Crowdsourcing + investigative journalism = ? (help make it happen)

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Following my research into investigative journalism I’ve been thinking about its future. One path clearly lies in tools of crowdsourcing and community being applied to local investigative journalism. It’s not a new idea, but it’s not happening nearly enough. So here’s the twist I’ve put on it as I seek to get funding to test it out: hand over the agenda to your public, and you have a potentially bigger, and more committed, workforce. Continue reading →

Product reviews the wiki/social way

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Interesting use of wikis for journalism over at ProductWiki: from TechCrunch:

“The idea behind ProductWiki is to create collaborative product reviews that boil all the judgments about a product into one single review. It avoids revision wars by requiring every reviewer to list both pros and cons, and then every other ProductWiki reader can vote on each pro and each con until a consensus emerges.

“Last week, the site turned on three new features which Ismail hopes will allow him to create the ultimate “product graph” (this is like a social graph for products, showing how products are related or connected to one another). Reviewers can now identify competing or related products, and vote on which ones they like better in a head-to-head, A-B fashion. The third feature is a product rank derived from the first two features. For instance, based on 15 votes, the iRex iLiad beats out both the Kindle and the Sony Reader in the e-book category (so far).”

What RSS reader do you use and why?

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I’m a Bloglines man, because it’s social and easier to click through than Google Reader. But what do you use – and why? Apart from anything else, it strikes me that there may be global differences in RSS reader use, in the same way there is with social networks (see below). You can also discuss this at the Online Journalism Blog Facebook Group.

Social networks map

A vlog post from 2020

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I was asked by The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond to write a blog post ‘from the year 2020’. “OK,” I thought, “so what would a blog post look like in 13 years’ time?” Well, it would almost certainly be mobile, so I filmed it on my phone. Apple will probably be scraping the barrel of products they can ‘re-engineer’ by then, and… well, it’s all in the video. I was hoping to get some video comments too, so if you’re feeling creative, upload a response to YouTube and I’ll add it in…

Google granted ‘magazine patent’

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From ITproPortal.com:

“Techcrunch and Huomah are reporting that Google is looking into launching a Do It Yourself Publishing Service for Magazines.”The patent abstract says that Google is investigating

“A method includes receiving personalized content from a plurality of content sources. The personalized content is based on user input. The method further includes receiving a personalized advertisement based on user input, and creating a customized publication including the personalized content and the personalized advertisement.””

More here. Thanks to Richard Grimes of the NUJ New Media mailing list for the link.

Human rights violations video site launched

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Mexico Reporter reports the launch of The Hub by human rights organization Witness to “allow people to publicize events or situations violating human rights using hand-held cameras or mobile phones. They gather material, upload it onto the Hub, and then tell viewers what they can do to help raise awareness of the problem and create change”

In reality, the videos on view at the moment don’t necessarily include the ‘what viewers can do’ element (which admittedly is asking a lot), but there is a specific ‘Take Action’ section. A good example of the ‘how’ of my Five Ws and a H.

Students launch local Christmas blog

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Final year Birmingham City University journalism degree students Todd Nash and Neil Timms have launched a niche blog covering the build up to Christmas in Birmingham, complete with video – it’s called Turkey Brumstick. Todd explains:

“For our Professional Journalism module we were asked to produce between five and ten articles for publication. We decided it would be better to create all of them on the same topic and publicise them on a blog to try to get publicity so that it can actually be of use to people.

“We’re filling a gap in the market: the local paper doesn’t produce a lot of video content; then there are the likes of the council websites which tell you what’s going on but not if it’s any good.”