Author Archives: Paul Bradshaw

Teaching entrepreneurial journalism: the elephant in the room – editorial independence

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angel meets demon

How many journalism students see editorial's encounter with commerce. Image by Scot A. Harvest

There’s a wonderfully written post on Sean Blanda’s blog about fixing entrepreneurial journalism courses. Unusually, the post demonstrates a particularly acute understanding of the dynamics involved in teaching (Lesson One, based on my experience of teaching ‘strategic learners’, strikes me as a particularly effective tactic*, while Lesson Two addresses the most common problem in students’ ideas: vagueness, or ‘mass marketism’).

But it also reminded me of a conversation I had recently about journalism students’ reactions to being taught entrepreneurialism – and the one lesson that’s missing from Sean’s list.

It’s this lesson: “Why?” Continue reading →

Where chasing traffic meets “important” journalism: Gawker’s experiment

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Nieman reports on a fascinating experiment in traffic-chasing content from Gawker which provides all sorts of insights into just how valuable that content is, and where it sits in the wider editorial mix. Here’s what they did:

“Each day for two weeks, a [different] single staff writer would be assigned “traffic-whoring duty.”” Continue reading →

72 SEO-chasing headlines to (mostly) laugh at today

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From here. More in the next post…

  1. Send in Your Stories About the World’s Worst Roommate
  2. Here’s a Young Jon Stewart, Moshing at a Dead Kennedys Show (Update: Probably Not)
  3. How Old Does Google Think You Are?
  4. Yes, This Is a Picture of Terry Richardson Fucking (Someone Who Looks Like Juliette Lewis) [Update]
  5. That’s Not Juliette Lewis Getting Boned by Terry Richardson, Juliette Lewis’s Publicist Says Continue reading →

How to investigate Wikipedia edits

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Ian Silvera (@ianjsilvera) gives a step-by-step guide on how to find out who’s behind changes on a Wikipedia page. Cross-posted from the Help Me Investigate blog.

First, click on the ‘view history’ tab at the top right of the Wikipedia entry you are interested in. You should then be directed to a page that lists all the edits that have occurred on that entry. It looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bradshaw_(journalist)&action=history

Second, to identify if someone has been deleting unhelpful criticisms of an organisation or person on their Wikipedia entry, you could read through each edit, but with large Wikipedia entries this exercise would be too time-consuming. Instead, look for large redactions. Continue reading →

ITV News’s new website – welcome to the news stream

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The new ITV website

A few months ago I saw an early version of ITV News’ new website, and was pretty impressed. Now it’s finally live – and I’m still impressed.

Why? Because this doesn’t just fiddle around the edges like so many news website relaunches have done since 2007. This reinvents the whole thing – and the result is more like a social network or a blog than a newspaper front page. Continue reading →

La Nación: data journalism from Argentina

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Guest post by Duarte Romero

Since the start of the year the Argentinian newspaper ‘La Nación’ has been publishing ‘Nación Data’, a blog dedicated to data visualization, interactive projects and especially, all the news related with data journalism.

During this time they have been posting interviews with experts from the community, reporting popular events such as NICAR and sharing the most innovative pieces made by other newspapers.

The multimedia development manager of ‘La Nación’, Momi Peralta, pointed out that their main goal so far is to release as much data as they can. Continue reading →

How to be a curation editor (aka network journalist)

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Locals and Tourists #23: Stockholm, by Eric Fischer

I’ve always been interested in the way that journalists rely on ‘hotspots’: those places and people you check in on if you’re looking for a story. What do I mean? Here are just a few examples from traditional journalism:

  • The courts
  • The emergency services
  • The pub (and its landlord)
  • Council meetings
  • The local vicar
  • The post office (think cards in the window)

What’s notable about that list is that these are not places where news events necessarily happen, but rather where information about them gets exchanged: crimes, fires and accidents take place all over town, but most of their perpetrators, heroes and victims eventually end up swapping stories in the same places. Pubs are great places for gossip (and fights), but you can’t be there all the time (and keep your job at least).

See something or say something: Amsterdam Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.

As more information gets exchanged online, new hotspots appear and old ones become less productive, from a journalistic point of view. Vicars deal with fewer births and marriages; cards move from the post office window to Freecycle.

I’ve written previously about network infrastructures for journalists online…

A network infrastructure for journalists online

…but I wanted to add to that with some more specific, practical steps for journalists. So over on Help Me Investigate I’ve written a guide to 7 pools of sources you can use as a journalist, and how they can inform your real-world digging. These are the new ‘hotspots’.

In case you haven’t got time to click through to that post, those 7 are:

  1. Prepackaged news
  2. Corridors of power
  3. Events
  4. Reluctant disclosures
  5. Reports, research and consultations
  6. Affected communities
  7. Experts and observers

Can you add any others?

How to be a network journalist

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Locals and Tourists #23: Stockholm, by Eric Fischer

Locals and Tourists #23: Stockholm, by Eric Fischer: Blue pictures are by locals. Red pictures are by tourists. Yellow pictures might be by either. Blue pictures are by locals. Red pictures are by tourists. Yellow pictures might be by either.

I’ve always been interested in the way that journalists rely on ‘hotspots’: those places and people you check in on if you’re looking for a story. What do I mean? Here are just a few examples from traditional journalism: Continue reading →

The straw man of data journalism’s “scientific” claim

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Guardian cover March 10 2012: Half UK's young black men out of work

Over the weekend Fleet Street Blues has had a bee in its bonnet about the “pretence” of data journalism and Saturday’s Guardian front page: “Half UK’s young black men out of work“.

This, says FSB, is a lie that demonstrates the “pretence” that “‘crunching the numbers’ is somehow an an abstract, scientific, mathematical task”. Continue reading →

From CMS to DMS

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There’s a persuasive argument being made by Francis Irving and Rufus Pollock in a joint blog post about the growth of data management systems – the ‘DMS’ to content management systems’ ‘CMS’:

“Just as then we wrote HTML in text files by hand and uploaded it by FTP, now we analyse data on our laptops using Excel, and share it with friends by emailing CSV files.

“But it reaches the point where using the filesystem and Outlook as your DMS stretches to breaking point. You’ll need a proper one.

“Nobody really knows what a proper one will look like yet. We’re all working on it.”

Their post lists what a DMS needs to do and the companies already trying to solve the ‘DMS problem’ from different directions: a list which includes Google Docs (“coming from the web spreadsheet direction”), the data social network BuzzData, visualisation tool Tableau, data marketplaces, operating systems, Scraperwiki, and PANDA (“making a DMS for newsrooms”)

It’s a well-drawn picture from an angle which I haven’t seen before. Certainly, a number of news organisations are trying to reduce the friction of producing content for different platforms by ‘atomising’ it in data-driven production processes (where a piece of content might be assembled and presented differently depending on the platform it is accessed through, for example), and their internal systems can probably be added to the list above.

What do you think? Is this a problem that’s being addressed in your own organisation?