Tag Archives: New York Times

Whatever happened to the audio slideshow?

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Remember the audio slideshow? Once one of the most compelling editorial formats – and a truly web-native one at that – it is now rare to see them on a news website. And a whole wave of audio slideshow work is starting to disappear from the web.

The page for BBC’s Jazz junctions – riding New York’s A Train now lacks the audio slideshow it once held, while The Guardian is awash with pages showing gaps where a slideshow should be – like After the riots and Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts (both from 2007), error messages about Flash (from 2010 and 2011) – or no pages at all in the case of Shrimp fishing in the Wash or Somalia’s refugee camps.

audio-slideshows-chart new-york-times

A search on the New York Times Chronicle tool shows a spike in mentions of audio slideshows at the end of the last decade. After 2010 they aren’t mentioned at all.

2012 seems to have been the last time audio slideshows were part of the fabric in the UK: most of the work on the Guardian’s Audio Slideshows section is from that year, while it represents the peak of production at the BBC. Here’s just a selection: Continue reading →

Guardian profiles routinely link to PGP keys – why aren’t other news orgs doing this?

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guardian-profile

What a pleasant surprise to visit a profile page on The Guardian website and see a big, prominent link to the member of staff’s public key. Is this routine? It seems it is: an advanced search for profile pages mentioning “public key” brings up over 1000 results. Continue reading →

Cartogram or election map? The Guardian vs The New York Times

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guardian referendum map

A cartogram represents geography diagrammatically. Note above for example that London takes up more space than parts of Wales because it has much denser population

The New York Times didn’t use a cartogram for its EU referendum map, Gregor Aisch explained last week, because they are “too confusing for readers unfamiliar with the geography”.

The Guardian, on the other hand, did use a cartogram. In a series of tweets their visuals editor Xaquin Gonzalez explained why

Continue reading →

Metrics and the media: we can measure it – but can we manage it?

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Today I will be chairing the ‘Data Strategy’ track of talks at the Monetising Media conference: individuals in every part of the industry talking about how metrics now inform not just content strategy but revenue, advertising, and customer relations.

As I introduce the day I will be thinking about two pieces of data in particular: research by the Tow Center’s Caitlin Petre into the use of Chartbeat; and Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking, a piece of research into consumption. Continue reading →

The newfound power of the social media editor

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Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is the editor controlling most people’s front page. Image by Niall Kennedy

The New York Times is “retiring” the traditional practice of pitching stories for the newspaper’s front page, reports Poynter’s MediaWire:

“Under the new system, each desk at The New York Times will pitch stories to be considered for “Dean’s list,” a list of stories that get “the very best play on all our digital platforms,” including Web, mobile and social platforms.”

And they are not alone.

As news organisations have moved from print-first to web-first to mobile-first the changing role of the social media editor has been fascinating to watch. Continue reading →

Charging for journalism – crowdfunder SA Mathieson’s experience

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SA Mathieson Beacon page

If you assumed that the future of journalism would only be free (or at least advertiser-funded), says SA Mathieson, you’re wrong. In a guest post for OJB Mathieson – who recently successfully crowdfunded his own project to report on the Scottish referendum – explains why the web turns out to be capable of charging for access too.

The Columbia Review of Journalism recently reported that the Financial Times now has nearly twice as many digital subscribers as print ones, having added 99,000 online customers in 2013.

They pay significant amounts for access: the cheapest online subscription to the FT is £5.19 a week. A free registration process does allow access to 8 articles a month – but try to access a ninth and you have to pay.

The FT was earlier than most to charge online, but many publishers have followed suit. Only a few – such as The Times – lock up everything, but titles including the Telegraph, New York Times and Economist all use metering, allowing non-paying readers access to a limited number of articles before a subscription is required. They have been joined by increasing numbers of trade and local publications.

This isn’t just an option for established titles: as a freelance journalist I write for Beacon, a start-up used by more than 100 journalists in more than 30 countries to publish their reporting. It has “more than several thousand” subscribers after five months’ operation, co-founder Adrian Sanders told the New York Times recently.

Continue reading →

Ethics in data journalism: privacy, user data, collaboration and the clash of codes

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This is the second in a series of extracts from a draft book chapter on ethics in data journalism. The first looked at how ethics of accuracy play out in data journalism projects. This is a work in progress, so if you have examples of ethical dilemmas, best practice, or guidance, I’d be happy to include it with an acknowledgement.

Gun permit holders map - image from Sherrie Questioning All

Gun permit holders map – image from Sherrie Questioning All

Hacks/Hackers: collaboration and the clash of codes

Journalism’s increasingly collaborative and global nature in a networked environment has raised a number of ethical issues as contributors from different countries and from professions outside of journalism – with different codes of ethics – come together.

This collaborative spirit is most visible in the ‘Hacks/Hackers’ movement, where journalists meet with web developers to exchange tips and ideas, and work on joint projects. Data journalists also often take part in – and organise – ‘hack days’ or ‘hackathons’ aimed at opening up and linking data and creating apps, or work with external agencies to analyse data gathered by either party. Continue reading →

How Wikileaks collaborations failed to create objective ‘global’ journalism – research

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Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war. Or, as an academic might put it:

“Professional journalism takes the nation as its unit of analysis, which [means] journalists employ ‘‘closed’’ language with respect to international issues when the nation is perceived as threatened, encouraging the citizen to read world events and issues from ‘‘our’’ point of view.”

This is the scene set at the start of Robert L. Handley‘s research into collaborative cross-border journalism. Handley wants to tackle the question of whether “global journalism” can result in the more objective outlook that its proponents hope for.

The partnerships that sprung up around Wikileaks‘s warlogs and cables provide an ideal way to explore that.

Europe vs the US

The overriding finding of Handley’s research is a difference in how European and US newspapers handled the Wikileaks material. European papers, he argues, “behaved as loyal to the nation-as-citizen and, more broadly, to citizens-wherever,” but the reporting of US partner The New York Times “demonstrated a loyalty to nation-as-official.”: Continue reading →

Online video and audio – a multimedia introduction

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Here are a series of videos, audio slideshows and podcasts that demonstrate some key lessons in producing audio and video for the web – and how that is different from broadcast.

Here are a series of videos, audio slideshows and podcasts that demonstrate some key lessons in producing audio and video for the web – and how that is different from broadcast.

http://storify.com/paulbradshaw/online-video-and-audio-a-multimedia-introduction/

FAQ: a review of 2012 with Data Driven Journalism.net

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The Data Driven Journalism website asked me a few questions as part of their end-of-2012 roundup. You can find the article there, but for the sake of archiving, my responses are copied below (without the helpful pictures they added):

What do you do?

I’m a data journalism trainer and Iecturer. I run the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University and am a visiting professor in online journalism at City University London. I’m also the author of Scraping for Journalists.

What was your biggest data driven achievement this year?

An investigation into the allocation of Olympic torchbearer places. The investigation came about as a result of scraping details on torchbearers from the official website. But it was also a great example of collaboration between non-journalists and journalists, as well as a number of techniques outside of core data journalism.

The investigation led to questions in Parliament and international media coverage. In the final week of the Olympic torch relay we published a short ebook about the affair, with all proceeds going to the Brittle Bone Society.

What was your favourite data journalism project this year and why?

I really liked Landportal.info, which is attempting to map land ownership – it’s highlighting a global trend of companies buying up land in Africa which would be easy to overlook by journalists. The New York Times’s multimedia treatment of performance data in three Olympic events across over a century was really well done. And I’m always looking at how data journalism can be used in softer news, where Anna Powell-Smith’s What Size Am I? is a great example of fashion/consumer data journalism.

For sheer significance I can’t avoid mentioning Nate Silver’s work on the US election – that was a watershed for data journalism and an embarrassment for many political pundits.

More broadly – what excites you in this field at the moment? Any interesting developments that you’d like to mention?

There’s a lot of consolidation at the moment, so less of the spectacular developments – but I am excited at how data journalism is being taken on by a wider range of companies. This year I’ve spent a lot more time training staff at consumer magazine publishers, for example.

I’m also excited about some of the new journalism startups based on public data like Rafat Ali’s Skift. In terms of tools, it’s great to see network analysis added to Fusion Tables, and the Knight Digital Media Center’s freeDive makes it very easy indeed to create a public database from a Google Doc.

What about disappointments?

I am constantly disappointed by publishers who say they don’t have the resources to do data journalism. That shows a real lack of imagination and understanding of what data journalism really is. It doesn’t have to be a spectacular interactive data visualisation – it can simply be about getting to better stories more quickly, accurately and more deeply through a few basic techniques.

Any predictions about what the future holds for data journalism in 2013?

I’ve just been training someone from Chile so I’m hoping to see more data journalism there!

Anything else you’d like to share with everyone?

Happy Christmas!