Tag Archives: google

From making data physical to giving journalists confidence (and a few other things too): Data Journalism UK 2019

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marie segger at data journalsm uk 19

Last week saw the third Data Journalism UK conference, an opportunity for the country’s data journalists to gather, take stock of the state of the industry and look at what’s ahead.

The BBC Shared Data Unit’s Pete Sherlock kicked off the event, looking back at the first 18 months of the unit’s existence. In that period the unit has trained 15 secondees and helped generate over 600 stories across more than 250 titles in the regional press.

Sherlock highlighted two stories in particular to demonstrate how the data unit had helped equip regional reporters in holding power to account: the Eastern Daily Press’s Dominic Gilbert‘s story on legal aid deserts, and JPI Media’s Aimee Stanton‘s report on electric car charging points.

Both stories resulted in strong pushback – from the Ministry of Justice and the electric car industry respectively – but their new data journalism skills gave them the confidence to persist with the story. Continue reading →

Got a new laptop? Here’s how to maintain your privacy from the start

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When you get a new laptop – with no cookies on it! – it’s a great opportunity to start afresh and protect your privacy online by default. As I recently got a new laptop here’s what I did as I set it up…

Start from scratch – no importing of settings/applications

Many laptop setup wizards offer the option to import applications, documents or other elements from your existing laptop. I didn’t do this, partly because I didn’t want to bloat my new laptop with anything that wasn’t necessary (and if you use cloud storage then you can download from there anyway), but largely because I wanted to check the settings of each application as I went – this is much easier to do if you’re installing them.

Browsers – install them all

I use at least four different browsers: Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. (You might also want to install Tor for particular use cases, although I’m not going to cover it here).

It’s useful to have different browsers partly because they offer different functionality, but also because it allows you to separate different activities. For example: Continue reading →

AllSides’s John Gable: from the Dark Ages of the internet to bursting bubbles

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all-sides-bias-rating

AllSides uses a bias rating system

As part of a series of articles on the innovators tackling the filter bubble phenomenon, Andrew Brightwell interviews John Gable, founder and CEO of AllSides, a website that has devised its own way to present alternative perspectives on American news.

When a man who helped build the first successful web browser says there’s something wrong with the Internet, it probably pays to listen.

“The internet is broken.”

John Gable’s diagnosis has authority: he has more than 30 years in the tech business, including stints at Microsoft, AOL and as a product manager for Netscape Navigator.

Now he is founder and CEO of AllSides Inc, a news website with a distinct mission. Visit AllSides.com and it offers the news you’d expect on any US politics site, except that its lead stories include a choice of articles: one from the left, centre and right.

 “The headlines are so radically different that even reading [them together] tells you more about that topic than reading one story all the way through.”

Continue reading →

Hello Allo: the first 12 things I learned about Google’s new chat app

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very-true-indeed

Google’s new chat app Allo is out in the UK, and I’ve been playing around with it.

There are two key artificial intelligence (AI) features that stick out in the app: firstly, the ability to interact with bots (the Google Assistant, which I’ve written about in a second post here), and secondly the way the app suggests responses while you chat.

I took screenshots during my first conversations using the app to see how the AI algorithms were set up before it had begun to learn much from my behaviour. Here are the highlights… Continue reading →

What next? How the news media can respond to losing

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A road crossing from high up

The infrastructure is complete. Image by Miroslav Petrasko

You can see the future coming.

Journalists need their own archives. Here’s how to start one

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Last week I wrote about the problem with trusting Twitter to keep a public record of all tweets. But it’s not just social networks; we can’t trust any website to keep information on our behalf.

3 recent articles highlight the problem particularly well.

Google loses interest and links rot Continue reading →

5 ways journalists can use Google tools – from the Digital News Roadshow

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Google Digital News RoadshowGoogle organised a free workshop on 14 December 2015 in Birmingham focused on how journalists can use technology to improve and complement their stories.

In this post Carla Pedret summarises some tips Google News Lab’s Matt Cooke gave during the event. You can read more about the event using the hashtag #DNRoadShow.

1. Putting ourselves in our audience’s shoes

As journalists we sometimes use words that we think are commonly used by our audience but actually are not.

In addition, one of the biggest difficulties is how to approach a story in a fresh way or a way that is attractive for our readers. Google Trends can give us some clues. Continue reading →

Google Digital News Roadshow in Birmingham December 14

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Google’s Digital News Roadshow comes to Birmingham on Monday December 14. It’s open to journalists, hyperlocal bloggers and journalism students, as well as pretty much “anyone with a strong interest in journalism.”

Here’s the blurb:

“Google News Lab and Trinity Mirror Group invite you to attend this free workshop session where short, bite size presentations;  will give you a clear overview of some of the tools, tips and tech that journalists are using around the world to complement their stories. Speakers will provide examples and case studies that could help inspire and engage your audiences.

It’s free, and drinks and “light refreshments” are included. Register here.

How one journalist found hidden code in a Google report and turned it into a story

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right to be forgotten analysis

The story found that most requests were made by private individuals, not politicians or criminals. Image: The Guardian

Sylvia Tippmann wasn’t looking for a story. In fact, she was working on a way that Google could improve the way that it handled ‘right to be forgotten‘ processes, when she stumbled across some information that she suspected the search giant hadn’t intended to make public.

Two weeks ago The Guardian in the UK and Correct!v in Germany published the story of the leaked data, which was then widely picked up by the business and technology press: Google had accidentally revealed details on hundreds of thousands of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests, providing a rare insight into the controversial law and raising concerns over the corporation’s role in judging requests.

But it was the way that Tippmann stumbled across the story that fascinated me: a combination of tech savvy, a desire to speed up work processes, and a strong nose for news that often characterise data journalists’ reporting. So I wanted to tell it here. Continue reading →

How The Cambodia Daily went HTTPS to protect its readers – guest post

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Last month The Cambodia Daily announced it was going HTTPS. In a guest post for OJB Joshua Wilwohl explains why they decided to go secure, and how they did it. (Disclosure: Joshua is a student of mine on the MA in Online Journalism by distance learning at Birmingham City University).

During the past year, The Cambodia Daily has witnessed an increase in government interest in monitoring the Internet.

This week, the newspaper revealed a government plan to inspect the network equipment, billing and data files of mobile phone operators and internet service providers.

Government officials argued this was to help with investigations into crime committed over Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

But computer crime experts said the Government’s planned tactics could also be used to monitor people’s phone calls and Internet data. As one expert said: Continue reading →