Category Archives: online journalism

Dealing with live data and sentiment analysis: Q&A with The Guardian's Martyn Inglis

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As part of the research for my book on online journalism, I interviewed Martyn Inglis about The Guardian’s Blairometer, which measured a live stream of data from Twitter as Tony Blair appeared before the Chilcot inquiry. I’m reproducing it in full here, with permission:

How did you prepare for dealing with live data and sentiment analysis?

I think it was important to be aware of our limitations. We can process a limited amount of data – due to Twitter quotas and so on. This is not a definitive sample. Once we accept that (a) we are not going to rank every tweet and (b) this is therefore going to be a limited exercise it frees us to make concessions that provide an easier technology solution.

Sentiment analysis is hard programatically, given the short time span of the event in which we can do this manually. We had an interface view onto incoming tweets which we had pulled from a twitter search. This allows us to be really accurate in our assessment. This does not work over a long period of time – the Chilcot inquiry is one thing, you couldn’t do it for an event lasting a week or so on. Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 3: Hypertext

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

In the third part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on hypertext in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized in online journalism. The general assumption of researchers interested in hypertextual online journalism is that if hypertext is used innovatively it would provide a range of advantages over print journalism: Continue reading →

UK general election 2010 – online journalism is ordinary

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Has online journalism become ordinary? Are the approaches starting to standardise? Little has stood out in the online journalism coverage of this election – the innovation of previous years has been replaced by consolidation.

Here are a few observations on how the media approached their online coverage: Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 2: The assets

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog.

In the first post in this series I argued that technology may not play such an important role to the development of journalism in new media as people seem to believe. In this post I will look at the three assets of new technology that are generally portrayed as the most significant for journalism in new media: multimedia, interactivity and hypertext (see for instance this article by Mark Deuze for arguments on why these three assets have been considered the most important for online journalism).

The general assumption of the “techno-researchers” has been that an innovative approach to online journalism implies utilizing these three assets of new technology. There are, of course, lots of other technological assets and/or concept related to technology that keeps popping up in the discourse on online journalism: Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 1: The revolution that never happened

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog.

Who would have thought, back in the 1990s, that by 2010, online newspapers would still be mainly about publishing written text to a mass audience?

Not many. The general assumption shared by academics, practitioners and media executives alike was that journalism would be revolutionized by new technology. Online journalism would be all about multimedia, hypertext and interactivity. Some even believed that the Internet would cause the the end of journalism (pdf). And the discourse surrounding both the practice of and research on online journalism is still quite preoccupied with how new technology will fundamentally change journalism.

So why, then, is online journalism still mostly all about producing written text to a mass audience? Why is use of multimedia, hypertext and interactivity still so rare? (If you believe  online journalism in fact is technologically innovative – keep on reading.)  Is it only because online newsrooms don’t have the resources they need to be innovative? Or are there other reasons?

In a series of posts I will take a closer look at online journalism and the promises of new technology.  I will do this by a close examination of the technologically oriented research on online journalism in Europe and the US that has been published during the last decade. This review will show that online journalism indeed is mostly all about text and traditional mass media thinking. Furthermore, it will show that new technology might not be the main driving force behind changes in journalism. The questions therefore are: why do online journalism develop as it does? How can we best understand the evolution of journalism in new media?  The last part of this series will address these questions.

First, however, it is useful to be reminded of a simple fact: revolution prophesying has been quite common  upon the entry of new technology throughout history. The telephone, television, the radio and computers were all supposed to cause “the end of history, the end of geography and the end of politics”, according to professor Vincent Mosco in his brilliant 2004 book The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Needless to say, these technological inventions did change the world dramatically, but not in such a quick and radical fashion the fortune-tellers seemed to believe. People tended to use these technologies quite differently than how many of the revolutionists predicted.

Take television: who would have thought in the 1950s and 1960s that radio would still be a powerful technological platform several decades later? Imagine the argument: who would want only sound, when you could have both sound and vision? It seems like a powerful argument (and please feel free to start hum that Bowie tune…). Then consider the fact that television was much more of a revolution than the Internet has been. It took only a few years for television to diffuse in society (8 years in the US), while it has taken the Internet 20 years to gain the same kind of penetration. Television did change journalism. But it didn’t kill it, or fundamentally change the social function of journalism and the role of the journalist. Likewise, the Internet will not kill journalism. It will change it, but perhaps no so radically as one would expect.

Things tend to transform slowly. Journalism transforms slowly. For instance, I recently read a 1925 book on feature journalism by American Harry Franklin Harrington. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess it was written 20 years ago. It portrayed feature journalism very much as it still is practiced today.

On that note I’ll end this introduction. In the next part of this series I will look at the the three assets of new technology that are generally considered to have the (potentially) greatest impact on online journalism: multimedia, hypertext and interactivity. What are they? And how do they fit with the wide range of concepts that flood the discourse on online journalism, concepts like crowdsourcing, wikijournalism, UGC, partucipatory journalism, citizen journalism, hypermedia, immediacy, etc?

Data journalism pt4: visualising data – tools and publishing (comments wanted)

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This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (here are parts 1; two; and three, which looks the charts side of visualisation). 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.

Visualisation tools

So if you want to visualise some data or text, how do you do it? Thankfully there are now dozens of free and cheap pieces of software that you can use to quickly turn your tables into charts, graphs and clouds.

The best-known tool for creating word clouds is Wordle (wordle.net). Simply paste a block of text into the site, or the address of an RSS feed, and the site will generate a word cloud whose fonts and colours you can change to your preferences. Similar tools include Tagxedo (tagxedo.com) and Wordlings (http://wordlin.gs), both of which allow you to put your word cloud into a particular shape.

ManyEyes (manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/) also allows you to create word clouds and tag clouds – as well as word trees and phrase nets that allow you to see common phrases. But it is perhaps most useful in allowing you to easily create scattergrams, bar charts, bubble charts and other forms. The site also contains a raft of existing data that you can play with to get a feel for the site. Similar tools that allow access to other data include Factual (factual.com), Swivel (swivel.com)[see comments], Socrata (socrata.com) and Verifiable.com (verifiable.com). And Google Fusion Tables (tables.googlelabs.com) is particularly useful if you want to collaborate on tables of data, as well as offering visualisation options.

More general visualisation tools include widgenie (widgenie.com), iCharts (icharts.net), ChartTool (onlinecharttool.com) and ChartGo (www.chartgo.com). FusionCharts is a piece of visualisation software with a Google Gadget service that publishers may find useful. You can find instructions on how to use it at www.fusioncharts.com/GG/Docs

If you want more control over your visualisation – or want it to update dynamically when the source information is updated, Google Chart Tools (code.google.com/apis/charttools) is worth exploring. This requires some technical knowledge, but there is a lot of guidance and help on the site to get you started quickly.

Tableau Public is a piece of free software you can download (tableausoftware.com/public) with some powerful visualisation options. You will also find visualisation options on spreadsheet applications such as Excel or the free Google Docs spreadsheet service. These are worth exploring as a way to quickly generate charts from your data on the fly.

Publishing your visualisation

There will come a point when you’ve visualised your data and need to publish it somehow. The simplest way to do this is to take an image (screengrab) of the chart or graph. This can be done with a web-based screencapture tool like Kwout (kwout.com), a free desktop application like Skitch (skitch.com) or Jing (jingproject.com), or by simply using the ‘Print Screen’ button on a PC keyboard (cmd+shift+3 on a Mac) and pasting the screengrab into a graphics package such as Photoshop.

The advantage of using a screengrab is that the image can be easily distributed on social networks, image sharing websites (such as Flickr), and blogs – driving traffic to the page on your site where it is explained.

If you are more technically minded, you can instead choose to embed your chart or graph. Many visualisation tools will give you a piece of code which you can copy and paste into the HTML of an article or blog post in the place you wish to display it (this will not work on most third party blog hosting services, such as WordPress.com). One particular advantage of this approach is that the visualisation can update itself if the source data is updated.

Alternatively, an understanding of Javascript can allow you to build ‘progressively enhanced’ charts which allow users to access the original data or see what happens when it is changed.

Showing your raw data

It is generally a good idea to give users access to your raw data alongside its visualisation. This not only allows them to check it against your visualisation but add insights you may not otherwise gain. It is relatively straightforward to publish a spreadsheet online using Google Docs (see the sidebar on publishing a spreadsheet)

SIDEBAR: How to: publish a spreadsheet online

Google Docs (docs.google.com) is a free website which allows you to create and share documents. You can share them via email, by publishing them as a webpage, or by embedding your document in another webpage, such as a blog post. This is how you share a spreadsheet:

  1. Open your spreadsheet in Google Docs. You can upload a spreadsheet into Google Docs if you’ve created it elsewhere – there is a size limit, however, so if you are told the file is too big try removing unnecessary sheets or columns.
  2. Look for the ‘Share’ button (currently in the top right corner) and click on it.
  3. A drop-down menu should appear. Click on ‘Publish as a web page’
  4. A new window should appear asking which sheets you want to publish. Select the sheet you want to publish and click ‘Start publishing’ (you should also make sure ‘Automatically republish when changes are made’ is ticked if you want the public version of the spreadsheet to update with any data you add.)
  5. Now the bottom half of that window – ‘Get a link to the published data’ – should become active. In the bottom box should be a web address where you can now see the public version of your spreadsheet. If you want to share that, copy the address and test that it works in a web browser. You can now link to it from any webpage.
  6. Alternatively, you can embed your spreadsheet – or part of it – in another webpage. To do this click on the first drop-down menu in this area – it will currently say ‘Web page’ – and change it to ‘HTML to embed in a page’. Now the bottom box on this window should show some HTML that begins with
  7. If you want to embed just part of a spreadsheet, in the box that currently says ‘All cells’ type the range of cells you wish to show. For example, typing A1:G10 will select all the cells in your spreadsheet from A1 (the first row of column A) to G10 (the 10th row of column G). Once again, the HTML below will change so that it only displays that section of your spreadsheet.

Once again, I’d welcome any comments on things I may have missed or tips you can add. Part 5, on mashups, is now available here.

Data journalism pt3: visualising data – charts and graphs (comments wanted)

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This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (the first, on gathering data, is here; the section on interrogating data is here). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around considerations in visualisation. A further section on visualisation tools, can be found here.

UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook.

“At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers – even a very large set – is to look at pictures of those numbers.” (Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001)

Visualisation is the process of giving a graphic form to information which is often otherwise dry or impenetrable. Classic examples of visualisation include turning a table into a bar chart, or a series of percentage values into a pie chart – but the increasing power of both computer analysis and graphic design software have seen the craft of visualisation develop with increasing sophistication. In larger organisations the data journalist may work with a graphic artist to produce an infographic that visualises their story – but in smaller teams, in the initial stages of a story, or when speed is of the essence they are likely to need to use visualisation tools to give form to their data.

Broadly speaking there are two typical reasons for visualising data: to find a story; or to tell one. Quite often, it is both. Continue reading →

Data journalism pt1: Finding data (draft – comments invited)

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The following is a draft from a book about online journalism that I’ve been working on. I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around sources of data and legal considerations

The first stage in data journalism is sourcing the data itself. Often you will be seeking out data based on a particular question or hypothesis (for a good guide to forming a journalistic hypothesis see Mark Hunter’s free ebook Story-Based Inquiry (2010)). On other occasions, it may be that the release or discovery of data itself kicks off your investigation.

There are a range of sources available to the data journalist, both online and offline, public and hidden. Typical sources include:

Continue reading →

Sutton and Cheam Guardian skewered by blogger for misreporting Election

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This is a Guest Article from political blogger Anna Raccoon about questionable Election reporting by the Sutton and Cheam Guardian , where all the candidates but one received objective biographies; it’s also a case study of one way that bloggers can hold journalists to account, and how the media is becoming more permeable.

For me, the more cross-scrutiny we get between journalists and bloggers, the better it will be for our media. It first appeared on Anna’s blog

The interesting, and potentially damning, points of this story are that one candidate was included with a joke biography in a survey of all candidates, that the audit trail seems to show conclusively that the newspaper had a full biography available – having used the photo which was attached to the same email, and that the journalist concerned has been shown to be a supporter of the candidate who would probably benefit most from damage to the Libertarian Party candidate. I’ll be pleased to run a reply from the Sutton and Cheam Guardian; I think it needs one. Continue reading →

Date for the diary: JEEcamp 2010 on May 21

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jeecamp

Given that Roy Greenslade has beaten me to blogging about my own event, I thought I’d better go ahead and blog about it here. I’m talking about JEEcamp of course – a conference-cum-unconference about journalism experimentation and enterprise. Put another way, if you read this blog, the sort of stuff I talk about.

It’s on May 21st at The Bond in Birmingham. Here’s what we’ve got:

  • Keynote from Simon Waldman, Author, Creative Disruption, and Digital Director, Guardian Media Group. (When I started blogging this was one guy I always read – and he’s still ahead of the game.)
  • Panel: What does the election result mean for publishers and startups? Confirmed so far: Tom Loosemore (ex-Ofcom, -BBC, now-Channel 4), Talk About Local’s Will Perrin and outgoing Creative Industries minister Sion Simon.
  • Please nominate who you would like as the fourth panellist.
  • Closing keynote: Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of Scotland’s first online-only newspaper, Caledonian Mercury (@calmerc), which launched earlier this year.

More importantly, in between all of that are a whole bunch of fringe meetings, chats over coffee and group discussions. You decide what to talk about here. Because, really, that’s what we go to conferences for, isn’t it?

And in the spirit of the internet, there’s a low barrier to entry: tickets are only £30

For those who haven’t been before, there’s coverage of last year’s event here and here. For those who have, feel free to post a comment.

You really don’t need to use any more brainpower on this. Book a ticket by emailing Kelly.ONeil@BCU.ac.uk (invoices available!) and sign up on the Facebook page or wiki.