Category Archives: online journalism

Universities without walls

@majohns Economist believes in future their distinguished and knowledgable audience is as important as their editors #smart_2011

This post forms part of the Carnival of Journalism, whose theme this month is universities’ roles in their local community.

In traditional journalism the concept of community is a broad one, typically used when the speaker really means ‘audience’, or ‘market’.

In a networked age, however, a community is an asset: it is a much more significant source of information than in other media; an active producer of content; and, perhaps most importantly, at the heart of any online distribution system.

You can see this at work in some of the most successful content startups of the internet era – Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, Slashdot – and even in mainstream outlets such as The Guardian, with, for example, its productive community around the Data Blog.

Any fledgling online journalism operation which is not based on a distinct community is, to my thinking, simply inefficient – and any journalism course that features an online element should be built on communities – should be linking in to the communities that surround it.

Teaching community-driven journalism

My own experience is that leaving the walls of academia behind and hosting classes wherever the community meets can make an enormous difference. In my MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, for example, the very first week is not about newsgathering or blogging or anything to do with content: it’s about community, and identifying which one the students are going to serve.

To that end students spend their induction week attending the local Social Media Cafe, meeting local bloggers and understanding that particular community (one of whom this year suggested the idea that led to Birmingham Budget Cuts). We hold open classes in a city centre coffee shop so that people from Birmingham can drop in: when we talked about online journalism and the law, there were bloggers, former newspaper editors, and a photographer whose contributions turned the event into something unlike anything you’d see in a classroom.

And students are sent out to explore the community as part of learning about blogging, or encouraged to base themselves physically in the communities they serve. Andy Brightwell and Jon Hickman’s hyperlocal Grounds blog is a good example, run out of another city centre coffee shop in their patch.

In my online journalism classes at City University in London, meanwhile (which are sadly too big to fit in a coffee shop) I ask students to put together a community strategy as one of their two assignments. The idea is to get them to think about how they can produce better journalism – that is also more widely read – by thinking explicitly about how to involve a community in its production.

Community isn’t a postcode

But I’ve also come to believe that we should be as flexible as possible about what we mean by community. The traditional approach has been to assign students to geographical patches – a relic of the commercial imperatives behind print production. Some courses are adapting this to smaller, hyperlocal, patches for their online assessment to keep up with contemporary developments. This is great – but I think it risks missing something else.

One moment that brought this home to me was when – in that very first week – I asked the students what they thought made a community. The response that stuck in my mind most was Alex Gamela‘s: “An enemy”. It illustrates how communities are created by so many things other than location (You could also add “a cause”, “a shared experience”, “a profession”, “a hobby” and others which are listed and explored in the Community part of the BASIC Principles of Online Journalism).

As journalism departments we are particularly weak in seeing community in those terms. One of the reasons Birmingham Budget Cuts is such a great example of community-driven journalism is that it addresses a community of various types: one of location, of profession, and of shared experience and – for the thousands facing redundancy – cause too. It is not your typical hyperlocal blog, but who would argue it does not have a strong proposition at its core?

There’s a further step, too, which requires particular boldness on the part of journalism schools, and innovativeness in assessment methods: we need to be prepared for students to create sites where they don’t create any journalism themselves at all. Instead, they facilitate its production, and host the platform that enables it to happen. In online journalism we might call this a community manager role – which will raise the inevitable questions of ‘Is It Journalism?’ But in traditional journalism, with the journalism being produced by reporters, a very similar role would simply be called being an editor.

PS: I spoke about this theme in Amsterdam last September as part of a presentation on ‘A Journalism Curriculum for the 21st Century’ at the PICNIC festival, organised by the European Journalism Centre. This is embedded below:

http://vimeo.com/15353276

Slides can be found below:

Comment call: do your students run hyperlocal blogs?

3 Replies

Thanks to the massive interest in hyperlocal blogs a lot of journalism courses are either asking their students to create hyperlocal websites, or finding their students are creating them anyway. This post is to ask what your own experiences are on these lines?

PS: I’ve also created a Google Group on the topic should you want to exchange tips with others.

The Independent’s Facebook innovation

20 Replies

The Independent newspaper has introduced a fascinating new feature on the site that allows users to follow articles by individual writers and news about specific football teams via Facebook.

It’s one of those ideas so simple you wonder why no one else appears to have done it before*: instead of just ‘liking’ individual articles, or having to trudge off to Facebook to see if there’s a relevant page you can become a fan of, the Indie have applied the technology behind the ‘Like’ button to make the process of following specific news feeds more intuitive.

To that end, you can pick your favourite football team from this page or click on the ‘Like’ button at the head of any commentator’s homepage. The Independent’s Jack Riley says that the feature will be rolled out to columnists next, followed by public figures, places, political parties, and countries.

The move is likely to pour extra fuel on the overblown ‘RSS is dying‘ discussion that has been taking place recently. The Guardian’s hugely impressive hackable RSS feeds (with full content) are somewhat put in the shade by this move – but then the Guardian have generated enormous goodwill in the development community for that, and continue to innovate. Both strategies have benefits.

At the moment the Independent’s new Facebook feature is plugged at the end of each article by the relevant commentator or about a particular club. It’s not the best place to put given how many people read articles through to the end, nor the best designed to catch the eye, and it will be interesting to see whether the placement and design changes as the feature is rolled out.

It will also be interesting to see how quickly other news organisations copy the innovation.

*If I told you I said this deliberately in the hope someone would point me to a previous example – would you believe me? Martin Stabe in the comments points to The Sporting News as one organisation that got here first. And David Moynihan points out that NME have ‘Like’ buttons for each artist on their site.

More coverage at Read Write Web and Future of Media.

Consequences of covert recording of MPs’ advice surgeries

1 Reply

This article is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

We have a new Cablegate, in which Vince Cable the Business Minster has revealed that he was not carrying out his quasi-Judicial role in a takeover bid by News Corporation objectively, in the presence of Daily Telegraph undercover reporters:

I have blocked it, using the powers that I have got. And they are legal powers that I have got. I can’t politicise it, but for the people who know what is happening, this is a big thing. His whole empire is now under attack. So there are things like that, that being in Government…All we can do in opposition is protest.”

There are two angles which interest me around the intrusion of covert reporting into the Constituency Surgeries of MPs. Firstly, whether the covert reporting done was justified in the context, and then whether there will be a significant political impact.

Covert Reporting

The PCC Code of Practice states:

(*) 10 Clandestine devices and subterfuge

i) The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails; or by the unauthorised removal of documents or photographs; or by accessing digitally-held private information without consent.

ii) Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.

but adds

The public interest

There may be exceptions to the clauses marked * where they can be demonstrated to be in the public interest.

1. The public interest includes, but is not confined to:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an
individual or organisation.

2. There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.

3. Whenever the public interest is invoked, the PCC will require editors to demonstrate fully that they reasonably believed that publication, or journalistic activity undertaken with a view to publication, would be in the public interest.

4. The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the
public domain, or will become so.

5. In cases involving children under 16, editors must demonstrate an exceptional public interest to over-ride the normally paramount interest of the child.

Given that the story has resulted in Vince Cable’s political role being heavily limited, and exposing his bias in a decision where he is required to be objective, I’d suggest that the subterfuge is very probably justified.

Impact on Constituency Surgeries

Politics is buried in mass lobbying from single issue campaigns by email (ask the people who run the House of Commons EMail system), demonstrations, and the rest. In this, the Constituency Surgery had given MPs at least one foot partly in touch with the ground.

As far as I am aware, this is the first time that covert recording has been used in a Constituency Surgery seriously to embarrass an MP, and I hope that MPs won’t be tempted to become much more cautious.

David Allen Green (aka Jack of Kent) has an interesting angle over at the New Statesman, pointing out that the newspapers would be fully aware of the views of Lib Dem Ministers:

… the Daily Telegraph’s lobby correspondents routinely hear what Liberal Democrat MPs are “really saying” about the Coalition. But because these conversations are on lobby terms, any criticisms will not be attributed to the MP in question.

but that therefore it was therefore necessary to record covertly somewhere else in order for direct ‘evidence’ to be obtained, and that this may form the thin end of a very long wedge. That “somewhere else” was the Constituency Surgery.

As a general rule, the constituency surgery of an MP should not be the place for secret recordings. That said, the confidentiality of the constituency surgery is there to protect the constituent, and not the MP (just as legal professional privilege is there to protect the client and not the lawyer). And so it is open for any constituent (real or supposed) to disclose what is said by an MP. So, on this basis, the Daily Telegraph’s secret recordings do not so far breach any grand political or legal principle.

However, there is some cause for concern. One suspects that the first use of interceptions of voicemails by tabloid reporters had a solid public interest basis; but it was quickly realised that such material was a rich seam to be mined just for trivial stories. Similarly, one hopes that newspapers do not now see constituency surgeries as “fair game”. The secret recording of a constituent would never be appropriate: there will always need to be a private space where a constituent can speak candidly to his or her Member of Parliament.

A variety of security measures would be available, ranging from verification of home addresses as being in the MP’s constituency to metal detectors and searches. Portable fingerprint scanners are now in use by the police routinely.

In a different context there was a conversation several years ago about whether the full Islamic veil was appropriate for an MP’s surgery, sparked off by Jack Straw.

Games, systems and context in journalism at News Rewired

8 Replies

I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web, and how we can help our readers to explore context around our stories.

Continue reading →

Adding geographical information to a spreadsheet based on postcodes – Google Refine and APIs

10 Replies

If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.

You can watch a video tutorial of this here.

1. Find a website that gives information based on a postcode

First, I needed to find an API which would return a page of information on any postcode in JSON…

If that sounds like double-dutch, don’t worry, try this instead.

Translation: First, I needed either of these websites: http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ or http://mapit.mysociety.org/

Both of these will generate a page giving you details about any given postcode. The formatting of these pages is consistent, e.g.

(The first removes the space between the two parts of the postcode, and adds .json; the second replaces the space with %20 – although I’m told by Matthew Somerville that it will work with spaces and postcodes without spaces)

This information will be important when we start to use Google Refine…

2. Create a new column that has text in the same format as the webpages you want to fetch

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your postcode column and follow the instructions here to create a new column which has the same postcode information, but with no spaces. To replace the space with %20 instead you would replace the express with

value.split(" ").join("%20")

Let’s name this column ‘SpacesRemoved’ and click OK.

Now that we’ve got postcodes in the same format as the webpages above, we can start to fetch a bunch of code giving us extra information on those postcodes.

3. Write some code that goes to a webpage and fetches information about each postcode

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column by fetching URLs…’

This time you will type the expression:

"http://www.uk-postcodes.com/postcode/"+value+".json"

That basically creates a URL that inserts ‘value’ (the value in the previous column) where you want it.

Call this column ‘JSON for postcode’ and click OK.

Each cell will now be filled with the results of that webpage. This might take a while.

4. Write some code that pulls out a specific piece of information from that

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column based on this column…’

Write the following expression:

value.parseJson()["administrative"]["district"]["title"]

Look at the preview as you type this and you’ll see information become more specific as you add each term in square brackets.

Call this ‘Council’ and click OK.

This column will now be populated with the council names for each postcode. You can repeat this process for other information, adapting the expression for different pieces of information such as constituency, easting and northing, and so on.

5. Export as a standard spreadsheet

Click Export in the top right corner and save your spreadsheet in the format you prefer. You can then upload this to Google Docs and share it publicly.

Other possibilities

Although this post is about postcode data you can use the same principles to add information based on any data that you can find an API for. For example if you had a column of charities you could use the Open Charities API to pull further details (http://opencharities.org/info/about). For local authority data you could pull from the OpenlyLocal API (http://openlylocal.com/info/api).

If you know of other similarly useful APIs let me know.

Case Study – Two political blog articles which went viral

1 Reply

One of the areas which interests me is how independent publishers can cut through to build an audience, or drive a story into the wider public arena. This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by political bloggers which gained widespread attention. Both of these pieces went viral via Twitter, rather than Facebook or any other social network.

Firstly, a piece, which caught the moment when the conviction of “Twitter Terrorist” Paul Chambers was confirmed. This piece achieved almost 1000 retweets.

This is the headline and abstract:

Heresy Corner: With the Conviction of Paul Chambers, it is now illegal to be English.

There is something deeply and shockingly offensive about the conviction of Paul Chambers for his Twitter joke, almost unbelievably reaffirmed today at the Crown Court in Doncaster. It goes beyond the normal anger anyone would feel at a blatant injustice, at a piece of prosecutorial and judicial overkill that sees the might of the state pitted against a harmless, unthreatening individual for no good reason.

Secondly, a piece from Anna Raccoon last week, about the case of Stephen Neary, who seems to have been caught up in a bureaucratic whirlpool through his autism:

The Orwellian Present – Never Mind the Future.

Steven Neary, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, Welfare Deputyships and The Court of Protection

These numbers of tweets are 50-100 times more than will be achieved by a reasonably well-received article. As a comparison the last 6 articles on the Heresy Corner homepage this morning are showing 3, 5, 4, 9, 40 and 2 retweets.

My observations:

1 – Both are non party-aligned writers embedded in the political blog niche, but also cover political questions from a position of non-political knowledge, with a degree of authority/respect which has come from their own work over two years or more.

2 – In these instances, both are amateur or professional subject specialists in the areas they cover here, and have an established readership who are able to give a boost to a piece in the social media nexus. As a comparison, in the world of Internet Consultancy much time (and money) is spent trying to build initial traction for articles and websites to give them a boost into wider internet prominence.

3 – The importance of “connectors”. Anna Raccoon’s piece received a significant boost from Charon QC, who provides an important hub-site in the legal niche – which of course is one place where a real difference can be made to Stephen Neary’s situation.

4 – The “edge of the political blogosphere” has become very important – both for specialist sites writing about political questions, and political blogs who “do more than politics”.

5 – These are two different types of article. The Heresy Corner summarised the online reaction to the “I’l blow you’re airport sky high” Twitter Joke Trial case at the right time to catch the Zeitgeist, while Anna Raccoon’s piece is a campaigning piece trying to direct attention to a particular case, in an area of society she has written about on perhaps a dozen occasions.

6 – Several legal commentators (eg Jack of Kent in addition to Charon) have pointed out (correctly) that for campaigning piece to convert attention into action, there needs to be more complete information about both sides of the story. A spotlight can be directed onto a perceived abuse, but there needs to be objective investigation afterwards.

That is a good distinction; but the rub is that officialdom can prevent both sides of the story being available to the public, and often only react to media spotlights – not to problems which they have not been embarrassed about.

7 – Neither of these bloggers are deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem, which is a distinct difference from some other mainly political sites, which report Facebook as a major source of traffic (example). I’ll write more on this another time, because I think it is important.

8 – During November, when the Paul Chambers piece was published, Heresy Corner jumped from 134 in the Wikio blog ranks to number 15 (illustrated). This was after changes which introduced a “Twitter” factor into the Wikio rankings. I’d suggest that this level of volatility may illustrate that they’ve overdone it.

Wrapping Up

The missing link for independent publishers is the ability to translate incisive observation or reporting into an effective influence.

I’ll return to that subject soon.

Can I ask a favour from brave souls who’ve reached the end of this article. I need a couple of dozen Facebook “Likes” for my own site’s new Facebook page to gain access to all features. You can “Like” me at the bottom of the rh sidebar here.

When we can’t believe our own eyes: Balance, objectivity, or transparency?

Wikileaks – a documentary

15 Replies

Here’s a well-produced (even in rough-cut form) documentary on Wikileaks by Swedish network SVT, published on YouTube in 4 parts. It covers quite a bit of the history of the organisation, the lessons it learned and the partnerships it made along the way – all of which provide valuable insights for any student of journalism as a practice or a cultural form, not to mention a more complex understanding than most coverage of the current situation provides. It really is essential viewing.