The Guardian, established as the Manchester Guardian on 5 May 1821, is 190 years old today. See the newspaper’s birthday editorial at this link, and a selection of images from the newspaper’s history here.
Dear the Guardian, many happy returns, in some form or other.
I really like this interactive feature from the excellent New York Times graphics team on readers’ reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden.
As a way of organising responses to a crowdsourcing exercise it isn’t anything new, it takes off from mapping responses geographically. But it is simple and effective, mixing text responses with a broad visual understanding of where the readership’s sentiments fall.
Interesting to see how many people sit right on the fence in the significance stakes.
The image below is a completely non-interactive screengrab of the feature, but follow this link for the full experience.
The NYT team has also put together some impressive graphics showing the layout of the compound, geography of the area and timeline of events.
Technology is “making fools” of high court judgements in relation to injunctions, according to former editor of the Sun Kelvin Mackenzie.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Today on Saturday, reflecting on Andrew Marr’s revelation last week that he had taken out a super-injunction to protect his family’s privacy, Mackenzie said there should not be any such protections afforded.
I am in favour of free speech. We get ourselves in a shocking situation now where there’s a sort of two-track society. There’s those of us who know what the allegations are and all the names of all the famous people, which are basically media folk, and there are the rest of the public who are denied of knowing.
He added that the “explosion” of the online world means allegations are instead just being published on sites based outside the US.
Allegedly intelligent high court judges … have absolutely no common sense on this issue or an understanding of how technology is making fools of their judgements.
Also speaking on the show was Desmond Browne QC, a member of the special committee set up by Lord Neuberger to examine the use of media injunctions by the courts.
I think there’s a substantial difference between someone who knows the name being able to go on Wikipedia, seeing that there has been a redaction and making a conclusion as a result, and something being plastered all over the front page of the Sun or the Daily Mail and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the courts to simply give up in the face of something that may be accessible on the web.
On Sunday the Observer published a debate between Max Mosley, the former chief of Formula One who previously won damages of £60,000 from the News of the World for breach of privacy, and John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship, on the very issue of super-injunctions. Finally there is a sequel to the already popular online slots Troll Hunter. The new ufaso slotebi has a very similar look, a great chance of winning up to 5,000 times the stake and lots of action thanks to ingenious features.
Mosley is currently trying to get the UK law changed in favour of “prior notification” before a newspaper publishes allegations about an individual. Speaking in the debate Kampfner claimed that if Mosley’s law succeeds “it will set back the cause of free speech by decades”.
Work experience has caused a bit of a stir in the nationals recently, what with Clegg and Cameron slugging out over social mobility. In an industry like the media, controversy over its almost mandatory unpaid placements is never far away.
But bloggers Wannabe Hacks have taken a step back from the debates about how to solve a problem like work experience to ask: What are the 50 best journalism placements?
The Wannabe Hacks – who have “all done reams of work experience themselves” – will be asking aspiring journalists to nominate their best placement in no more than 40 words.
They can be paid or unpaid, and contributors are asked to include the publication name and section if applicable.
Nominations can be sent to Ben Whitelaw on top50@wannbehacks.co.uk. The deadline is Friday, 27 May at 5pm.
Managing editor of the Huffington Post Media Group Jai Singh, is leaving for a role as Yahoo Media Network editor in chief, paidContent reports.
At Yahoo, he will be responsible for increasing original content and performance across all platforms—and for all of YMN’s leading brands, not only Yahoo News.
Read more from paidContent on this here. Yahoo also reported the move itself.
Every journalist needs to know about data. It is not just the preserve of the investigative journalist but can – and should – be used by reporters writing for local papers, magazines, the consumer and trade press and for online publications.
Think about crime statistics, government spending, bin collections, hospital infections and missing kittens and tell me data journalism is not relevant to your title.
If you think you need to be a hacker as well as a hack then you are wrong. Although data journalism combines journalism, research, statistics and programming, you may dabble but you do not need to know much maths or code to get started. It can be as simple as copying and pasting data from an Excel spreadsheet.
You can find out more about getting started and trying your hand at complex data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, on 27 May. More details about the event are here and you can order tickets, which cost £156 including VAT, by clicking here.
Here are 10 reasons to give data a go.
1. Everybody loves a list. Did you click on this post as you wanted an easy-to-read list rather than an involved article?
2. Everybody loves a map. Try Quantum GIS (QGIS), a free, open source tool, or OpenHeatMap, a fantastic, east-to-use tool as long as your data is categorised by country, local authority, constituency, region or county.
3. Tools bring data to life. Applications such as ManyEyes and Yahoo Pipes mash data and turn complex numbers and datasets into easy to read visualisations that work well both online and in print. Try this how to guide to Yahoo Pipes to get you started. Here are 22 data visualisation tools from Computer World.
4. Data may need cleaning up. Try using clean up tools like Scraperwiki, which helps non-technical journalists copy a few lines of code to turn a document such as pdf into a number-friendly file like a csv, and Google Refine, which Paul Bradshaw has written some useful posts on over on the Online Journalism Blog.
5. Data of all sorts is increasingly available. The open data movement across the UK is resulting in an increase in the release of data. The possibilities are huge, says Paul Bradshaw on the Guardian’s Datablog. January 2010, saw the launch of data.gov.uk, a fantastic resource for searching for datasets.
6. Data journalism can answer questions. A good place to start in data journalism is to ask a question and answer it by gathering data. Numbers work well. One option is to submit a Freedom of Information request to ask for the numbers. It helps if you ask for a csv file.
7. You can use the crowd. Crowdsourcing by asking a question on Twitter or using a site like Help Me Investigate, an open source tool for people can use to collaborate to investigate questions in the public interest.
8. Data can be personal to every reader. DocumentCloud can highlight and annotate documents to help readers see what is important and learn a document’s back story.
9. “Data journalism is not always presenting the data as journalism. It’s also finding the journalism within the data,” Jay Rosen said in relation to this article on Poynter on how two journalists from the Las Vegas Sun spent two years looking at 2.9 million documents to find out what “what’s right, and wrong, about our local health care delivery system”. The result was that the journalists exposed thousands of preventable medical mistakes in Las Vegas hospitals. The Nevada legislature responded with six pieces of legislation.
10. “Data ethics is just as important as ethics in journalism, in fact they are one in the same,” according to this post on Open Data Wire. Consider the BBC’s FoI request which showed a 43 per cent rise in GPs signing prescriptions for antidepressants and the ethics of unquestioningly relating this to the recession. Ben Goldacre has highlighted the problems with seeing patterns in data.
This is a cross post originally published on the news:rewired website. You can get your tickets here.
A full agenda for news:rewired – noise to signal, is here. A list of more than 20 speakers is here.
Today is World Press Freedom Day. It comes at a time when news organisations and freelance journalists working to report on uprisings in the Arab world have battled, and are still battling, restrictions on their ability to do their job.
In Egypt we heard of news bureaux being shut down during the protests in the country, in Libya foreign journalists told of ‘days of brutality’ in detention while two Western journalists were killed while trying to cover the conflict. And beyond the uprisings, across the world, there are daily reports of journalists, both local and foreign, being prevented from carrying out their work to report on the events around them, through legal action, technological blackouts or violence and intimidation.
Journalists killed around the world in 2010. Infographic supplied by World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers
So today has been marked as a day to show support for the journalists fighting for a free press and to remember those who died doing so. The BBC reports that “hundreds, if not thousands” of events are being held across the world today. For its part director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks has called for a minute’s silence at 11am “to mark the sacrifices made by journalists in the name of press freedom, and to honour those who have been killed”.
Some might see this as just a gesture, which will surely not be observed by all. But the turmoil, anguish and the death toll from the Arab Spring revolts and revolutions have brought home as rarely before how critical the role of journalists is, in not just doing a job, but reporting on events which decide the fate of nations.
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is providing a range of material including interviews, infographics and cartoons, for news outlets to use to highlight the meaning of the day.
The BBC Trust has approved a new strategy for BBC Worldwide to include a greater focus on international opportunities.
In a release published by the trust today, it confirmed that a new strategy was approved for BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the broadcaster, in March.
This follows an 18 month-long review of the BBC’s commercial activities, setting out changes to the future remit of BBC Worldwide.
The BBC Executive’s strategy for BBC Worldwide is now to develop a more integrated and ‘balanced’ internationally-focused portfolio that, within the agreed parameters, balances the need for growth with acceptable levels of risk. BBC Worldwide should also seek to invest in growth businesses which offer new rights monetisation opportunities.
The National Union of Journalists has called on Johnston Press shareholders to encourage management to work with the union.
In an open letter, published on its website, being presented to the publisher’s shareholder’s at an AGM today, the union criticises cuts at Johnston Press.
The Johnston Press annual report boasts about ‘local content’, ‘teams of local experts’ and proclaims that ‘Content is King’. Yet behind the corporate jargon, the company has reduced staff in its editorial teams dramatically in the last 12 months, with so-called ‘back-office functions’ – which include newspaper content creators – being moved sometimes miles away from the communities they serve.
The much-hailed new content management system is ‘operational’ across the business. This is purely down to the hard work of journalists. The company’s failure to invest in new hardware made the shaky implementation of the system exceedingly difficult. Similar systems have been introduced successfully at other newspaper groups who recognised this was a key investment that couldn’t be brought in on the cheap.
Over 230 editorial staff have been made redundant; significantly, 85 per cent volunteered to leave, a testament to the poor morale amongst staff. Those made compulsory redundant were often treated badly – in some cases individuals were given only a few hours to make a choice between a huge pay cut and imposed relocation or being forced to leave. All of this has taken place at a company that claims to belong to ‘Investors in People’.
Peer Index has ranked the 100 most authoritative UK journalists on Twitter. The ranking platform uses resonance, reach, activity, and other metrics to tot up a number for tweeters.
In first place is Telegraph fashion and style writer Hilary Alexander, who currently commands a Peer Index of 78 and a following of 176,238.
In second place is Bad Science blogger and Guardian writer Ben Goldacre, who has an index of 76 and a following of 105,885.
Journalism lecturer and founder of helpmeinvestigate.com Paul Bradshaw, who will be speaking at Journalism.co.uk’s upcoming news:rewired conference, is in 7th place, and fellow news:rewired speaker Kevin Anderson is 10th.