Journalisted Weekly: Labour Conference, Dr Conrad Murray and BAE

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

Labour Conference, Dr Conrad Murray and BAE

• The Labour Party Conference in Liverpool was the most covered story this week
• Trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor and job losses at BAE systems covered lots
• Stirling Prize, New Zealand rugby crisis and Assange autobiography covered little

Covered lots

• Labour party activists converge on Liverpool for the annual Party Conference, 308 articles (including Ed Miliband’s keynote speech, 270 articles; Ed Balls’ speech, 119 articles; mentions of the phrase ‘predators and producers’, 48 articles; and fame following a speech by young party member Rory Weal, 41 articles)
• Conrad Murray, former personal doctor to Michael Jackson, on trial for involuntary manslaughter, 121 articles
• BAE Systems announces nearly 3,000 jobs to be lost due to defence cuts, 115 articles

Covered little

• Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton, wins the RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture, 8 articles
• New Zealand threaten to pull out of 2015 Rugby World Cup over costs, 7 articles
• Julian Assange’s Unauthorised Autobiography reviewed, 7 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

• Ed Miliband: 497 articles (+140% on last week)
• David Cameron: 474 articles (+7% on last week)
• Tony Blair: 236 articles (+39% on last week)
• George Osborne: 240 articles (-4% on last week)
• Ed Balls: 182 articles (+77% on last week)
• Gordon Brown: 168 articles (+31% on last week)
• Nick Clegg: 125 articles (-58% on last week)
• William Hague: 110 articles (+86% on last week)
• Alex Salmond: 99 articles (+39% on last week)
• Yvette Cooper: 99 articles (+200% on last week)

Celebrity vs. serious

• Carlos Tevez causes controversy after apparently refusing to play against Bayern Munich, 87 articles, versus key Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki killed in Yemen, 62 articles
• Strictly Come Dancing begins new series, 80 articles, versus roof collapse at Kellingley Colliery kills miner, 44 articles
• Rihanna told off by farmer during video shoot in Northern Ireland, 38 articles, versus 1,000 Navy jobs to be cut in the UK, 32 articles
• Three England rugby players reprimanded after incident in bar, 13 articles, versus strikes and protests in Greece over austerity measures, 13 articles

Arab spring (countries & current leaders)

• Syria and President Assad: 50 articles (+138% on previous week)
• Libya’s National Transitional Council: 47 articles (-19% on previous week)
• Yemen and President Saleh: 37 articles (-33% on previous week)
• Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah: 37 articles (+61% on previous week)
• Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu: 17 articles (-83% on previous week)
• West Bank and President Abbas: 17 articles (-81% on previous week)
• Iran and President Ahmadinejad: 17 articles (-45% on previous week)
• Bahrain and King Al Khalifa: 14 articles (+250% on previous week)
• Gaza and Hamas: 6 articles (-82% on previous week)
• Qatar and Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani: 4 articles (+300% on previous week)
• Jordan and King Abdullah: 3 articles (unchanged on previous week)
• Egypt’s Military Council: 3 articles (+200% on previous week)
• Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan: 2 articles (-87% on previous week)

Who wrote a lot about… the ongoing debt crisis in Europe

• Hugo Duncan – 8 articles (Daily Mail)
• Ralph Atkins – 7 articles (Financial Times)
• Gary Parkinson – 6 articles (The Times)
• Jamie Grierson – 5 articles (The Independent)

Long form journalism

• 3,878 words: ‘Le Mans 24 Hour Moto 2011: Loneliness of the long-distance biker’ – Matt Kelly, The Daily Mirror, 29 September 2011
• 2,974 words: ‘Poet’s corner: The battle for TS Eliot’s village’ – John Walsh, The Independent, 1 October 2011
• 2,495 words: ‘Helmand is not meant to be like this’ – John Cantlie, BBC News, 1 October 2011

Journalists who have updated their profile

• Gethin Chamberlain is the South Asia correspondent at The Observer. He has previously held posts as foreign correspondent at the Sunday Telegraph, chief reporter at The Scotsman and as the Edinburgh bureau chief at the Daily Record. You can follow Gethin on Twitter: @newsandpics
• Julian Evans works freelance for Prospect, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent and The Traveller. He has also written for BBC Radio and BBC Four, and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of the West of England. He has written several books and recieved many awards for his work. Follow Julian on Twitter: @thejulianevans

Read about our campaign for the full exposure of phone hacking and other illegal forms of intrusion at the Hacked Off website

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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‘If this then that’: ten recipes for journalists

If this then that – or ifttt – is a tool that allows you to connect various other tools together to create rules or tasks. It allows you to connect 17 channels, including SMS, Facebook, WordPress and Dropbox, offering 1040 possible task combinations.

The most popular ‘recipe’, a task designed and shared by others, will give you an idea of how ifttt works. This recipe allows you to connect your Facebook and Dropbox accounts so that when someone tags you in a photo on Facebook, the photo will be added to your Dropbox folder (cloud storage allowing you to access your files on different devices).

Here are ten ifttt recipes for journalists:

1. When you receive an email from a key contact or your editor, you receive an SMS

You no doubt receive scores of emails but there are some senders that are more important to hear from than others. This recipe allows you to set up a key contact, such as a source or your editor, and receive a SMS whenever that person emails you.

2. When you post a link to Delicious, add to Dropbox

If you use Delicious to bookmark interesting stories, this recipe allows you to also save the links to Dropbox. For example, I am interested in new smartphone apps so have set up a connection so that any Delicious bookmark that I tag “app” is posted to a folder in my Dropbox account.

3. Post Google+ posts to your Facebook page

Google+ adds additional responsibility for anyone in the newsroom tasked with managing social media.

It is widely recognised that non-automated posts are best when it comes to Facebook and Google+. This recipe allows you to write a link post in Google+ and automatically post the link to your site’s Facebook page. You can also create a rule to post status updates.

To do this you need to set up an RSS feed of your Google+ account. Copy your Google+ ID, which is the long number in the URL of your Google+ profile, and paste it on the end of http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=. My Google+ feed is therefore http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=107031542976965456407, for example.

4. Create an Evernote every time you star an item in Google Reader

If you use Google Reader as your RSS feed reader and want a quick way of saving key articles to Evernote, this is a solution.

5. Post to Instapaper (or Read It Later) every time you star an article in Google Reader

If you use Instapaper to read articles later this is a quick way of posting from Google Reader.

6. Post a ‘favourite’ tweet (with links) to Instapaper (or Dropbox or Evernote)

When you come across a tweet with a link and want to save it for later you may well click star to make it a favourite. This recipe allows you to save those favourite tweets and post the linked articles to Instapaper. Alternatively, you can also set this up to save to Dropbox of Evernote.

7. Add favourite Flickr photos to Dropbox

If you post stories you write online, you may well use Flickr images with creative commons licences. Flickr allows you to indicate favourite images that you come across and may want to use at a later date. This recipe saves those images to Dropbox. Alternatively, you can set this up to save favourites to Evernote.

8. Send me an email (or SMS) to remind me about a daily meeting, weekly or monthly task.

If you have a daily or weekly meeting or task to carry out, ifttt can enable you to create reminder.

9. Send me an email (or SMS) every time a certain person tweets

Twitter is a great source for journalists but it is easy to miss a tweet from a key contact. Perhaps the key source is a person or company that only occasionally tweets and when they do you want to be alerted immediately. This recipe allows you to receive an email when an individual tweets. You can also set a rule to receive an SMS.

10. Send me an email every time a keyword is mentioned in an RSS feed

This is a recipe I suggested in a recent Journalism.co.uk tip of the day. It is a way you can set up an alert when a keyword is mentioned by a particular news provider.

If you are a journalist and have a favourite ifttt recipe, share it in the comments session below.

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Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web

Tool of the week: Topsy

What is it? A search engine and analytics for the social web

How is it of use to journalists? Topsy is a really handy search tool for monitoring what is being discussed on the social web.

Search for a keyword or phrase and you will be presented with news articles, tweets, videos and photos. Search results are returned visually, so you can see icons and avatars beside the source.

What is particlularly useful is the ability to see how frequently a term is being used. For example, a search for “Knox” will return Twitter mentions, articles and videos. You can also click on “experts” to see what recognised news providers have published.

A search for “phone hacking” returns results and also shows the number of times the keyword has been used in the last hour, day, week, month and all time. You can also get these results shown on a graph, create and email alert or set up an RSS feed from a keyword.

You can carry out advanced searches, enabling you to include or exclude additional terms, languages and set a date range or drill down and search for a keyword used by a particular Twitter user.

As a journalist you can not only use Topsy to help you locate sources and monitor rumours (such as team talk by football fans), you can use it to add colour to an article or feature.

For example, you can use Topsy to tell you that interest in the “Amanda Knox” case has been such that her name has been mentioned 516 mentions in the last hour (the search was carried out at 4.30pm on Monday, 3 October), 3,804 times in the past day and 16,000 times overall.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Avoiding common first-job mistakes

Poynter has some handy tips on avoiding some of the common mistakes made by journalists just starting out on their first job.

The CoveritLive session included questions on time management, learning about your beat, and bagging yourself a mentor or two.

Mentors come in several types. Some will tell you how the political landscape is laid out. Others will help you with your reporting Others with your writing. Think of establish a coaching staff or a board of directors for your career.

Full post at this link.

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You can now see how many readers are online with Google Analytics real-time reports

Google Analytics has launched real-time data, allowing news sites to see how many readers are online and gauge the success of individual tweets.

The development was announced on the Google blog last week and is being rolled out  over the coming weeks.

You can sign-up for early access using this form.

The Google blog illustrates how real-time can be used to monitor the impact of social media.

For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.

Meanwhile, Google is also launching a premium analytics account with additonal analysis and support for an annual fixed fee, according to this blog post which has more details.

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