How do: Newscientist.com to be revamped

#Tip of the day for journalists: Try these online programming tutorials

November 5th, 2012 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Top tips for journalists

Image by espensorvik on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Want to try your hand and learn some computer programming? Journalists are often encouraged to learn some code – and here are 27 ways to learn online.

The Next Web has helpfully complied the list.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

Tags: Code, journalism tips, programming

Tool of the week for journalists – Codeacademy, for those who want to start to code

October 11th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Tool of the Week, Training

Tool of the week: Codeacademy

What is it? Free tutorials in basic JavaScript

How is it of use to journalists? The rise in data journalism, an interest in Hacks/Hackers meetups and collaboration between journalists and developers has led to many journalists to express a wish to start coding. But where to start?

Codeacademy is a learning tool that offers tutorials to get you started. So far there are only a couple of courses on the site but they are free and superbly designed.

The homepage gets you to begin entering a bit of JavaScript and you soon find yourself progressing though the tutorial. There is a progress bar to show you how much of the course you have completed and reward badges to give you the equivalent of the teacher’s gold star.

You might well find you quickly learn simple JavaScript that has a useful application for you as a journalist. For example, within the first five minutes you learn that writing “.length” at the end of a word or phrase gives you the character count. You can then open an editor (using Chrome from a Mac the command is ALT+CMD+J), paste the headline of a news story, add “.length” and you will have the character count of the headline.

Tags: Code, Data journalism, Javascript, tip

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – HTML5 for journalists

September 29th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Sarah Marshall in Online Journalism, Top tips for journalists

Most online journalists will have the basics of HTML and be able to hand code a link, know how to display a headline as bold and have the skills to add emphasis.

And while you have probably heard for HTML5 you may not have looked into what this means for you as a journalist.

If that is the case here is a helpful background article headlined HTML5: briefing notes for journalists and analysts.

To read up on the new mark-ups then here’s Martin Belam’s incredibly useful HTML 5 for journalists, which was published just over a year ago.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Tags: Code, currybet, html, html5, Martin Belam

KDMC: Everyblock’s public code useful for news organisations

February 3rd, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Handy tools and technology

Over at the Knight Digital Media Center, journalist Michele McLellan takes a look at Everyblock’s decision to publish the open source code for the application that powers its ‘micro news’ engines in 11 U.S. cities. She recommends that news organisations and entrepreneurs take note.

Full story at this link…

Tags: Code, EveryBlock, journalist, michele mclellan, micronews, open source code, United States

Charles Arthur: New to journalism? Learn to code

January 19th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Editors' pick, Online Journalism, Training

“All sorts of fields of journalism – basically, any where you’re going to have to keep on top of a lot of data that will be updated, regularly or not – will benefit from being able to analyse and dig into that data, and present it in interesting ways,” says the Guardian’s technology editor.

Full story at this link…

Tags: Charles Arthur, Code, programming, technology editor, The Guardian