

Not many. The general assumption shared by academics, practitioners and media executives alike was that journalism would be revolutionized by new technology. Online journalism would be all about multimedia, hypertext and interactivity. Some even believed that the Internet would cause the the end of journalism (pdf). And the discourse surrounding both the practice of and research on online journalism is still quite preoccupied with how new technology will fundamentally change journalism.

So why, then, is online journalism still mostly all about producing written text to a mass audience? Why is use of multimedia, hypertext and interactivity still so rare? (If you believe  online journalism in fact is technologically innovative – keep on reading.)  Is it only because online newsrooms don’t have the resources they need to be innovative? Or are there other reasons?

In a series of posts I will take a closer look at online journalism and the promises of new technology.  I will do this by a close examination of the technologically oriented research on online journalism in Europe and the US that has been published during the last decade. This review will show that online journalism indeed is mostly all about text and traditional mass media thinking. Furthermore, it will show that new technology might not be the main driving force behind changes in journalism. The questions therefore are: why do online journalism develop as it does? How can we best understand the evolution of journalism in new media?  The last part of this series will address these questions.

First, however, it is useful to be reminded of a simple fact: revolution prophesying has been quite common  upon the entry of new technology throughout history. The telephone, television, the radio and computers were all supposed to cause “the end of history, the end of geography and the end of politics”, according to professor Vincent Mosco in his brilliant 2004 book The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Needless to say, these technological inventions did change the world dramatically, but not in such a quick and radical fashion the fortune-tellers seemed to believe. People tended to use these technologies quite differently than how many of the revolutionists predicted.

Take television: who would have thought in the 1950s and 1960s that radio would still be a powerful technological platform several decades later? Imagine the argument: who would want only sound, when you could have both sound and vision? It seems like a powerful argument (and please feel free to start hum that Bowie tune…). Then consider the fact that television was much more of a revolution than the Internet has been. It took only a few years for television to diffuse in society (8 years in the US), while it has taken the Internet 20 years to gain the same kind of penetration. Television did change journalism. But it didn’t kill it, or fundamentally change the social function of journalism and the role of the journalist. Likewise, the Internet will not kill journalism. It will change it, but perhaps no so radically as one would expect.

Things tend to transform slowly. Journalism transforms slowly. For instance, I recently read a 1925 book on feature journalism by American Harry Franklin Harrington. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess it was written 20 years ago. It portrayed feature journalism very much as it still is practiced today.

On that note I’ll end this introduction. In the next part of this series I will look at the the three assets of new technology that are generally considered to have the (potentially) greatest impact on online journalism: multimedia, hypertext and interactivity. What are they? And how do they fit with the wide range of concepts that flood the discourse on online journalism, concepts like crowdsourcing, wikijournalism, UGC, partucipatory journalism, citizen journalism, hypermedia, immediacy, etc?

UK General Election 2010 – Interactive Maps and Swingometers

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Tony Hirst takes a look at how different news websites are using interactivity to present different possibilities in the UK election. This post is cross-posted from the OUseful.Info blog:

So it seems like the General Election has been a Good Thing for the news media’s interactive developer teams… Here’s a quick round up of some of the interactives I’ve found… Continue reading →

Data journalism pt5: Mashing data (comments wanted)

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This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (part 1 looks at finding data; part 2 at interrogating data; part 3 at visualisation, and 4 at visualisation tools). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around tips and tools.

UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook.

Mashing data

Wikipedia defines a mashup particularly succinctly, as “a web page or application that uses or combines data or functionality from two or many more external sources to create a new service.” Those sources may be online spreadsheets or tables; maps; RSS feeds (which could be anything from Twitter tweets, blog posts or news articles to images, video, audio or search results); or anything else which is structured enough to ‘match’ against another source.

This ‘match’ is typically what makes a mashup. It might be matching a city mentioned in a news article against the same city in a map; or it may be matching the name of an author with that same name in the tags of a photo; or matching the search results for ‘earthquake’ from a number of different sources. The results can be useful to you as a journalist, to the user, or both.

Why make a mashup?

Mashups can be particularly useful in providing live coverage of a particular event or ongoing issue – mashing images from a protest march, for example, against a map. Creating a mashup online is not too dissimilar from how, in broadcast journalism, you might set up cameras at key points around a physical location in anticipation of an event from which you will later ‘pull’ live feeds: in a mashup you are effectively doing exactly the same thing – only in a virtual space rather than a physical one. So, instead of setting up a feed at the corner of an important junction, you might decide to pull a feed from Flickr of any images that are tagged with the words ‘protest’ and ‘anti-fascist’. Continue reading →

Data journalism pt4: visualising data – tools and publishing (comments wanted)

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This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (here are parts 1; two; and three, which looks the charts side of visualisation). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around tips and tools.

UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook.

Visualisation tools

So if you want to visualise some data or text, how do you do it? Thankfully there are now dozens of free and cheap pieces of software that you can use to quickly turn your tables into charts, graphs and clouds.

The best-known tool for creating word clouds is Wordle (wordle.net). Simply paste a block of text into the site, or the address of an RSS feed, and the site will generate a word cloud whose fonts and colours you can change to your preferences. Similar tools include Tagxedo (tagxedo.com) and Wordlings (http://wordlin.gs), both of which allow you to put your word cloud into a particular shape.

ManyEyes (manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/) also allows you to create word clouds and tag clouds – as well as word trees and phrase nets that allow you to see common phrases. But it is perhaps most useful in allowing you to easily create scattergrams, bar charts, bubble charts and other forms. The site also contains a raft of existing data that you can play with to get a feel for the site. Similar tools that allow access to other data include Factual (factual.com), Swivel (swivel.com)[see comments], Socrata (socrata.com) and Verifiable.com (verifiable.com). And Google Fusion Tables (tables.googlelabs.com) is particularly useful if you want to collaborate on tables of data, as well as offering visualisation options.

More general visualisation tools include widgenie (widgenie.com), iCharts (icharts.net), ChartTool (onlinecharttool.com) and ChartGo (www.chartgo.com). FusionCharts is a piece of visualisation software with a Google Gadget service that publishers may find useful. You can find instructions on how to use it at www.fusioncharts.com/GG/Docs

If you want more control over your visualisation – or want it to update dynamically when the source information is updated, Google Chart Tools (code.google.com/apis/charttools) is worth exploring. This requires some technical knowledge, but there is a lot of guidance and help on the site to get you started quickly.

Tableau Public is a piece of free software you can download (tableausoftware.com/public) with some powerful visualisation options. You will also find visualisation options on spreadsheet applications such as Excel or the free Google Docs spreadsheet service. These are worth exploring as a way to quickly generate charts from your data on the fly.

Publishing your visualisation

There will come a point when you’ve visualised your data and need to publish it somehow. The simplest way to do this is to take an image (screengrab) of the chart or graph. This can be done with a web-based screencapture tool like Kwout (kwout.com), a free desktop application like Skitch (skitch.com) or Jing (jingproject.com), or by simply using the ‘Print Screen’ button on a PC keyboard (cmd+shift+3 on a Mac) and pasting the screengrab into a graphics package such as Photoshop.

The advantage of using a screengrab is that the image can be easily distributed on social networks, image sharing websites (such as Flickr), and blogs – driving traffic to the page on your site where it is explained.

If you are more technically minded, you can instead choose to embed your chart or graph. Many visualisation tools will give you a piece of code which you can copy and paste into the HTML of an article or blog post in the place you wish to display it (this will not work on most third party blog hosting services, such as WordPress.com). One particular advantage of this approach is that the visualisation can update itself if the source data is updated.

Alternatively, an understanding of Javascript can allow you to build ‘progressively enhanced’ charts which allow users to access the original data or see what happens when it is changed.

Showing your raw data

It is generally a good idea to give users access to your raw data alongside its visualisation. This not only allows them to check it against your visualisation but add insights you may not otherwise gain. It is relatively straightforward to publish a spreadsheet online using Google Docs (see the sidebar on publishing a spreadsheet)

SIDEBAR: How to: publish a spreadsheet online

Google Docs (docs.google.com) is a free website which allows you to create and share documents. You can share them via email, by publishing them as a webpage, or by embedding your document in another webpage, such as a blog post. This is how you share a spreadsheet:

  1. Open your spreadsheet in Google Docs. You can upload a spreadsheet into Google Docs if you’ve created it elsewhere – there is a size limit, however, so if you are told the file is too big try removing unnecessary sheets or columns.
  2. Look for the ‘Share’ button (currently in the top right corner) and click on it.
  3. A drop-down menu should appear. Click on ‘Publish as a web page’
  4. A new window should appear asking which sheets you want to publish. Select the sheet you want to publish and click ‘Start publishing’ (you should also make sure ‘Automatically republish when changes are made’ is ticked if you want the public version of the spreadsheet to update with any data you add.)
  5. Now the bottom half of that window – ‘Get a link to the published data’ – should become active. In the bottom box should be a web address where you can now see the public version of your spreadsheet. If you want to share that, copy the address and test that it works in a web browser. You can now link to it from any webpage.
  6. Alternatively, you can embed your spreadsheet – or part of it – in another webpage. To do this click on the first drop-down menu in this area – it will currently say ‘Web page’ – and change it to ‘HTML to embed in a page’. Now the bottom box on this window should show some HTML that begins with
  7. If you want to embed just part of a spreadsheet, in the box that currently says ‘All cells’ type the range of cells you wish to show. For example, typing A1:G10 will select all the cells in your spreadsheet from A1 (the first row of column A) to G10 (the 10th row of column G). Once again, the HTML below will change so that it only displays that section of your spreadsheet.

Once again, I’d welcome any comments on things I may have missed or tips you can add. Part 5, on mashups, is now available here.

Data journalism pt3: visualising data – charts and graphs (comments wanted)

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This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (the first, on gathering data, is here; the section on interrogating data is here). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around considerations in visualisation. A further section on visualisation tools, can be found here.

UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook.

“At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers – even a very large set – is to look at pictures of those numbers.” (Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001)

Visualisation is the process of giving a graphic form to information which is often otherwise dry or impenetrable. Classic examples of visualisation include turning a table into a bar chart, or a series of percentage values into a pie chart – but the increasing power of both computer analysis and graphic design software have seen the craft of visualisation develop with increasing sophistication. In larger organisations the data journalist may work with a graphic artist to produce an infographic that visualises their story – but in smaller teams, in the initial stages of a story, or when speed is of the essence they are likely to need to use visualisation tools to give form to their data.

Broadly speaking there are two typical reasons for visualising data: to find a story; or to tell one. Quite often, it is both. Continue reading →