Jonathan Stray: A computational journalism reading list

Journalist and computer scientist Jonathan Stray has posted an interesting breakdown of what he calls “computational journalism”, a kind of parent term for data journalism, visualisation, computational linguistics, communications technology, filtering, research and more.

I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that.

Stray has put together a reading list under each sub-header (including our very own ‘How to: get to grips with data journalism‘).

Worth a read.

Full post on Jonathan Stray’s blog at this link.

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TechCrunch: All eyes on the Daily, but watch out for News.me

Last year we wrote about a personalised tablet news service being developed by Betaworks, the technology development company behind online services such as Tweetdeck and Bit.ly, and the New York Times.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfield has been playing with an early version of the new app, called News.me, and has a preview up on the site.

Schoenfield is billing News.me as the NYT’s answer to the Daily, but it seems much more like social aggregation apps such as Flipboard, using Twitter and URL-shortener Bit.ly to pull in content.

When you first launch News.me, you see the welcome screen below with a few tutorial hints: Tap on the people along the top dock to see what stories are appearing in their Twitter streams, tap on a story headline or excerpt to read it full screen, or you can stretch a story open inside the stream with a reverse-pinch. This reverse-pinch is one of my favorite parts of the experience. You flick to scroll through the stream, and when you find something you like, you can open it up and read it without loading a new page.

Full post on TechCrunch at this link.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – dealing with council data

David Higgerson has put together 10 tips on dealing with council spending data, although much of his advice can be applied to any data set, such as handling pdf and csv files as well as getting the best stories out of the numbers. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Center for Public Integrity strikes content deal with Newsweek and Daily Beast

The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.

The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.

See the full release on the agreement here.

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Journalisted Weekly: Football, phone hacking, and Egyptian uprising

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about.

It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

for the week ending Sunday 30 January

• Sexist remarks by two football commentators and phone hacking received much coverage
• Egyptian protests and the leaking of the ‘Palestine papers’ dominated headlines
• Drugs from Britain used on US death row and the return of a Tunisian Islamist leader received little attention

Covered lots

• Sky Sports football commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys, forced to resign after making sexist remarks on air, 403 articles
• Protestors amassing against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, following the overthrow of Tunisia’s president, 329 articles
• More phone hacking allegations, with an MP and more celebrities coming forward, 243 articles
• 1,600 leaked documents on the Middle East peace process, revealing the Palestinian leadership’s concessions to Israel, 98 articles

Covered little

• The Spanish families of 261 babies, stolen over five decades, call for an investigation, 4 articles
• Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, returns after 23 years of exile, 3 articles
• Lethal drugs supplied by a small British pharmaceutical company are used to execute a second prisoner on US death row, 2 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

• David Cameron: 501 articles (-10% on previous week)
• George Osborne: 315 articles (+51% on previous week)
• Ed Balls: 155 articles (-22% on previous week)
• Gordon Brown: 142 articles (-26% on previous week)
• Tony Blair: 140 articles (-55% on previous week)
• Vince Cable: 134 articles (+109% on previous week)
• Nick Clegg: 132 articles (-29% on previous week)
• Ed Miliband: 120 articles (-57% on previous week)
• Theresa May: 102 articles (+23% on previous week)
• William Hague: 100 articles (+138% on previous week)

Celebrity vs serious

• British film ‘The King’s Speech’, nominated for 12 Oscars, 141 articles vs. a bomb in Moscow airport, killing 35 and wounding up to 200 people, 74 articles
• Cheryl Cole, with a new tattoo, 62 articles vs. Nelson Mandela, rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung, 63 articles
• Actor Charlie Sheen, back in rehab, 28 articles vs. protests in Lebanon as Hezbollah swears in a new prime minister, 20 articles

Who wrote a lot about…’protests in Egypt’

Jack Shenker – 13 articles (The Guardian), James Hider – 11 articles (The Times), Peter Beaumont – 10 articles (The Guardian), Roula Khalaf – 7 articles (Financial Times), Adrian Blomfield – 6 articles (Telegraph)

Long form journalism

• 4,731 words: ‘The loneliness of the long distance cyclist’ – Paul Kimmage, The Sunday Times, 30th January 2011
• 4138 words: ‘Aung San Suu Kyi’ – David Pilling, Financial Times, 28th January 2011
• 3,162 words: ‘Gold rush in the Amazon’ – Alfonso Daniels, Daily Telegraph, 28th January 2011

More from the Media Standards Trust:

The Media Standards Trust’s panel event ‘Libel reform: in the public’s interest?’ is available to watch on our website

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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Data Miner: Social searching – who has the story?

There is a lot of so-called ‘noise’ on social media networks. A lot of stuff in general. But it is, at times, a great place to find leads or information about stories.

In part two of a series on “social searching”, Nicola Hughes of Data Miner UK has posted a useful guide to some of the tools you can use to cut through all the noise and find what you are looking for, including Topsy, Kurrently, socialmention, and Twitter’s advanced search options.

When you’re chasing something specific then go to Twitter’s advanced search. I’m not sure why it’s not in a more convenient place on the Twitter site itself. This gives you loads more options especially location, people and even language. By far and away the best resource for big breaking events.

See the full post on Data Miner UK at this link.

See part one – Social searching: what’s out there? – at this link

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BuzzMachine: ‘Cable companies, add Al Jazeera English NOW!’

Writing on his BuzzMachine blog, Jeff Jarvis has called for US cable networks to start carrying Al Jazeera’s English-language network.

Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera has been covering the civilian unrest in Egypt but was effectively shut down by the Egyptian government on Sunday, according to reports. In the following days Al Jazeera journalists have been reportedly arrested and detained in the country.

Jarvis acknowledges that Al Jazeera English is available to stream online but tells cable companies that this just isn’t enough.

Yes, we can watch AJE on the internet. But as much of an internet triumphalist as I am, internet streaming is not going to have the same impact–political and education impact–that putting AJE on the cable dial would have. I can watch AJE in the Zurich hotel room where I am now; I want to be able to watch it on my couch at home.

Full post on BuzzMachine at this link.

The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog has also picked up on the difficulty of accessing Al Jazeera English from within the US. Media Reporter Brian Stelter talks about the issue in an NYT video.

As the uprising in Egypt nears its second week, a lot of people are calling this Al Jazeera’s moment. The Qatar-based broadcaster has been showing us pictures that most US broadcasters haven’t been able to get … Al Jazeera also has an English-language channel, but a lot of people don’t know it because it’s very hard to access in the United States … Most of us can’t watch it in the US unless we watch on our computers.

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Follow Beet.TV’s Online Video Journalism Summit

Beet.TV will be live streaming its Online Video Journalism Summit from the Washington Post today.

The event kicks off at 9am local time and will include a chat with the Post’s political blogger Chris ‘The Fix’ Cillizza and panel discussions about the opportunities in online video news.

You can read more about the event here, follow the Twitter hashtag #beetmeet and watch the live stream on Beet.TV’s Livestream channel.

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Newsquest ad revenue drops almost 8% but digital revenue is on the rise

Fourth-quarter advertising revenues at UK publisher Newsquest were down 7.8 per cent year on year in 2010, while digital revenues were on the up, according to figures published by US parent company Gannett.

Gannett released its financial results for 2010 yesterday, including a detailed report of it’s fourth-quarter revenue.

The US company went on to describe Newsquest as “an internet leader in the UK”, claiming that its network of web sites attracted over 65 million monthly page impressions from approximately 8.8 million unique users in December.

You can read the full release from Gannett here…

Journalism.co.uk reported last week that staff at Newsquest titles in certain regions were understood to have been asked to take a week’s unpaid leave in response to “poor trading conditions”.

An internal Newsquest memo circulated in Wales, Gloucestershire, and the South Midlands said that revenues are “considerably below last year’s performance” and therefore action needed to be taken “to drive revenues and control costs sooner rather than later”.

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FT editor criticises Fleet Street for ‘conspiracy of silence’ over phone hacking

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber accused Fleet Street of being ruled by a ‘conspiracy of silence’ over the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, and said it was because of other newspapers being involved in the so-called “dark arts”.

Barber was giving the Hugh Cudlipp lecture last night at the London College of Communication.

Below is an excerpt from his 5000-word speech, a full version of which can be found here.

The phone-hacking scandal marks a watershed – not just for News International but also for tabloid journalism. True, the practice of phone-hacking was widespread (and not only among the tabloids). The Information Commissioner’s report in 2006 showed that 305 journalists used private investigators. The number may well have been higher. And yet, beyond the conviction of one News of the World journalist and one private investigator, the infamous Glenn Mulcaire, no serious action was taken against them; not by the police, not by the courts, and not by the Press Complaints Commission.

The PCC was supine at best. And while the Metropolitan Police has now re-opened its inquiry, many questions remain about why it did not pursue the original News of the World investigation with sufficient rigour.

Most important of all, the newspaper industry itself did not take the issue seriously or seek to establish the truth. Indeed, aside from the lead taken by the Guardian, which was followed by the FT, BBC and Independent, the rest of the newspaper industry took a pass on the News of the World phone-hacking story – almost certainly because they too were involved in “dark arts”.

Yesterday the Press Complaints Commission announced it was setting up a phone-hacking review committee to draw together the lessons learned as a result of the outcomes of the relevant police inquiries and ongoing legal actions in the phone hacking case.

The Metropolitan police are currently investigating the use of phone hacking by the News of the World after reopening the case earlier this month.

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