Category Archives: online journalism

When reporting on data remember that those who don’t count aren’t counted

Invisible man image by Brian

In a guest post for OJB, Help Me Investigate contributor Natalie Leal talks about how statistics on benefit claimants, migrants and A&E admissions reflect organisations’ priorities – and can be skewed as a result.

I recently witnessed an unemployed woman at a job centre shouting that she would “never ever” set foot in there again.

The woman, who had just been told that her benefits would be cut off for thirteen weeks, stormed past two security guards on her way out.

They turned to each other and joked:

“That’s another one off the books.”

Continue reading →

The 10 most-read posts (and one page) on the Online Journalism Blog in 2014

1 Reply

The last 2 months of 2014 saw a return to regular blogging after some quiet periods earlier in the year

2014 was the 10th anniversary of the Online Journalism Blog, so I thought I’d better begin keeping track of what each year’s most-read posts were.

In 2014 the overriding themes for this blog were programming for journalists, web security, and social media optimisation. Here are the most-read posts of the year, plus one surprisingly popular new page with some background and updates. Continue reading →

This Christmas, encrypt your emails and make the haystack bigger

3 Replies

Image by Daniella Hartmann

Why should journalists be interested in web security? You may not fear your social media accounts being hacked by propagandists, your email hacked by companies you write about, or your phone records being seen by police, but there is another good reason for adopting security measures.

“Anonymity loves company,” security researcher Ross Anderson reminded attendees at this month’s Logan Symposium on secrecy, surveillance and censorship. “You can only hide in a crowd.”

In other words, the more people who use encryption in their email, or other security measures, the less unusual it becomes.

And the more widespread these practices are, the harder it is for the contents of messages to be used to identify whistleblowers – whether that is with journalists, charities, or even whistleblowing services (remember that only the message is encrypted, not the identity of the sender or recipient).

So if you have some spare time over the festive period, why not get yourself set up with an email client like Thunderbird with a plugin like Enigmail, and get started.

3 reasons why 2014 was the year news organisations finally ‘got’ web-native production

1 Reply

This Independent story includes two embedded YouTube videos and a Flickr photo gallery

Something remarkable happened this year. Something I’ve been waiting for for a long time.

News reports on the web finally started to look more and more like… well, web-native articles.

Not print articles online, not broadcast journalism online, but online journalism, online. I’m talking about journalism which isn’t just text: whether that means linking and embedding or mixing text with images, video or audio.

So what changed in 2014? Here are three factors I’ve noticed growing in influence over the last 12 months. Continue reading →

Podcast: Journalism outside the website, from WhatsApp to Email

2 Replies

I recently hosted a podcast discussion at Birmingham City University for my MA Online Journalism students on ‘platform publishing‘: in other words, journalism on platforms other than traditional websites.

My guests discussed their experiences of publishing for email, SnapChat, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They were: Continue reading →

Protecting whistleblowers, anonymity – and Daniel Ellsberg. Day 2 of the Logan Symposium

Tip: If your blog comments have moved to Twitter, embed tweets at the end of your posts

4 Replies

@paulbradshaw @BBCCollege interesting piece. to your final point, curation can be scaleable eg. if users are involved. Wikipedia?

— Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah) July 3, 2014

What happens when people comment on your blog – but it’s not on your blog?

More often than not people now comment on a blog post by tweeting – essentially microblogging – their response.

Those comments can be valuable – but they’re lost to anyone reading the original post and, indeed, yourself, unless you can later find it through search.

In ye olde days of blogging, blogged responses could be automatically added to your comments section via pingbacks. But microblogged responses don’t qualify for pingbacks.

So why not add them manually: embed those tweets at the end of your article by pasting the link to the tweet. WordPress will automatically turn that link into an embedded tweet.

You can then subhead those embedded tweets as ‘Comments‘, or add an ‘UPDATE‘.

For two examples see the end of this post on Curation, aggregation and why news organisations can’t be ‘the next LinkedIn’. Or this post on capitalisation in UK headlines, updated with a response from Guardian Style:

@robcrilly @paulbradshaw I Promise You That Hell Will Freeze Over Before We Start Capitalising Every Word In A Headline.

— Guardian style guide (@guardianstyle) November 21, 2014

New free web journalism book – in Portuguese

“Don’t be afraid: keep them afraid” and other notes from the Logan Symposium on surveillance’s first day

4 Replies

Seymour’s parting advice to young journalists: maintain a watchdog role and hold power to account

On Friday I was at the Logan Symposium on secrecy, surveillance and censorship, an event which, as is often the case with these things, managed to be inspiring, terrifying, and confusing in equal measure.

Notably, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFadyen opened the day by talking about investigative journalists and hackers together.

It is common to hear attacks on journalists mentioned at these events, but rare to hear an old-fashioned hack like MacFadyen also talk about the “growing number of hackers being imprisoned”, while noting the commonalities of a desire for a free press, free speech, and “a free internet”. Continue reading →