As part of my semi-regular FAQ series, here are some answers to a series of questions posed by someone as part of their research.
Significantly. Journalists are trained to find regular sources of news – that mostly means formal organisations such as government bodies, unions, press officers, and a few community figures such as the local vicar, postmaster etc. Continue reading
The thing that struck me most as the media scrambled to report the publication of the Leveson Report was this: no one had really read it.
I mean, of course, really read it. All of it. Some had read one section; others had read another. Some had even read the executive summary.
But none had read – and digested – all of it.
It was impossible to. Even journalists reviewing the final Harry Potter novel had a whole night to stay up reading it.
And that had wizards. Continue reading
Here’s my attempt to capture some of the more interesting exchanges about the Leveson Report on Twitter yesterday.
Here’s my attempt to capture some of the more interesting exchanges about the Leveson Report on Twitter yesterday.
http://storify.com/paulbradshaw/yet-another-leveson-pundit-conversation
Image by Mr T in DC
When you start publishing online you move from the well-thumbed areas of defamation and libel, contempt of court and privilege and privacy to a whole new world of laws and licences.
This is a place where laws you never knew existed can be applied to your work – while other ones can come in surprisingly useful. Here are the key ones:
Comparison of time spent on a selection of Live Blogs, articles, and picture galleries at Guardian.co.uk, March to May 2011
In a guest post for OJB, Neil Thurman highlights a new research report that suggests that Live Blogs outperform other online news formats by up to 300% and are seen by readers as more transparent, trusted, and ‘factual’ than conventional online news stories.
The following was written for three:d, the newsletter of MeCCSA, the Media Communications and Cultural Studies Association (PDF, page 9).
Something has happened to self-publishing over the past few years. No longer the last resort for local historians and wannabe poets, it is now a sign of entrepreneurial spirit, an alternative to the limitations of attention-starved journalism, and a way of kicking against the pricks of mainstream publishing. Self-published books have almost tripled in number over the last five years, with a number of authors making the bestseller lists. More than one in ten ebooks bought by UK readers is now self-published.
This year I finally joined that group, as I made a long-planned move away from writing for traditional publishers towards publishing my own ebooks. In fact, I published three. So what’s the appeal? Continue reading
Here’s a meta-Storify with one link: to another Storify, where more is revealed…
http://storify.com/paulbradshaw/community-management-tips-for-journalists-1
Someone, somewhere right now will be writing a thesis, dissertation or journal paper about the very modern moral panic playing out across the UK media.
What began as a story about allegations of sexual abuse by TV and radio celebrity Jimmy Savile turned into a story about that story being covered up, into how the abuse could take place (at the BBC too, in the 1970s, but also in hospitals and schools), then into wider allegations of a paedophile ring involving politicians.
Image by Lasse Havelund
In the second part of this extract from Chapter 10 of Scraping for Journalists I recap the basics before discussing techniques to use in looking for patterns in data, and how regex can deal with non-textual characters such as spaces and carriage returns, special characters such as backslashes, and ‘negative matches’. You can find the first part here.
So Nate Silver won in 50 states; big data was the winner; and Nate Silver and data won the election. And somewhere along the lines some guy called Obama won something, too.
Elections set the pace for much of journalism’s development: predictable enough to allow for advance planning; big enough to justify the budgets to match, they are the stage on which news organisations do their growing up in public.
For most of the past decade, those elections have been about social media: the YouTube election; the Facebook election; the Twitter election. This time, it wasn’t about the campaigning (yet) so much as it was about the reporting. And how stupid some reporters ended up looking. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 