Guardian hire YouTube makeup star Lauren Luke

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In another sign of their savvy web strategy, The Guardian have signed up YouTube makeup star Lauren Luke to write a column (with accompanying video) in the revamped Weekend section (they also just happened to run a full page story on Luke in Saturday’s paper.)

The importance of people like Lauren – a 27-year-old single mother who lives with her son, mum, sister and nieces – to online news distribution is made pretty clear by the following quote from the article:

“A brief BBC interview with Luke for a local Tyneside news programme has been seen by more than 2.2 million people, becoming one of the most viewed BBC clips on YouTube worldwide.”

And here it is:

I’ve written previously that if you want to get into journalism you should have a blog. I’d add to that: if you want your own column, you should build up a following on YouTube too. News organisations will increasingly not just be looking for people who know what they’re talking about, but how to distribute it effectively online.

Shame the video’s not embeddable though.

UPDATE (of sorts): As if to reinforce my point, the Washington Post “has appointed a new multimedia journalist as a result of his participation in a YouTube contest” – although this was a more traditional reporting job obtained through a YouTube journalism contest – Project:Report.

Sport and data – now it’s more than just ‘interactive’

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I’ve written previously on the Online Journalism Blog about ‘Why fantasy football may hold the key to the future of news‘. Now it seems The Guardian has taken things up a notch with the wonderful Chalkboard feature: an interactive database-driven toolkit that allows you to create your own ‘chalkboards’ illustrating whatever point you may wish to make about a team or player’s performance. Here’s my first attempt below:

Cute, yes? But more than just cute. This is an idea that takes sports data and makes it more than just ‘interactive’. This makes it communicative. 

Because you are not just toying with data but creating it to make a point. Once you create a chalkboard it is published to everyone, with space for comments. You can send it, share it or embed it – as I have.

Clearly there are improvements that can be made – starting with searchability/findability from the chalkboard/team page and the odd bug (the description which I entered was not visible on the test I did above, and limiting it to the final 15 minutes does not seem to have worked – you still see all passes).

But really that would be picking holes in what is a beautifully thought-through piece of work – a piece of work that understands if you’re to make news work online it has to be as much a platform as a destination (a platform which in turn opens up plenty of opportunities for monetisation).

The site claims match stats will be available 15 minutes after the full time whistle. Suddenly the calls to local radio to bemoan the manager’s tactics seem one-dimensional. And spending 60 seconds reading the match report is nothing compared to the time that will be spent carefully constructing your argument as to why your star midfielder should not have been sold to that close relegation rival…

Thanks to Alex Lockwood for the tip-off.

10 Twitter users that every journalism student should follow?

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UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

  1. @davelee – former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
  2. @channel4news – example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable) Continue reading →

Speaking at the Perugia International Journalism Festival 2009

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The lineup for the Perugia International Journalism Festival 2009 has been announced. I’ll be speaking on the first of a series of panels devoted to ‘New Media – The Future of Journalism’. The topic is “Blogs and online communities: Where now for interactive journalism?”. The other members of the panel are Luca Conti, Ben Hammersley Antonio Sofi and Juan Varela.

The following day Paolo Ligouri, Marco Pratellesi, Charlie Beckett, Erik Ulken and Giuseppe Smorto will discuss “Networked journalism – permeable, interactve, 24/7, multi-platform, multi-dimensional – is here. The media is saved!” (if they have any time left after they finish reading out the title) Continue reading →

How do you ‘follow’ 2500 people on Twitter?

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OK, I’ve had enough. That’s it. I’ve had enough of people suggesting we should all have limits on the number of people followed on Twitter. The tweet that did it? Peter King, who suggested “Twitter should cap how many people you can follow at 10% of the # of people following you. Put a premium on the # you follow.” and “Twitter needs to be a place for leaders to lead. Otherwise we’ll cancel each other out.”

Yeah, that’s what we need: more leaders. And forcing people to broadcast to an audience before they can listen to anyone.

Many people have a ‘quality not quantity’ strategy with Twitter where they restrict themselves to following a certain number of Twitterers. But by using certain tools and adopting a certain mindset, I think you can have both quality and quantity. So here’s how I ‘follow’ 2,500 people on Twitter: Continue reading →

‘Journalists: learn to code’ says Guardian’s Arthur

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Charles Arthur of The Guardian makes his point pretty plain: “If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code”

“Let’s be clear that I’m not saying “code” as in “get deep into C++ or Java” … I mean it in the sense of having a nodding acquaintance with methods of programming, and perhaps a few languages, so that when something comes along where you’ll need, say, to transform data from one form to another, you can. Or where you need to make your own life easier by automating some process or other.

” … None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively – and quote them meaningfully – too.”

Amen to that.