The Guardian Awards for Digital Innovation open for entries

The Guardian has today (Monday, 24 October) launched its re-branded award scheme, with a focus of creative uses of technology.

The 2012 Guardian Awards for Digital Innovation has new categories including ‘best new website’, ‘tech guru of the year’ and the ‘best new app’.

Called the 2012 Megas, the scheme has adapted “to celebrate and recognise creative achievements and inspiring entrepreneurial spirit within the field of technology”, the Guardian said in a release.

The announcement said:

The 2012 Guardian Awards for Digital Innovation, which began in 2008 as the MediaGuardian Innovation Awards, will focus on cutting-edge digital accomplishments, in line with Guardian News & Media’s digital-first strategy, announced earlier this year. For the first time, one of the winners will get the rare opportunity to guest-edit the Guardian’s MediaGuardian website for a day.

Chair of the judging panel Dan Sabbagh, Guardian News & Media’s head of media & technology, said in the release:

These awards have championed a variety of digital innovations since 2008. Our past winners are testament to the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the UK’s digital scene, and with more free-to-enter categories than ever before, I’m looking forward to hearing about the wide range of inspiring projects that are out there. Offering one winner the opportunity to guest edit the MediaGuardian website is a new move for us, and I’m sure this will result in some fascinating issues being covered on our website once the winners are announced next year.

The judging panel for the awards includes Wired editor-at-large Ben Hammersley and TV presenter Aleks Krotoski.

The closing date for applications is 5pm on Friday, 20 January. The winners will be announced in March 2012 at a presentation ceremony in London.

The new categories are:

Free to enter

• Tech guru of the year (sponsored by Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network)
• Young innovator of the year (sponsored by Wired)
• Best startup business (sponsored by Taylor Wessing)
• Best startup leader / CEO

£200 per entry

• Best new website
• Best new app
• Best digital campaign – communications, marketing & PR
• Best use of technology for social change

There is more information at Guardian.co.uk/megas, including a list of previous winners.

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Phone hacking: Follow Les Hinton’s evidence to MPs

Former News International and Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton is giving evidence to MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee this afternoon.

You can follow his appearance, which he is making via video link from New York, here on Parliament TV.

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 15-21 October

1. NYT.com: ‘incredibly surprising’ growth in unique users

2. Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month

3. How to: manage reader comments as a journalist

4. How to get involved with the Guardian’s latest venture into hyperlocal

5. Ten incredibly useful browser add-ons for journalists

6. Times and Sunday Times to cut up to 150 editorial posts

7. Hillsborough families call on Sun to name sources

8. Twitter, journalists and court coverage: where to draw the line?

9. Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing

10. Times libel appeal reaches Supreme Court

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#jpod: How video games can tell news stories

Creating a video game to tell a news story can enhance a reader’s understanding of the complexity of the issues involved. When 33 Chilean miners were trapped underground just over a year ago the world’s media told the story and in this Los 33 game, created by Root 33, the online viewer has the task of rescuing each miner and gets to understand the lengthy rescue process.

In this week’s #jpod, technology correspondent Sarah Marshall speaks to Bobby Schweizer, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play; Shannon Perkins, editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com, who created Cutthroat Capitalism, a game where the player becomes a Somali pirate; and Scott Klein, editor of news applications at ProPublica.

The podcast hears about notable newsgames, discusses when a story warrants a game, and how much money is needed to create one.

Schweizer talks about his latest project, the Cartoonist, which aims to enable journalists to create their own online newsgames.

Podcast: Download

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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Follow the Guardian Hack Day 2011

Yesterday and today, staff at the Guardian have been having a get together that sums up the kind of thing the organisation is really good at.

The Guardian Hack Day is about getting its developers in a room and getting them to build stuff, with helpful advice from staff from editorial, commercial, or anywhere I think.

Information architect Martin Belam probably describes it better:

I suppose we should explain a bit more about what a “hack day” is at the Guardian. Essentially for two working days our tech team puts aside their normal work, and gets to work on a project of their own choosing. Sometimes they will work as teams, sometimes as individuals. (And sometimes I think they have been secretly coding the things for months in advance anyway). Other people, like the design and UX team, and commercial & editorial staff, are also encouraged to take part if they can spare the time.

This is certainly not the first hack day, but they are liveblogging this one, and it makes for interesting reading. It is coming to a close now, I got sidetracked away from posting something about it yesterday, but you can still follow the day two liveblog here, and you can look back on the goings on from yesterday here.

A nice hack from someone outside the Guardian also appeared today: http://latertodayguardian.appspot.com/

Created by Chris Thorpe, who used to work for the Guardian’s Open API Platform team, it uses a Guardian JSON feed to turn the news organisation’s new experimental open newslist into a great looking column-based page, with links to reporters’ Twitter accounts and a Guardian API search to try and match the newslist to published stories.

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Guardian iPad app downloaded nearly 150,000 times in first week

The Guardian’s new iPad app has been downloaded 145,880 times since it was launched last Thursday (13 October), with more than a third of those from outside the UK.

The app is free for the first three months due to a sponsorship deal with Channel 4, after which it will cost £9.99 per month.

The Guardian also today revealed that just over a million Facebook users have installed the Guardian’s Facebook app, which was released exactly a month ago.

Since its launch at the beginning of the year, the Guardian’s iPhone app has been downloaded over half a million times; its Android app, which was launched last month, has been downloaded over a quarter of a million times.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said in a statement:

Since launching last week, the new Guardian iPad edition has already been downloaded over 145,000 times. This number of downloads in a week is a fantastic achievement, and shows the appetite among our readers to access our content in new, digital ways. This is our most successful app launch to date, and an important milestone as we continue to evolve into a digital-first news organisation.

Statistics breakdown

iPad app downloads
Total: 145,880
UK: 85,018
US: 29,082
Res of the wold: 31,780

Guardian iPhone app
Since launching in January this year, the app has been downloaded over 570,000 times, with nearly 100,000 users going on to take out subscriptions.

Guardian Android app
This launched last month, on 7 September, and since then the app – which is free and ad-funded – has been downloaded over 250,000 times.

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#followjourn – @AlanFisher Alan Fisher/journalist

Who? Alan Fisher

Where? Alan is senior correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

Twitter? @AlanFisher

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips, 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 rachel at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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Ten incredibly useful browser add-ons for journalists

Browser extensions for Google Chrome, add-ons for Firefox and Safari extensions can be very powerful and incredibly useful to journalists.

Here is a list of some that can help you find and search, verify sources and speed up picture annotation.

Some of the extensions in this list are our tips and the rest are suggestions submitted to us after we sent out a tweet asking for nominations.

1. HoverMe (Chrome)

Verifying Twitter sources can be testing. When this browser extension for Chrome is installed and you hover over a Twitter profile photograph, it will enable you to see what other online accounts that user has and although not fool-proof, will give you some idea of whether they are a real person with LinkedIn, YouTube and Delicious accounts and, helpfully, a Klout score, which measures online influence.

The downside is you have to use Twitter’s own website rather than a platform such as TweetDeck and it does depend on users using the same email address to link their various profiles.

2. Awesome Screenshot (Chrome and Firefox)

An incredibly useful Chrome and Firefox extension for online journalists who spend time annotating screengrabs in Photoshop and other graphics packages.

First you click the button on your browser to take a screen shot and then you can crop the image, circle or blur an area and save it.

3. Greplin (Chrome)

Greplin is an incredibly useful tool and has a handy browser extension which allows you to search your own private files from Chrome. It’s like Google for your email, calendar, Dropbox and Delicious. After you have signed up to Greplin and added the extension you can then type ‘g’ in the url field and search for a keyword or phrase and find references to it from your Gmail, Facebook and Dropbox accounts, plus in several other platforms.

4. Delicious (Firefox, Chrome, Safari)

Delicious has various add-ons to help users of the bookmarking platform. You can post a URL directly to Delicious and see your tags to allow you to easily find archived bookmarks.

Tipster: @the_claus

5. British English Dictionary (Firefox)

If your CMS, such as WordPress, has a default US spelling setting, this is one way of switching it to British English. Install the add-on, select several rows of text, right-click and change the language.

6. Firebug (Firefox)

This is a handy extension for journalists to “edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page”. By clicking on the installed add-on, you will be given a screen which shows you the code. Handy for spotting bugs.

7. Zotero (Chrome and Safari)

Zotero is a tool to help you collect, organise, cite, and share your research sources. Click on the add-on and you can file any web page into your Zotero library and manually add additional notes and information. There is a video here that explains how Zotero works.

Tipster: @onlinejourno

8. ScribeFire (Chrome and Safari)

ScribeFire allows you to blog from your browser, without opening the CMS or platform. You can post to platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, and LiveJournal.

You can edit and update existing posts and also schedule posts for the future (if your blog allows that). You can also delete posts, save drafts, tag, categorize and upload images, and post to multiple blogs at once.

Tipster: @onlinejourno

9. WikiTrust (Safari and Firefox)

Journalism students are no-doubt told never to rely on information form Wikipedia. This handy add-on goes some way to help you understand the online reputation of authors and content, however. Click the installed tab (within Wikipedia) and the intensity of the colour highlighting the text will tell you the degree to which it has been revised by high-reputation authors.

An orange background indicates new, unrevised, text, white is for text that has been revised by many reputed authors.

Tipster: @the_claus

10. Greasemonkey (Firefox)

This Firefox add-on allows you to  “customise the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript”. For example, use other people’s code to do things like remove the Facebook side ticker.

Journalist Mary Hamilton, who recommended the add-on said she uses it to automate really simple tasks and auto-refresh web pages.

Tipster: @newsmary

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Twitter, journalists and court coverage: where to draw the line?

There was an interesting discussion going on at Cardiff University today, as Darren Waters, a social media producer in the BBC Wales newsroom, joined students for a discussion on community which, according to the hashtag on Twitter (#cjscomm), included a topical discussion on the issue of immediacy in online reporting.

Recent events, specifically in relation to court coverage, have demonstrated the issues this can raise for journalists and news outlets working in the online environment, with the pressure and power of immediate publication at their fingertips. Earlier this month several news outlets mistakenly reported that Amanda Knox’s conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher had been upheld, when the judge was in fact returning a guilty verdict for a charge of slander. The murder conviction was overturned, but once the word “guilty” had been heard several news organisations quickly sent out their stories and the Guardian made the same mistake on its liveblog.

Another specific challenge related to this is the delivery and sharing of breaking news on platforms such as Twitter, where journalists face making important decisions of when to share certain information and when to hold back.

In December last year England and Wales’ most senior judge published new guidelines which gave journalists greater freedom to file live reports and Twitter updates from court. As I write this a number of journalists are covering the Vincent Tabak trial live, with the issue of what a journalist should and shouldn’t report from a court case (and the wider approach to using Twitter) being simultaneously highlighted in the Cardiff University discussion.

Follow the hashtag to read more from the debate and advice offered by Waters. And feel free to tell us what you think. Where should the line be drawn in court reporting, especially during the hearing of detailed evidence, and what considerations should journalists make before pressing the button to submit? Share your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter @journalismnews.

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Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month

The Guardian expects this weekend will see the millionth person install its new Facebook app, exactly a month since it was launched.

The app, which allows Facebook users to see what their friends are reading after a single sign-in when they agree to share their viewing habits, was launched on 22 September at the London leg of Facebook’s F8 conference.

Content sales and marketing director at the Guardian Chris Lawson gave the prediction at the newspaper’s Media Guardian Changing Advertising Summit 2011, which is underway in London.

Less than two weeks after launch, on 5 October, the Guardian reported 129,000 app installs generating over 600,000 story reads.

That figure is likely to grow significantly when the Guardian release up-to-date statistics, which it plans to do in the next few days.

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