Tag Archives: Telegraph

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 →

Wanted: MA Data Journalism applicants to partner with The Telegraph

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telegraph expenses data journalism

The Telegraph was behind one of the biggest data journalism stories of the last decade

As part of the new MA in Data Journalism we have partnered with a number of organisations who are keen to bring data journalism expertise into their newsroom.

I am now inviting applications from people who want to work with The Telegraph during their MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University.

The Telegraph has a long history of data journalism, most famously breaking a series of stories around MPs’ expenses in 2009. Examples of its data journalism – ranging from sport and politics to text analysis and data video – can be found in its TeleGraphs section.

The news organisation is looking for applicants who are interested in developing the ability to clean and analyse data to find interesting stories; an awareness of tools that you can use to source and scrape data; and a knowledge of data visualisation in order to communicate your stories. Successful applicants will learn these skills on the MA course and have the opportunity to apply them in collaboration with The Telegraph. Continue reading →

41 key moments in the history of online journalism {now 45} – have I missed any?

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July 7 bombings image

A key moment in recent journalism history: Adam Stacey’s image taken during the July 7 bombings

In the history chapter of the Online Journalism Handbook you will find a timeline of key events in web journalism. While working on the forthcoming second edition I recently revisited and updated the timeline. Below are the 41 key events I have settled on — but have I missed any? Let me know what you think. Continue reading →

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 →

How I did it: filming video at the Calais migrant camp – videographer Alastair Good

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Alastair Good was a solo video journalist for The Telegraph for a decade before recently going freelance. As part of work on the forthcoming second edition of the Online Journalism Handbook, I interviewed Alastair about his experiences of filming video at the Calais migrant camp. I’m republishing it in full here.

The refugee/migrant camp in Calais had been growing steadily for some time. Estimates varied between five and ten thousand people who had travelled from the southern part of the globe to escape war, persecution and poverty. They were all hoping for just one thing: the chance to make a dangerous journey across the Channel to Britain.

One of my contacts in an aid agency working in the camp called me to say that bulldozers were due to move in to clear the camp the next day. I pitched the story to my editor and was on the Eurostar by the afternoon. 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 →

Beyond Spotlight: 6 more data journalism projects that influenced policy

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spotlight data journalism

Brian d’Arcy James plays data journalist Matt Carroll in the movie Spotlight

Spotlight won an Oscar for its portrayal of the Boston Globe’s investigation into institutional silence over child abuse, including some old school data journalism by Matt Carroll. But it’s far from the only example of data journalism shaping policy: Anna Noble asked members of the NICAR-L computer assisted reporting forum for five of their own examples (first published here).
Continue reading →

Curation is the new obituary: 8 ways media outlets marked Bowie’s life and death [now 16]

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The media’s reaction to David Bowie‘s death from cancer early this morning demonstrates just how widely curation has become in journalism practice – and specifically, how it has become the web native version of the obituary. Below I’ve done a bit of curation of my own: 8 13 16 ways that different publications used curation to mark the death of a legend. If you have seen others, please let me know.

1. Liveblogging curation

The Telegraph’s live reporting of Bowie’s death is an example of curation itself, incorporating just some of the following elements:

  • The Facebook update of the statement confirming Bowie’s death
  • Embedded tweets from key figures reacting to the death
  • A video playlist
  • A single video of his last single, along with other videos to illustrate reactions
  • A posting from Bowie’s official Instagram account

Continue reading →

How The Telegraph liveblog historical anniversaries

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Rudolf Heitsch's flamethrower-equipped Dornier 17 on the ground near Shoreham

A public domain image from Laurence’s Battle of Britain liveblog

The Telegraph’s Laurence Dodds has an unusual claim to fame: he has liveblogged not just one, but four, historical anniversaries: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the funeral of Winston Churchill; the anniversary of Waterloo; and the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

Anniversary liveblogging is a particularly under-recognised sub-genre which can be enormously successful, and yet there’s very little written about it.

So I asked Laurence what it involved, and what he’s learned from his experiences. Continue reading →

Data journalism at the 2015 UK General Election: geeks bearing gifts

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bbc election quizThis has been the election when the geeks came in from the cold. There may be no Nate Silver-style poster boy for the genre this side of the pond – but instead, I believe we’ve finally seen the culmination of a decade of civic hacking outside the newsroom. And if anyone deserves credit for that, it is not the Guardian or the Telegraph, but MySociety, Tweetminster, and Democracy Club.

Looking back at my review of online election reporting in 2010 it’s striking how much has changed. Back then data journalism’s contribution was all about interactive presentation of results, but little else.

In the time between that election and this one, however, two things have changed within the news industry: firstly, a more code-literate workforce, including dedicated data project teams; and secondly, the rise of mobile, social media-driven consumption and, as part of that, visual journalism. Continue reading →