1970 sticker album – image by John Cooper
When should you stop buying football stickers? I don’t mean how old should you be – but rather, at what point does the law of diminishing returns mean that it no longer makes sense to buy yet another packet of five stickers?
This was the question that struck me after seeing James Offer‘s ‘How much could it cost to fill a World Cup Sticker Album?‘ Continue reading
Susanna Rustin has written one of the best overviews I’ve yet seen of the growing number of legal cases involving individuals being put in jail for being ‘offensive’ – vital reading if you’re interested in media freedom and media law, given the obvious implications for journalism.
The key law here is the Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127, which I’ve written about previously in 7 laws journalists now need to know.
Rustin summarises a number of cases where individuals have been prosecuted and jailed under the Act, and focuses in particular on two recent cases relating to social media updates posted following the stabbing of a school teacher.
“The cases of [Jack] Newsome and [Robert] Riley are different. They did not target or menace individuals, and lawyers and human rights campaigners have this week raised concerns about their being jailed for causing offence.”
Former director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer, provides some useful legal context and raises his own concerns around how “too many prosecutions for these kinds of offences can have the effect of chilling free speech”:
“There always used to be a protected space, so you could say things in private you could not say in public. With social media there is no protected space, and that’s what there needs to be a debate about. The notions around place and reaction just don’t work with social media. You could have a situation where two people in their living room make remarks to each other for which they would never be arrested, but if they make these remarks by email, they could be, as the legislation covers any public electronic communication system.”
More questions from a student as part of the ongoing FAQ series. This time it’s about the role of social media in ‘media freedom’, competition between social media and mainstream media, and credibility of citizen journalists…
Given that media freedom is largely about the legal and political framework in which organisations operate, I’d say social media has had very little effect. An analogy would be asking what effect hammers have had on builders’ freedoms: it’s another tool which they can use, but whether they use it and how depends on what happens to them if they do. Continue reading
When you’ve converted data from a PDF to a spreadsheet it’s not uncommon for text to end up being split across multiple rows, like this: 
In this post I’ll explain how you can use Open Refine to quickly clean the data up so that the text is put back together and you have a single row for each entry. Continue reading
It’s not often I encounter a piece of data journalism which solves a common problem in the field – and it’s even rarer to find a piece of work which tackles two.
But that’s just what lean data journalism Ampp3d did last week when it published a piece of visualisation on the deaths of construction workers in Qatar.
The two problems? Creating impact on mobile – and making big numbers meaningful. Continue reading
Last month I spoke to some health reporters from a national broadcaster about my favourite sources of health data. As part of that I wrote a post on Help Me Investigate. I’m cross-posting it here this month as I talk about sources of data on the Data Journalism MOOC:
Continue reading
What is a reverse subscription model? Cedric Motte looks at what happens when you see digital as the heart of your distribution marketing and the paper as a commodity. This post was originally published in French on NewsResources.
“Reverse publishing” first hit newsroom organisations some years ago (although many medias didn’t switch and instead “just” added another digital newsroom downstairs).
The idea is simple: because of mobile penetration and generous data plans, readers use their mobile (and tablet at home) to access news along the day. So a newsroom has to think about releasing news in a digital way to keep up with the tempo of news. The paper comes later. Continue reading
Cover design by Matt Buck/Drawnalism
My latest ebook – Finding Stories in Spreadsheets – is now live on Leanpub.
As with Scraping for Journalists, I’m publishing the book week-by-week so the book can be updated based on reader feedback, user suggestions and topical developments.
Each week you can download a new chapter covering a different technique for finding stories, from calculating proportions and changes, to combining data, cleaning it up, testing it, and extracting specific details.
There’s also a downloadable spreadsheet at the end of each chapter with a series of exercises to practise that chapter’s technique and find particular stories.
Along the way I tackle some other considerations in telling the story, such as context and background, and the importance of being specific in the language that you use.
If there’s anything you’d like covered in the book let me know. You can also buy the book in a ‘bundle’ with its sister title Data Journalism Heist, which covers quick-turnaround techniques for finding stories in spreadsheets using pivot tables and advanced filters.
@BrownhillsBob @paulbradshaw we only got 4 / 7 local candidates respond to questionnaires ( and @wolvesonwheels 17 /78 across the city)
— WV11.co.uk (@WV11) May 21, 2014
One of my abiding memories of the 1997 General Election involves bumping into a candidate from one of the major parties in a beer cellar. The candidate was supposed to have been on air at the time, participating in a live hustings for the small local radio station I was working for.
During a short conversation with them it quickly became clear that they felt an informal meet and greet with a bunch of bemused students was a better use of their time.
That was until I gently nudged him in the direction of the nearest cab…
A decade and a half later I hoped this sort of incident was a thing of the past. But is that the case? Continue reading
Looking across the comments in the first discussion of the EJC’s data journalism MOOC it struck me that some pieces of work in the field come up again and again. I thought I’d pull those together quickly here and ask: is this the beginnings of a ‘canon’ in data journalism? And what should such a canon include? Stick with me past the first obvious examples…
These examples of early data visualisation are so well-known now that one book proposal I recently saw specified that it would not talk about them. I’m talking of course about… Continue reading
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