LiveCity is a new data-driven project from Le Parisien that aims to bring together a range of public data sources to serve audiences across its webpages and apps. In a guest post for OJB, Project Director Stanislas de Livonnière, spoke to Steve Carufel about the challenge of aggregating one city’s dispersed open and live data feeds into a single set of dashboards and widgets that could be integrated into the outlet’s website and apps.
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By Agustin Palacio
Quotes lie at the heart of what journalists do. It is often what makes news ‘new’; they are the ingredients of the ‘national conversation’ that journalism seeks to host. Now one site is seeking to provide an overview of that conversation.
Launched in March as a beta, Trooclick tracks quotes from news sites and social media and classifies them by topic, showing on one screen who is saying what and whether their comments are ‘positive’ or ‘negative’.
Its creators believe that it provides a more neutral account of current events due to a greater variety of sources than anything else currently available. Community manager Paul Nolan said:
“Our aim is to provide an alternative to article-based journalism that can be used by the general public.
“Why read a handful of articles when you can get a cross section of every opinion on a breaking news story at a glance? We think that telling stories through articles needs to be challenged and we are providing an alternative.”
![“We are not a magazine company,” he exclaims, unprompted. “We are a media company with a portfolio.” “We want to build the next LinkedIn, the next Gilt [a US commerce site], the next Facebook,”](https://onlinejournalismblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/timeincquote.png)
M Scott Havens, senior vice president of digital, Time Inc
“We want to build the next LinkedIn, the next Gilt [a US commerce site], the next Facebook,”
Platforms came up at the BBC ‘Revival of Local Journalism‘ event last week too. Why weren’t regional newspaper publishers doing more to become ‘platforms’ for their local communities? Continue reading
Over at Help Me Investigate Health I’ve just published a bunch of 20 places to keep up to date with clinical commissioning. It’s an example of something I’ve written about previously – setting up an online network infrastructure as a journalist. And below, I explain the process behind it:
If you’re going to start scrutinising a field, it’s very useful to be kept up to date with developments in that field:
Rather than checking a list of websites on the off chance that one has been updated, a much more efficient way to keep up to date on what’s happening is to use a free RSS reader. Continue reading
I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming… traditional media corporations in Latin America are launching news sites based exclusively on content originated in social media.
First of all, we have 140 – news of Twitter, a new web site lunched by Perfil in Argentina, intended as a site for “people who don’t have a Twitter account but want to find out what’s happening” in the microblogging world.
Twitter has had a tremendous growth in the country in 2010, thanks mainly to TV shows that sudenly began using Twitter as a live interactive tool with the audience.
Then local celebrities and world-cup football players joined the conversation, finishing the job of popularizing the social network, and now even politicians replace their traditional press releases with fleeting 140 character messages that sometimes end up in front pages.
140 was created by Darío Gallo, executive editor of Perfil.com and former Director of Noticias (the most popular political magazine of the country), one of the early adopters of Twitter in Argentina. He assured me the new project is receiving good reactions and traffic. Continue reading
Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions
Cecilia Friend and Jane B. Singer
ME Sharpe, 2007, 245 pp., ISBN 0765615738
On April 16, 2007, a 23-year-old man shot and killed 32 people at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. As the shootings were taking place students reported what was taking place on blogs, mobile phones, instant messaging, Flickr, Wikipedia, and social networks.
As they did so, journalists started arriving in search of information and reaction. Some “lurked”, taking what they found and publishing it elsewhere; others engaged in “digital doorstepping” – asking students for their experiences and feelings, or if they’d be willing to be interviewed on camera.
While traditional journalists saw the material as being ‘in the public domain’, many students reacted angrily to the invasion of what they saw as ‘their’ space. It was an example of worlds colliding, highlighting the new ethical challenges facing journalists as new media technologies enabled the distinction between public and private, and between publisher and audience, to collapse.
In this context, Friend and Singer’s book on the ethics of online journalism is hugely welcome. Continue reading
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