Who? Mark Prigg
Where? Mark is science and technology editor at the Evening Standard.
Twitter? @markprigg
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, Mark Prigg
Tags: deportation, james fallah-williams, nuj
Online survey tool QuickSurvey has relaunched after a full makeover.
The tool, developed by market research firm Toluna, offers news organisations the opportunity to carry out market research using an online community of people who are ready and willing to respond.
It has obvious uses for businesses, including media organisations, and potential for PRs, but our review of the software struggled to see how it can assist journalists.
Testing out QuickSurvey
I decided to create a sample survey to test out the technology by asking QuickSurvey to find out how often people buy a local newspaper, why they buy one, how often they read local news online and what they would like to see from their local newspaper. Within an hour I had received 250 responses at a cost of around £200.
Click here for the results of my example QuickSurvey on local newspapers. You can play around with the data, graphs and pie charts and see a long list of things people would like to see from their local newspaper.
How does QuickSurvey work?
When I started playing around with QuickSurvey I thought of surveying a hand-picked group of respondents. For example, I thought I could ask 20 news sites what percentage of their web hits came via Twitter, which had the potential to result in a news story.
QuickSurvey is not the best tool to use for this as it doesn’t allow you to enter figures as an answer, such as percentages. I soon realised that QuickSurvey’s main strength is the community of online respondents who willing to answer your questions.
You decide on how many people you want to complete the survey, what type of person (you could pick an all-male survey, for example) and, if carrying out a survey with your own respondents, you can ask them to include an email address (information which, like the research carried out, is yours to keep).
You can embed the active survey on your news site, email it to particular contacts or, if you want to use the Toluna community, you can allow it to be displayed on Toluna only.
If you are asking your own respondents to answer questions QuickSurvey is free, but if you ask the Toluna community you pre-pay for credits and are charged for the number of clicks from the community. One credit is deducted for every one person who answers one question.
I had 250 respondents answer four questions costing me 1,000 credits. A pay-as-you-go deal for 1,500 credits costs £240.
Results were returned in minutes and it was interesting to see people responding in real time. The company has a million poll rates a day globally and 2,000 responses can be gathering in eight to 12 hours so it offers a fast response to market research.
When your survey is completed, in less than an hour in my case, you can download reports, including word clouds of the answers.
The verdict: QuickSurvey is incredibly easy to use and within an hour you will have some very usable feedback and market research at a cost of around £200.
Not allowing people to respond using percentages was slight problem, as was not being able to select a very specific geographical area, like a newspaper’s distribution area. Another obvious problem is the respondents, who are all web savvy by nature, which skews results when asking a question about whether they read news online.
Is it of use to the news industry? No doubt there are uses in gathering data by using QuickSurvey.
Is it of use to journalists? Probably not, unless they have the money to pay for large surveys to provide research for a story.
Is it of use to PR professionals? Almost certainly. I can envisage a press release starting with the line: “A new survey shows 90 per cent of women think…”
Tips on creating a survey using QuickSurvey
Be short and relevant:
Keep answers simple:
Be clear:
Stay neutral and cautious:
Always test your survey:
Tags: Local newspapers, ONLINE survey
Ryan Giggs is the latest celebrity to take legal action over News of the World phone hacking, according to this article in the Guardian. The article states the footballer is suing NOTW parent company News Group Newspapers and private detective Glenn Mulcaire for breach privacy, claiming his mobile phone messages were intercepted by journalists.
It is understood that Giggs was visited by officers from the Metropolitan police in Manchester several weeks ago, before he was named as the footballer who took out an injunction against News Group Newspapers.
Separately, the Guardian can also reveal that Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News Group’s parent company News International, was shown evidence for the first time last week by the Metropolitan police which suggests she was also targeted by Mulcaire.
Earlier today former Conservative cabinet minister Norman Fowler called upon the government to hold an inquiry into the phone hacking scandal during questions in the House of Lords.
Tags: News of the World, phone hacking, privacy law, Rebekah Brooks, Ryan Giggs
New figures from comScore, which measure digital use, show that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Tumblr “reached new heights” in the US in May.
comScore’s blog on the “network effect” shows social networking accounts for almost 14 per cent of the time people spend online – or one in every six minutes.
The new stats show social blogging site Tumblr has grown by 166 per cent in the past year, reaching 10.7 million visitors in May, its first month surpassing the 10 million visitor mark.
A post states:
Today Facebook is the fourth largest US web property in audience size with 157.2 million visitors in May, representing its all-time high and a gain of 3.2 million visitors vs. the previous month. While other reports have been circulating that Facebook witnessed a pronounced user decline this month, comScore data shows quite a different story. Given that Facebook now reaches 73 per cent of the total US internet population each month, one thing we should anticipate is that the site’s audience cannot grow forever. The law of large numbers says that once a site has penetrated the majority of a market, each incremental user becomes that much more difficult to attract. So given its size, Facebook’s future US growth is likely to come more from increasing usage per visitor than its ability to attract new users in perpetuity. One impressive stat to note is that Facebook’s average US visitor engagement has grown from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year, so it appears to be succeeding in that regard.
The author states:
Upon the release of comScore’s May US data, I immediately noticed that it was not just a banner month for Facebook but also for several other leading players in the social networking category who also reached all-time US audience highs: Linkedin (33.4 million visitors), Twitter (27.0 million) and Tumblr (10.7 million).
Twitter also had a particularly strong month in May with 27 million US visitors, representing an increase of 13 percent in the past year. (Note: while much of Twitter’s usage occurs away from the Twitter.com site, past comScore research has indicated that approximately 85-90 per cent of Twitter users visit the website each month). Twitter’s success in May can likely be attributed in part to the exceptionally buzzworthy news story of Osama Bin Laden’s death, as well as ongoing discussion of the Royal Wedding.
Tags: Comscore, Facebook, LinkedIn, social media, Tumblr, Twitter
Speaking in the House of Lords on Tuesday, Lord Black of Brentwood, who is also executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, raised his concerns about Clause 13 of an education bill, which would introduce reporting restrictions on alleged teacher misconduct.
Addressing the House Lord Black said he feared he would be “a lone voice” in raising what he felt were “serious repercussions for freedom of expression and the rights of children”.
First, it is unprecedented because it gives to a particular group of professionals a right that no one else enjoys. Yes, it is appalling if a teacher is falsely accused of a crime-and I take to heart the comments of my noble friend Lady Perry – but that happens in other careers involving children, too. If this reaches the statute book, who really believes that the move towards greater secrecy in the justice system will stop there? We had a glimpse of that in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch. The GMC has already started a campaign arguing that doctors called before its disciplinary committee to answer charges of abusing a patient should not be identified. Interfering with the media’s ability to report in this way is therefore profoundly dangerous-the thin end of a wedge that will lead inexorably to much wider reporting restrictions that will undermine the long-held principle that, for justice to be effective, it must be open and transparent.
Those principles exist for good reason because not all criminal misconduct is prosecuted. Teachers accused rightly of assaults might never be charged by the police due to lack of evidence or because of failure to take a whistleblower seriously. A teacher might be dismissed from a school and, for whatever reason, the school and those involved want no publicity. Allowing him or her indefinite anonymity has frightening implications for the welfare of children. As I understand it, it would also be an offence to name a teacher accused of a crime even if he or she were identified at an inquest or in a civil court action. The media or a parent would have to apply to another court to lift the reporting restrictions, as would anyone who wanted to publish the findings of an official inquiry. In an open society, that cannot be right.
He closed by urging the Government “to think again”, and if they press ahead to amend the current bill to include the provision of a public interest defence and the exemption of courts and other statutory bodies from the automatic restrictions.
Hatip: The Newspaper Society
Tags: education bill, House of Lords, Lord Black, reporting restrictions, teacher anonymity
A pen that can upload handwritten notes to a computer while recording audio notes that play along side them? Now there’s a thought.
It has been around for a while – since 2007 – and has been updated regularly, the latest being Livescribe Connect, which means you can share notes, by clicking the pen on the page of a special notepad, via Facebook, Evernote, Google docs or email.
Could this be a way of sending shorthand notes back to a newsroom? You can certainly send shorthand notes back, but you will still need a computer to do so.
So how does the Livescribe pen work and how is it of use to journalists?
A media release explains how the pen works:
Livescribe smartpens digitally capture everything you hear and everything you write in your special Livescribe notebook, notepad or paper that you can print out yourself. To play back important information you simply tap anywhere on your handwritten notes in your Livescribe notebook, and you can replay exactly what you could hear when you wrote them.
Your written notes can then be reviewed on screen as well as on paper. When you plug your pen into your Mac or PC, the pen strokes and audio get transferred together to your Livescribe desktop. And they stay in sync. You can then click any part of the on screen pen strokes to play the audio from that moment.
“There is an app called MyScript that will convert your writing into text, which can be purchased as an extra feature. along with lots of other news apps,” UK spokesperson for the US company, Charlotte Priest, told Journalism.co.uk.
An easier way of understanding how the pen works is to watch the video:
The compatibility with Facebook, Evernote and Googledocs certainly sounds appealing but there are a few draw backs.
The pens are not yet wifi or 3G enabled so require docking and, therefore, the journalist needs to be near a computer; the pdf created requires the latest version of Adobe Reader, which many people will not have.
A free pdf reader is available in the App Store to allow iPad owners to view and hear notes on the device. Although notes are searchable, this is not the case with shorthand so the pen does not offer a new way to search pages of a shorthand book.
The Livescribe pen starts at £99 for a 2GB model which can store 200 hours of audio.
Tags: evernote, Facebook, Google Docs, livescribe smartpen
Northcliffe Media is to sell off a number of its regional titles to Staffordshire Newspapers, part of Iliffe News and Media Limited.
In March it was reported that Northcliffe Media’s new managing director, former Metro director Steve Auckland, was planning to launch a review of the division’s 115 regional newspapers.
Parent company the Daily Mail and General Trust had previously ruled out buying or launching any more local newspapers, but had said it was interested in any approaches for its regional newspaper division.
Titles affected by the latest announcement are from its Leek Post & Times Business, including the Leek Post & Times, Uttoxeter Post & Times, Moorlands Advertiser and South Cheshire Advertiser.
In a statement Northcliffe Media said the sale is subject to the appropriate legal consultation with the employees of the Post & Times.
The sales will give the publisher “a greater opportunity to concentrate on developing our Stoke portfolio”, a statement added.
No one from Staffordshire Newspapers was available to comment at the time of writing.
Tags: Daily Mail and General Trust, Iliffe News and Media Limited, Local newspapers, Northcliffe Media, regional, Staffordshire
Who? Padraig Reidy
Where? Padraig is the news editor at Index on Censorship.
Twitter? @mepadraigreidy
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, padraig reidy
MySociety, the organisation behind some of the biggest democracy projects in the UK, has today made public two reports which it commissioned to gain greater understanding of two of its sites – TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
As the site itself says: “We think transparency is a good thing for many reasons, but one of its rarely mentioned virtues is how valuable transparency can be for the people within the organisations which are transparent.”
And there have been some interesting discoveries. According to MySociety one of the reasons that both the sites were set up was to make representatives accessible to newcomers to the democratic process. So it was “heartening” to find, for example, that 60 per cent of visitors to TheyWorkForYou had never previously looked up who represents them, and two in five users of WriteToThem have never before contacted one of their political representatives, was a positive sign.
But, as you would expect with any properly neutral evaluation, it’s not all good news. Our sites aim to reach a wide range of people, but compared to the average British internet user, WriteToThem users are twice as likely to have a higher degree and a higher income. It also seems that users are disproportionately male, white, and over 35.
Tags: democracy, mySociety, Politics, research, transparency
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