Over on Poynter, deputy editor of StarTribune.com Matt Thompson runs through a series of questions to ask when producing the headline for a story, from the seemingly obvious but still overlooked “is it accurate” and “does it work out of context”, to whether it would benefit from the inclusion of a number or an “implication”.
The app was released to the Android Market last week and, according to the market, has been downloaded between 10,000 and 50,000 times in one week and rated more than 230 times averaging 3.6 stars. A press spokesperson for the Economist was unable to confirm or release download figures.
The new app follows in the footsteps of the magazine’s iPhone and iPad apps, which have seen 2.4 million downloads since they were launched in November.
“We now have almost 700,000 unique devices accessing the apps each month,” Oscar Grut, managing director, digital editions said in a release.
As with all digital content, Android users will be able to read some articles for free but will need to pay for a subscription to receive all content. A weekly subscription allows users to receive the magazine by post, plus read content via the app and paywalled website, which is available from 9pm on a Thursday evening (5pm New York time), 12 hours before it is delivered through a subscriber’s letter box.
A single issue can be bought via the app for £3.99. The magazine cover price is £4.
Once downloaded, issues are stored on the user’s device and can be read when not connected to the internet. Every issue also includes a full audio edition.
The Android app, which operates on all Android phones and small and medium tablets running OS 2.x, was built by TigerSpike, which built iPad apps for the Economist, the Telegraph and Time Out.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we are recommending journalists to follow online too. Recommended journalists can be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Data gets its own social network today (2 August), with the launch of BuzzData, which its CEO describes as “a cross between Wikipedia for data and Flickr for data”.
BuzzData is due to launch in public beta later when Canada, where the start-up is based, wakes up.
It launched in private beta last week to allow a few of us to test it out.
What is BuzzData?
BuzzData is a “social network for people who work with data”, CEO Mark Opausky told Journalism.co.uk.
Users can upload data, data visualisations, articles and any background documentation on a topic or story. Other BuzzData users can then follow your data, comment on it, download it and clone it.
Members of the Toronto-based team hope the platform will be a space where data journalists come together with researchers and policy makers in order to innovate.
They have thought about who could potentially use the social network and believe there are around 15 million people who deal with statistics – whether that data be around sport, climate change and social inequalities – and who are “interested in seeing the data and the conversation that goes on around certain pieces of data”, Opausky said.
We are a specialised facility for people who wish to exchange data with each other, share data, talk about it, converse on it, clone it, change it, merge it and mash it up with other data to see what kind of innovative things may happen.
BuzzData does not allow you to create data visualisations or upload them in a way which makes beautiful graphics immediately visible. That is what recently-launched tool Visual.ly does.
How is BuzzData of use to journalists?
BuzzData allows you to share data either publicly or within a closed network.
Indeed, a data reporter from Telegraph.co.uk has requested access to see if BuzzData could work for the newspaper as a data-publishing platform, according to a member of BuzzData’s team.
Opausky explained that journalists can work by “participating in a data conversation and by initiating one” and gave an example of how journalism can be developed through the sharing of data.
It allows the story to live on and in some cases spin out other more interesting stories. The journalists themselves never know where this data is going to go and what someone on the other side of the world might do with it.
Why does data need a social network?
Asked what sparked the idea of BuzzData, which has secured in excess of $1 million funding from angels investors, Opausky explained that it was down to a need for such a tool by Peter Forde, who is chief technology officer.
He had spent many years studying the data problem and he was frustrated that there wasn’t some open platform where people could work together and share this stuff and he had a nagging suspicion that there was a lot of innovation not happening because information was siloed.
Going deeper than that, we recognised that data itself isn’t particularly useful until you can put it into context, until you can wrap it around a topic or apply it to an issue or give it a cause. And then even when you have context the best, at that point, you have is information and it doesn’t become knowledge until you add people to it. So his big idea was let’s take data, let’s add context and lets help wrap communities of people round this thing and that’s where innovation happens.
You can sign up for BuzzData at this link. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.
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Announcing the launch of an internal review of editorial controls and practices last week, Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Daily Mirror, was keen to stress that the review was not connected to recent phone-hacking allegations levelled against its tabloid.
The publisher issued a statement in response to the claims that the Mirror was implicated in the use of the so-called dark arts, calling them “totally unsubstantiated”.
But allegations concerning the paper have since mounted. Lawyer Mark Lewis, who has represented a number of celebrities in phone-hacking suits against News International, said in yesterday’s Sunday Times that the Mirror is facing “about three or four cases which will start within the next few weeks”.
Another report, in the Independent on Sunday, claims that “top investors” in Trinity Mirror, undoubtedly concerned by the steep share-price drop the company saw last week, “want to know more” and have quizzed chief executive Sly Bailey.
Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who was fired by Bailey in 2004, has come under scrutiny as the spotlight shifts from News International to Trinity Mirror, although he denies any knowledge of criminality at the Mirror during his time there. Conservative MP Louise Mensch was forced to apologise to Morgan in parliament last week, after incorrectly stating he had admitted being aware of phone hacking at the tabloid.
Citing evidence collected by the Information Commissioner’s Operation Motorman report, blogger Guido Fawkes has alleged that Morgan signed off on £442,000-worth of invoices submitted to the paper by a private detective. It is important to note, however, that the use of a private detective does not necessarily involve any criminality.
According to a report in yesterday’s (31 July) Sunday Telegraph, Trinity Mirror is planning to increase its cost-cutting target for the year from £15 million to £25 million, triggering further job losses.
The company is due to publish its annual financial results on 11 August.
If you are trying to nail that all important 100 words per minute at Teeline or if your shorthand is a bit rusty and you are in need of a refresher, there is a handy iTunes podcast feed called Machine Speed Shorthand to help.
You can search for “Teeline” in iTunes and download podcasts with scripts read at various speeds so that you can practice using your iPhone, iPod, iPad or other mp3 player while on the train when you find yourself with a spare few minutes.
The podcasts appear to have stopped being produced and the quality of the recordings is not great but they still provide a handy free resource for those learning Teeline.
Adobe has launched the first HTML5 editing tool: Adobe Edge. The new software allows designers to create animations for news sites using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript rather than Flash.
Unlike animations built in Flash, Edge moving graphics can be viewed on Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
Edge Preview is now available as a free download for both Mac and PC while Adobe encourages and gathers feedback.
Edge Preview 1 focuses primarily on animation and motion, with upcoming previews featuring additional creative capabilities and functionality.
Adobe states that Edge is designed for evaluation purposes only.
We do not recommended that this release be used on production systems or for any mission-critical work.
Even those without previous experience of creating animations can have a go at importing pictures and graphics, adding text and drawing simple shapes, and then add them to the timeline and try out key framing and transitions.
Users can then add the animation to news stories. Adobe explains how this is done.
Edge stores all of its animation in a separate JavaScript file that cleanly distinguishes the original HTML from Edge’s animation code. Edge makes minimal, non-intrusive changes to the HTML code to reference the JavaScript and CSS files it creates.
BBC journalists in Brighton, hometown of Journalism.co.uk, are taking part in today’s nationwide strikes at the corporation over compulsory redundancies. Staff at BBC Radio Sussex formed a picket outside the station’s offices on Queen’s Road this morning (1 August) from 4am, leaving management to find non-union staff to present the station’s programmes.
The mid-morning show, which airs from 9am-12pm, was produced at the Sussex offices by stand-ins and broadcast simultaneously by BBC Kent Radio.
There are no compulsory redundancies proposed at BBC Sussex, but Paul Siegert, the NUJ rep for the region, told Journalism.co.uk this morning he feared that the implementation of BBC’s Delivering Quality First Strategy could lead to cuts at the station.
“We know that there is a thing that BBC management are looking at at the moment called DQF, which we call Destroying Quality Forever, which is going to mean that there will be 20 per cent cuts across the BBC, and so we are expecting that there will be job cuts in places like this if we don’t take action now.”
Danielle Glavin, Siegert’s deputy at the Sussex chapel and West Sussex reporter for the station, said: “We are just trying to protect the BBC, otherwise it will be desolated”.
John Lees, the station’s sports correspondent, was outside the BBC Sussex building at 4am this morning to begin the picket, about the time he would arrive for work. His part of the show was presented by another member of staff this morning. He said that no union members had crossed the picket line in Sussex, and that the staff were “standing firm” in today’s strike and in the indefinite work to rule beginning tomorrow.
“Either you’re an NUJ member or you’re not, and if you are you’ve got to support to strike. And we do.”
Also among the picketers was Kathy Caton, a World Service employee on a year’s attachment in Sussex. Caton is among those to have already been made compulsorily redundant, and would have been forced out of the BBC last month if she had still been working out of the World Service offices at Bush House, London. Because of her attachment to BBC Sussex, she has a stay of execution until next June.
She told Journalism.co.uk that there is “simply no fat to cut away” at the local station.
“Everything is done on such a tight ship, and to achieve the cuts that the BBC has planned means losing jobs, losing services and losing programmes.
“But there’s no slack here, people aren’t sitting around eating foie gras and swilling it down with champagne. It’s a tight ship.”
Caton will see out her attachment in Sussex until June next year, and then join the other World Service staff forced out by the cutbacks. The BBC intends to make 100 staff compulsorily redundant, out of a total of 387 job cuts across the World Service and BBC Monitoring.
She praised the World Service as “one of the finest things that the BBC is involved in”.
“What it produces versus its annual cost is extraordinary. To kill it off so fundamentally is something future generations will look back on and despair.”
The BBC has defended the need to make compulsory redundancies in order to achieve the savings set out by last year’s comprehensive spending review. Lucy Adams, the corporation’s director of business operations, said in a message to staff today that the corporation could not agree to the union’s demands for no compulsory redundancies.
“Following the cuts in central Government grants to the World Service and BBC Monitoring we have had to close 387 posts, meaning that regrettably there are nearly 100 staff who as a result are facing compulsory redundancy. We have been working with all these affected staff to ensure that they have opportunities for redeployment and retraining but we cannot and will not give preferential treatment to individuals depending on their union status.
“We hope the NUJ will realise that these issues are best solved at a local level, and a national strike that penalises all our audiences is not in the interests of their members, other BBC staff or licence fee payers.”
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we are recommending journalists to follow online too. Recommended journalists can be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
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