Three Nigerian journalists were killed last weekend, in two separate incidents, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Muslim rioters killed two reporters working with a local Christian newspaper on Saturday, according to local journalists and news reports. Also on Saturday, court reporter Edo Sule Ugbagwu, at left, from the private daily The Nation was shot dead at his home by two gunmen, according to local journalists.
Over in the US the iPhone prototype drama continues, as Gawker Media challenges the legality of the search warrant served on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, last Friday. Gawker’s Gizmodo site had received an iPhone 4G protoype and revealed its features online. As CNet reported:
Police have seized computers and servers belonging to an editor of Gizmodo in an investigation that appears to stem from the gadget blog’s purchase of a lost Apple iPhone prototype.
Gawker claimed the search warrant was invalid under a part of California law. This part of the law, CNET reported, ” prevents judges from signing warrants that target writers for newspapers, magazines, or ‘other periodical publications.'”
But yesterday CNET reported that Gizmodo might not be protected by journalist shield law after all.
If Gizmodo editors are, in fact, a target of a criminal probe into the possession or purchase of stolen property, the search warrant served on editor Jason Chen on Friday appears valid. A blog post at NYTimes.com on Monday, citing unnamed law enforcement officials, said charges could be filed against the buyer of the prototype 4G phone – meaning Gizmodo.
Background to the Gizmodo scoop at this link. Promo video below:
Do journalists need to learn to code? Probably not, but those who can are likely to find themselves quickly snapped up by news organisations with interactive and data teams.
I have no grand hopes of learning to code properly, but I would like to feel a little more comfortable with the language and learn more about the ways programmers work and how it could help journalism.
That was one reason I went along to last night’s Ruby in the Pub informal meetup (tagged #RITP or #rubyinthepub on Twitter), initiated by journalists Joanna Geary and James Ball (even though James himself got stuck at work and missed the event).
The other reason was to meet brave souls playing in the programming-journalism no-man’s land. I think there are exciting things to come out of the programmer-journalist relationship. We’re already seeing that in projects led by mySociety and OpenlyLocal, in collaboration with bloggers and other media.
The US, of course, is streets ahead, with news organisations employing designated journalist-programmers. ProPublica, the non-profit investigative organisation, employs application developers and editors, integrated into the news team, as does the Chicago Tribune (for example). The New York Times has a dedicated interactive team – the head of which, Aron Pilhofer, came along to last night’s meet-up (he recently wrote about this new breed of ‘hacker-journalists’ at this link).
Over here, we’re seeing moves in the right direction (the Scott Trust now has a bursary for students who want to learn software development) and of course news organisations do employ developers, designers and programmers, but we’ve got some catching up to do in terms of integrating and prioritising programming skills.
[For some examples of interactives, visualisations and data-driven journalism follow this link]
So…what is Ruby? Ruby on Rails is a open source web application framework, using the Ruby language. Only a minority of programmers use it (you can see a comparison of frameworks at this Wikipedia link), but it was the consensus language agreed for the meet-up.
Developer Dave Goodchild (@buddhamagnet) was restricted by the lack of wifi, but nonetheless he did a grand job in educating us Ruby ignoramuses the very basics.
If you do decide to download RoR to have a proper play, Dave recommends building a blog – the format of which is easy to understand for a journalist – and following this online tutorial on the Ruby on Rails blog.
It was a brief introduction and the properly keen will have to do their homework to learn properly, but it’s good to hear developers explaining how they use it – and showing how quickly something can be built.
The evening was also a meeting of cultures; as journalists explained their various work brick walls and developers explained the differences between various coding languages and platforms.
Most useful for me was hearing about the projects developers are implementing in their respective organisations and the tools they are using.
Whether or not very much Ruby knowledge was gleaned by the hacks in one evening, I have great hopes for the conversation between programmers and journalists. It could result in some very innovative applications and stories that will help British journalists catch up with our US counterparts and break new ground.
If you would like to know more about interactives and data-driven journalism, check out the agenda for news:rewired – the nouveau niche (25-06-10) where these topics will be addressed. Buy your ticket (£80 + VAT) at this link. Speakers include OpenlyLocal’s Chris Taggart; the OnlineJournalismBlog’s Paul Bradshaw; and Ollie Williams from BBC Sport.
A slow news day in Salisbury, evidently. We have a contender for the Westmorland Gazette’s office chair on fire story… (RIP, 2007) Nice to see Newsquest hacks rivalling each other for the most pacy story of the decade.
Expect the comments to come. Among the observations so far, ‘vfredc’ says:
It’s outrageous that something like this is allowed to happen in this country. I want this to be addressed in the next prime ministeral debates. Let’s see Nick Clegg talk himself out of this one.
“Less than three weeks after its launch, Apple’s iPad already accounts for 26 percent of the mobile devices accessing Wired.com,” the technology site and magazine reports.
Overall, mobile devices account for between 2.3 per cent and 3.5 per cent of our traffic. For April 3 to 19, iPad users represented 0.91 per cent of total site traffic.
A short debate appeared in yesterday’s Observer, over whether newspaper site commenters should be allowed to remain anonymous or not.
(It’s particularly timely given historian Orlando Figes’ Amazon review confessions, and also – as I’ve just posted – the Telegraph writer Cristina Odone’s outrage over internet pests’ challenging her facts)
Journalist and academic Aleks Krotoski argues for the right to anonymity (an extract):
The anti-anonymity brigade assumes that the cloak of the keyboard brings out the very worst in people because there’s no accountability in an identity vacuum. This belief, however, is purely anecdotal and is completely empirically unfounded. Really, what happens online is just the opposite: research shows that people are more willing to be open and honest and to help one another than to try to break down the virtual social order.
The Observer’s Rachel Cooke, meanwhile, argues for unmasking the users (an extract):
As for cowardice, yes, of course anonymous posters are cowards. It’s pathetic. The honourable thing to do is to put your name to bad reviews and all the other stuff, and if this makes your social life awkward – as it sometimes does for me – the upside is that, in future, you will think rather harder before you begin typing.
Cristina Odone, writing on Telegraph.co.uk, faced a commenter backlash when she wrote an article labelling Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris, “Dr Death”.
Along with many perturbed commenters, Evan Harris challenged Odone’s factual evidence.
Odone’s next step? To write a comment piece claiming she was “spooked” by the reaction, arguing “there’s no room in the Lib-Labs’ intolerant culture for discussion”.
Many commenters, however, give a disclaimer that they are not Liberal Democrat.
We recommend reading both pieces and sets of comments in full to judge the affair for yourself.
Election leaflet project, the Straight Choice, is offering regional newspapers and bloggers a free widget that displays recent leaflets distributed in their local constituencies.
“There are loads of local stories locked away in election leaflets, and we want to make sure that as many local eyes as possible are on them,” said Richard Pope, from the Straight Choice. “So we’ve created a widget that lets local papers and bloggers display leaflets from their constituency on their own website.”
To find your widget, simply visit your constituency’s page via this link, http://www.thestraightchoice.org/browse.php, and find the code at the right hand side of the page.
Furthermore, the Straight Choice is offering users the chance to customise the widget further, by aggregating several constituencies together. Pope encourages anyone interested to contact team [at] thestraightchoice.org.
As we reported at the end of last month, the Guardian started syndicating Straight Choice content on its politics sites.
Here’s an example of the Brighton Pavilion widget (Journalism.co.uk’s local constituency):
The Washington Post has launched a new tool which integrates Facebook with its site, reports Nieman Journalism Lab, “allowing users to ‘like’ any story and follow what their friends like or share on Facebook, all within the confines of the WaPo site”.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the sixth Honduran journalist has been killed since March 2010.
[Jorge Alberto Orellana] 50, host of the program “En vivo con Georgino” (Georgino Live) at the local private station Televisión de Honduras, was shot to death on Tuesday by an unidentified gunman in the city of San Pedro Sula, in northern Honduras, according to local news accounts. As the journalist was leaving the station around 9 p.m., the attacker shot him in the head and fled on foot, the local newspaper Tiempo reported. The journalist was taken to Hospital Mario Rivas, where he was pronounced dead.