The EJC filmed three videos during the day at JEEcamp – here they are:
JEEcamp – three videos by the European Journalism Centre
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Category Archives: online journalism
Downing Street Twitter given the Twitter Quotient treatment
Thanks to Shawn Smith for leading me to Twitter Quotient.
Something for the Weekend #4: scraping the web with iMacro
This week’s Something for the Weekend is a little different, as it’s a tool for newsgathering rather than publishing. But what a tool.
iMacro is a plugin for Firefox, with paid versions for Internet Explorer or standalone use.
There’s a lot of corporate/technical jargon on the website (“create solutions for web automation”), because, like some of the best web tools (e.g. Twitter), this can be used for so many things it’s hard to describe in a single sentence. But here are some of the headlines: Continue reading
UK Government signs up to Twitter
I’m not the only one to have noticed an unusual surge of people signing up to Twitter recently. But today, Downing Street started using it. And when the UK government signs up to Twitter, you know it’s hit the mainstream.
Oh, and where did I hear this? On Twitter.
Anyway, turns out it’s just Twitter shovelware using Twitterfeed, though that’s not bad in itself, and actually shows a higher level of tech savviness than simply twittering.
Meanwhile, those who want mobile updates on government matters now have it, which is pretty good. Marshall Manson suggests Brown may be the first head of state to use the tool, while Luke Pollard adds “to be fair both Obama and Clinton are well progressed and twittering a plenty in their fight for the democratic nomination – here and here – and arguably have a better Twitter pedigree”. Continue reading
A web presence without a website?
Sarah* is a final year journalism degree student who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine.
She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.
“I don’t have a website,” she replied.
“But you have a blog?”
“Yes.”
“Facebook?”
“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”
“So you do have a web strategy.” Continue reading
Mapping news just got a kick up the arse
Once again news organisations will be looking over their shoulder at the launch of MetaCarta’s news mapping service. The more I play with this, the better I like it.
The red page icons on the opening page are something of a red herring – those are just the main headlines. A search for “Birmingham” brings up a whole lot more from my home town (and interestingly, not Birmingham, Alabama, meaning the site has worked out where I am).
Perhaps more interestingly, a keyword search gives you a global picture of what’s going on with, say news on the “environment”. How else would I have discovered a story about logging in Indonesia?
You can combine places with keywords, and change the date range of your search (the default is last 24 hours).
There’s a lot of scope for serendipity here, but a few weaknesses.
The most obvious is lack of RSS or bookmarkability. Having to keep checking this site and, worse, repeat a search makes this extra work.
Secondly, the current sources are limited to Reuters, AP and Guardian.co.uk. News organisations should be helping make their content map-friendly to get in on this.
And related to this, locations are currently quite generic, seemingly based on text recognition. Imagine what this could do if it tapped into geotagged stories from local newspapers such as those of Archant?
Reviewed: FriendFeed and CoverItLive
I’ve written two reviews over at JournalismEnterprise.com:
CoverItLive is “a Twitter-meets-chatroom-meets-poll that you can embed on your site.”
and the much-hyped FriendFeed is “Facebook, but uglier and more flexible.”
The world according to newspapers
The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007. Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them[1].
War reporting: two online reports – spot the difference
Two approaches to reporting on war have crossed my virtual desk recently. First, a broadcast journalist at ITV News told me about their video blogs from Afghanistan – embedded below:
Second, Reuters send me a press release about ‘Bearing Witness, “a unique multimedia package and online documentary to mark 5 years of reporting war in Iraq”
Watch the video. Then, go to http://iraq.reuters.com/
Spot the difference? Continue reading
JEEcamp – when the cottage news industry met mainstream media
What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?
That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? Continue reading
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