Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

New York Times/ProPublica’s DocumentCloud makes newspaper debut

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DocumentCloud, a technology aimed at making data more accessible and helping journalists and news organisations deal with large volumes of documents, has made its debut on the Chicago Tribune’s website.

The Tribune has used DocumentCloud to publish the source documents of a news story and allow readers to browse by section and receive additional information around highlighted annotations.

The Tribune is one of 21 more than 70 news partners beta testing the technology, which is funded by a grant from the Knight News Challenge in 2009. The New York Times and ProPublica have allowed several staff to “moonlight” on the project, but is an independent organisation led by Eric Umansky, senior editor at ProPublica, Scott Klein, news applications editor at ProPublica, and Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times newsroom’s interactive technologies editor

Update: Despite this tweet from Aron Pilhofer, I am reliably informed by Amanda Hickman, programme director of DocumentCloud, in the comment below that the technology has also appeared alongside Newshour and Propublica stories too.

Dan Nguyen: Coding for journalists – four online tutorials

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Dan Nguyen, a developer/journalist for ProPublica, the  non-profit investigative news organisation, has shared four tutorials that would:

…guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites.

Four-part series at this link…

Yahoo releases Style Guide for writing and editing

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Yahoo has released a style guide for writing, editing and creating content in the ‘digital world’. Priced at £13.12 on Amazon.co.uk (currently on pre-order only), it promises to be the ‘Ultimate Sourcebook’.

Here’s the blurb:

Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a top story? How can I better know my site’s audience? The rapid growth of the Web has meant having to rely on style guides that are intended for print publishing, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style, or The Associated Press Stylebook, but these excellent guides do not address writing for the Internet.

The Yahoo! Style Guide does. Writers and programmers at Yahoo!, faced with a lack of industry guidance fifteen years ago, began cobbling together a set of guidelines for Web writing.

The seeds of The Yahoo! Style Guide were planted with their first in-house reference guide, and Yahoo! content creators have built and added to the guide ever since, making it the go-to manual inside Yahoo!. Polished and expanded for its public debut, this resource will cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as:

• Identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone
• Constructing clear and compelling copy
• Developing a site’s unique voice
• Streamlining text for mobile devices
• Optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results
• Streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.

The Yahoo! Style Guide will help anyone who writes, edits, or designs for the Internet accomplish their work with clarity and precision.

Via FishbowlNY

Nieman Journalism Lab: Gawker’s new traffic metric measures ‘reader affection’

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While others pour over pageviews and underscore uniques, Gawker Media has been quietly working on a new metric, one designed to measure so-called “reader affection”. This new metric is called “branded traffic” and is, according to Nieman Journalism Lab, “both more nebulous and more significant” than traditional forms of measurement.

The idea is to measure the number of visitors that arrive at the site via a direct search for its name or variations on its branding, or by typing in the site URL directly, and distinguish them from more incidental traffic.

The metric comes from a simple compound: direct type-in visits plus branded search queries in Google Analytics. In other words, Gawker Media is bifurcating its visitors in its evaluation of them, splitting them into two groups: the occasional audience, you might call it, and the core audience.

The original Gawker release highlights the value the site places on turning the internet passerby into an affectionate reader:

While distributing content across the web is essential for attracting the interest of internet passersby, courting these wanderers, massaging them into occasional visitors, and finally gaining their affection as daily readers is far more important. This core audience – borne of a compounding of word of mouth, search referrals, article recommendations, and successive enjoyed visits that result in regular readership – drives our rich site cultures and premium advertising products.

Full post at this link…

Random Guardian and New York Times – a ‘chatroulette for news’

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While I might not entirely understand the growing popularity of Chatroulette, a video chat site where users can change to a new, random partner at the click of a button, it’s interesting to see the Guardian’s and New York Times’ own take on a ‘chatroulette for news’.

The Random Guardian will throw up a random page from the past 24 hours from Guardian.co.uk, which can be changed by clicking ‘play again’.

Daniel Vydra, a software developer at the Guardian, has created the same randomiser for the New York Times too, pulling in the Times Newswire API.

It’s mainly a bit of fun, but following on from our post on Ultraknowledge and new ways to search and navigate news sites, the applications bring a note of serendipity and gaming to your average browsing experience.

paidContent:UK: iPad plans from Spectator and FT

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paidContent:UK looks at plans from two UK publishers readying their iPad editions ahead of the device’s US launch this weekend.

Digital editions provider Exact Editions is involved with The Spectator’s iPad launch, which will adopt a freemium model, Exact’s co-founder told pC:UK.

Elsewhere the Financial Times is preparing a sponsored FT iPad app. Launch sponsor Hublot will subsidise a two-month free access period. After this, the app will revert to the same model as the FT’s iPhone app, which is feel to download, but charges for access to more than 10 articles.

iPad news: would you pay more?

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The Wall Street Journal have announced that they will charge $17.99 for their iPad edition. As reported by FishbowlNY, a subscription to both the online and print version of the Journal costs $2.69 a week, or roughly $10.76 a month. And yet, the paper wants to hike that cost up 67 per cent for a subscription to the iPad edition alone.

The move raises questions about the comparable value of print and digital editions. More specifically, of print, online, and what we might call enhanced digital editions, like those being designed for the iPad format.

Given that online news content is largely free (although the Journal’s is not), but print news content is largely charged for, we might automatically value digital editions less, and assume that they will cost less. In announcing that its much-publicised iPad edition will probably be cheaper than its print magazine, Wired magazine has followed this way of thinking.

But does the potential of the iPad to offer an enhanced experience of multimedia content, interactivity and social sharing, not to mention the device’s status as a groundbreaking way of delivering news, in turn offer publishers an opportunity to value it higher than the print product? Or, in the case of the Journal, a subscription to both print and online?



image by curious lee

Exclusive to our users: Journalism.co.uk in 3D

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Inspired by Grazia’s new 3D issue of its magazine, we’re proud to reveal a product we’ve been working on for several months minutes: Journalism.co.uk in 3D. Our lead design architect Harriet will guide you through the steps.


Background to magazines and augmented reality here.

NYTimes.com: How Ushahidi is ‘transforming the notion of bearing witness’

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How Ushahidi, the mapping technology developed to help bloggers and citizen journalists share information about political violence in Kenya, is being used by news organisations and governments:

With every new application, Ushahidi is quietly transforming the notion of bearing witness in tragedy. For a very long time, this was done first by journalists in real time, next by victim/writers like Anne Frank and, finally, by historians. But in this instantaneous age, this kind of testimony confronts a more immediate kind: one of aggregate, average, good-enough truths.

Full story at this link…