#news2011: ProPublica model ‘not feasible’ as commercial venture, says editor-in-chief

UCLan project awarded £64,000 from Google to support ‘news entrepreneurs’

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Awards, Data

The University of Central Lancashire’s Journalist Leaders Programme has secured €75,000 (£64,000) of Google funding to support “news entrepreneurs” after being named as one of three winners of the International Press Institute’s News Innovation Contest.

The programme, founded by researcher, academic and consultant on newsroom and digital business innovation François Nel (pictured), will develop a project called Media and Digital Enterprise (MADE), to offer an “innovative training, mentoring and research programme”.

The funding awarded by IPI will be spent by the UCLan programme on working “to create sustainable news enterprises – whether for social or commercial purposes – by helping innovators”.

Nel told Journalism.co.uk MADE will “support the entire news ecosystem as we need innovation across the sector”.

He is now looking for people with entrepreneurial ideas who are interested in news innovation.

The other two winners of the contest are Internews Europe, a European non-profit organisation created in 1995 to help developing countries establish and strengthen independent media organisations to support freedom of expression and freedom of access to information, alongside the World Wide Web Foundation, a Swiss public charity founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.

In February Google announced it was awarding $2.7 million to the Vienna-based IPI for its contest.

There were round 300 applicants, reduced first to 74 and then to 26 before the three winners were selected by a panel of seven judges, including journalism professor and commentator Jeff Jarvis.

The winners of the total fund of $600,000 were announced yesterday; Nel heard this morning how much the MADE project is being allocated, telling Journalism.co.uk “it’s fantastic to have support for news innovations”.

Nel and others working on the Leaders Programme have been working with news organisations, including Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror and the Guardian Media Group, looking at digital processes and innovative business models.

MADE allows us to pull those strands together and work with directly with news entrepreneurs. And we’re really excited about the possibility of putting this to the test.

Nel explained that MADE will “deliver good skills for a whole range of news start-ups” and he is now “looking to work with individuals, groups and companies, who are interested in news innovation” to get involved.

The project will help develop new skills and test the business plans, offering bespoke support to those with entrepreneurial ideas.

We’re looking to support five good people and good ideas for at least three months so that we can give those ideas legs.

The project includes various partners that were part of the bid, including one to build content and one to build communities.

Developers at ScraperWiki will be working with the project to develop innovations in data journalism and build content. Another partner is Sarah Hartley who is now working on the Guardian’s social, local, mobile project n0tice, with this area of the project focusing on building communities.

MADE will also involve Nel’s colleagues at Northern Lights, an award-winning business incubation space at UCLan.

The project also has an international element, involving groups in Turkey, drawing on Nel’s connections in the country.

Nel explained why the funding and ongoing support from IPU is vital.

In the digital news media space the cyber world is littered with start ups. The corpses of news start ups are every here. What we really need to do is help news entrepreneurs stay up and that’s what we are trying to do here.

Tags: François Nel, google, ipi, Sarah Hartley, scraperwiki, UCLAN

Guardian’s Facebook app delivering 1m extra hits a day

November 30th, 2011 | 1 Comment | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Online Journalism, Social media and blogging, Traffic

The Guardian’s Facebook app is generating almost a million extra page impressions per day, according to figures released by the news outlet and by Facebook.

Two months on from its launch at Facebook’s f8 conference in London the app has been installed by over four million users.

The news outlet also believes that the app is engaging a younger audience, as over half (56.7 per cent) of the app’s users are 24 and under and 16.7 per cent are 17 and under.

Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group, said in a statement:

As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations

The Independent, the other UK-based news outlet to launch a Facebook app following f8 on 22 September, is reporting that it has more than one million monthly active users connecting their Facebook accounts.

The integration has bumped up older articles that have gone viral through social distribution, according to the Facebook post detailing the statistics.

The news organisation found that many of the “most shared” and “most viewed” stories on the site have been from the late 1990s, “a result of the increased social virility”.

The Guardian and Independent both took a different approach when building their Facebook appshe Guardian focused on the reading experience within Facebook, the shared reading experience for the Independent takes place on the news site.

Yahoo! News, which like the Independent integrated the app into its site, has reported that 10 million people are using the app, with Yahoo! News experiencing a 600 per cent increase in traffic coming from Facebook as a result.

People who connect to Facebook on Yahoo! read more articles than the average user, the Facebook post states.

Like the Guardian, the Washington Post built a social reader app for Facebook as a companion for its website with the social sharing taking place within Facebook. It has drawn more than 3.5 million monthly active users so far. The Facebook post states that the social reader is growing, especially among international audiences and younger readers, with 83 per cent of readers under 35 years old.

According to Facebook, the statistics released last night show that the apps do five things:

1. Show recommendations to increase engagement. Keep people engaged by prominently showing friends’ recent activity on your main pages and pages with high exit rates. When no social content is available, surface personalised recommendations based on users’ interests on Facebook and clearly explain why you’re showing each recommendation.

2. Create compelling objects. Maximise the click through rates of your stories by specifying Open Graph tags for all your articles and including compelling images, titles and descriptions. Avoid misleading images or titles to prevent your app from being marked as spam, which will negatively impact your app’s distribution in news feed.

3. Leverage your existing user base. If you have an existing site, be sure to make connecting a prominent option for existing users. And if people are already sharing your content on Facebook, consider sending referral traffic from Facebook into a flow that makes it easy for people to have a social experience on your site.

4. Make the benefits of sharing clear. Open Graph apps are designed for people that want to share. In your app, you should clearly explain how your app works and the benefits of adding your app to their timeline. Choose an approach that makes the most sense for your users, whether that’s an informative dialog, in-line marketing messaging, house ad inventory, and/or a learn more page.

5. Keep users in control. As we’ve previously highlighted, people are more active when they are in control. In addition to the privacy controls on Facebook, we encourage you to build controls into your app that fit how people use your app.

Tags: Facebook, facebook apps, Independent, The Guardian, Washington Post, Yahoo News

#news2011: Russia Today on raising awareness through its FreeVideo platform

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Broadcasting, Events, Handy tools and technology, Online Journalism

After the second day of sessions focused on business at the Global Editors Network news summit, including paywalls and paid-for app, it was fitting that during the third and final day of presentations we heard about projects offering content and platforms for free.

One such project came from Russia Today which outlined its FreeVideo platform, described as an “English language video agency”. The website, which should be of interest to journalists worldwide, provides free video footage that journalists can download, edit and reuse for their own projects and output.

Answering a question from the floor about the business model, Alexei Nikolov, managing director of Russia Today, said it was to “promote the channel” on a global scale.

The site includes “stock footage” as well as video covering specific news events. Xenia Fedorova, head of the department of promotion and development of media projects for the broadcaster, explained that all the footage comes with multilingual scripts and shotlists.

She added that the website has more than 9,000 news channels already registered and using footage “on a daily basis”.

I spoke to her more at the end of the session about the decision to go down the free distribution route, their attribution methods and to find out whether there are plans in the pipeline to monetise the platform.

There are of course other platforms out there offering video content to journalists, such as the UK-based Video News Agency and also in 2009 Al Jazeera opened up its footage under creative commons licensing.

Tags: Broadcast, free, Global Editors Network, Russia Today, Video

Journalisted Weekly: Leveson Inquiry, Tahrir Square and England RFU

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Journalism

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.

Journalisted Weekly: Leveson Inquiry, Tahrir Square and England RFU

for the week ending Sunday 27 November

The first wave of witnesses to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry dominated this week’s news
Violent protests in Tahrir Square, and the England rugby team scandal, covered lots
Carina Trimingham lobbying row, Basra bombs and Welsh budget resolution covered little

Covered lots

The Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and phone hacking, 339 articles (including evidence given by Hugh Grant, 120 articles and Bob and Sally Dowler, 106 articles)
Violent protests involving thousands of people at Tahrir Square in Egypt continue before elections take place, 273 articles
Scandal continues to engulf the England Rugby World Cup squad after damning reports of their conduct are leaked, 195 articles
Death of Gary Speed, 85 articles

Covered little

Carina Trimingham, partner of Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, embroiled in row over privileged access to ministers, 13 articles
Three bombs explode in Basra, Iraq, killing 19 civilians, 6 articles
Welsh Labour and Liberal Democrats agree Budget deal after months of deadlock, 4 articles

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

David Cameron: 583 articles (-12% on last week)
George Osborne: 341 articles (-1% on last week)
Nick Clegg: 212 articles (+91% on last week)
Ed Miliband: 133 articles (+13% on last week)
Ed Balls: 106 articles (+56% on last week)
Gordon Brown: 100 articles (+4% on last week)
Tony Blair: 90 articles (-28% on last week)
Danny Alexander: 85 articles (+204% on last week)
Chris Huhne: 78 articles (+359% on last week)
Boris Johnson: 77 articles (unchanged since last week)

Celebrity vs. serious

British actors shine at International Emmy Awards, 38 articles versus Nick Clegg announces new Youth Contract to tackle growing youth unemployment, 35 articles
Janet Devlin‘s final week on The X Factor as she is voted off the show, 36 articles versus Arcadia group announces closure of hundreds of high street shops, 31 articles
Duchess of Cornwall attends Strictly Come Dancing rehearsal, 13 articles versus Youth Justice Board quango saved by Government, 12 articles

Arab spring (countries & current leaders)

Egypt’s Military Council: 105 articles (+275% on previous week)
Syria and President Assad: 91 articles (-46% on previous week)
Yemen and President Saleh: 39 articles (+388% on previous week)
Libya’s National Transitional Council: 38 articles (-21% on previous week)
Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan: 28 articles (+12% on previous week)
Bahrain and King Al Khalifa: 20 articles (+567% on previous week)
Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah: 14 articles (-13% on previous week)
Gaza and Hamas: 13 articles (+44% on previous week)
Iran and President Ahmadinejad: 12 articles (+9% on previous week)
Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu: 10 articles (unchanged since previous week)
Jordan and King Abdullah: 9 articles (-78% on previous week)
West Bank and President Abbas: 9 articles (+50% on previous week)
Qatar and Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani: 2 articles (up from 0 in previous week)

Who wrote a lot about… clashes between the Government and Unions over planned public sector pensions strikes

Rajeev Syal – 7 articles (The Guardian)
Macer Hall – 4 articles (Daily Express)
Polly Curtis – 4 articles (The Guardian)
Hélène Mulholland – 4 articles (The Guardian)

Long form journalism

5,056 words: ‘England riots: the personal cost’ – Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, 25 November 2011
3,852 words: ‘Still hidden away’ – Christine Toomey, Sunday Times, 27 November 2011
2,235 words: ‘Identity and the internet: From pixels to persona’ – Richard Waters Financial Times, 21 November 2011

Journalists who have updated their profile

Jack Oughton is a photographer at KKVA Fine Art Photography and Portraiture and works freelance for The Independent, the International Astronomical Union, FHM and Empire magazines, along with a number of companies. He was previously a writer intern for Catch 22 Magazine after completing a Higher National Diploma in Astronomy and Science at the University of Glamorgan. He has written several books: ‘Glamorgan University Observational Diary’, ‘A Layman’s Guide To Nuclear Fusion’ and ‘The Speech Of The Chimera’, all in 2010. Follow Jack on Twitter @koukouvaya
Jane Symons is a freelance health writer, media consultant and facilitator whose work has been published in publications including the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, the Telegraph and Sunday Express, as well as various women’s magazines. She has previously been editor of Sun Health at The Sun, health editor of Woman’s Own, and chief sub editor for the Telegraph Magazine. In addition, she has written two books: ‘Pregnancy: The Best for You and Your Baby’ in 1999 and ‘How to Have a Baby and Still Live in the Real World’ in 2003. Follow Jane on Twitter @janesymons1

The Media Standards Trust, which runs journalisted, won the ‘One to Watch’ category at this year’s Prospect Think Tank Awards

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

Read the MST’s submission to parliament’s Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions and the House of Lords Communications Select Committee on investigative journalism

The Orwell Prize 2012 is now open for entries following a launch debate on ‘Writing the Riots’

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

Tags: Journalism, journalisted, leveson, Media Standards Trust, tahrir square

App of the week for journalists – DropVox, for saving audio to Dropbox

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in App of the Week

App of the week: DropVox

Operating systems: Apple (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad)

Cost: £1.49

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? DropVox is a voice recorder that automatically saves your audio to your Dropbox account, a free service that allows you to store files and access them from any device.

DropVox provides a simple voice recorder which saves to Dropbox as you press the stop button, allowing you to record another memo or interview while your audio is saving.

The advantage for journalists is the ability to record an interview on a phone or iPad and then access the audio from any computer.

Unfortunately it does not record broadcast quality audio and the iPhone’s own voice memo will give far better sound despite also recording as an m4a.

DropVox uploads best via a wireless connection but short interviews can be transferred by 3G.

Reviews: It gets five stars in iTunes App Store.

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

Tags: Audio, Dropbox, dropvox, iphone apps

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use iPiccy for preparing images for the web

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Design and graphics, Top tips for journalists

If you usually crop, resize, fix and add borders to images using Photoshop, there is a free web app you should know about.

iPiccy is a web app available in the Chrome store that will help you perform basic image edits.

It will save you from launching Photoshop and is worth remembering when you find yourself working on a computer without an image editing application.

Click this link for 10 free Chrome web apps that journalists should know about.

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.

Tags: chrome web store, tip, Top tips for journalists, web apps

#news2011: A guide to APIs and why ‘everybody who has content’ needs one

November 30th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Events, Journalism, Top tips for journalists

API is a term that is increasingly referred to in relation to news outlets. APIs are not new – indeed it has been two years since the Guardian launched it’s open API. But what does it mean for the online journalism industry today and why is are APIs so important?

On the third and final day of the Global Editors Network news summit we heard from Torsten de Riese, who is managing director of NewsCred, which, as he explained, “runs a content API and serves the world’s best journalism”.

He offered delegates a helpful description of APIs and explanation of why they are so useful to content providers, which I got him to expand on in an interview after the session.

The most important part of API is the I, the interface. API is the interface for your content for the rest of world.

It’s the interface to building products, the interface to your apps, it’s the interface to your web, it’s the interface to your IPTV presence.

It enables you to build stuff with your content. It basically takes content, standardises it in terms of format, tagging etc. You can decide how much you want to tag, what standards you want to apply.

Every time someone wants to take your content and build something, they know exactly how to get it.

De Riese, who was involved in the launch of the Guardian’s open API, told the conference that, at the Guardian, there was a “vision to get developers to use our content, build stuff and so we just opened it up”, with “hundreds” of developers now using it and building “really exciting stuff”.

He added that the way the Guardian was able to build its Facebook app recently was thanks to its API. Today the Guardian announced its Facebook app has so far been installed by over four million users.

Developers can just go and build stuff. There are lots of people out there who want to do that, who just want to get on with it. If you give them something they can do something, they can use it.

APIs couples with enthusiasm in the developer community means publishers can “tap into this wonderful world of developers and allow them to come up with some really interesting stuff”.

In the audio interview below I talk to De Riese about APIs and why content providers “all need” the technology.

Tags: #news2011, apis, apps, interface, Newscred, technology, torsten de riese

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – know how to tweet via SMS

November 29th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Social media and blogging, Top tips for journalists

Because technology seems to fail when you least want it to, know how to report from your phone via Twitter using text messages.

SMS has been was used in tweeting the advance of Hurricane Irene, during the Arab spring and other major news stories, so it is worth having the SMS Twitter number saved to your phone.

Our 10 technical Twitter tips post explains how to do this.

Tags: SMS, Twitter

Lessons from Hacks/Hackers and a Knight-Mozilla fellowship winner

November 29th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Events

Hacks/Hackers global coordinator and New York co-organiser Chrys Wu (@MacDiva on Twitter) spent an evening with Hacks/Hackers Brighton on Tuesday, 22 November to report on what chapters around the world have been doing.

She explained Hacks/Hackers started just 18 months ago, with an idea originating in mid-2009.

“Developers and journalists really do need each other,” Wu said, explaining how a variety of social meetups, talks, demo days and hackathons are the basis for the Hacks/Hackers community.

The groups work to “improve the practice of journalism through tools and technologies”.

She explained that there are now many chapters around the world, including about 20 in Africa, with one launching in Cairo soon.

A group has also started in Yerevan, Armenia, and has announced a hackathon with help from Microsoft.

And because “talking is good; making is better,” developers and journalists spend hack days together, such as at Hacks/Hackers Hacking, an event which took place at ONA11, the Online News Association conference held in Boston in September.

The ONA11 hack day included a project where a team of about 10 hacks and hackers who took up a challenge to help NPR’s Andy Carvin work out how to visualise data from around 85,000 tweets.

A journalist from La Nacion in Argentina also tasked a group with developing a way to process data from PDFs in order to better understand gas prices in the country.

Chrys, a coder as well as a journalist, has spent time at The Los Angeles Times, where she worked on the Pulitzer prize-winning series, Altered Oceans, CBS and The Washington Post, having been recruited to help develop content distribution strategy.

She works with Hacks/Hackers chapters worldwide to help them launch and sustain local communities interested in journalism and technology.

Developer Laurian Gridinoc (@gridinoc on Twitter) is one of the first five winners of a Knight-Mozilla fellowship and will spend 10 months embedded within the BBC newsroom to generate ideas, train colleagues and bridge the gap between technology and the news.

Laurian told Hacks/Hackers Brighton about the proposal that resulted in him securing a funded placement and discussed the types of projects he will be working on.

He said there were around 300 ideas submitted, with 60 getting through to the first round. Twenty projects were invited to attend a learning lab in Berlin, and 11 finalists presented to news partners. Just five were selected to become Knight-Mozilla fellows, with one each at the BBC, Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, Zeit Online and the Boston Globe.

Each news organisation had different aims and selected a hack/hacker with skills and ambitions that matched their plans.

Gridinoc, who proposed a collaborative storyboarding tool, will be “trying to enhance storytelling”, particularly in online video.

He will be addressing problems with Adobe Flash and will expanding possibilities by constantly asking the question “what if”: “What if there weren’t the constraints of time? What if there weren’t any constrains on platforms?” he said.

He will then use open source assets to create his own code, templates and prototypes, spending a maximum of two weeks on a project.

Laurian hinted the kind of interactives he might produce at the BBC, demonstrating Tangle.js, a JavaScript library that provides a simple API for “tangling up” the values in a document, allowing the reader to explore a document by changing the values using a slider and seeing the resulting values change. (See this Tangle template demonstration).

Laurian also shared his interesting career path. While studying medicine he co-founded a brand strategy and interactive consultancy in Romania. He then followed his interest in the semantic web through a masters in computational linguistics and research into semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (Open University). For the past year he has been based in Birmingham, implementing applications using semantic web technologies at the technology innovation company Talis.

This is cross-posted on the Hacks/Hackers blog.

Tags: #hhbtn, Chrys Wu, hacks and hackers, Hacks/Hackers Brighton, knight-mozilla, Laurian Gridinoc