Paul Bradshaw’s excellent Online Journalism Blog has two posts of use for journalists starting to work in data journalism the first looking at understanding XML and RSS while the second outlines JSON for beginners. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.
To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Tags: data, journalism tips, tip
Who? Laurie Penny
Where? Laurie Penny writes for the New Statesman and the Guardian.
Twitter? @pennyred
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Tags: #followjourn, Laurie Penny
Journalists, a lot of journalists in this room probably, recoil at the G word. “Oh you want to turn my really serious story into a game…
This was Citizenside editor-in-chief Philip Trippenbach speaking in an #ijf11 session earlier today called Beyond the Article.
Trippenbach has been trumpeting the benefits of gaming for journalism for some time now. He made a convincing case for gaming at a recent Journalism.co.uk news:rewired event called, coincidentally enough, Beyond the Story.
Trippenbach has worked on interactive projects for the BBC and a host of other outlets. But clearly the “G word” is still a long way from taking root with most journalists.
He made a convincing case again today. This time – having joined citizen press agency Citizenside in January – for the power of gaming for citizen journalism initiatives.
The most powerful interactive form is gaming, in terms of interactive journalism, that is where the win is. When you talk about gaming baked right into the heart of a package, that is very profound.
With the addition of Trippenbach to its staff, Citizenside is certainly baking gaming right into the heart of its operation, and he outlined how it is using the form for two key purposes.
Citizenside users are encouraged to progress from level to level by accomplishing certain tasks, or “missions”, just like you did when you played computer games as a kid (or maybe as an adult too – according to Trippenbach more people in Western Europe and North America play computer games than don’t, although I forgot to ask where he got the data for that one).
And just like those computer games, the missions at Citizenside get harder as you go along, with the early stages requiring you to capture a relatively easy-to-obtain image, and the latter requiring, say, a good image of a state leader or an important newsworthy event.
Perhaps the most interesting thing Trippenbach talked about was how the agency uses that points-based gaming system not just for engaging users, but to help with assessment and verification of user-generated content, always a thorny issue for citizen press agencies.
If we get a picture from a level 35 user, well, it takes a long time to get to level 35 or 45, and the Citizenside editorial team know that that user has demonstrated commitment to our values.
So not only does the gaming element of the operation help engage users by breaking down their involvement into a series of incremental tasks and levels, it also is a huge advantage to Citizenside for an indication of the reliability of the content it is receiving.
If its someone who has submitted five packages and five of them have been refused, well, we know what that is, but if it’s someone with a 100 per cent record, well, fine.
We have a trust system that allows some users to post directly to the homepage and be post moderated.
As well as information about the user, Citizenside uses software to access data about the package itself.
This technical side of the verification process can potentially allows the agency to see whether an image has been edited in PhotoShop or uploaded to Flickr, and reveal when and where it was taken and uploaded.
I want to return to the issue of gaming and engagement quickly before I finish. However many journalists Trippenbach has seen turn their noses up at gaming, I have seen examples at this festival of gaming creeping in to some of the best and most popular mainstream journalism taking place.
Citizenside’s example of breaking the user engagement down into small, incremental stages has echoes in the Guardian’s MPs expenses app, which aimed to crowdsource the examination of the 458,000 documents published.
The app had two million hits in the first two days but, as the Guardian’s Martin Belam explained recently, users were unenthusiastic because the process hadn’t been broken down into achievable-seeming stages.
When a second batch of documents were released, the team working on the app broke them down into much smaller assignments. That meant it was easier for a small contribution to push the totals along, and we didn’t get bogged down with the inertia of visibly seeing that there was a lot of documents still to process.
So gaming doesn’t necessarily mean the fully-fledged computer games we play on a PlayStation, it can be the simple interactive engagement of the Guardian app, or the New York Times’ Budget Puzzle interactive in which you attempt to solve the deficit.
As Trippenbach acknowledged after the session, gaming is not yet taken seriously as a medium. But at Citizenside it may be the solution to the two key problems facing any citizen agency, engagement and verification, and for that reason you can bet that they take it very seriously.
See more from #ijf11 on the Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog.
Tags: #ijf11, Citizen journalism, Citizenside, gaming, interactive journalism, news:rewired, philip trippenbach, photojournalism
The New York Times has one of the largest, most advanced graphics teams of any national newspaper in the world. Yesterday at the International Journalism Festival, NYT deputy graphics editor Matthew Ericson led an in-depth two-hour workshop on his team’s approach to visualising some of the data that flows through the paper’s stories every day.
He broke the team’s strategy down in to a few key objectives, the four main ones being:
Provide context
Describe processes
Reveal patterns
Explain the geography
Here is some of what Ericson told the audience and some of the examples he gave during the session, broken down under the different headers.
Provide context
Graphics should bring something new to the story, not just repeat the information in the lede.
Ericson emphasised a graphics team that simply illustrates what the reporter has already told the audience is not doing its job properly. “A graphic can bring together a variety of stories and provide context,” he said, citing his team’s work on the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
We would have reporters with information about the health risks, and some who were working on radiation levels, and then population, and we can bring these things together with graphics and show the context.
Describe processes
The Fukushima nuclear crisis has spurned a lot of graphics work at news organisations across thew world, and Ericson showed a few different examples of work on the situation to the #ijf11 audience. Another graphic demonstrated the process of a nuclear meltdown, and what exactly was happening at the Fukushima plant.
As we approach stories, we are not interested in a graphic showing how a standard nuclear reactor works, we want to show what is particular to a situation and what will help a reader understand this particular new story.
Like saying: “You’ve been reading about these fuel rods all over the news, this is what they actually look like and how they work”.
From nuclear meltdown to dancing. A very different graphic under the ‘desribe processes’ umbrella neatly demonstrated that graphics work is not just for mapping and data.
Disecting a Dance broke down a signature piece by US choreographer Merce Cunningham in order to explain his style.
The NYT dance critic narrated the video, over which simple outlines were overlaid at stages to demonstrate what he was saying. See the full video at this link.
Reveal patterns
This is perhaps the objective most associated with data visualisation, taking a dataset and revealing the patterns that may tell us a story: crime is going up here, population density down there, immigration changing over time, etc.
Ericson showed some of the NYT’s work on voting and immigration patterns, but more interesting was a “narrative graphic” that charted the geothermal changes in the bedrock under California created by attempts to exploit energy in hot areas of rock, which can cause earthquakes.
These so-called narrative graphics are take what we think of as visualisation close to what we have been seeing for a while in broadcast news bulletins.
Explain geography
The final main objective was to show the audience the geographical element of stories.
Examples for this section included mapping the flooding of New Orleans following hurricane Katrina, including showing what parts of the region were below sea level and overlaying population density, showing where levies had broken and showing what parts of the land were underwater.
Geography was also a feature of demonstrating the size and position of the oil slick in the Gulf following the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, and comparing it with previous major oil spills.
Data + story > data
It doesn’t take a skilled mathematician to work that one out. But don’t be fooled by it’s simplicity, it underpinned a key message to take away from the workshop. The message is equally simple: graphics and data teams have the skill to make sense of data for their audience, and throwing a ton of data online without adding analysis and extracting a story is not the right way to go about it.
More from Matthew Ericson on the NYT graphics team
I spoke to Ericson after the session about what kind of people make up his team (it includes cartographers!) and how they go about working on a story.
Here’s what he had to say:
The BBC’s Peter Horrocks on data journalism
I spoke to Peter Horrocks, who is director of the BBC World Service and the BBC’s global online news operations after the session about his take on data journalism and whether the BBC Global News had ambitions in this direction.
Here’s what he had to say:
See the full list of links for Ericson’s session on his blog.
Tags: #ijf11, data, Data journalism, graphics, matthew ericson, New York Times
Listen below for this week’s news round-up from Journalism.co.uk’s Sarah Marshall and sign up to our iTunes podcast feed for future audio.
This week’s jpod reports on the third arrest of a News of the World journalist this month; how Tindle reporters are striking over the quality of the newspapers they are producing and we hear more on how MPs believe cuts at the BBC World Service will have a negative impact on its future.
There is also more information on Journalism.co.uk’s fourth news:rewired event, noise to signal, which takes place on 27 May at Thomson Reuters, Canary Wharf.
Podcast: Download
Tags: News of the World, Podcast
The Press Association has signed “a landmark deal” with the Associated Press to distribute PA’s UK video news footage through the US wire’s archive.
Under the new agreement AP’s archive customers will be able to access more than 18,000 UK videos, with new content from PA added on a daily basis.
A release from both parties says the deal will help the PA extend the reach of its footage beyond the UK and “significantly bolster the UK news element of AP’s video offering”.
It added the stories supplied to AP have been “specifically designed as ‘archive-friendly’ compilations of the rushes from which the story was created”.
Fully shortlisted, the stories provide customers with longer sequences and greater depth than the tightly edited packages offered by other suppliers.
Tags: Associated Press, Broadcast, deal, Press Association, Video
Mashable’s community manager and social media strategist Vadim Lavrusik is to take up Facebook’s new role of journalist program manager.
Journalism.co.uk reported in February that Facebook had created the role in its marketing team in order to bring in an experienced journalist to help news organisations understand how the social network can be used as a reporting and distribution tool.
Announcing his new role on his Facebook page Lavrusik said he will be “leading the charge” to build programs that help journalists utilise Facebook in their reporting.
This includes the likes of the recently launched Journalists on Facebook Page and Facebook Journalism Meetups program, as well as resources for journalism educators, but also taking insightful feedback to product on how Facebook can be improved for journalism.
Tags: Facebook, social media, Vadim Lavrusik
In a release today the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced ministers have confirmed the UK will adopt an amended framework on electronic communications “exactly as set out by the EU”, which will include the need for website owners to get the user’s permission before a cookie – a text file used to store information such as user preferences – can be used.
Today’s announcement follows a consultation where concerns were raised about the impact of changes to the use of cookies.
To address these concerns, the Government has said it will work with browser manufacturers to see if browser setting can be enhanced to meet the requirements of the revised directive.
The updated directives must be implemented by 25 May, the release added, and the Information Commissioner’s Office will publish further guidance on the use of cookies.
Last month Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said the new law will be a challenge but “will have positive benefits” by offering more choice and control over what information businesses and other organisations can store on and access from consumers’ own computers.
But he added that the limited time remaining until the directive becomes European law was causing concern.
Tags: cookies, Department for Media Culture and Sport, online, privacy, website publishers
The winners of the 2011 Dart Awards, which recognise outstanding reporting that portrays traumatic events with accuracy, insight and sensitivity by US media outlets, have been announced.
The Boston Globe won for “A tormenting problem: An exploration of new-age bullying“, the Dallas Morning News for “Private battles“, NPR with the Center for Public Integrity for “Seeking justice in campus rapes“, and NPR with ProPublica for “Brain wars: How the military is failing its wounded“.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and WLRN reined honourable mentions.
Set up by Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1995, the award programme is open to teams with winning teams receiving a $5,000 cash prize.
Tags: Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, dart awards, NPR, USA
Never be the first to mention a figure when negotiating freelance pay. That’s the advice of Joanne Mallon, a freelance journalist and specialist career coach for people in media who gave a talk at a National Union of Journalists meeting in Brighton last night.
“Avoid mentioning a rate even if you’re asked,” she said. “Tell them you don’t have a set rate and ask what their budget is.”
Her advice is to “use quite neutral language” and discuss money as an “object in the room”. Avoid asking “what are you going to pay me?”
If you are locked in stalemate in a conversation with a commissioning editor, give a range of rates, she advised. “Don’t be afraid to say no” if the pay is too low.
“Ask questions to establish yourself as a confident person,” she suggested.
Tipster: Sarah Marshall.
To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Tags: Freelance, Joanne Mallon, nuj, tips, tips of the day, Top tips for journalists
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