Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

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Visualisation shows the topics New York Times journalists are writing about

The Visual Communication Lab, part of the IBM Center for Social Sofware has created a site to provide a visualisation to show what subjects New York Times journalists are writing about.

NYT Writes, created by research developer Irene Ros, allows users to enter a subject and see a visualisation of the journalists who have written on that subject.

This post on the VCL blog explains what the visualisation shows.

There are a few things that you will see once the search is complete. First, on the left side of the screen you will see a stack of bubbles at varying sizes. Each bubble represents a term, or “facet”, that was used to describe one or more articles containing your search query.

Facets get manually attached to each article by the New York Times staff. An article about “Tsunami” might be tagged as being about “Natural Disasters,” for example. The size corresponds to the relative amount of times that tag appeared comparing to all the other facets collected from all other articles in the query set.

You can mouse over each bubble to see the tag name appear in the middle as well as how much it appeared relative to the other facets below the stack itself. This stack could also represent what I call a “dedicated writer” – someone who only writes about one topic for 30 days would have a similar stack to this one.

You can try out NYT Writes at this link

How newspapers can use Facebook more effectively

Five great examples of data journalism using Google Fusion Tables

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Google Fusion Tables allows you to create data visualisations including maps, graphs and timelines. It is currently in beta but is already being used by many journalists, including some from key news sites leading the way in data journalism.

To find out how to get started in data journalism using Google Fusion Tables click here.

Below are screengrabs of the various visualisations but click through to the stories to interact and get a real feel for why they are great examples of data journalism.

1. The Guardian: WikiLeaks Iraq war logs – every death mapped
What? A map with the location of every death in Iraq plotted as a datapoint.
Why? Impact. You must click the screen grab to link to the full visualisation and get the full scale of the story.

2. The Guardian: WikiLeaks embassy cables
What? This is a nifty storyline visualisation showing the cables sent in the weeks around 9/11.
Why? It’s a fantastic way of understanding the chronology.

3. The Telegraph: AV referendum – What if a general election were held today under AV?
What? A visual picture of using the hypothetical scenario of the outcomes of the 2010 general election if it had been held under the alternative vote system.
Why? A clear picture by area of the main beneficiaries. See how many areas are yellow.

4. WNYC: Mapping the storm clean-up
What? A crowdsourced project which asked a radio station’s listeners to text in details of the progress of a snow clean-up. The datapoints show which streets have been ploughed and which have not. There are three maps to show the progress of the snow ploughs over three days.
Why? As it uses crowsourced information. Remember this one next winter.

5. Texas Tribune: Census 2010 interactive map – Texas population by race, hispanic origin
What? The Texas Tribune is no stranger to Google Fusion Tables. This is map showing how many people of hispanic origin live in various counties in Texas.
Why? A nice use of an intensity map and a great use of census data.

You can find out much more about data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, an event held at Thomson Reuters, London on Friday 27 May.

Review: Pressjack, software to create digital magazines

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Pressjack allows users to turn RSS feeds and online content into a page-turning digital magazine within minutes, which can then be shared by email or social networking sites.

What is it?
The best way to answer that is to view an example. Here is one we made earlier. You will need Adobe Flash to view it.

Pressjack joins Flipboard and Zite the category of social magazines. But unlike Flipboard and Zite, which are for iPad and designed to tailor make a magazine based on content flagged up by people from your social networks, Pressjack is designed so you use your own web content – which includes text, photos and video – to create a digital magazine for your customers or readers.

The current version is Flash-based so cannot be viewed on the iPad or iPhone but a HTML5 version is in development and due to be released this summer.

Three ideas of how Pressjack could be used by news organisations?

1. Local newspapers offering regional print editions of jobs and property supplements could produce tailored, more localised digital versions using Pressjack;
2. Create an weekly newsletter and email the link to the magazine to your subscribers, as we have done here;
3. Create a special supplement – such as after an election or event – to be emailed out and posted to Twitter and Facebook.

What you need to know about Pressjack

Pressjack is currently in beta and users can register to download the free software. Later it will be possible to upgrade to the enterprise or pro versions, which will have additional features such as the ability to add your own advertising (instead of Pressjack’s advertising) and host the magazine on your own site.

Developers hope Pressjack will be out of beta by mid-July. Paul McNulty managing director of Trinity Innovations, the company behind Pressjack, told Journalism.co.uk:

We took the decision to release the product and start engaging people. We made a lot of assumptions but we’re now including the user in the next step.

The product came about as a way to promote Trinity Innovations’ main product, page-turning eBook software called 3D Issue. “Eloquent organisation is what this tool is all about”, McNulty said.

Pressjack has a few limitations but developers are improving it all the time. When I first tried it, just three weeks ago, the user interface and the customisations were not a patch on what they are now.

The verdict: Pressjack is great at doing what it sets out to do: allow you to easily create a digital magazine. It is quick – it took me less than 10 minutes to download the software and create this example magazine – and the end product is nicely designed.

The downside is your magazine is hosted elsewhere (though you can upgrade to give you the ability to host your own publication) and it can’t be embedded.

Will customers follow the link? Do they all have Flash? Are readers’ internet connections fast enough to see the magazines before clicking to close the window? I’m not sure. My main problem though is that I am just not a fan of the format: of page-turning online publications.

How to: create a digital magazine using Pressjack

1. Register for the trial version and download and install the software;
2. In the “content” tab, click “add” and give your magazine a name (Journalism.co.uk’s weekly newsletter, for example);
3. Add RSS feeds by clicking “all feeds” and click the + button to the top right of the screen (I added our “news”, “blogs”, “jobs” and “press releases” feeds;
4. Drag and drop the RSS feeds onto the name of you magazine;

5. Click the “articles” tab. You can now edit the individual stories or delete any you don’t want to include (it is not possible to batch delete, unfortunately). You will be able to see associated pictures, which you can choose to omit. Click “build”;
6. Click the “output” tab and Pressjack will build your magazine. This may take a few minutes depending on the number of stories you’re including.

7. At this point users have the option to customise the colours and the design. There are also options to add Google Analytics ID so that stories read in the digital magazine will be counted in web stats.
8. Click “publish” and the magazine will be uploaded to Pressjack’s site. You will be given a URL, which you can email or post on social networking sites or your own site.

Let us know if you use Pressjack by leaving a comment below or by sending us a message @journalismnews

Where does Twitpic row leave journalists?

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Newspapers, broadcasters and websites are unable to publish Twitpic photos without permission from the person who owns the copyright, according to a media law specialist.

And the copyright is owned by the person who took and uploaded the photo, the founder of Twitpic, a service which allows users to append a photo or video to a tweet, has confirmed in the company’s blog.

“From what I’ve heard of the terms they are describing I don’t think that journalists can use the pictures people have uploaded to Twitpic and print or broadcast them,” media law consultant David Banks told Journalism.co.uk.

The question of the copyright of Twitpics has been answered this week and founder of Twitpic Noah Everett has apologised to users after it faced a barrage of criticism when it changed its terms leading many users to understand that Twitpic would have the right to sell users’ photos.

Twitpic users ditched their accounts in their droves in favour of alternatives, like this (really nice) option, Imgur.

“To clarify our ToS regarding ownership, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it’s your content,” Everett said on the blog.

However, by signing up to use Twitpic you agree to allow the company to distribute your images to its partners, which include celebrity photo agency WENN.

Twitpic has said that it had changed its terms to prevent the media publishing and broadcasting photographs of newsworthy events – like this Twitpic of the Hudson river plane crash – without the permission.

Writing on the Twitpic blog, founder Noah Everett said:

Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable.

Twitpic’s full terms of service are at this link.

The BBC editorial guidelines on the use of photographs from social media sites are at this link.

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

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Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

Visualisation shows the topics New York Times journalists are writing about

Five great examples of data journalism using Google Fusion Tables