Tag Archives: FT

Words as data: how data journalists tell stories about documents and text

Documents and other collections of text can be goldmines for data journalism — if you know how to approach them as data. Here are some techniques and inspiration for your next data project.

From stories about political speech and song lyrics, to street names and social media chatter, data journalists now have a wide range of examples of text-as-data to draw inspiration and guidance from, while tools such as Pinpoint and NotebookLM are making text analysis easier than ever.

I compiled a list of over 200 pieces of data journalism where text or documents were used as sources. Quantification techniques ranged from counting the frequency of a single word and using Google’s ngram viewer, to machine learning and topic modelling.

Looking at those articles it’s clear that, once quantified, journalists tell the same stories about text as any other piece of data: using the seven most common angles.

But how those angles are used — and how often — is where it gets interesting…

7 common angles for data stories: text and documents
Scale: how often words/phrases are used
Change: how language has changed
Ranking: the most/least common words/phrases
Variation: e.g. in relation to gender, ethnicity, ideology etc.
Exploration: journeys through multiple angles; interactives
Relationships: correlations, similarities and connections
Meta: ‘how we quantified text’
Leads: clusters, patterns or themes for further digging

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5 highlights from news:rewired: from live video ethics to mobile data journalism

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Photo: Reuters News Agency

In a guest post for OJB, Livia Vieira rounds up some of the highlights of News:Rewired 2017, from best practices to deal with fake news and engagement with live videos, to newsroom automation, mobile data journalism and collaborative storytelling and groundbreaking initiatives in newsrooms.

1. Engagement and ethics in live social video

According to Alfred Joyner, head of video of IBT Media, 66% of the views on Facebook Live videos happen after they end, so it is important to re-package the content, giving it new meaning.

Alfred also emphasised that IBT trains its anchors and uses high quality equipment to ensure the quality of transmissions — although all speakers hit on the point that Facebook Live is not TV, and so does not need to have that ‘casted’ format. Continue reading →

Podcasting and money in the UK

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Image by Stephen Rosger

In a guest post for OJB first published on his blog, broadcaster Joe Norman explores the UK market for podcasting.

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself questioning whether — in the UK in particular — it is possible to make money from podcasting.

The bigger productions seem to be an add-on to radio programmes, heavily reliant on content produced — presumably — using on-air budgets.

Many of the others appear, on the face of it, to be labours of love with some sponsorship that may cover cost. Continue reading →

AudioBoom on election coverage, moving from hosting to publishing – and SoundCloud

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Who’s winning the #GE2015 Listening Election on audioBoom? The @Conservatives are ahead, but for how long? pic.twitter.com/ZKmMNTnriD

— audioBoom News (@audioBoomNews) abril 24, 2015

By Antia Geada and Agustin Palacio

The AudioBoom digital news team is facing its first big challenge: covering the upcoming General Election.

The team was created at the beginning of the year, specialising in covering international news, as it aimed to be not only a platform where others share audio, but also a publisher in its own right.
Team leader David Marsland has joined this group, which is now focused on engaging people in politics in the run up to the general election. He says:

“People don’t get involved with politics that much outside of the election’s time. But with the elections approaching, we are getting a lot of listeners for all of our political staff.”

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HOW TO: Write a ‘Get the data’ article

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ft get the data

One of the simplest ways to get started with data journalism techniques is a ‘Get the data’ article.

Start by looking at examples of other ‘Get the data’ articles. A good search for this is:

intitle:"get the data" -getthedata

This searches for the exact phrase “get the data” in the title of the page but also excludes the site getthedata.org (which otherwise dominates results) by using the minus operator.

You can obviously add further terms, such as ‘news’ or ‘finance’, to narrow further.

Here are some examples:

Those three examples show two different types of datablog. The Guardian, for example, take public data which has just been released and make it more accessible to a broader audience. Continue reading →

Advertising is publishing – the Facebook effect

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Before the internet made it easier for advertisers to become publishers, they were already growing tired of the limitations (and inflated price) of traditional display advertising. In the magazine industry one of the big growth areas of the past 20 years was client publishing: helping – to varying degrees – companies create magazines which were then given or sold to customers, staff, members, or anyone interested in their field.

With some traditional advertising revenue streams dropping like a stone, newspapers belatedly started to see similar potential in their own markets. Trinity Mirror’s Media Wales are among a few newspaper publishers to sell video production services and the organisation has followed US newspapers in selling SEO services; while the FT followed Conde Nast when it recently bought an app production company.

While the execution varies, the idea behind it is consistent: this is no longer about selling content, or audiences, but expertise – and quite often expertise in distribution as much as in content production. Continue reading →

The New Online Journalists #10: Deborah Bonello

What education and professional experience led to your current job?

After I graduated from Bristol University in 1998 (I wrote for my student newspaper Epigram for most of my time there), I moved up to London and started working for Newsline, an online news service run as part of the media database product Mediatel.

A year later I was taken on by New Media Age as a reporter, where I got to watch the dot com boom become the dot com crash and work with the then-editor, Mike Butcher, now the editor of TechCrunch Europe.

From there I moved to Campaign to edit their Campaign-i section, and when that got cut because of budgets after a year I spent the next few years freelancing on media business magazines (Campaign, Media Week, NMA, FT Creative Business) and watching how the traditional publishing industry took on the internet.

By then, I was fed up of London and business journalism, so I headed off to Latin America. After a year in Argentina as a print only journo, I moved to Mexico to launch NewCorrespondent.com, an experiment in digital journalism, with help from Mike Butcher. Continue reading →

@Guardiantech accounts for 78% of the growth in national newspaper Twitter accounts

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National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

What’s more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78% of the total) is down to just one account – that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I’m tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me (@malcolmcoles)!

You can see the full table here, or below (although the iframe isn’t behaving properly, so you’re better off clicking here).
Continue reading →

UK newspapers add 213,892 Twitter followers in a month

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National UK newspapers had 1,471,936 Twitter followers at the start of September – up 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures (orignally posted here) below or here.

I have more Twitter statistics here.

Guardian the most bookmarked newspaper on delicious