Tag Archives: presentation

Scraping for Journalists – ebook out now

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My ebook Scraping for Journalists: How to grab data from hundreds of sources, put it in a form you can interrogate – and still hit deadlines is now live.

You can buy it from Leanpub here. Leanpub allows you to publish in installments, so you get an alert every time new content is added and update your version. This means I can adapt and improve the book based on feedback from the people who use it. In other words, it’s agile publishing, which makes for a better book. (Also, I can publish at a Codecademy-like weekly pace which suits learning particularly well.)

There’s a Facebook page and a support blog for the book for commenting too.

Meanwhile, here’s a presentation I did at News:Rewired last week which covers some of the ground from the book:

Presentations translated into Arabic: guides for citizen journalists

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Late last year I was asked to put together some presentations giving advice on verifying information, finding people and stories online, ethics, and news values. These were translated by Anas Qtiesh into Arabic as part of CheckDesk, a project to support Middle East citizen journalists created by Meedan at Birmingham City University.

The materials are collected at ArabCitizenMedia.org. I’ve linked to each presentation above.

My Henry Stewart talk about 'Blogging, Twitter and Journalism'

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I’ve recorded a 48 minute presentation covering ‘Blogging, Twitter and Journalism‘ for the Henry Stewart series of talks. It’s designed for journalism students and covers

  • How blogging differs from other journalism platforms;
  • Key developments in journalism blogging history;
  • What makes a successful blog
  • What is Twitter and how is it useful for journalists and publishers? and
  • Why RSS is central to blogging and Twitter and how it works

Did Web 1.0 begin dying in September 2008?

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Nicholas Moerman has put together an impressive collection of graphs showing a general decline over the past year in visits to mainstream websites across a raft of categories, from content and commerce to portals and porn. The only sites that buck the trend? I’ll let you guess.

He doesn’t know why this is (or even if he’s seeing things), which is rather refreshing, but offers some ideas, and it’s certainly food for thought. Here it is:

Presentation: Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)

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Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.

Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.

Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.

Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.

I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:

Online Journalism lesson #6: Interactivity

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I’ve been rather tardy about getting all of these online, so here’s the 6th of my presentations from the Online Journalism class of Spring 2009, looking at Interactivity. Much of what I talk about here is also in my lengthy post on the topic:

Making money from content online – presentation

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Here’s a presentation I made yesterday at the Fazeley Digital event. It’s intentionally provocative – and I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to read the real points I’m making here. Anyway, comments welcome.

Experiences in social media from the Birmingham Post’s Jo Geary

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Insightful presentation from Development Editor Jo Geary on some of the lessons she’s learned while building the Birmingham Post’s presence in social media. You can also find it on her blog here.