Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

All-day interview tips from @NewsLeader – Wednesday 27th May

Tomorrow, from 8am to 8pm, @NewsLeader aka Justin Kings, will be tweeting tips from BBC and commercial broadcasters as ‘a day of advice aimed at producing better interviews’.

“Journalists from BBC Radio 1 and the World Service, editors from Sony nominated Beacon Radio and Jack FM, and BBC local radio are amongst the contributors,” Kings, who runs the media consultancy NewsLeader, told Journalism.co.uk.

“I think it’s exciting because it’s rare that people from BBC and commercial sectors get to share best practice with each other,” Kings said. “It’s not too late to share tips via @newsleader,” he added.

Cnet News: Newly prominent videos on Google News

“Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning. But when it re-emerged, it sported newly prominent news videos hosted at YouTube,” reports Cnet.

Some of the news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. “Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player with a news video. Although the videos had been present before, Google is calling attention to them with the new logo as part of a facelift launched Thursday,” Cnet explains.

Full post at this link…

Event: Liveblogging with CoverItLive’s Keith McSpurren

UPDATE (May 12) – The session with Keith McSpurren will kick off at 1pm tomorrow – if you’re attending it’s in Room AG03 ground floor, College Building, City university – that’s 280 St John St, London EC1 (map here)

Liveblogging – the format of choice for news sites to cover events it would seem given recent examples.

Times Online did some great work during the G20 protests; the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog has long used a real-time approach for reporting the markets; while Trinity Mirror’s regional titles have joined forces to produce group-wide liveblogs in the past – to name but a view.

Liveblogging tool CoverItLive was first profiled by Journalism.co.uk in April 2008.

Next week its founder Keith McSpurren is in the UK and will be coming to City University in London to talk about the good, the bad and the potential for liveblogging and news.

This is an informal and free event, from 1pm next this Wednesday (May 13).

Leave a comment below if you’re interested or email laura [at] journalism.co.uk and I’ll send you more details.

Spread the liveblogging word.

paidContent:UK: Sun’s page 3 girls too ‘obscene’ for Apple newspaper app

paidContent:UK reports: “Just as newspapers were looking to attract new mobile readers, Apple has rejected the first version of Newspaper(s), an iPhone app that let users read the content of over 50 newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, France’s Le Monde, and the UK’s tabloid the Sun. Apple rejected the app on the grounds that The Sun, with its topless Page 3 Girls, was ‘obscene’.

Full story at this link…

TechCrunch: Why a Kindle for newspapers won’t save them

Responding to this week’s scheduled launch of a new large screen version of Amazon’s Kindle (an e-reading device), this TechCrunch post says newspapers should not pin their hopes on this new technology.

“It’s not the ‘paper’ part of newspaper that’s the problem, it’s the ‘news’,” writes MG Siegler, adding that Kindle’s new launch could do well in the textbooks market.

(A post on BNET responding to TechCrunch suggests the site hasn’t fully disclosed its own investments in a mobile computing device)

Full post at this link…

Reuters using Apture for multimedia linking

Last year BBC News online trialled technology from Apture, which created pop-up windows to wikipedia pages, youtube and relevant articles from certain hyperlinks.

Now Reuters is using the the feature – predominantly on its blogs – to do the same, linking to images, maps, Twitter updates, videos and relevant articles.

The service ‘helps Reuters.com enhance its content with intuitive links to related information available on the Web, without directing reader traffic away from Reuters.com’, says a release from Apture.

You can see it in the screengrab below or take a look at Apture in aciton on the Reuters Fan Fare blog.

Apture on Reuters

The Beeb ended its Apture trial – despite positive feedback – but with the Washington Post and Reuters using it, let’s see what happens.

WindowOnTheMedia: Database journalism defined

An interesting day to flag this one up (given that the Guardian  is actively calling for people to play with the Swine Flu data today): Nicolas Kayser-Brill has written an entry on Wikipedia for ‘database journalism’.

Full story at this link…

Also see: #DataJourn Part 1: a new conversation (Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog)

Martin Belam: “Introducing Information Architecture at the Guardian”

As Journalism.co.uk reported last month the first London Information Architecture mini-conference raised immediate online interest, and ‘sold’ out fast. Here Martin Belam shares his notes from the event on his blog.

Full post at this link…

Daily Sentinel: How to use Twitter to break news from the field

The Sentinel’s online editor, Matthew Stoff, and lead developer, David Durrett, have compiled a handy ‘how to’ guide on using Twitter to report breaking news and building a Twitter widget for your site. (via Editors Weblog)

Full article at this link…