Who? Andrew Gregory
Where? Andrew is a staff reporter on the Daily Mirror
Twitter? @andrew__gregory
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.
Tomorrow (Saturday 3 December) is International Open Data Day. We have been asking what the open data movement has done for journalism.
Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore – @smfrogers
It’s only been a couple of years and you could argue that open data has changed the world: Wikileaks, government spending, what we know about the riots… The irony is that the governments behind much of this data have only contributed the numbers; the hard work has been done by an army of developers and data journalists who have created stories and new ways of telling them. When we started the Datablog in 2009, we thought it would be popular only with developers; now everyone wants to know the facts behind the news.
Nicola Hughes – @DataMinerUK
It’s the knowing how to use it that’s vital. it’s a (re)source.
Borja Bergareche – @borjabergareche
It’s helped us do the best journalism of the 20th century in the 21st century.
Lucy Chambers, community coordinator, Open Knowledge Foundation – @lucyfedia
Evidence-based journalism. Journalists will back up stories, readers will expect to be able to verify facts.
Andrew Gregory – @andrew__gregory
Open data is useful. But original journalism also requires good human sources.
Rune Ytreberg – @ytreberg
The obvious: Open data has made journalism more transparent.
Megan Cunningham – @megancunningham
Open data has accelerated the opportunities for crowd sourced investigative journalism. But the potential hasn’t been realised.
Harriet Minter – @Harriet_Minter
It’s forced journalists to embrace spreadsheets, brought interactives to the forefront and given us many bad infographics.
Greg Hadfield – @GregHadfield (who is organising the UK’s first open-data cities conference)
Data – whether open or not – has always fuelled journalism. Data that is increasingly “open” (in the fullest sense of the term) will transform journalism.
Ironically, a lot of the best revelatory journalism of the past has depended on journalists unearthing data (ie “stuff”) that others want to keep locked. Ideally, by lawful means. Therefore, openness may remove some of the mystique that journalists delight in, as people who know things that only those “in the know” know.
An open-data tsunami will mean that more journalism will be about interpreting – and putting into context – data that is open to all, at least in its rawest, unrefined form.
To an even greater degree, journalism will be about adding value to data by transforming it into information. The best journalism will be to add value to information, to provide insight, even wisdom.
Openness of data will change the behaviour of individuals and organisations. But not immediately and not in every case. Would MPs have played fast and loose with their expenses if they knew data about each claim would be published openly and in real time? Sad to say, it is quite possible some would.
Much good journalism has involved shedding light on data that was routinely (although not widely) available and which was only rarely studied or analysed.
Importantly, some of the best journalism has involved making connections and spotting patterns. I’m thinking of earlier parliamentary abuses, such as the “cash-for-questions” scandal of the mid-1990s, before Hansard was on the web, and when it was rarely read in print by journalists.
Those were the days when typewriters and telephones – rather than computers and the internet – were the primary journalistic tools. When bars and restaurants – rather than offices and desktops – were the venues for journalistic enterprise.
With more data openly available – along with more tools easily available for mining, sifting and interpreting it (as in the case of the Wikileaks material) – there are many more needles to be found in the burgeoning haystacks of unstructured data.
But even when every day is #Opendata Day, the best stories may remain hidden in full public view – until one of the new generation of journalists stumbles expertly across them.
Audio platform SoundCloud has been around since 2007 but it is only this year that it has really taken off as a space for the spoken word as well as music.
Here are 10 ways it can be used by broadcast and digital journalists:
1. Record and share audio. You can do this from a computer or your smartphone or tablet. SoundCloud has apps for iPhone/iPad and Android but consider using one of the third-party iPhone apps that allow you to edit or trim before uploading directly to SoundCloud.
VC Audio Pro (£3.99) (a previous Journalism.co.uk app of the week) allows you to do a full multitrack edit before uploading to SoundCloud.
Try iRig Recorder (free for the basic app, £2.99 for the one with full functionality) and FiRe Studio (£2.99). Both allow you to trim and alter levels before uploading.
At Journalism.co.uk we’ve been uploading audio interviews and podcasts to our SoundCloud account, gathering over 2,800 followers and engaging with a new audience.
2. Search for sources. If you are looking for quotes or audio from a news event, search SoundCloud much in the way you would hunt down videos on YouTube. You will then be tasked with verifying the recordings, facing the same challenges as checking reports posted on Twitter and YouTube.
SoundCloud has an advanced search function which allows you to search the “spoken” category for a keyword. There is also an option of searching for content under a creative commons licence. Try searching for Japan earthquake, Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street to see the type of content available.
3. Discoverability. As with other platforms, SoundCloud hosts content that goes viral and has an embed option so you can post it to your site. Take this interview with US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It is a message to her South Arizona constituents, her first since being shot in the head in January. It’s clocked up over 21,000 plays, and demonstrates the benefits of SoundCloud’s commenting system.
4. Create maps. You’ll need to get some help from SoundCloud, but the team can create a bespoke map to allow you to crowdsource audio or plot recordings from in-house reporters. Ben Fawkes from Soundcloud told Journalism.co.uk how you do this, explaining that all you will need to do is define a location and define a hashtag and audio will then be automatically plotted. Take a look at this example of a map created with audio from Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival.
5. Use the new HTML5 player. If you embed SoundCloud audio in blog posts you should be aware of the new HTML5 player. The standard player is Flash meaning it won’t work on iPhones and iPads. Instead, when copying the embed code click on the “customise player” and toggle through the tags to the HTML5 option.
6. Consider a customised player. There are options to customise the player, including adding photos, such as this example used on the London Literature Festival site.
7. Invite user-generated audio content. Encourage your audience to submit audio into a drop box. You can embed the SoundCloud drop box widget on your site and ask readers to upload their own audio. Here’s an example of NPR adding a widget to encourage listeners to share their summer music memories.
Another option is to consider an embeddable record button on your site. At present this will require some developer assistance but SoundCloud is now working on making an easy option so sites can add a button and encourage user-generated audio content to be submitted directly. Here is an example of a record button being used on a musician’s site. This is a different option, of a mapped audio tour guide of Dorchester, Boston, where readers can submit audio via a record button on the site. Go to site bupropion online .
There’s also the option of gathering audio via phone calls, as Chatter.fm has done by using Twilio technology.
Another option for user-generated content (UGC) is to use SoundCloud’s importer tool to allow readers/listeners (or your reporters) to submit audio via email or smartphone.
8. Prepare to add SoundCloud sharing to your news organisation’s app. SoundCloud is working on an iOS and Android sharing kit, which will mean you can submit audio to SoundCloud via your own app. You could encourage readers or reporters to submit stories/field recordings to your app and have the audio uploaded to SoundCloud so that it’s shareable, streamable and has all the relevant meta data.
9. Record a phone interview using SoundCloud. There are easier ways but this is a good option for when you need to record an interview and are armed only with a mobile phone. Make a three-way phonecall by calling this number, dial your interviewee and the SoundCloud line will then record your account. You can then upload the audio publicly or privately.
10. Get your audio transcribed. Speaker Text is a transcription company that is integrated with SoundCloud. It takes 48-72 hours to be transcribed and costs 99 cents a minute. It’s a way of making audio search engine optimised but you can also link to a certain sentence within the audio, for example referencing a quote or comment.
Related posts: News organisations are increasingly using SoundCloud, says founder
Poynter has an interesting post highlighting the overhaul of the New York Times’ commenting system.
The news outlet has introduced “trusted commenters“, which the Times describes as an “invitation-only programme designed for our most valued commenters”.
Those who have proved to be trusted by consistently having comments approved will be allowed to leave comments that will be made live immediately without the need for moderation.
Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman explains the overhaul of the NY Times’ commenting system:
The trusted commenter programme is the most significant new feature, in my opinion. Those who join will have to submit and verify real names, a profile photo and hometown by connecting a Facebook account. (Some people object to using Facebook, so other identity verification methods may be supported later, [Sasha Koren, deputy editor of interactive news] said.)
In exchange they get instant commenting, as well as a higher profile on the site. With a special “trusted” logo attached to their color photo and full name, they stand out visually from the other commenters who usually have an anonymous username and no profile photo.
Sonderman’s full post on how New York Times’ overhaul of its comment system and how it grants privileges to trusted readers is at this link.
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.
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 virality”.
The Guardian and Independent both took a different approach when building their Facebook apps. The 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.
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.
Who? David Rae
Where? David is editorial director of Sigaria
Twitter? @david_rae
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.
1. Mail titles hit back at Grant over ‘mendacious smears’
2. Ten things every freelance journalist should know
3. Sky News faces contempt charge over kidnap coverage
4. How to: best post news on Twitter and Facebook
5. Steve Coogan claims Andy Coulson set up ‘sociopathic sting’
6. Tips for freelance journalists on National Freelancers’ Day
7. Mother of Hugh Grant’s baby: press made life ‘unbearable’
8. Guardian apologises to Sun for Leveson doorstepping claim
9. Max Mosley: Press had ‘no human feeling at all’
10. Syrian cameraman ‘mutilated and killed following arrest’
Six million apps of magazines published by Future Publishing have been downloaded since the launch of Apple’s Newsstand six weeks ago.
In the first month since launch, the magazine publishing company, which has apps of 65 UK titles, made $1 million in the increased business, Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of iPad and tablet editions at Future Publishing, told Journalism.co.uk in a podcast on how Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry.
Newsstand, which launched on 12 October when Apple released iOS 5, is an iPhone and iPad home screen app that acts as a direct portal into a new magazine and news publication section of the iTunes App Store.
Future, like other publishing companies, has appealed to customers by offering free downloads of particular back issues, with iPhone and iPad users responding by downloading five million free editions.
Goldsmith said initial statistics are encouraging with 40 per cent of sales being made up of subscriptions rather than individual editions.
Other publishers are also reporting an increased impact. Daryl Rayner, managing director of Exact Editions, which works with publishers to create digital editions, reported “very pleasing results” with 15-30 per cent of subscriptions taken out on an annual basis rather than as 30-day subscriptions and renewals at 85-88 per cent.
Chris Talintyre, head of direct and digital marketing at Factory Media, which publishes 27 websites and 19 magazines, reported more than 850,000 downloads and initial sales data for October showing a month-on-month increase of 150 per cent since Newsstand’s launch.
Goldsmith said Newsstand is “absolutely intrinsic to the future of Future Publishing,” which yesterday reported a £19 million loss, largely because of a slump in print in the US.
Future said that its UK operations had been “resilient” overall, with revenues falling just 2 per cent.
US losses were “partially offset” by growth in digital revenues, which saw a 25 per cent hike.
Goldsmith illustrated how the iPad and Newsstand is changing the magazine market with the example of Comic Heroes, a special edition, bi-monthly magazine. On the physical news stand “it does okay”, he said, but “it’s a special edition and no one expects it to do marvellously”
But on Newsstand things are different.
It’s our second biggest page turning, flat app. It has gone through the roof because it is a brand that means different things to a different device. And that means we will invest in the title in terms of IP, in terms of staffing, in terms of marketing, in a way that we previously probably wouldn’t have invested in to that extent.
Is it going to revolutionise our business? It could do, it could well do.
I think the next 12 months are gong to be very, very interesting indeed.
Click here to hear more statistics and how Newsstand is revolutionising magazine publishing.