Category Archives: Multimedia

Nieman Lab: What we can learn from US sports journalists

Review: Pressjack, software to create digital magazines

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

2011 Rory Peck Awards open for entries

Five tools to liven up local election reporting

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If you are reporting on the referendum on the voting system, the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies or from one of the 305 town halls across England and Northern Ireland with local elections, how are you going to present the results?

As a text only story which reports how many seats have been lost or gained by each party? Or are you going to try visualising the results? Here are five free and easy to use tools to liven up the results.

1. Many Eyes

Many Eyes is a free data visualisation tool. If you have not tried your hand at any data journalism yet, today could be the day to start.

A. Create a Many Eyes account;

B. Create your spreadsheet using Excel, Open Office (free to download) or Google Docs (free and web based);

You could follow my example by putting ward names across the top, parties down the side and the number of each ward seats won by each party. You will need to include the total in the end column.

C. Paste the data into Many Eyes, which will automatically read your pasted information;

D. Click ‘visualise’. In this example I selected the ‘bubble chart’ visualisation. Have a play with other visualisations too;

E. Copy the embed code and paste it into your story;

2. OpenHeatMap

OpenHeatMap is a way to visualise your results in a map. It is free and very easy to use. You start by creating a spreadsheet, uploading the data and you can then embed the map in your web page.

A. Go to OpenHeatMap (you don’t need a login);

B. Create a spreadsheet. The easiest was to do this is in Google Docs. You must name your columns so OpenHeatMap can understand it. Use ‘UK_council’ for the local council, ‘tab’ for the party and ‘value’ for the number of seats. In this example, the tab column indicates the party with the most seats; the value is the number of seats;

C. Click ‘share’ (to the right hand side of your Google Doc), ‘publish as a web page’ and copy the code;

D. Paste the code into OpenHeatMap and click to view the map. In this example you will see the parties as tabs along the top which you can toggle between. You can change the colour, zoom in to your county or region and alter the transparency so you can see place names;

E. Click ‘share’ and you can copy the embed code into your story.

3. Storify

Anyone can now join Storify (it used to be by invitation only). It allows you to tell a story using a combination of text, pictures, tweets, audio and video.

A. Sign up to Storify;

B. Create a story and start adding content. If you click on the Twitter icon and search (say for ‘local election Kent’) you can select appropriate tweets; if you click on the Flickr icon you can find photos (you could ask a photographer to upload some); you can also add YouTube videos and content from Facebook. When you find an item you want to include, you simply drag and drop it into your story;

C. The art of a good Storify story is to use your skills as a storyteller. The tweets and photos need to be part of a narrative. There are some fantastic examples of story ideas on Storify;

D. Click to publish;

E. Copy and paste the embed code into the story on your site.

4. AudioBoo

You can record audio (perhaps the results as they are announced or reaction interviews with councillors) and include it in your story.

The easiest way is to download the free smartphone app or you can upload your own audio via the website.

A. Create an AudioBoo account;

B. Download the Android or iPhone app;

C. Record your short interview. You may decide to include a photo too;

D. Login to the audioboo website and click ’embed’;

E. Paste the embed code into your story.

5. Qik

Qik is a free and allows you to live stream video. Why not broadcast the results as they happen?

A. Create a Qik account;

B. Download the app (iPhone, Android, Blackberry – a full list of supported phones is here);

C. The video will be automatically posted live to your Qik profile but you’ll need to add the code to your website before you record (you can also live stream to your Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube channel).

D. To do this go to ‘My Live Channel’ (under your name). Click on it to get your embed code for your live channel.

E. Paste your embed code in your website or blog, where you want the live player to be.

How did you get on with the five tools? Let us know so that we can see your election stories.

Media release: Reuters launches 24-hour live news stream

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Reuters this week announced it had launched an online live stream service, providing video access to breaking and scheduled news events from around the world.

In a release the news agency said the live stream will provide a faster and cost-effective option to the traditional satellite news-gathering method.

“Publishers asked for customizable news video, and that’s exactly what we are delivering,” said Chris Ahearn, president of media, Thomson Reuters.”You will continue to see Reuters delivering tools that increase efficiency, reduce cost, and drive revenue. We are working hard to meet the growing demands of the media industry.”

According to Reuters the Tribune Company in the US and Fairfax Media in Australia were the first to adopt the new technology, to carry live coverage of the royal wedding.

Ten things every journalist should know about data

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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.

How to: Create a Tumblr blog for your news organisation

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What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is a very visual way of blogging. One of the many beauties of Tumblr is its simplicity and easy interface. You can create an account, choose a URL, select a design theme and create your first post in under five minutes.

It is free and it is social: users can reblog, flag up things they like and engage by asking questions and commenting. Since each Tumblr blog has its own URL, you don’t need to be a member to view posts.

Although it has been around since 2007, over the past year it has been growing at an incredible rate.

“Right now Tumblr serves up 5.7 billion pages each month; this is growing by 400 million more pages every week,” Mark Coatney from Tumblr told Journalism.co.uk.

Almost half the Tumblr pages viewed are from the US, but the UK Tumblr community is growing fast and it now has 4.5 million unique users and 8 per cent of page views making it the third largest country on Tumblr.

The US is first, with 32 million people visiting the site; Brazil second with 5.6 million.

News organisations are joining Tumblr.

The Guardian launched its Tumblr blog earlier this year, with a notable experiment of live reporting from the SXSW conference;
Washington Post’s technology blog is the best example so far of a news organisation integrating Tumblr into its main site;
Since it’s difficult to view Al Jazeera TV in America Al Jazeera’s Tumblr has become a source of news;
The New York Times T Magazine officially joined earlier this month following the controversial axing of an unofficial Tumblr blog.

Five of the best Tumblr news blogs are at this link.

Tumblr, which was started in New York in 2007, by David Karp when he was just 20, almost became too popular for its own good. In December, rapid expansion led to it being down for eight hours. It has since opened another data centre to cope with capacity.

How does it work?

There are seven post types: text, photo, quote, link, chat, video, plus you can ask or answer questions.

You can post from the web-based dashboard or by downloading the free iPhone, Android or BlackBerry app.

There are also other options including posting links from Bookmarklet, publishing via email and other third party applications (find out more via the Goodies tab on the dashboard).

You can decide to follow people or organisations, much as you do on Twitter. You can reblog (similar to retweet) and “like” a story. Followers can also ask questions or leave messages. You can create a group blog so several members of a team can contribute (go to the dashboard and members).

Who should consider Tumblr?

News organisations and individuals.

There are some great examples of news organisations getting to grips with Tumblr with the Guardian leading the way in the UK. There are some great examples from the worlds of fashion and art.

Tumblr’s Mark Coatney pointed us in the direction of this Short Form Blog, a really nice independent site that does news analysis and curation.

Why use Tumblr?

To engage with the 4.5 million UK Tumblr users.

“Our use of Tumblr is neither a marketing exercise nor a means by which to generate simple click-throughs,” Stephen Abbott, executive producer at Guardian.co.uk told Journalism.co.uk.

“We launched the Tumblr because we wanted to engage with the Tumblr community and we’re always on the lookout for new communication tools which might help to improve or augment our editorial coverage.”

First things first

Get a feel for Tumblr and decide whether it is suitable for you or your news site.

“I would advise any journalists thinking about using Tumblr for their organisation to first get to grips with the nature of the platform and become familiar with the practices and tone used on Tumblr.

“Then they’ll be in a much better position to decide whether they could find a opening or niche on Tumblr which could be filled by their journalistic output,” Abbott explained.

Think about how you can engage without the Tumblr community and what you want to blog.

Perhaps you can use it for fashion and lifestyle, the best photography from your publication or as a way to connect readers with your newsroom. The Economist’s Tumblr blog includes its cartoons and front pages.

News organisations can use Tumblr “as a way into specific niches” of the organisations, Tumblr’s Mark Coatney advises.

“For instance, Washington Post does a very nice Tumblr blog just for their style section; this allows a specific kind of post reader another entry into the paper tailored just for them.”

The second piece of advice Coatney has is for organisations to use Tumblr “as a way to foster peer-to-peer communication between news organisation and reader”: GQ’s Tumblr, for instance, does an excellent job of using Tumblr’s “ask” feature (every Tumblr blog as an ask me a question page) to bring readers inside the GQ’s office.

His third piece of guidance is to use Tumblr “as a way to bring the intelligence of the newsroom to the public: CNN Money Tech has a group Tumblr that replicates the chatter that goes on in newsrooms every day; a cast of seven CNN reporters regularly dash off short notes and observations about stories they’re following throughout the day”.

Think visually. And also in terms of video and audio as Coatney explains.

Tumblr is a very visual platform; of the 25 million posts done every day on Tumblr, half of them are photos.

Posts with striking visuals tend to be reblogged more by other users as well, helping to spread the content quickly throughout Tumblr’s network.

The Guardian’s Stephen Abbott said: “We will often strive to post stories which have striking pictures or video to accompany the text of the post.

“But this doesn’t mean that we only post picture-led stories. As you can see from the variety of posts at guardian.tumblr.com, we like to try to post stories picked from a wide variety of sections on guardian.co.uk to showcase the breadth of content on our site.”

Along with receiving much attention for its use of Tumblr at SXSW, the Guardian has carried out two other experiments as part of its editorial coverage: this Glastonbury 2010 scrapbook and this one on untangling the web.

Think about who will manage it. Large news organisations use community editors.

“The Guardian Tumblr account is managed by our news community coordinators Laura Oliver and James Walsh,” Abbot explained.

“Laura and James work closely with our news desk editors on a wide variety of our coverage – from breaking news to long-form features – and they pick a variety of stories that they feel will be appropriate for Tumblr.”

Ready…

Now you have got a feel for Tumblr blogs you can create your account, which takes a few minutes. All you need is an email address, a password and a username, which will become part of your URL (thenews.tumblr.com)

Upload a picture/avatar. This is probably going to be your logo, perhaps the same as your Twitter thumbnail.

Now choose a design. You can opt for a free theme, pay for a premium one (costing between $9 and $49) or you can customise your own (perhaps with the help of a developer).

Look around at other examples and see what is most effective.

“We looked at many Tumblr accounts before creating the Guardian Tumblr in order to survey the enormous variety of designs and layouts available – but we didn’t copy any of these.

“Our designers came up with a look and feel for the Tumblr which was distinct to the Guardian but which capitalises on the strengths of Tumblr,” Abbott said.

Download the free smartphone app if you want to post from away from your desk/laptop.

Connect with Facebook and/or Twitter if you want your posts to be automatically added to your Facebook and Twitter news feeds (via customise on the dashboard). Bear in mind it will indicate that the post is via Tumblr.

Steady…

Consider other add ons. Tumblr supports short comments but you can also add your Disqus account you can also take advantage of Tumblr’s own back up tool. You can decide whether or not you want to embed the blog into your own website (via Goodies).

Get ready to analyse. Paste your Google Analytics code into your site description in the customize menu.

You’ll also be checking the notes section to see what has been reblogged.

You don’t necessarily have to heavily promote your Tumblr blog.

“We have alerted Guardian readers to the presence of the Guardian Tumblr via our main @Guardian Twitter account but, at present, we don’t promote the Guardian on Tumblr across our other platforms.” Abbott told us.

Go!

Start posting.

Go visual
Be conversational
Keep it short. One, two or three paragraphs and link additional background content
Don’t just promote your own content. For example, the LA Times has linked to an Economist article on California; Al Jazeera has posted third party content of a time lapse map of uprisings and protests
Tag tag tag. Tumblr is powered by tags
Reblog
Ask and answer

How did you get on? Let us know when your news organisation has set up a Tumblr account.

Five stories to inspire you to try Storify – which anyone can now join

Anyone can now join multimedia storytelling platform Storify.

The site, which allows users to drag and drop elements such as tweets, audioboo recordings, photographs from Flickr and YouTube videos to tell a dynamic story, which can then be embedded on a news website or blog, was previously in private beta and an invitation was required. As of this week Storify is now in public beta.

Since its launch in September, private beta users have created more than 21,000 stories, according to this post.

Storify stories have been viewed more than 13 million times, 4.2 million views were in March. The stories generated have been embedded on more than 5,000 sites, including news sites from the New York Times, to the Guardian and BBC.

Here are five stories to inspire you to have a go:

1. The Stream, the daily television show powered by social media and citizen journalism on Al Jazeera English, has created this Storify story on Blogging from “Between the Bars”.

[View the story Blogging from “Between the Bars” on Storify]

2. The Wall Street Journal embedded this Storify story which asks where should New York place QR codes?
[View the story QR codes in New York City on Storify]

3. Storify received record views after March’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
[View the story Latest on Japan earthquake and tsunami on Storify]

4. BBC London curated the London marathon with Storify.
[View the story Your Story of Marathon 2011 on Storify]

5. And whether you love of hate the hype, the Royal Wedding will no doubt inspire more Storify stories, such as this one from ABC News.
[View the story UK gears up for royal wedding on Storify]

Do you have any useful tips for people using Storify? Please share them with Journalism.co.uk readers.

News sites can now add a Facebook ‘send’ button

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Facebook has launched a new plugin with great appeal to news sites.

“Send” is similar to the “like” function but allows Facebook users (and there are half a billion of them) to send a news story as a private message to an individual, a few friends or a group.

The “send” button can be added to a site’s sharing options, as the Washington Post has done here:

Or users can click the Facebook icon or ‘share’ button and they will then have the option to send the story as a private message.

A Facebook user may come across a gallery of marathon pictures on a news site and decide to “send” the link to everyone who sponsored them. Or a charity may want to “send” a news feature about a campaign to a particular group, which the members can then discuss privately.

According to this Facebook blog post, the ‘send’ button keeps people on your site.

The send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don’t need to leave the web page they’re on or fill out a long, annoying form.

Compared to the alternatives, the send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and groups.

A small group of news sites and brands launched their ‘send’ buttons yesterday.

Details of how to add the ‘send’ button to your site are at this link.

Sport goes hyperlocal with a web streamed cricket match

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An Easter Monday cricket match on a village green in rural England is to be web streamed as a possible world first.

Social media consultant John Popham came up with the idea to film the match in Wray, the first wifi hotspot village in Lancashire, after being inspire by two tweets, he explains on his website.

There were two tweets which really inspired this. The first was from Dan Slee expressing his hopes for keeping up with a local village cricket team via twitter, the other was from Chris Conder (@cyberdoyle) as she tested the 30Mbps symmetrical internet connection her village now has access to, courtesy of Lancaster University.

“I started this off as a demonstration to show what can be done cheaply and easily,” Popham told Journalism.co.uk.

But despite plans to use technology such as Livestream‘s free web streaming service to broadcast the match, the idea has now gathered pace.

With the help of a retweet from Stephen Fry it has now attracted attention and Birmingham-based Aquila TV has offered to take over the filming and web streaming, which will be embeddable so can be displayed on the Wray village website and by anyone else interested in broadcasting the match.

Popham explained he is trying to demonstrate the importance of strong and reliable broadband and upload connections in rural areas and explained “there are hardly any other rural areas where this would be possible apart from Wray”.

The attention has also resulted in interest from across the pond.

“I’ve been contacted by Americans over the moon to be able to watch cricket on a village green,” Popham said.

Is Wray’s cricket web stream the first of its kind, or do you know of another wired village transmitting to the world? Tell us in the comments area.

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

Online journalism news

Category Archives: Multimedia

Nieman Lab: What we can learn from US sports journalists

2011 Rory Peck Awards open for entries

Media release: Reuters launches 24-hour live news stream

Ten things every journalist should know about data