Tag Archives: mobile

Data journalism in Hungary: how Átlátszó’s new datavis project seeks to be both investigative and educational

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In Hungary, not-for-profit news site Átlátszó has launched a full-time data team to create a wide range of data visualisations and data-driven stories. Amanda Loviza spoke to data journalist Attila Bátorfy about his plans to have Átló raise the quality of data journalism in Hungary.

Átlátszó was created in 2011 as Hungary’s first crowd-funded independent investigative news site, with a stated goal of holding the powerful accountable.

Data journalist Attila Bátorfy joined the site two and a half years ago. It was not long before he told editor-in-chief Tamás Bodoky that the site needed a whole separate team to produce higher quality data visualisations. Continue reading →

My online journalism Masters course is changing its name. Here’s why

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telegraph-newsroom image by alex-gamela

MA student Alex Gamela took this image of the Telegraph newsroom during the first year of the MA

My MA in Online Journalism has a new name: the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism*. It’s still a course all about finding, publishing and distributing journalism online. So why the name change?

Well, because what ‘online‘ means has changed.

For the last 18 months I’ve been talking to people across the industry, reflecting on the past 7 years of teaching the MA, and researching the forthcoming second edition of the Online Journalism Handbook. Here, then, are the key conclusions I arrived at, and how they informed the new course design:

1: Adapting to new platforms is a specific skill

In the last few years a significant change has taken place. Journalism is now increasingly ‘native’, playing to the strengths of multiple platforms rather than just using them as promotional ‘channels’. It went from web and social to chat, keeps remembering email, and in the near future will take in cars, the home and other connected devices too. Continue reading →

Online audio tool Anchor: micro-podcasting or public conversations?

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Anchor is a new app which allows you to record – and, crucially, reply to – audio from your mobile phone.

Described as ‘audio blogging’ or collaborative podcasting, the tool aims to ride a fresh wave of interest in audio. And it has a lot of potential. We’ve been here before with Audioboo, but Anchor has some key differences. Continue reading →

What they said: analytics, bots and devices

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When you see a complex issue summed up in a few tweets, it’s worth saving. So I’m doing just that below: via Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Mary Hamilton, Neil Thackray and Steffen Konrath.

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17 takeaways on mobile publishing from Monetising Media 2015

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mobile desktop timeHow do you reach an audience which is consuming more content on mobile than desktop – and at different schedules to the traditional print model? At Monetising Media last week industry leaders shared their concerns and strategies for succeeding on mobile without losing quality and content. Maria Crosas Batista sums up some of the key takeaways:

Product rather than platform: Lee Wilkinson, Hearst Magazines International

Lee Wilkinson bets on product rather than platform:

“If your audience is the core of a product strategy you are more likely to engage and reach them when your content is out there.”

Continue reading →

This simple piece of visualisation will have you rethinking what you know about impact and mobile

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deadworkers

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 →

4 uses for Foursquare for journalists

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I’ve been fiddling with the mobile location-based social networking game Foursquare for a few months now. The concept is simple: as you move around a city you ‘check in’ to locations. You can see where your friends last checked in, and you can add comments as you go. But does it have journalistic uses? I think it does. Here are just 4:

1. Finding contacts

Until recently I refrained from pressing the ‘Tell Twitter’ or ‘Tell Facebook’ buttons when I checked into a location. However, that changed when I realised what happens when you do.

In one example, David Nikel, a political candidate in Birmingham, ‘checked in’ at Birmingham New Street train station 5 minutes after I had. Although I hadn’t ‘shared’ my check in via Twitter, because Nikel did, his automatically generated tweet said that I was there too. This alerted me and led to us meeting.

2. Social capital

Foursquare plugs into your existing social networks but adds an extra layer of information. If you know that John spends a lot of time at Urban Coffee Co you can make a point to go there yourself more often, or at least have it as a potential conversation-opener.

3. Tips

Users can add ‘tips’ to locations – a feature which is currently underused but has potential for leads as well as…

4. Distribution

Foursquare has already signed deals with Metro in Canada, Bravo TV and the FT. The potential is obvious: content directly relevant to your location. The big issue for Foursquare is whether it can achieve the scale that most publishers need.

How about you? Are using Foursquare or one of the other location based social networks, such as Brightkite or Gowalla – and how has it been useful?

iPhone News Apps Compared

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We’re all being told that mobile is the next big thing for news, but what does it mean to have a good mobile news application? Jonathan Stray reports.

Just as an online news site is a lot more than a newspaper online, a mobile news application is a lot more than news stories on a small screen. The better iPhone news apps integrate multimedia, social features, personalization, and push notifications.

Not all apps get even the basics right. But a few are pushing the boundaries of what mobile news can be, with innovative new features such as info-graphic displays of hot stories, or integrated playlists for multimedia.

Here is my roundup of 14 iPhone news offerings. I’ve included many of the major publishers, some lesser known applications, and a few duds for comparison.

NYTimes
The New York Times Company
Free

The New York Times iPhone application

The New York Times iPhone application

The Times doesn’t do anything new with this application, but they do everything fairly well.

The app is designed around a vertical list stories, with a headline, lede, and photo thumbnail for each. Stories are organized into standard news sections, plus the alway interesting “Most Popular.”   Banner ads sometimes appear at the bottom, plus occasional interstitial ads when appear when you select a story.

The focus of the news is of course American. There’s no personalization of news content based either on interest or location, which may well prove to be a standard feature for mobile news applications. Fortunately, the app includes a search function, though it only seems to go a few days back.

Downloaded articles are available when the device is offline, which is a useful feature. Favorites stories can be saved, or shared via email, text message, Twitter, and Facebook.

The UI has a few quirks. The “downloading news” progress bar is expected, but the sometimes equally long “processing news” phase makes me wonder what the app is doing. The photos in a story very sensibly download after the text, but the scroll position jumps when the photo appears,which is hugely annoying.

There’s little innovation or differentiation here, but the experience is smooth.

Continue reading →

Charging for mobile content – Steve Outing on the Men’s Health iPhone app

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Steve Outing highlights how Men’s Health are exploring the new features of the 3.0 iPhone/iPod Touch operating system:

“Now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

“Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.”

Outing then explores what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app (much more detail on his post):

  1. One-off premium purchases
  2. Enable premium services for an added fee
  3. Delay the news by an hour
  4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
  5. A paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house.

Steve is inviting more ideas on his post.

Mobile phones as servers – one to watch

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One of those rather dry-sounding reports on TechCrunch that some-company-has-raised-some-investment-for-some-technology caught my eye recently, because in par 2 comes this:

“Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.”

Now, it’s one thing to realise that your typical phone now is more powerful than the PCs of a decade ago, but the real power in computers is their networked nature. This technology – if realised – could open up some incredible possibilities. One that immediately occurs is the possibility to make data on phones searchable -mash that up with GPS data and you can imagine saying ‘Find me images or video on mobile phones within 30 miles of today’s major news event’.

There are likely many more possibilities – and I’d welcome your input here on what this would make possible…