Tag Archives: Music

How to use FOI to develop good journalism habits

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Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are not only one of the best ways to get original and exclusive stories that set your reporting apart — they’re also a good way to develop core journalism habits like curiosity, scepticism, and creativity. Here are some tips on how to get started with FOI while developing those qualities.

Being curious: how often is this happening? How much has it increased?

Headlines: Rising numbers of hospital patients so fed up they discharge themselves Figures reveal how many lives firefighters have saved Welsh parents owe thousands in school dinner debts
Headlines: How the cost of paying up is sending bailiffs' diaries wild Council use of bailiffs to chase debts jumps 16% in two years Acid attack hospital admissions have almost doubled Student Loans Company overcharges 78,000 graduates Schools converting to academies cost councils £30m
All these stories involve asking the question “how much” or “how many” about an issue or event

Curiosity is the first quality I identified in my series on the 7 habits of successful journalists — and FOI is a great way to hone that.

One good way to get started with FOI is to identify an event or problem that you’ve read about, and get curious about it: how many times is that event happening? How much is that problem costing? These are perfect questions for FOI.

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Leveraging music to help people understand data

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In a guest post for OJB, Ion Mates interviews Tom Levine and Roman Heindorff about the role of audio in data journalism.

Audiolisation (sometimes called ‘auralization‘ or ‘sonification’) is the process of turning complex data to sound.

Instead of using graphics and bar charts, one can represent the contents of a spreadsheet by assigning sounds to different kinds of data.

In the above example, the activity of newsrooms is represented by verses, phrases and different rhythms. The author is Thomas Levine.

Beginning to represent data as audio

Tom started playing with computers from an early age. His main interest was to design things towards them being easier to use.

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NME.com “do” the News Diamond

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I had an email recently from the Editor of NME.com, David Moynihan, about the News Diamond in practice. I thought it was worth reprinting in full:

“You describe much of what I do for a living: I am the Editor of NME.com and work in a buzzing cross-platform environment that mirrors your theories. Now that the dust is starting to settle a bit more in digital publishing, publishers are really taking notice of websites and web staff in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Continue reading →