#Followjourn @michelleminkoff /journalist

Kelvin MacKenzie: Online makes mockery of super injunctions

May 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Broadcasting, Editors' pick, Legal

Technology is “making fools” of high court judgements in relation to injunctions, according to former editor of the Sun Kelvin Mackenzie.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Today on Saturday, reflecting on Andrew Marr’s revelation last week that he had taken out a super-injunction to protect his family’s privacy, Mackenzie said there should not be any such protections afforded.

I am in favour of free speech. We get ourselves in a shocking situation now where there’s a sort of two-track society. There’s those of us who know what the allegations are and all the names of all the famous people, which are basically media folk, and there are the rest of the public who are denied of knowing.

He added that the “explosion” of the online world means allegations are instead just being published on sites based outside the US.

Allegedly intelligent high court judges … have absolutely no common sense on this issue or an understanding of how technology is making fools of their judgements.

Also speaking on the show was Desmond Browne QC, a member of the special committee set up by Lord Neuberger to examine the use of media injunctions by the courts.

I think there’s a substantial difference between someone who knows the name being able to go on Wikipedia, seeing that there has been a redaction and making a conclusion as a result, and something being plastered all over the front page of the Sun or the Daily Mail and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the courts to simply give up in the face of something that may be accessible on the web.

On Sunday the Observer published a debate between Max Mosley, the former chief of Formula One who previously won damages of £60,000 from the News of the World for breach of privacy, and John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship, on the very issue of super-injunctions.

Mosley is currently trying to get the UK law changed in favour of “prior notification” before a newspaper publishes allegations about an individual. Speaking in the debate Kampfner claimed that if Mosley’s law succeeds “it will set back the cause of free speech by decades”.

Read the full debate here…

Tags: BBC, Desmond Browne, injunctions, Kelvin MacKenzie, privacy, privacy law

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – serving local communities online

May 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Joel Gunter in Hyperlocal, Top tips for journalists

AOL’s hyperlocal news initiative Patch has come in for a bit of criticism in its time, but the 10,000 Words blog takes a look at what Patch is doing right in terms of serving its communities.

The list of five examples includes transparency of editors, accessibility for news tips, and topic-specific email notifications.

The Patch network, which now has more than 500 sites in 20 different states in the US, set about rampant expansion toward the end of 2010, and announced PatchU, a partnership with US journalism schools.

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

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

Tags: communities, Hyperlocal, journalism tips, local communities, tip

Wannabe Hacks go in search of 50 best journalism placements

May 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Joel Gunter in Awards, Editors' pick, Training

Work experience has caused a bit of a stir in the nationals recently, what with Clegg and Cameron slugging out over social mobility. In an industry like the media, controversy over its almost mandatory unpaid placements is never far away.

But bloggers Wannabe Hacks have taken a step back from the debates about how to solve a problem like work experience to ask: What are the 50 best journalism placements?

The Wannabe Hacks – who have “all done reams of work experience themselves” – will be asking aspiring journalists to nominate their best placement in no more than 40 words.

They can be paid or unpaid, and contributors are asked to include the publication name and section if applicable.

Nominations can be sent to Ben Whitelaw on top50@wannbehacks.co.uk. The deadline is Friday, 27 May at 5pm.

I’m sure there is something else going on that day too…

Tags: placements, Training, wannabe hacks, work experience

#Followjourn @smcoates – Stephen Coates/journalist

May 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Booker in Recommended journalists

Who? Stephen Coates

Where? Stephen is the news editor for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Jakata where he manages a team of reporters and photographers covering Indonesia and East Timor.

Twitter? @smcoates

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, Stephen Coates

paidContent: Managing editor of Huffington Post Media Group leaving for Yahoo

May 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Editors' pick, Jobs, Online Journalism

Managing editor of the Huffington Post Media Group Jai Singh, is leaving for a role as Yahoo Media Network editor in chief, paidContent reports.

At Yahoo, he will be responsible for increasing original content and performance across all platforms—and for all of YMN’s leading brands, not only Yahoo News.

Tags: Huffington Post, Jai Singh, Jobs, online news, Yahoo

Ten things every journalist should know about data

May 3rd, 2011 | 1 Comment | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Data, Editors' pick, Handy tools and technology, Journalism, Multimedia, Online Journalism

Every journalist needs to know about data. It is not just the preserve of the investigative journalist but can – and should – be used by reporters writing for local papers, magazines, the consumer and trade press and for online publications.

Think about crime statistics, government spending, bin collections, hospital infections and missing kittens and tell me data journalism is not relevant to your title.

If you think you need to be a hacker as well as a hack then you are wrong. Although data journalism combines journalism, research, statistics and programming, you may dabble but you do not need to know much maths or code to get started. It can be as simple as copying and pasting data from an Excel spreadsheet.

You can find out more about getting started and trying your hand at complex data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, on 27 May. More details about the event are here and you can order tickets, which cost £156 including VAT, by clicking here.

Here are 10 reasons to give data a go.

1. Everybody loves a list. Did you click on this post as you wanted an easy-to-read list rather than an involved article?

2. Everybody loves a map. Try Quantum GIS (QGIS), a free, open source tool, or OpenHeatMap, a fantastic, east-to-use tool as long as your data is categorised by country, local authority, constituency, region or county.

3. Tools bring data to life. Applications such as ManyEyes and Yahoo Pipes mash data and turn complex numbers and datasets into easy to read visualisations that work well both online and in print. Try this how to guide to Yahoo Pipes to get you started. Here are 22 data visualisation tools from Computer World.

4. Data may need cleaning up. Try using clean up tools like Scraperwiki, which helps non-technical journalists copy a few lines of code to turn a document such as pdf into a number-friendly file like a csv, and Google Refine, which Paul Bradshaw has written some useful posts on over on the Online Journalism Blog.

5. Data of all sorts is increasingly available. The open data movement across the UK is resulting in an increase in the release of data. The possibilities are huge, says Paul Bradshaw on the Guardian’s Datablog. January 2010, saw the launch of data.gov.uk, a fantastic resource for searching for datasets.

6. Data journalism can answer questions. A good place to start in data journalism is to ask a question and answer it by gathering data. Numbers work well. One option is to submit a Freedom of Information request to ask for the numbers. It helps if you ask for a csv file.

7. You can use the crowd. Crowdsourcing by asking a question on Twitter or using a site like Help Me Investigate, an open source tool for people can use to collaborate to investigate questions in the public interest.

8. Data can be personal to every reader. DocumentCloud can highlight and annotate documents to help readers see what is important and learn a document’s back story.

9. “Data journalism is not always presenting the data as journalism. It’s also finding the journalism within the data,” Jay Rosen said in relation to this article on Poynter on how two journalists from the Las Vegas Sun spent two years looking at 2.9 million documents to find out what “what’s right, and wrong, about our local health care delivery system”. The result was that the journalists exposed thousands of preventable medical mistakes in Las Vegas hospitals. The Nevada legislature responded with six pieces of legislation.

10. “Data ethics is just as important as ethics in journalism, in fact they are one in the same,” according to this post on Open Data Wire. Consider the BBC’s FoI request which showed a 43 per cent rise in GPs signing prescriptions for antidepressants and the ethics of unquestioningly relating this to the recession. Ben Goldacre has highlighted the problems with seeing patterns in data.

This is a cross post originally published on the news:rewired website. You can get your tickets here.

A full agenda for news:rewired – noise to signal, is here. A list of more than 20 speakers is here.

Tags: computer world, Data journalism, Many Eyes, news:rewired, OpenHeatMap, QGIS, yahoo pipes

BBC calls on journalists to mark World Press Freedom Day

May 3rd, 2011 | 1 Comment | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Editors' pick, Press freedom and ethics

Today is World Press Freedom Day. It comes at a time when news organisations and freelance journalists working to report on uprisings in the Arab world have battled, and are still battling, restrictions on their ability to do their job.

In Egypt we heard of news bureaux being shut down during the protests in the country, in Libya foreign journalists told of ‘days of brutality’ in detention while two Western journalists were killed while trying to cover the conflict. And beyond the uprisings, across the world, there are daily reports of journalists, both local and foreign, being prevented from carrying out their work to report on the events around them, through legal action, technological blackouts or violence and intimidation.

Journalists killed around the world in 2010. Infographic supplied by World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers

So today has been marked as a day to show support for the journalists fighting for a free press and to remember those who died doing so. The BBC reports that “hundreds, if not thousands” of events are being held across the world today. For its part director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks has called for a minute’s silence at 11am “to mark the sacrifices made by journalists in the name of press freedom, and to honour those who have been killed”.

Some might see this as just a gesture, which will surely not be observed by all. But the turmoil, anguish and the death toll from the Arab Spring revolts and revolutions have brought home as rarely before how critical the role of journalists is, in not just doing a job, but reporting on events which decide the fate of nations.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is providing a range of material including interviews, infographics and cartoons, for news outlets to use to highlight the meaning of the day.

Tags: BBC, press freedom, WAN-IFRA