Author Archives: Joel Gunter

About Joel Gunter

Joel Gunter is a senior reporter at Journalism.co.uk.

Hilary Clinton’s net freedom speech: analysis from Index on Censorship

Leave a reply

Press freedom organisation Index on Censorship has consulted a number of experts over US secretary of state Hilary Clinton’s recent speech on internet freedom.

They include Chinese internet activist Wen Yunchao and former Guardian head of digital and Tow Center professor Emily Bell, who says:

There are many contradictions in how the US government has tackled the issue of the internet; from a rather ambivalent approach to net neutrality, through the involvement in industry of providing cyber security to overseas repressive regimes, to its extremely hostile reaction to the Wikileaks disclosure of diplomatic cables …

The irony of the timing of the speech was not lost on the Twitterverse. As Clinton spoke, lawyers from the department of justice were defending their pursuit of information on Wikileaks operatives, which involved ordering platforms such as Twitter to hand over user data on individuals it linked to the organisation.

Full post on Index on Censorship at this link.

‘You can’t give a machine data and get journalism out the other end’

Leave a reply

Guardian information architect Martin Belam blogs today about the latest in a series of talks at the newspaper about digital products and services.

In-house developer Daithí Ó Crualaoich worked with Belam on the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in the Guardian’s Open Platform API and has worked on some of the newspaper’s recent high profile datajournalism projects. Ó Crualaoich’s talk addressed the software development part of datajournalism.

He reminded the audience that software devs are not journalists. They have general purpose skills with software that can be turned to any processing function, like the controls on a washing machine, but they generally, he said, have very limited skills in understanding what makes a story into “a story” in the way that journalists process information. This means that to take part in these kinds of projects, software developers have to adapt their general purpose skills to focus on journalism.

Full post on currybetdotnet at this link.

Mainstream media drives Twitter trends, claims study

Leave a reply

Mainstream media drives a large number of trending topics on Twitter, according to a new study by Hewlett Packard.

The HP research analysed more than 16 million tweets over 40 days last year, finding that mainstream media accounts belonging to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Sky, Reuters, the Telegraph, the BBC and El Pais were among 22 accounts identified as the source of the most retweets related to trending topics.

Full study on HP at this link and embedded below.

Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay

Editors Weblog: Is photojournalism an objective practice?

Leave a reply

Looking at New York Times photographer Damon Winter’s photo series, A Grunt’s Life – which won the third place award in the Pictures of the Year International features contest – Paul Hoffman asks whether the style of the photography compromises the objectivity of the images as war documentary.

Does the old school, discolored, oversaturated, plastic toy camera feel of the photographs, which was created through the Hipstamatic app on Winter’s iPhone, detract from their validity?

Several critics argue “yes”. According to their perspective, the overtly artistic nature of this series pushes the photographs out of the objective realm of “photojournalism” and into the subjective realm of “photography”…

Full post on Editors Weblog at this link.

Journalisted Weekly: (Ex) President Mubarak, Big Society, and The King’s Speech

Leave a reply

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.

for the week ending Sunday 13 February

  • Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt dominated the news
  • Cameron’s Big Society under fire and The King’s Speech at the Baftas kept things British
  • A suicide bomber in school uniform and alleged torture in Egypt received little coverage

News about the joint Media Standards Trust/Cardiff University local news project, including an ITV Wales programme, available on our website

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

Covered lots

  • Hosni Mubarak, resigning from the Egyptian presidency after 30 years in power and 18 days of popular protests, 629 articles
  • PM David Cameron preparing to defend his Big Society policy in face of renewed criticism, 125 articles
  • British film The King’s Speech, sweeping the board at the Baftas as predicted, 118 articles

Covered little

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

Celebrity vs serious

Who wrote a lot about…’Mubarak’

Chris McGreal – 16 articles (The Guardian), Andrew England – 9 articles (Financial Times), Donald MacIntyre – 9 articles (The Independent), Sadie Gray – 8 articles (The Times), Heba Saleh – 8 articles (Financial Times), Roula Khalaf – 8 articles (Financial Times), Martin Fletcher – 8 articles (The Times), Jack Shenker – 8 articles (The Guardian), Adrian Blomfield – 8 articles (The Telegraph), James Hider – 7 articles (The Times)

Long form journalism

Politico: Amid WikiLeaks battle, Clinton to assert US support for internet freedom

Leave a reply

Hilary Clinton is due to give a speech on internet freedom later today. In the wake of Egypt’s shutting off of internet access during recent protests, and in the midst of her department’s ongoing battle with WikiLeaks, it has the potential to be interesting.

Politico has published extracts from the speech Clinton is expected to give. Certain parts closely resemble previous attempts by the US administration to carefully chastise China for its severe curtailments of internet freedom:

History has shown us that repression often sows the seeds for revolution down the road. Those who clamp down on internet freedom may be able to hold back the full impact of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever… Leaders worldwide have a choice to make. They can let the internet in their countries flourish, and take the risk that the freedoms it enables will lead to a greater demand for political rights. Or they can constrict the Internet, choke the freedoms it naturally sustains—and risk losing all the economic and social benefits that come from a networked society…

While others are clearly there to speak to the problem of WikiLeaks, and clarify the pro-freedom stance of an administration currently attempting to subpoena private information from Twitter accounts belonging to members and affiliates of the whistleblowers’ site.

Our allegiance to the rule of law does not dissipate in cyberspace. Neither does our commitment to protecting civil liberties and human rights. The United States is equally determined to track and stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we pursue these goals in accordance with our values… Liberty and security. Transparency and confidentiality. Freedom of expression and tolerance. There are times when these principles will raise tensions and pose challenges, but we do not have to choose among them. And we shouldn’t. Together they comprise the foundation of a free and open Internet…

See more on Politico at this link.

BetaTales: Can the story of traffic accidents be told in a new way?

Leave a reply

BetaTales takes a look at a new project based on traffic accident data from journalists and programmers at Norwegian media house Bergens Tidende.

Accidents are apparently common fare in the Western part of Norway, with frequent news reports of collisions on the region’s narrow, winding roads.

With this in mind, journalists at Bergens Tidende approached the Norwegian Public Roads Administration armed with the Freedom of Information Act, eventually getting access to a database of all road accidents in the country.

The database turned out to be a journalistic goldmine: It contained details about 11,400 traffic accidents all over the country, all neatly arranged in an Excel file. Not only did the database give the exact position of each accident, but it also included numerous details, such as how many were killed and injured, the seriousness of injuries, driving conditions, type of vehicle, type of street, speed limit, time of the day, etc.

Still, most journalists would at this point probably have been happy to take a look at the database, extract some of the relevant accidents and made a couple of news stories based on them. In Bergens Tidende, though, the journalists instead were teamed up with programmers. Within a few weeks all the traffic accidents in the country had been put on a big Google map with endless ways to search the database.

Full story on BetaTales at this link.

“Killing Roads” project from Bergens Tidende at this link (Norwegian).

Bergens Tidende multimedia journalist Lasse Lambrechts talks about “Killing Roads”:

A look at the Guardian Hacks SXSW event

Leave a reply

The Guardian played host to designers, developers and journalists at the weekend for its “Guardian Hacks SXSW” event. (The raw data reveals that there were 82 developers, 12 girls and 12 ‘full beards’, among other things.)

Guardian information architect Martin Belam takes a look at some of the day’s hacks on his blog:

The hack that appeared to draw the most gasps from the assembled journalists in the room, and consequently won, was Articlr, which was presented by Jason Grant. It was a back-end tool for easily monitoring social media and rival coverage of a story in real-time, and then simply dragging-and-dropping elements from external sites into a story package. With a bit of geo-location goodness thrown in. I fully expect the feature request to be on my Guardian desk by about 11am this morning…

Plus you can see full coverage from the Guardian at this link and related Twitter goings on using the #gsxsw hashtag.

OJB: Three things the BBC has done for online journalism

1 Reply

Three weeks on from the announcement that the BBC would cut 360 jobs as part of a 25 per cent cut to its online budget, Paul Bradshaw looks at three things the corporation has done for online journalism.

1. Web writing style

The BBC’s way of writing for the web has always been a template for good web writing, not least because of the BBC’s experience with having to meet similar challenges with Ceefax – the two shared a content management system and journalists writing for the website would see the first few pars of their content cross-published on Ceefax too.

Even now it is difficult to find an online publisher who writes better for the web.

Full post on Online Journalism Blog at this link.