In carrying out some research for a feature on CV and job interview tips, we asked on Twitter for memorable and tough questions asked at journalism job interviews.
Below is a Storify of the responses.
Wired.com has published a feature about tongue-in-cheek gaming, adding a playful twist by turning the article into a game.
In a feature called the curse of Cow Clicker: How a cheeky satire became a videogame hit, Wired.com reports on how a “cow-clicking game” (FarmVille), inspired another cow clicking game (Cow Clicker), by adding a cow clicking element to the feature – perhaps a first in digital storytelling.
Every time a reader clicks on the word “cow” – repeated 97 times within the feature – a graphic of a cow appears, with the “cownter” keeping track of how many cows have been clicked on. The cows in fact obscure the text therefore making it more difficult to read the article.
Readers can also click on the graphical cows to send them to their Facebook friends.
The feature is intended to “echo the theme” of the Cow Clicker Facebook game discussed in the feature, Shannon Perkins editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com told Journalism.co.uk. “It’s an intentionally trivial experience obscuring a more content rich experience,” he said.
Cow Clicker was created by Ian Bogost, a game developer, academic and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at play. The game, which peaked at 56,000 players, was inspired by popular Facebook game FarmVille.
The Wired.com featured includes an interview with Bogost.
… This thought popped into my head,” Bogost says: “Games like FarmVille are cow clickers. You click on a cow, and that’s all you do. I remember thinking at the time that it felt like a one-liner, the kind of thing you would tweet. I just put it in the back of my mind.”
He developed Cow Clicker with “transparently stupid prizes—bronze, silver, and golden udders and cowbells—that people could win only by amassing an outlandish number of points. (A golden cowbell, for instance, requires 100,000 clicks.)”
On one level, this was all part of the act. Bogost was inhabiting the persona of a manipulative game designer, and therefore it made sense to pull every dirty trick he could to make the game as sticky and addictive as possible. But as he grew into the role, he got a genuine thrill from his creation’s popularity. Instead of addressing a few hundred participants at a conference, he was sharing his perspective with tens of thousands of players, many of whom checked in several times a day.
Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.
Journalisted Weekly: Kim Jong-un, New Year honours and Syria
for the week ending Sunday 1 January
Covered lots
Covered little
Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)
Celebrity vs. serious
Eurozone leaders (top ten by number of articles)
Who wrote a lot about… Rick Santorum
Long form journalism
Journalists who have updated their profile
The Media Standards Trust, which runs journalisted, won the ‘One to Watch’ category at this year’s Prospect Think Tank Awards
Read about our campaign for the full exposure of phone hacking and other illegal forms of intrusion at the Hacked Off website
Visit the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism
Read the MST’s submission to parliament’s Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions and the House of Lords Communications Select Committee on investigative journalism
The Orwell Prize 2012 is open for entries
For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe
Image by DanBrady on Flickr. Some rights reserved
Imagine a top tabloid newspaper supported a leading ‘non-Westminster’ politician through his difficult divorce. Instead of printing hard-hitting stories about the moral duplicity of this very Christian politician, it publishes soft-focus, upbeat articles about his lovely new wife and their joyous life together. The politician goes on to become a leading national figure, but then the tabloid discovers a story of his corruption when he was back in the regions. The politician rings up the tabloid editor to threaten ‘unpleasant and public consequences’ if they publish. What happens next?
The Leveson inquiry has not really got to grips with this aspect of media practice. Never mind the law or the codes, feel the power. In the past, commentators like John Lloyd felt the press had become too mighty and could make or break politicians and even determine elections. Then during the Blair/Campbell years it was felt the pendulum had swung the opposite way. Perhaps some people could imagine Peter Mandelson making a similar threat to a journalist at the height of his career?
In fact the scenario outlined above is playing out in the real world. In Germany, the President, Christian Wulff, was silly enough to try to intimidate his old chums on Bild. The tabloid ignored the threats and published the story of how Wulff had taken a very large secret loan from the wife of a local businessman. He then lied about it. The scandal now threatens to end the career of the man who is, in effect, Germany’s head of state. In the midst of the Eurozone crisis, this is not good news for Angela Merkel.
But the point is that – without subterfuge or phone-hacking – this German tabloid has turned on its former political ally. As the chief executive of Bild’s publisher, the Springer group, Mathias Döpfner said “whoever takes the elevator up with Bild will also take the elevator down with it”.
It is always difficult to make international comparisons. Is Axel Springer comparable to Rupert Murdoch? As I have written elsewhere, British tabloids are pretty unusual. But the question does spring to mind – could it, or perhaps rather, how would it happen here?
This is a cross-post from the Polis blog.
Tool of the week: The Interviewr
What is it? A tool to schedule, record and archive interviews
How is it of use to journalists? The Interviewr has been designed for journalists. It allows you to schedule phone interviews, add notes and questions you want to ask, record and store the audio, and upload related files.
Free to use, the Intreviewr uses Twilio to power the recording of phone calls. After entering your phone number (with a +44 at the start, if you are in the UK) and the interviewee’s number (again with the country code), both will receive a call at the scheduled time and the conversation will automatically be recorded. You will then be able to download it and play it back.
The Interviewr is still in beta and is developing a subscriber service. There is also an iPhone app (priced at £1.99), allowing you to start the interview and playback the audio from your phone.
Google Maps image of Pakistan
Pakistan has topped another 2011 list of countries ranked by the number of journalist killings, this one recorded by the International Federation of Journalists.
It follows being named the “deadliest country for journalists” in 2011 by the Committee to Protect Journalists in its December report.
The latest toll reported a total of 106 journalist and media worker deaths worldwide last year, in what the IFJ called “another bloody year for media”.
The organisation has written to the secretary general of the UN calling “for effective implementation of international legal instruments to combat the prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against journalists”.
The IFJ report found a total of 11 deaths in Pakistan, the same figure was also reported for Iraq and Mexico.
By Matt Buck, currently engaged as engraver to @tobiasgrubbe
If…
1. Rupert Murdoch revives the News of the World, but online-only.
2. Nick Davies loses his job at the Guardian, but joins the revived News of the World as part of its investigative team.
3. The Guardian poaches the “fake sheikh” Mazher Mahmood from the Sunday Times.
4. A trend develops for floundering local newspapers to be bought out by local entrepreneurs, returning control and vested interest to their communities.
5. The Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the UK press concludes nothing needs to be done about unethical and/or illegal media practices, as they are redundant because everyone is publicly revealing everything about themselves on social media sites like Facebook anyway.
6. Journalists are officially declared to be bloggers, thereby ending a perennial (and very tedious) debate.
7. The Guardian launches a paywall.
8. Richard Desmond, founder of Northern & Shell and owner of Express Newspapers is knighted in the New Year Honour list and becomes chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
9. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and is appointed National Security Adviser to the Obama administration.
10. Facebook buys the Daily Mail, as part of a number of strategic acquisitions of ‘accordant’ news outlets throughout the world.
Thanks to Matt Buck for permission to use his excellent cartoon.
Journalism.co.uk will be off from today for the Christmas break. We’ll be back on 3 January.
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all of our readers.
Not quite true-to-life picture of Brighton pier courtesy of Elsie esq on Flickr, some rights reserved.
1. Ten things every journalist should know in 2012
2. ‘Privacy is for paedos’: The Leveson inquiry so far, in quotes
3. Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories
4. Q&A Sky News: 2011, an extraordinary year for news
5. Piers Morgan’s phone ‘hacked by Mirror colleague’
6. Tabloid Girl author explains ‘heightened reality’ tales
7. Dangerous assignment deaths ‘highest on record’
8. App of the week for journalists – iRig Recorder, for recording, trimming and sharing audio
9. Leveson inquiry: Piers Morgan denies hacking allegations
10. NoW whistleblower’s brother: Hacking was ‘routine’ at the Sun
Click the above image to connect with Journalism.co.uk on Twitter
After putting together some lists of the top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011, the top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011 and Journalism.co.uk’s top 10 stories on Facebook in 2011, we’ve compiled a list of the most tweeted Journalism.co.uk news stories and blog posts of the year.
1. Journalists increasingly using social media as news source, finds study 1,250
2. BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters 911
3. Ten ways journalists can use Google+ 881
4. Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism 720
5. Al Jazeera English hits US screens after New York cable deal 508
6. #ijf11: Lessons in data journalism from the New York Times 468
7. How the five journalists with the greatest online influence use social media 367
8. ‘Is there a better way of doing this?’: Johann Hari responds to plagiarism accusations 361
9. #su2011: New online open newsroom a hit for Swedish newspaper 356
10. News of the World to publish final edition this Sunday 318
Data was gathered using Searchmetrics.