Category Archives: blogs

Wiki journalism: the experiences of WikiCity Guides

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I asked Pat Lazure, co-founder of the wiki journalism project WikiCity Guides, to tell me more about his experiences with the project. This is what he said:

Key Factors Driving Citizen Journalism

There has been a lot written about citizen and crowd-sourced journalism, and to this end, several entrepreneurs and creative folks have aggressively explored the widening opportunities within this space. I could write a chapter on why this is happening but instead, boiling it all down, there are two key factors driving these opportunities: Continue reading →

Dear Peter Preston: universities shun the NCTJ too

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I have an enormous amount of respect for Peter Preston, and much of what he says in Sunday’s Observer piece about careers in journalism is spot-on. But this line strikes me as just wrong:

“If you want to be a journalist, try to get on one of the 68 National Council for the Training of Journalists accredited courses, along with 1,800 or so other hopefuls, but in general beware courses the NCTJ shuns (of which there are far too many).”

There are so many assumptions underlying this sentence that it’s a challenge to unpick them, but here are the main two:

  1. That ‘being a journalist’ is limited to newspapers – regional newspapers, to be specific. Most other employers of journalists – national, broadcast, magazines and online – rarely ask for NCTJ qualifications. Even regional newspapers – the heartland of the NCTJ – do not recruit a majority of trainees with an existing NCTJ qualification.
  2. Secondly, that courses not accredited by the NCTJ have been ‘shunned’. I teach on a journalism degree which chose, a decade ago, not to pay for NCTJ accreditation. The decision was taken by the then-head of journalism, the redoubtable and wonderful Sharon Wheeler, for reasons both financial (the money that would be paid to the NCTJ for a shiny badge would be better spent elsewhere) and educational (the NCTJ  strictures make it hard to be flexible in a changing media environment). That decision was restated by our current head of journalism Sue Heseltine, and I agreed with it: I didn’t see what we would gain for the money we pay to the NCTJ other than a marketing tool that we do not need (we receive around 10 applicants for every place).

That decision was also informed by the problems universities have had with the NCTJ, which I’ve written about elsewhere (the comments to which are particularly interesting). I’ve also written about the assumption that journalism degrees are comparable to training courses.

I don’t have a problem with NCTJ training in particular – indeed, I wish more journalists had the sort of understanding of local government and law that their courses teach – but I do have a problem when it is seen as the only, or best, route into journalism (an image perpetuated by the NCTJ’s own marketing materials). The same is true of university courses, which vary wildly in quality and scope (the latter is not such a bad thing; a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be good for any creative industry).

The only good advice I can think of for aspiring journalists is to simply go out there and do journalism – because there’s no longer anything stopping you – me or Peter Preston included.

5 data visualisation tips from David McCandless

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Here’s another snippet from my data journalism book chapter (now published). As part of my research David McCandless, author of the very lovely book and website Information is Beautiful gave  his 5 tips for visualising data:

  1. Double source data wherever possible – even the UN and WorldBank can make mistakes
  2. Take information out – there’s a long tradition among statistical journalists of showing everything. All data points. The whole range. Every column and row. But stories are about clear threads with extraneous information fuzzed out. And journalism is about telling stories. You can only truly do that when you mask out the irrelevant or the minor data. The same applies to design which is about reducing something to its functional essence.
  3. Avoid standard abstract units – tons of carbon, billions of dollars – these kinds of units are over-used and impossible to imagine or relate to. Try to rework or process units down to ‘everyday’ measures. Try to give meaningful context for huge figures whenever possible.
  4. Self-sufficency – all graphs, charts and infographics should be self-sufficient. That is, you shouldn’t require any other information to understand them. They’re like interfaces. So each should have a clear title, legend, source, labels etc. And credit yourself. I’ve seen too many great visuals with no credit or name at the bottom.
  5. Show your workings – transparency seems like a new front for journalists. Google Docs makes it incredibly easy to share your data and thought processes with readers. Who can then participate.

JEEcamp is full – but the fringe event still has places

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If you arrive the evening before JEEcamp next week you should take the chance to attend the Future of News fringe event ‘Entrepreneurship Special’, which features Marc Reeves, ex-Birmingham Post editor and current editor of The Business Desk West Midlands. The event is organised by The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John, who is also well worth hearing from (and may be an award-winner by the end of this week).

It’s free.

That is all. Book here.

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.”

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 →

Why do people read online news? (Research summary)

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Ioana Epure summarises “Harnessing the potential of online news: Suggestions from a study on the relationship between online news advantages and its post-adoption consequences”, a study by An Nguyen (University of Stirling)

In the last decade journalism has entered a stage in which news organisations are less reluctant to invest in online operations, but An Nguyen’s study starts from the premise that they do so driven not by the desire to innovate and fully exploit the potential of online news, but because of the fear that the internet will replace traditional media in the news market.

As a consequence, they haven’t actually tried to understand what users want from online news and how what they want will affect their behaviour after receiving it.

Surprisingly, the results of Nguyen’s study show that traditional press still has a battle to carry, provided that practitioners understand why people have turned to online news and try to offer them something similar. Continue reading →