Author Archives: Sarah Marshall

About Sarah Marshall

I'm Journalism.co.uk's technology correspondent, recommending tools, apps and tips for journalists. My background is in broadcast and local news, having worked as a radio producer and newsreader and print journalist.

#MozFest – Build ‘social video’ using Popcorn Maker

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A still from “History in the Streets”

Imagine being able to add tweets, maps, and Wikipedia information to online video without coding skills. Consider having the ability to layer video with images from Google Street View as easily as hypertext allows you to link together web pages.

You can now do exactly that using the Popcorn Maker, a tool launched in alpha on Friday at the Mozilla Festival on media, freedom and the web in London.

Popcorn Maker is a web application that allows journalists who cannot code to add YouTube or Vimeo videos and select to add tweets, Flickr images and maps, plus use additional plugins to include images from Google Street View and even primary source documents from Document Cloud. Users of Popcorn Maker drag the elements onto the timeline using a platform that looks like Final Cut and other familiar software. Completed projects can then be embedded into news stories.

Online video journalism has had the tendency to follow TV conventions of talking heads, noddies (a cutaway of an interviewee nodding his or her head to hide an edit) and narrated video packages. What Popcorn offers is an easy way to create a web-native form of video storytelling. And because it is “social video” or “semantic video” experiences are dynamic, constantly updating, and customised right in the web browser for each user.

Popcorn.js is Mozilla’s HTML5 media toolkit, a javascript library for integrating the web into video production, launched version 1.0 at the festival.

The challenge of building Popcorn was first launched a year ago and since then the library has been gathering plugins thanks to an army of open source developers.

Popcorn has already being used in some newsrooms but until the launch of Popcorn Maker it has required embedded developers to code the mashups.

Brett Gaylor, project lead for Mozilla’s Popcorn told Journalism.co.uk what Popcorn offers video journalism.

It’s the ability to link to the relevant content that that video is about.

The basic function that Popcorn serves it to act as a timing layer over a video or audio file which means you are able to link times within video or audio to other content on the web.

For example, between 30 and 40 seconds into a video you could show a map of where where this interview took place. Or if you are doing a report on the second world war and you what to show where the Canadians were in Dieppe you could have a Wikipedia article that would appear at that given time.

And because it has the ability to link out to changing web content, a video, say, on the credit crisis will link to a hashtag and give the latest tweets.

In the above test example I added a YouTube video and grabbed the Twitter tool (bottom right), adding it to my timeline and searched for the #MozFest hashtag.

Gaylor hopes the beta version of Popcorn Maker will launch late spring 2012, with a polished, finished product by the end of next year.

We are now working on how to allow the user to lay those out on the page. We’ve conquered how to do it and now we have to make it a pleasing experience for the author to place those items on a page.

There several inspiring demos online, including History in the Streets, which links to Google Street View, and, on Wired.com, there is the documentary the One Millionth Tower, premiered at the festival and showing at the Frontline Club this evening (Monday 7 November) and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Popcorn gave filmmakers the ability to control a 3D environment and augment that environment with real time information from Wikipedia, Yahoo Weather API, Flickr and Google Maps.

Still from “The One Millionth Tower”

Ideas and examples of potential uses shared by Mozilla:

  • Pull a football player’s real-time stats, Wikipedia entry or twitter feed right into the action of a game or sportscast;
  • Pull a politician or pundit’s “truth score” history or voting record into an online interview;
  • Dynamically inject photos from Flickr as “b-roll” or context for video or audio stories;
  • Match footage about an oil spill with real-time footage of the spill’s present size in real time;
  • Annotate political speeches or newscasts with viewers’ own media, commentary and social responses;
  • Pull Google Street View onto the screen to dynamically explore depicted neighbourhoods and places.

Examples of uses of Popcorn so far include:

News

PBS Newshour used Popcorn to annotate President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address.  The French/German broadcaster Arte augmented current affairs programming using the platform. Both implementations involved developers working in the newsroom to code the social video.

Radio

Popcorn’s ability to augment video also applies to audio.  Radio pioneers Radiolab used Popcorn to invite fans to create accompanying visualizations for their “seeking symmetry” episode, while Danish Radio augmented their broadcast with an innovative “hyper-transcript” that allowed viewers to see a dynamic transcript of the audio, and select parts of the broadcast to tweet to their followers.

Commercial applications

Semantic video pioneer RAMP is using Popcorn to augment commercial content like the People’s Choice Awards.  RAMP’s MediaCloud technology produces automated tags and transcripts across 1800 videos and seamlessly integrates celebrity content from across the web into their video archive.

Video-conferencing and other applications

At the application layer, the open source web conferencing platform Big Blue Button has adopted Popcorn for playback of presentations and webinars. The educational platform Grockit also uses Popcorn to provide richer feedback from learners and teachers.

Project lead Brett Gaylor told Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall more about Popcorn.

Popcorn.js, an HTML5 javascript library for integrating the web into video production by journalismnews

#MozFest – First draft of new Data Journalism Handbook written in 48 hours

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The first draft of a handbook to help journalists deal with data has been created this weekend, with plans for it to be published next week.

You can read the table of contents of the Data Journalism Handbook here.

The book was written in 48 hours at the Mozilla Festival in London, with contributions from 55 people, including staff from the BBC, Guardian and New York Times. It has six chapters and 20,000 words and is a response to a challenge set by Mozilla, a nonprofit technology company, to “assemble a utility belt for data-driven journalists”.

The challenge stated:

There’s increasing pressure on journalists to drive news stories and visualisations from data. But where do you start? What skills are needed to do data-driven journalism well? What’s missing from existing tools and documentation? Put together a user-friendly handbook for finding, cleaning, sorting, creating, and visualising data — all in service of powerful stories and reporting.

Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Liliana Bounegru, European Journalism Centre hosted sessions at the Mozilla Festival to create the handbook.

A blog post written by Gray lists some of the contributors

Interested in getting started in data journalism? Kevin Anderson is leading an introduction to data journalism one-day training course for Journalism.co.uk in January 2012.

The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 29 October-4 November

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1. Newspaper image recognition app Paperboy launches for UK titles

2. Journalists get a photo byline in Google News (but only those on Google+)

3. Independent launches site redesign and new iPad app

4. Dying for the truth: drug cartels target journalists in Mexico

5. Phone hacking: Internal NI documents published

6. Fifth of FT.com traffic coming from mobile devices

7. Tool of the week for journalists – TimeKiwi, to create social media timelines

8. Jo Yeates’ landlord: media responsible for ‘extraordinary tissue of fabrications’

9. Investigative journalism news site ExaroNews launches

10. Injunctions furore has calmed, editors tell select committee

#followjourn – @bydanielvictor Daniel Victor/social media editor

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Who? Daniel Victor

Where? Daniel is the new social media editor at ProPublica

Twitter? @bydanielvictor

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.

SoundCloud launches HTML5 widget viewable on iPhone and iPad

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SoundCloud has today released an HTML5 player enabling audio recordings embedded in news stories to be viewed on an iPhone or iPad.

The move will no doubt be welcomed by news organisations and podcasters, keen to embed audio in posts but aware that the iPad and iPhone audience cannot view them as Apple devices do not support Flash.

In an announcement SoundCloud lists the features of the public beta version of its widget and named those who have been using the first test version.

  • iPad/iPhone mobile support
  • Attractive new waveform design encourages more interactivity with the sound
  • Timed comments now are more usable on the widget (at the request of users)
  • Easier to view information about the sound (e.g. title, person)
  • Easier sharing (e.g. Facebook Like, Google+ and Twitter sharing options)

In addition, this HTML5 widget is the first move to provide creators with clearer indicators of possible sharing actions and further transitions SoundCloud away from a pure music player to more robust, interactive sound object. Thus far, Britney Spears, Big Time Rush, Wattpad, Intelligence Squared (a global forum for live debate), Future Human Podcast and West African Democracy Radio have been using SoundCloud’s HTML5 widget and as this beta test is the first iteration, subsequent versions will include even more social elements.  The public beta is built on a new HTML5 technology platform that will allow SoundCloud to add new features to the widgets at a faster pace from now on.

Last month, SoundCloud announced a partnership with Storify, allowing users to add SounCloud recordings to the curation site.

Journalists get a photo byline in Google News (but only those on Google+)

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Google has started the roll out of a new feature giving journalists a photo byline for stories displayed on Google News. But there is a caveat – for the byline to be displayed journalists must have a Google+ account.

The highlighted picture and author name will show how many followers that journalist has, which may encourage more connections as readers can then choose to add the named journalist to one of their Google+ circles.

It could be a smart move from Google’s point of view as it could encourage journalists to start using Plus and may prompt those who signed up early but whose interest has since waned to pay more attention to the social network.

There are instructions on how to link your Google profile to your news stories to enable your photo byline to appear in Google News.

An announcement on the Google blog fully explains how and why journalists are to be highlighted in Google News.

How a hyperlocal is calling on the community for crowdfunding with Pitch-in!

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The Port Talbot Magnet, a hyperlocal launched by a group of journalists six months ago, has been asking the community to fund stories in an bid to make the site sustainable.

One of those behind the hyperlocal, Rachel Howells, told Journalism.co.uk:

Last month we launched Pitch-In! which was our call to the community, to let them know that we are here and that we want to collaborate with them and we want them to be a part of the news service.

Pitch-in! follows crowdfunding initiatives such as Spot.us, based in the US, in asking readers and interested parties to donate money.

The Port Talbot Magnet is asking the community to meet targets to “sponsor our football results service”, “help us buy public liability insurance”, “sponsor a court reporter for a day” or contribute to the development fund or offer general support.

Howells, one of the directors of the Port Talbot Magnet, explained:

These are just a taste of what we would like to achieve. We have a long list of goals, including reporting council meetings and news, police and emergency services news, increasing our coverage of business news, sport, arts, music, entertainment, charity groups and campaigns – things we don’t have the resources for at the moment. And we are looking for local people to tell us what they would like us to cover, as well as giving journalists the opportunity to pitch in with ideas for investigations or news that they think should be covered.

A month on from launching Pitch-in! as a “call to community” and Howells said it has had “some success”, appearing to have generated around £40 in donations.

It’s a little more than we would have had if we hadn’t asked.

The Port Talbot Magnet is the result of cutbacks in South Wales and the closure of the Trinity Mirror-published Port Talbot Guardian, which shut in 2009.

A group of journalists, the majority of whom were members of the Swansea branch of the National Union of Journalists, started discussing how to “do something proactive to keep ourselves in journalism”.

Howells herself is former editor of Big Issue Cymru, who was made redundant when her job moved to Glasgow.

We could see there were changes in the industry that were particularly affecting Wales and that were affecting journalism generally.

As they were setting themselves up as a cooperative the group toyed with various ideas, settling for a news site for Port Talbot to fill the “natural vacuum” left by the closure of the local paper.

When the Port Talbot Guardian closed we just thought; here is a group of people who need local news, we are a group of journalists who want to provide it, surely there must be a way of filling the gap and creating some employment for ourselves as well.

The journalists’ joint effort developed into a local news site for the town of 35,000. Eight professional journalists are on the board of the Port Talbot Magnet, plus there are 20 “interested parties”, including academics and PRs.

The site launched in April 2011, in the same month as the Passion, a three-day play starring Michael Sheen, was performed in the local area and the hyperlocal became a community partner for the National Theatre Wales. Howells said this provided traffic and a “great test and great showcase” for the site.

Attempts to get public funding had proved unsuccessful, prompting the group to last month turn to community funding and also set up a membership scheme.

We can’t run it just as volunteers for ever, we want it to grow and develop, but we recognise that we can’t do it by ourselves.

Howells is hoping the community will answer the call, to subsidise the money generated through advertising.

Along with her role as journalist and director of the news site, Howells is also studying a funded PhD at Cardiff University, looking at what happens to a town that loses its local paper, the implications for democracy, and looking at possible sustainable business models. For obvious reasons her research is focused on Port Talbot.

Asked about her findings so far she explained it was too early to provide results from her research.

What I can tell you is that there were all these awful predictions that the number of local newspaper titles would drop significantly and that up until 2015 we were going to lose a percentage of them. This hasn’t happened at all and the number of closures has been minimal.

But underneath the surface though, when you look at the number of staff that have gone, if you look at how newspapers have merged with each other, the pagination of newspapers, there is an encroaching poverty in the newsgathering, particularly in this area.

Investigative journalism news site ExaroNews launches

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A new investigative journalism site is today marking the launch of its “field trial”, during which time it will test the platform and carry a selection of articles “to give people an idea of what is coming”.

ExaroNews aims to “hold power to account” and will launch as a fully-fledged, paywalled investigative news site “in a few weeks”, with a focus on appealing to readers in the business community, Mark Watts, the site’s editor told Journalism.co.uk.

The new organisation plans to encourage WikiLeaks-style whistleblowing, hoping those with a potential story will contact the Fleet Street-based editorial team or leave the documents in an anonymous drop box, which will launch at a later date, Watts explained.

The server is physically located outside of the jurisdiction which means it makes it much safer in terms of attempts to find out who has passed information on.

As well as hoping to have leaked documents to investigate, the team of mainly freelance journalists will spend the majority of time “crawling public data for stories that are generally going missed”.

The journalists will be “investigating governments in the widest sense of that word, investigating public bodies and what they are up to” by analysing the “increasing volume of public data available”, Watts said.

Journalists working for a mainstream media title don’t really have the time to assess and make sense of that data.

The team of journalists

The growing team of journalists working for the organisation includes “people who have worked on both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, people who have worked in broadcasting and people from trade magazine backgrounds”, Watts told Journalism.co.uk.

One of those is former Westminster correspondent for the Guardian David Hencke, he said, plus there are “those who are much fresher out of journalism college, particularly those who have learned a bit about data journalism and a bit about how to make use of information that is put in the public domain by an array of public bodies”.

Watts himself ran the investigations unit at the now-defunct Sunday Business, and has worked on the Sunday Times and on TV programme World in Action.

Sample stories

One of the stories currently on the site is on negotiations between the new Libyan government and the UK, which, according to Watts, was later reported in the Sunday Times.

Former Guardian journalist David Hencke has a series of stories on the site “how auditors found crazy examples of misspending by all sorts of Whitehall departments and all this was gathered from audit reports that were in the public domain but had not been picked up on”, Watts said.

Subscription costs

Paywall prices have not yet been set and readers will be able to access the site by paying for a subscription or can opt to micro-buy articles, Watts explained.

The site is particularly, but not exclusively, aimed at a business and City audience,  simply because we think that that’s probably where the paying audience will be, as distinct from the general consumer, which has got used to the idea of having content for free.

Once the paywall is launched readers will see a homepage with introductions to articles and will be then prompted to micro-buy or subscribe.

Investigative journalism does cost money and although people are getting used to the idea of getting news content for nothing, of course what they are often getting for free is just regurgitated, rehashed, or, to use that phrase, churned material which its no wonder is free as really it is pretty valueless.

ExaroNews is holding a launch party this evening (1 November).

Nieman: Zeega, ‘like Storify for multimedia’

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The Nieman Journalism Lab has a post on Zeega, a storytelling web app that it describes as “like Storify for multimedia”. The people behind Zeega, which is not yet public, describe it as a whole different medium rather than simply new software.

Nieman describes the concept:

The still-in-alpha software feels like Storify for multimedia: As you travel across the web, use a simple bookmarklet to collect media fragments — a Flickr image, a YouTube video, a track from the Free Music Archive — and dump it into a project bin. You can share your project bin and invite others to collaborate on the story. The editor interface is simple: Select a few seconds from a video, cut it with a few seconds of another video, drop in a music track, and suddenly you have a little story. You can even prompt the user to call a number or send a text message, delivering a surprising bit of audio in return. The output is pure HTML5, no Flash.

The post also has details on the team behind Zeega and how this summer there were awarded a $420,000 Knight News Challenge grant.

Co-founder Jesse Shapins tells Nieman how he feels hacks should seek to collaborate with hackers and how journalists should develop a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of specific technologies.

“I do think you should have a culture within journalism of creativity around interaction, around the ways in which code works, and what the code makes possible. That doesn’t mean making a journalist learn to write every single programming language that exists. If they’re able to have a rich understanding of the creative possibilities, they can creatively approach the projects that they create.”

There is more on how Zeega makes interactive storytelling simple here.

Tool of the week for journalists – TimeKiwi, to create social media timelines

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Tool of the week: TimeKiwi

What is it? A new tool to turn tweets, blog posts and Instagram photos into a timeline. Add a Twitter handle, a Tumblr, WordPress and Posterous blog and an Instagram account and TimeKiwi will mash them into a combined timeline.

How is it of use to journalists? For storytelling. The tool allows you to demonstrate how a story has progressed. The tool does not require you to authorise the app so you can add any Twitter handle to see how that person’s tweets have played out over time.

Take this example of a timeline of canon Dr Giles Fraser who resigned from his role as chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral last week over plans to forcibly evict Occupy protesters. Adding his @giles_fraser handle allows you to show his tweets as either a vertical or horizontal timeline.

The free version of TimeKiwi cannot be embedded so it is of limited use in telling a story on your site but you can still share links to created timelines. A “business” version is in the pipeline which promises an embed feature and custom views which could be of particular interest to journalists who can then show mapped out tweets and blog posts within a news story.

This TimeKiwi takes in the @journalismnews Twitter account and the Journalism.co.uk WordPress blog.