Category Archives: online journalism

How to investigate Wikipedia edits

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 →

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:

Prepackaged news
Corridors of power
Events
Reluctant disclosures
Reports, research and consultations
Affected communities
Experts and observers

Can you add any others?

8 common mistakes when writing for the web – and what to do about them {now 9}

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Image of post it notes by Anselm23 on Flickr

Here is a checklist covering 8 mistakes made repeatedly by first-time web writers, which I’ve put together for one of my classes. The idea is simple: if you answer ‘No’ to any of these, carry on to the accompanying guidance that follows underneath.

Checklist: are you doing the following? Continue reading →

Generation AudioBoo: how journalism students are interacting online

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This post is by Judith Townend (@jtownend).

The journalism class of 2012 has a pretty enviable opportunity to get their stuff out there; the development of online platforms like Twitter, Google+, Storify, Tumblr, Posterous, AudioBoo, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, CoverItLive and Vimeo allows piecemeal dissemination of content to relevant and engaged audiences, without necessarily needing to set up a specific site.

Free technology allows them to find and do journalism outside journalism, in productive and creative ways. To adapt David Carr’s description of Brian Stelter, his browser tab-flicking colleague at the New York Times, we’re seeing the rise of the ‘robots in the basement‘. Continue reading →

“All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard”

Announcing Help Me Investigate the Olympics

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My crowdsourced investigative journalism project Help Me Investigate has launched a fourth specialist site: Help Me Investigate the Olympics.

The site is being run by a colleague of mine from Birmingham City University, Jennifer Jones, as part of a project we’re working on which sees students at BCU and other universities connecting to wider online networks in investigating Olympics-related questions.

Jennifer knows those networks particularly well as the coordinator for #media2012, web editor and staff editor for Culture @ the Olympics. She is also writing her PhD on Social Media, Activism and the Olympic Games at the University of the West of Scotland.

If you want to contribute to the site or related investigations, get in touch in the comments or via Olympics@helpmeinvestigate.com

The New Journalists #13: Rosie Taylor

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Rosie Taylor

As part of an ongoing series of profiles of young journalists, I interviewed Rosie Taylor about her work as founding editor of student media showcase site Ones To Watch which she balances with a role as trainee reporter at the Daily Mail.

What led you to your current roles?

I got the bug for journalism writing for my student newspaper at the University of Sheffield and was news editor in my final year. My involvement in student media gave me the idea for Ones to Watch.

I did work experience everywhere I could find a sofa to sleep on for a week, got a minimum wage job covering reporters on leave at my local paper and managed to get a Scott Trust Bursary to do a postgraduate course in Print Journalism at Sheffield.

This ultimately led to a job at the Mail, where I spent five months on secondment at the Manchester Evening News before moving to the Mail offices in London this year.

What do your jobs involve?

I run Ones to Watch in my spare time, which mainly involves looking through hundreds of articles produced by students around the UK every day and putting a selection of the best ones on the site. I’m also constantly on the look out for new start-ups, student media news and ways to expand the site.

In my day job I’m a general news reporter, covering anything that gets thrown at me!

How do you see things developing in the future?

I’m still clinging to the hope that journalism, in one form or another, will survive throughout my lifetime. I want to keep writing stories and breaking news and I’m fascinated by how the platform for doing so is changing all the time.

I hope that Ones To Watch will continue to expand and that my mission to raise the profile of student media as a vital part of our press will continue to gain momentum.

The New Online Journalists #12: Michael Greenfield

What factors helped you land the job?

I was offered an interview after I was recommended to Sky News by someone I was doing freelance work for.

The main factors that helped me get to that point were:

having a Broadcast Journalism MA from City University London;
having a substantial amount of work experience in the industry;
going straight into work wherever I could get it straight off the back of my MA;
and applying myself as best I could when given the chance of bits of freelance work.

The whole process proved to me that you really don’t know how things will fall so you just have to get yourself out there.

Where do you see your career developing?

Well the scheme finishes at the end of August 2013 and I’m hoping that I will continue to work at Sky News. They are the pioneers in news coverage – they were the first UK news broadcaster to go HD, their iPad app has been awarded for it’s innovation and they are constantly looking to embrace new ideas and different approaches to how we see news.

I see my career and its relative success revolving around my ability to be a multi-platform journalist. The notion of TV, radio and online journalism being mutually exclusive is becoming increasingly outdated, and so I must strive to be a good journalist across all multi-media platforms.

Audiences expect news in many different formats now, so the more skilled I am at delivering the story through pictures, audio, online copy and social media outlets, the better I will be able to serve a public hungry for information.

I am keen to stress, however, that despite all the technological change, I will stick to the core principles of journalism that I have been taught and now exercise every day.

Games are just another storytelling device

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Whenever people talk about games as a potential journalistic device, there is a reaction against the idea of ‘play’ as a method for communicating ‘serious’ news.

Malcolm Bradbrook’s post on the News:Rewired talk by Newsgames author Bobby Schweizer is an unusually thoughtful exploration of that reaction, where he asks whether the use of games might contribute to the wider tabloidisation of news, the key aspects of which he compares with games as follows:

“Privileging the visual over analysis – I think this is obvious where games are concerned. Actual levels of analysis will be minimal compared to the visual elements of the game

“Using cultural knowledge over analysis – the game will become a shared experience, just as the BBC’s One in 7bn was in October. But how many moved beyond typing in their date of birth to reading the analysis? It drove millions to the BBC site but was it for the acquisition of understanding or something to post on Facebook/Twitter?

“Dehistoricised and fragmented versions of events – as above, how much context can you provide in a limited gaming experience?”

These are all good points, and designers of journalism games should think about them carefully, but I think there’s a danger of seeing games in isolation.

Hooking the user – and creating a market

With the BBC’s One in 7bn interactive, for example, I’d want to know how many users would have read the analysis if there was no interactive at all. Yes, many people will not have gone further than typing in their date of birth – but that doesn’t mean all of them didn’t. 10% of a lot (and that interactive attracted a huge audience) can be more than 100% of few.

What’s more, the awareness driven by that interactive creates an environment for news discussion that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Even if 90% of users (pick your own proportion, it doesn’t matter) never read the analysis directly, they are still more likely to discuss the story with others, some of whom would then be able to talk about the analysis the others missed.

Without that social context, the ‘serious’ news consumer has less opportunity to discuss what they’ve read.

News is multi-purpose

Then there’s the idea that people read the news for “acquisition of understanding”. I’m not sure how much news consumption is motivated by that, and how much by the need to be able to operate socially (discussing current events) or professionally (reacting to them) or even emotionally (being stimulated by them).

As someone who has tried various techniques to help students “acquire understanding”, I’m aware that the best method is not always to present them with facts, or a story. Sometimes it’s about creating a social environment; sometimes it’s about simulating an experience or putting people in a situation where they are faced with particular problems (all of which are techniques used by games).

Bradbrook ends with a quote from Jeremy Paxman on journalism’s “first duty” as disclosure. But if you can’t get people to listen to that disclosure then it is purposeless (aside from making the journalist feel superior). That is why journalists write stories, and not research documents. It is why they use case studies and not just statistics.

Games are another way of communicating information. Like all the other methods, they have their limitations as well as strengths. We need to be aware of these, and think about them critically, but to throw out the method entirely would be a mistake, I think.

UPDATE: Some very useful tweets from Mary Hamilton, Si Lumb, Chris Unitt and Mark Sorrell drew my attention to some very useful posts on games and storytelling more generally.

Sorrell’s post Games Good Stories Bad, for example, includes this passage:

“Games can create great stories, don’t get me wrong. But they are largely incapable oftelling great stories. Games are about interaction and agency, about choice and self-determination. One of the points made by fancy-pants French sociologist Roger Caillois when defining what a game is, was that the outcome of a game must be uncertain. The result cannot be known in advance. When you try and tell a story in a game, you must break that rule, you must make the outcome of events pre-determined.”

And while reading Lumb’s blog I came across this post with this point:

” A story as an entity, as a thing doesn’t exist until some event, some imagination, some narrative is constructed, relived, shared or described. It must be told. It is “story telling”, after all. Only at the point that you tell someone about that something does it become real, does it become a story. It is always from your perspective, it is always your interpretation, it is a gift you wish to share and that is how it comes to be.

“In a game you can plant narrative as discoverable, you can have cut scenes, you can have environments and situations and mechanics and toys and rules and delight and wonderful play – and in all of this you hide traditional “stories” from visual and textual creators (until read or viewed they don’t exist) and you have the emergence of events that may indeed become stories when you share with another person.”

And finally, if you just want to explore these issues in a handy diagram, there’s this infographic tweeted by Lumb:

A Model of Play - Dubberly Design Office

For more background on games in journalism, see my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/paulb/gamejournalism

Journalist Filters on Twitter – The Reuters View

It seems that Reuters has a new product out – Reuters Social Pulse. As well as highlighting “the stories being talked about by the newsmakers we follow”, there is an area highlighting “the Reuters & Klout 50 where we rank America’s most social CEOs.” Of note here is that this list is ordered by Klout score. Reuters don’t own Klout (yet?!) do they?!

The offering also includes a view of the world through the tweets of Reuters own staff. Apparently, “Reuters has over 3,000 journalists around the world, many of whom are doing amazing work on Twitter. That is too many to keep up with on a Twitter list, so we created a directory Reuters Twitter Directory] that shows you our best tweeters by topic. It let’s you find our reporters, bloggers and editors by category and location so you can drill down to business journalists in India, if you so choose, or tech writers in the UK.”

If you view the source of Reuters Twitter directory page, you can find a Javascript object that lists all(?) the folk in the Reuters Twitter directory and the tags they are associated with… Hmm, I thought… Hmmm…

If we grab that object, and pop it into Python, it’s easy enough to create a bipartite network that links journalists to the categories they are associated with:

import simplejson
import networkx as nx
#http://mlg.ucd.ie/files/summer/tutorial.pdf
from networkx.algorithms import bipartite

g = nx.Graph()

#need to bring in reutersJournalistList
users=simplejson.loads(reutersJournalistList)

#I had some 'issues' with the parsing for some reason? Required this hack in the end...
for user in users:
	for x in user:
		if x=='users':
			u=user[x][0]['twitter_screen_name']
			print 'user:',user[x][0]['twitter_screen_name']
			for topic in user[x][0]['topics']:
				print '- topic:',topic
				#Add edges from journalist name to each tag they are associated with
				g.add_edge(u,topic)
#print bipartite.is_bipartite(g)
#print bipartite.sets(g)

#Save a graph file we can visualise in Gephi corresponding to bipartite graph
nx.write_graphml(g, "usertags.graphml")

#We can find the sets of names/tags associated with the disjoint sets in the graph
users,tags=bipartite.sets(g)

#Collapse the bipartite graph to a graph of journalists connected via a common tag
ugraph= bipartite.projected_graph(g, users)
nx.write_graphml(ugraph, "users.graphml")

#Collapse the bipartite graph to a set of tags connected via a common journalist
tgraph= bipartite.projected_graph(g, tags)
nx.write_graphml(tgraph, "tags.graphml")

#Dump a list of the journalists Twitter IDs
f=open("users.txt","w+")
for uo in users: f.write(uo+'n')
f.close()

Having generated graph files, we can then look to see how the tags cluster as a result of how they were applied to journalists associated with several tags:

Alternatively, we can look to see which journalists are connected by virtue of being associated with similar tags (hmm, I wonder if edge weight carries information about how many tags each connected pair may be associated through? [UPDATE: there is a projection that will calculate this – bipartite.projection.weighted_projected_graph]). In this case, I size the nodes by betweenness centrality to try to highlight journalists that bridge topic areas:

Association through shared tags (as applied by Reuters) is one thing, but there is also structure arising from friendship networks…So to what extent do the Reuters Twitter List journalists follow each other (again, sizing by betweenness centrality):

Finally, here’s a quick look at folk followed by 15 or more of the folk in the Reuters Twitter journalists list: this is the common source area on Twitter for the journalists on the list. This time, I size nodes by eigenvector centrality.

So why bother with this? Because journalists provide a filter onto the way the world is reported to us through the media, and as a result the perspective we have of the world as portrayed through the media. If we see journalists as providing independent fairwitness services, then having some sort of idea about the extent to which they are sourcing their information severally, or from a common pool, can be handy. In the above diagram, for example, I try to highlight common sources (folk followed by at least 15 of the journalists on the Twitter list). But I could equally have got a feeling for the range of sources by producing a much larger and sparser graph, such as all the folk followed by journalists on the list, or folk followed by only 1 person on the list (40,000 people or so in all – see below), or by 2 to 5 people on the list…

Friends lists are one sort of filter every Twitter user has onto the content been shared on Twitter, and something that’s easy to map. There are other views of course – the list of people mentioning a user is readily available to every Twitter user, and it’s easy enough to set up views around particular hashtags or search terms. Grabbing the journalists associated with one or more particular tags, and then mapping their friends (or, indeed, followers) is also possible, as is grabbing the follower lists for one or more journalists and then looking to see who the friends of the followers are, thus positioning the the journalist in the social media environment as perceived by their followers.

I’m not sure that value Reuters sees in the stream of tweets from the folk on its Twitter journalists lists, or the Twitter networks they have built up, but the friend lenses at least we can try to map out. And via the bipartite user/tag graph, it also becomes trivial for us to find journalists with interests in Facebook and advertising, for example…

PS for associated techniques related to the emergent social positioning of hashtags and shared links on Twitter, see Socially Positioning #Sherlock and Dr John Watson’s Blog… and Social Media Interest Maps of Newsnight and BBCQT Twitterers. For a view over @skynews Twitter friends, and how they connect, see Visualising How @skynews’ Twitter Friends Connect.