Category Archives: Events

#dendatameet: Digital editors meet to discuss data and journalism

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Journalism.co.uk is at the Digital Editors Network’s spring meet-up today discussing how news publishers can access useful sources of data and make the most of them
Here’s the line-up:

  • Martin Belam, the information architect in the Guardian’s web development team;
  • Paul Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism Blog;
  • Jueditorially and commercially.
    lian Tait, an organiser of the FutureEverything conference who’s working to make Manchester the UK’s first OpenData City;
  • ProPublica reporter Olga Pierce and news application developer Jeff Larson will discuss the process of building layered data stories at the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news site.

The event is sponsored by Northwest Vision & Media and the School of Journalism, Media & Communication at the University of Central Lancashire and full details are at this link, but you can follow tweeted updates in the liveblog below:

Facebook and Google to be quizzed on whether the internet is safe for free speech

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Index on Censorship is to host a debate on the internet and free speech at the Free Word Centre in London, tonight [12 May] at 6.30 pm.

It will feature:

  • Richard Allan, director of policy EU, Facebook
  • Anthony House, European policy and communications manager, Google
  • Gus Hosein, policy director, Privacy International

If like Journalism.co.uk, you’ve been increasingly alarmed by social network tactics that threaten journalists’ safety and confidentiality, you might like to submit a question to be asked at the event, at this link: ‘Put your questions to Facebook and Google – We ask is the internet safe for free speech?’

Background:

Local Newspaper Week: Mapping a week’s local news headlines

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It’s Local Newspaper Week this week – an event organised by the Newspaper Society to recognise the role of newspapers in local communities. This year’s focus is local independent journalism and holding public bodies to account.

To mark the week, we want to create a snapshot of a week’s headlines from local newspapers across the UK. We’ve kickstarted the map with a picture of Journalism.co.uk’s local newspaper the Argus in Brighton, but want your pictures of newspaper A-boards or headlines from where you are – whether you’re a journalist at that title or a local reader.

You can email the images to laura [at] journalism.co.uk; upload them to our Local Newspaper Week Flickr group at this link; or send them via Twitter using the hashtag #lnw to @journalismnews.

Please include where the photo was taken (village/town/city at least) so we can map it and your name if you want a mention.


View #lnw: Local Newspaper Week headlines map in a larger map

Paul Foot Award opens for entries

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The annual Private Eye/Guardian Paul Foot Award for campaigning and investigative journalism is open for entries in 2010:

The overall winner will be awarded £5,000, with the 5 runners-up each receiving £1,000 at a ceremony to be held in London on 2nd November 2010. Submissions will be accepted for material published in a newspaper, magazine or on a website between 1st September 2009 and 31st August 2010.

The form can be found at this link [PDF] and the closing date is 1 September 2010.

Read Journalism.co.uk’s coverage from last year at this link.

#gv2010: Follow the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010

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The two day Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 is about to kick off in Santiago.

Organisers plan to webcast from the main auditorium 6-7 May.

Global Voices, the citizen media project translated into more than 15 languages, will be hosting discussion and activity around “next generation citizen media, public access and citizen participation” at the two day event.

Global Voices Online will gather with a diverse group of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists from around the world for two days of public discussions and workshops. A two-day internal meeting for Global Voices editors, translators and contributors will follow the public gathering.

GV is also live blogging in English and in Spanish on its site, and via Twitter (@gvsummit2010 / #gv2010).

More information at this link…

Disclaimer: I am a contributor to Global Voices Online.

#ge2010: Inside the biggest night in broadcasting

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It’s quiet now. You can hear a pin drop. In twelve hours’ time it will be organised chaos. I am at the BBC TV ‘hub’ in Belfast getting ready for the biggest night not just of politicians’ lives but broadcasters’ too. Tonight is general election result night and we’ll be live on BBC One and Two for hours on end bringing predictions, results and analysis to British people and many further afield.

In my bit of the hub, I handle all the material going ‘across the water’ from here to the David Dimbleby programme in Television Centre London. BBC Northern Ireland is at all of the eighteen counts at eight counting centres throughout the province, bringing breaking results, analysis, and interviews with the movers and shakers. I will be constantly offering material to the central hub in London, which they will accept, reject or just plain ignore. At busy periods they could probably fill four TV channels with election results coming in.

This is the BBC at its journalistic and technical best. Hundreds of hacks working on getting the results, processing them and analysing the team in London. Nothing can go wrong on the night. Little is left to chance. Rehearsals have been taking place for the better part of the last week. All systems tested, none found wanting-so far. From my desk I can talk to sixteen different locations/units to see what’s happening.

In front of me will be sitting the BBC Northern Ireland hub producer. They’re going out live too from 10.00pm until the last result here, probably around six hours later. We’ll share their fruits with the rest of the nations when we can. To my left will be the RTE hub producer from Southern Ireland. They’re going big on this election with a Belfast and a London Studio and a big outside broadcast to boot.

This is my eighth British general election with the BBC and it still gets the adrenalin going after 30 years.

After it’s over – tomorrow afternoon by best reckoning – it is time for the post mortem and the analysis of what went right what went wrong. To that end, I’ll be producing an event for the Media Society next Tuesday at the University of Westminster entitled Who Won the TV Election? (more details at www.themediasociety.com or below).

Enjoy tonight’s coverage on TV, and come along next tuesday to praise or blame the great men and women who put on this quinquennial spectacle. Rocket science it may not be, but at times it isn’t far off.

Could peace journalism offer a future for news media?

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Non-violent activism is not reported enough in the media, which focuses on violence in too much of its language and reportage, Richard Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, argued yesterday in a Coventry Conversation event at Coventry University entitled “Give Peace Journalism a Chance!”

“Peace journalism is solution-orientated. It gives a voice to the voiceless. It’s attempting to humanise the enemy and exposing lies on all sides, highlighting peace initiatives and focusing on the invisible effects of violence, such as psychological trauma,” he said.

Keeble attacked the traditional media, for acting as propaganda for war, rather than a resolution promoter, but stressed the importance of alternative media in promoting peace journalism.

“Part of the critique is the critique of the language of the media and one of the things that always amazes me, is the way in which the metaphor of war is everywhere […] there’s all different kinds of ways in which alternative citizen journalists are challenging the professional monopoly of this word journalism, and I celebrate them enormously.”

Talking about the exposure of war, Keeble said: “It is the responsibility of journalists to expose the truth.”

“You are not being told to be objective,” he added. “There’s no way in which X can be balanced with Y, because what about A, B, C and D and everything else in between? The whole notion of balance is problematic, isn’t it?”

Reportr.net: ‘Does new media require new journalism ethics?’

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Professor Alfred Hermida reports on today’s conference at the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which will look at changing media ethics in an online environment.

At the heart of the ‘New Journalism, New Ethics?’ conference is whether new forms of media require new standards. Or do established ethical principles still apply?

Ahead of the event, the Center has released a report – ‘Ethics for the new investigative newsroom’.

You can view the report at this link [PDF].

Full post at this link…

#ppa: Follow the PPA’s annual magazine conference

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Today sees the PPA’s annual conference – a chance to hear the business and consumer magazine industry discuss social media, iPhones and iPads, digital revenues and more. Speakers include: David Rowan, editor of WIRED; Christian Hernandez, head of international business development, Facebook; and the CEOs of IPC Media, Future Publishing and Reed Business Information. There’s a full agenda to download here.

Follow live Twitter updates from delegates in the liveblog below:

Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders

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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.