#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – reporting tools shared at #jiconf

The Journalism Interactive conference took place at the University of Maryland in the US this weekend.

One of the people presenting was Amy Webb of Webbmedia, who also shared her tech trends at the Online News Association conference (#ONA11), held in Boston last month.

A post on Reportr.net lists Webb’s tips on the top technology trends for academics, which are also of interest to journalists.

One of Webb’s tips is to use Greplin, a search engine for your own private files which allows you to type in a keyword of phrase and find uses of that term in your personal accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. (Greplin was recommended by us as one of 10 incredibly useful browser add-ons for journalists.)

Webb also mentions Livescribe, a pen which plays back audio of an interview (which Journalism.co.uk has reported on in the past).

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Similar posts:

• Tool of the week for journalists – Greplin, to search your private files and profiles
• Ten incredibly useful browser add-ons for journalists
• #followjourn – @TomMcArthur/editor
• Bracknell News creates video campaign to raise cancer treatment fund
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 15-21 October

Reporters Without Borders urges Iraq authorities to reopen radio station

Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders has urged authorities in Iraq to reconsider the closure of radio station Al-Sada, reportedly the only independent broadcaster in the Al-Qadisiya province.

At the weekend RSF reported that the station was closed down because of music “contrary to local morality”, but that the local branch of the Iraqi journalists’ union had warned that the decision “violated freedom of the press as guaranteed by the constitution”.

Its representative stressed that such a move was unprecedented in Iraqi justice and warned of the dangers that it might present for the media industry.

Similar posts:

• Afghanistan government criticised for closing down TV station
• Jon Slattery: NUJ ‘out of date’ for new media journalists, says mag branch
• BECTU members apply to NUJ in order to join BBC strikes
• Denying press cards to citizen journalists a ‘disservice to news consumers’
• DailyFinance: US local TV stations to take on obituaries from local press

New York Times: Arab Spring reshapes market for TV news

The New York Times published an interesting article yesterday (30 October) on potential changes facing the Arab television news market, looking at the impact of both the Arab Spring and the impending influx of new providers, national and local.

As author Eric Pfanner writes, the area is “poised for a shot of new competition” with two 24-hour news channels in the pipeline: Alarab from media company Rotana, to be run in partnership with Bloomberg and Sky Arabia, to be launched by BSkyB in spring next year.

As well as this, following the uprisings across the Arab world, the industry may start to see more local media and new channels opening up, he adds.

One reason that news providers like Al Jazeera attracted such a large following was that they were beyond the control of authoritarian regimes in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where governments kept the local media on a tight leash.

Now that those regimes have fallen, the local news media are moving toward greater openness, and new channels providing news and commentary on current events have sprung up.

This could eventually undermine the audience for so-called pan-Arab channels beamed in from outside via satellite, analysts say.

Read more on how the Arab Spring is reshaping the market for TV news.

Similar posts:

• Nadim Hasbani: Arab audiences are not watching western-owned news stations
• Video: Freelance foreign correspondent discusses reporting from Yemen and Libya
• WAN: Arab Press Forum protests against travel restrictions
• Al Jazeera launches Twitter dashboard to track uprisings
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 22-28 October

Mashable: Five tools to better time your tweets

If you are trying to work out the best time to tweet about a news story and get maximum attention, it is worth making a note of the free applications listed in this Mashable post on five tools to help you work out the best time to send out tweets.

The post has been written by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, an application which enables you to schedule tweets.

The five tools are:

1. WhenToTweet

2. TweetStats

3. Tweriod

4. TweetReports

5. TweetWhen

Add your Twitter handle to the various websites and the five tools will provide an interesting insight and help in your planning of social media optimisation (SMO) – (although we are not convinced 8am GMT on a Saturday is really the best time for @journalismnews to tweet).

Similar posts:

• Tool of the week for journalists – WhenToTweet
• Mashable: How to work out the best time to post on your Facebook page
• Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets
• Nieman: New data on the Daily suggests social media decline
• How to embed tweets directly from the new Twitter

PolitiFact and Poynter team up to create the PolitiFact Lab

At the end of last week PolitiFact announced it had launched a partnership with the Poynter Institute to create the PolitiFact Lab: “an initiative that will oversee joint projects and educational programmes on fact-checking”.

According to a statement from PolitiFact the lab will promote best practice and carry out fact-checking research.

The partnership will be modelled after the success of joint programs that Poynter and PolitiFact created in 2010 for PolitiFact Florida, a unique partnership of the Times, the Miami Herald and other Florida newspapers. It was underwritten by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Collins Center for Public Policy and the Craigslist Charitable Fund.

Read more on how PolitiFact and the Poynter Institute have launched a partnership to create the PolitiFact Lab.

Similar posts:

• Knight News Challenge names community news project as winner
• HuffPost: Obama’s State of the Union address, now with real-time fact checking
• Nieman: Exploring a niche for non-niche fact-checking
• Politico: US local papers to syndicate fact-checking site PolitiFact
• PolitiFact wins National Press Foundation award

Guardian on using Gaddafi corpse images: ‘Complaints arrived within the hour’

The use of the image of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse in coverage of his death caused much controversy earlier this month, as newsrooms across the country made decisions about which images to use and with what prominence. At the time newspapers and broadcasters swiftly sought to explain the reasoning for their decisions to their audience, with the BBC’s Steve Herrmann issuing a statement to say the BBC News site would be “working on ways to ensure that we can give appropriate warnings on our website when we think images from the news are especially disturbing”.

And the debate continues, with the Guardian’s readers’ editor Chris Elliot yesterday questioning the way in which the newspaper had used the images of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse after it emerged he had been killed.

In a column published yesterday Elliot revealed that almost 60 readers wrote to him or the letters page to complain about the use of the images “as gratuitous, exploitative or triumphalist” while others posted criticisms online.

Elliot concludes that while he agreed with the decision to publish at the time, he is now “less convinced” about the manner in which they were used.

The scale of the photo on the newspaper front page of 21 October and prominent picture use on the website took us too close to appearing to revel in the killing rather than reporting it. And that is something that should feature in our deliberations the next time – and there will be a next time – such a situation arises.

Interestingly he added that in 2006, when the Guardian published images of Saddam Hussein after being hanged, it received more than 200 complaints.

However the Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade does not agree with Elliot, arguing that “it was a valid journalistic response to this most extraordinary of news stories to publish the picture and to publish it big on the front page”.

It was news – gruesome, grisly, ghastly (choose your own shock adjective) news – and the images told a story of brutality and mob chaos that could not be explained in words alone.

Similar posts:

• 2012 World Press Photo winners announced
• VisualEditors: Rocky Mountain News goes retro with final front page
• BBC trials News Radar project – how to see the ‘whole’ BBC news site
• Top 20 most clicked news stories on Facebook in 2011
• MediaGuardian: NY Times goes for front-page advertising

Independent launches site redesign and new iPad app

The Independent has today launched a revamp of its website, the same day as it released a new iPad app .

The site redesign follows a makeover of the layout of the print edition of the paper and a new masthead and also takes place in the same month the Independent launched a metered paywall outside the UK.

Martin King, editor of Independent.co.uk, explains the changes to the site in a post:

• We have introduced greater flexibility in our use of images. This not only means a homepage and channel pages that can better reflect the variance of our daily coverage, but also a more dynamic use of images in articles.
• There is a smoother and more flexible integration of video that better matches the YouTube and 24-hour TV world.
• There are clearer ways to express yourself – comment on an article, share it with your Facebook friends or Tweet your view about it.
• Meanwhile Jack Riley, our head of digital development, has devised some further advances. These include: a new tagging system for the site; dynamic pages for all of our writers; and a more intelligent automated system for related content. We’re also extending our use of Facebook’s Open Graph to include more topic pages and all writers. His article will follow shortly.

The most recently released ABC-audited web figures show Independent.co.uk had 14,675,273 unique browsers in September.

The Independent’s new iPad app is free for an initial trial period and will then charge users £19.99 a month for access to “premium” digital content from the Independent and Independent on Sunday.

This compares to £9.99 a month for the Guardian’s new iPad app, which provides content six days a week as it excludes the Observer; £9.99 for the Times iPad edition, again providing content six days a week; and £9.99 a month for the Telegraph iPad app which, like the Independent, provides content seven days a week.

Similar posts:

• iPad apps – Wired UK unveils iPad edition and Independent’s i reveals launch plans
• Wired gets ‘wired’ with Adobe for iPad edition
• paidContent UK: Mail Online on iPad next week
• Guardian iPad app downloaded nearly 150,000 times in first week
• Guardian launches Kindle edition and outlines new mobile plans

Seven tips on reporting overseas by the Summer Reporter

Dutch freelance journalist Gemma van der Kamp spent her summer travelling across Europe meeting journalists and “non-journalistic news producers” as part of a Summer Reporter project run by De Nieuwe Reporter (DNR). She shares her seven tips for backpack reporting.

Gemma's Summer Reporter kit

1. Travel third class or buy a bicycle. In the midst of curious locals who wonder what you are doing, you quickly get to know the country. Working on hard wooden benches in shaky trains might be uncomfortable; it is much more fun than feeling lonely in fancy single first class coupés. Riding a bicycle is even better.

2. If you work across Europe and travel by public transport, use the convenient journey planner from the German Railway Network . This online tool maps out how best to travel from the North of Denmark across Moldavia to Southern Italy and is strikingly accurate.

3. Sell your work internationally. If you work internationally and want your work translated in other languages or need video subtitles, have a look at Straker Translation. This online translation company has developed its own machine translation model, though uses human editors to make sure the translation is accurate.

4. Be patient. Adapt your concept of time and distance. An hour in the UK is equal to ten minutes in India. Agreeing on meeting up at 4pm, might turn out to become 8pm in some countries. A 60km trip that takes an hour in the UK can last a day in Ukraine. Take these factors into account when agreeing on deadlines for your work.

5. Pop up and be nosy-poky. To quickly find your way in a new country and to find good stories, get away from the computer and go out to talk to people. Ask people where the media outlets are based and where local journalists gather for drinks. Local journalists usually have a wide network and can easily introduce you to potentially interesting sources. Don’t put too much energy in trying to arrange meetings before your arrival. Simply pop up by knocking on doors.

6. Dare to be unprepared. If you have no idea whether you really have secured an interview, don’t worry. Dare to take the risk to travel for hours to the agreed meeting place, because you unconsciously keep your eyes open for a possible alternative story. The best stories often are the result of chance encounters.

7. If you live on a shoe string, try to spend nights at other people’s couches via the home stay network couchsurfing. It is the ideal way to get to know locals and it could open doors to a more permanent place to stay. When I lived in New Delhi, one couchsurf night resulted in a three months’ stay for a minute rent.

Similar posts:

• Twittering the Californian bush fires
• A Guardian hotel? Publisher says it is ‘exploring options’
• British Guild of Travel Writers’ competition for unpublished writers
• Is there life after a journalism course? The Coventry Class of 2009 – James Robinson
• #followjourn: @hackneye/freelance travel writer

The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 22-28 October

1. Newspaper sites see traffic drop across the board

2. WikiLeaks suspends publishing ‘to ensure future survival’

3. Future CEO Stevie Spring resigns following restructure

4. Cuttings.me, a new portfolio platform for freelance journalists

5. Tool of the week for journalists – Error Level Analysis, to test if a photo is a hoax

6. Reporting the Arab Spring: ‘These stories will go on and on’

7. IWMF honours four women for courageous journalism

8. News among most popular tablet uses, US report finds

9. BBC Trust launches impartiality review of Arab spring coverage

10. Storify gets a new look and promises ‘to revise the entire reader experience’

Similar posts:

• 2011 Rory Peck Awards open for entries
• New York Times: Arab Spring reshapes market for TV news
• Muslimah Media Watch: ‘Score’ for BBC with football story
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – know how to tweet via SMS
• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)

#jpod in depth: How some news outlets are going it alone in the world of WikiLeaks

In this week’s #jpod news editor Rachel McAthy looks at the issue of document leaks in light of WikiLeak’s announcement earlier this week that the “financial blockade” has forced it to temporarily suspend publishing operations. At the beginning of the year news outlets started to launch their own internal WikiLeaks-style platforms to enable anonymous submissions.

In this podcast we speak to the head of Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit Clayton Swisher about the broadcaster’s decision to set up the platform and how it is to re-launch in the ‘coming weeks’, and El Pais journalist Joseba Elola about why he values a relationship with WikiLeaks and the difficulties of going it alone.

Podcast: Download

You can also hear more about OpenLeaks (referred to in the podcast) in the below audio, in an interview with co-founder Daniel Domscheit-Berg who spoke to Journalism.co.uk at the World Editors Forum in Vienna earlier this month:

You can sign up to our iTunes podcast feed for future audio.

Similar posts:

• #media140 #jpod – Day one round-up with speaker interviews
• #media140 – El Pais writer Joseba Elola ‘witnessing history’ with WikiLeaks
• #jpod in depth: A look at threats to press freedom around the world
• #media140: Full coverage from media140 2011
• #jpod in depth: Huffington Post lands in the UK