Former News International and Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton is giving evidence to MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee this afternoon.
You can follow his appearance, which he is making via video link from New York, here on Parliament TV.
1. NYT.com: ‘incredibly surprising’ growth in unique users
2. Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month
3. How to: manage reader comments as a journalist
4. How to get involved with the Guardian’s latest venture into hyperlocal
5. Ten incredibly useful browser add-ons for journalists
6. Times and Sunday Times to cut up to 150 editorial posts
7. Hillsborough families call on Sun to name sources
8. Twitter, journalists and court coverage: where to draw the line?
9. Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing
Yesterday and today, staff at the Guardian have been having a get together that sums up the kind of thing the organisation is really good at.
The Guardian Hack Day is about getting its developers in a room and getting them to build stuff, with helpful advice from staff from editorial, commercial, or anywhere I think.
Information architect Martin Belam probably describes it better:
I suppose we should explain a bit more about what a “hack day” is at the Guardian. Essentially for two working days our tech team puts aside their normal work, and gets to work on a project of their own choosing. Sometimes they will work as teams, sometimes as individuals. (And sometimes I think they have been secretly coding the things for months in advance anyway). Other people, like the design and UX team, and commercial & editorial staff, are also encouraged to take part if they can spare the time.
This is certainly not the first hack day, but they are liveblogging this one, and it makes for interesting reading. It is coming to a close now, I got sidetracked away from posting something about it yesterday, but you can still follow the day two liveblog here, and you can look back on the goings on from yesterday here.
A nice hack from someone outside the Guardian also appeared today: http://latertodayguardian.appspot.com/
Created by Chris Thorpe, who used to work for the Guardian’s Open API Platform team, it uses a Guardian JSON feed to turn the news organisation’s new experimental open newslist into a great looking column-based page, with links to reporters’ Twitter accounts and a Guardian API search to try and match the newslist to published stories.
The Guardian’s new iPad app has been downloaded 145,880 times since it was launched last Thursday (13 October), with more than a third of those from outside the UK.
The app is free for the first three months due to a sponsorship deal with Channel 4, after which it will cost £9.99 per month.
The Guardian also today revealed that just over a million Facebook users have installed the Guardian’s Facebook app, which was released exactly a month ago.
Since its launch at the beginning of the year, the Guardian’s iPhone app has been downloaded over half a million times; its Android app, which was launched last month, has been downloaded over a quarter of a million times.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said in a statement:
Since launching last week, the new Guardian iPad edition has already been downloaded over 145,000 times. This number of downloads in a week is a fantastic achievement, and shows the appetite among our readers to access our content in new, digital ways. This is our most successful app launch to date, and an important milestone as we continue to evolve into a digital-first news organisation.
Statistics breakdown
iPad app downloads
Total: 145,880
UK: 85,018
US: 29,082
Res of the wold: 31,780
Guardian iPhone app
Since launching in January this year, the app has been downloaded over 570,000 times, with nearly 100,000 users going on to take out subscriptions.
Guardian Android app
This launched last month, on 7 September, and since then the app – which is free and ad-funded – has been downloaded over 250,000 times.
Who? Alan Fisher
Where? Alan is senior correspondent for Al Jazeera English.
Twitter? @AlanFisher
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips, we are recommending journalists to follow online too. Recommended journalists can be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to rachel at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Browser extensions for Google Chrome, add-ons for Firefox and Safari extensions can be very powerful and incredibly useful to journalists.
Here is a list of some that can help you find and search, verify sources and speed up picture annotation.
Some of the extensions in this list are our tips and the rest are suggestions submitted to us after we sent out a tweet asking for nominations.
Verifying Twitter sources can be testing. When this browser extension for Chrome is installed and you hover over a Twitter profile photograph, it will enable you to see what other online accounts that user has and although not fool-proof, will give you some idea of whether they are a real person with LinkedIn, YouTube and Delicious accounts and, helpfully, a Klout score, which measures online influence.
The downside is you have to use Twitter’s own website rather than a platform such as TweetDeck and it does depend on users using the same email address to link their various profiles.
2. Awesome Screenshot (Chrome and Firefox)
An incredibly useful Chrome and Firefox extension for online journalists who spend time annotating screengrabs in Photoshop and other graphics packages.
First you click the button on your browser to take a screen shot and then you can crop the image, circle or blur an area and save it.
3. Greplin (Chrome)
Greplin is an incredibly useful tool and has a handy browser extension which allows you to search your own private files from Chrome. It’s like Google for your email, calendar, Dropbox and Delicious. After you have signed up to Greplin and added the extension you can then type ‘g’ in the url field and search for a keyword or phrase and find references to it from your Gmail, Facebook and Dropbox accounts, plus in several other platforms.
4. Delicious (Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
Delicious has various add-ons to help users of the bookmarking platform. You can post a URL directly to Delicious and see your tags to allow you to easily find archived bookmarks.
Tipster: @the_claus
5. British English Dictionary (Firefox)
If your CMS, such as WordPress, has a default US spelling setting, this is one way of switching it to British English. Install the add-on, select several rows of text, right-click and change the language.
6. Firebug (Firefox)
This is a handy extension for journalists to “edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page”. By clicking on the installed add-on, you will be given a screen which shows you the code. Handy for spotting bugs.
7. Zotero (Chrome and Safari)
Zotero is a tool to help you collect, organise, cite, and share your research sources. Click on the add-on and you can file any web page into your Zotero library and manually add additional notes and information. There is a video here that explains how Zotero works.
Tipster: @onlinejourno
8. ScribeFire (Chrome and Safari)
ScribeFire allows you to blog from your browser, without opening the CMS or platform. You can post to platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, and LiveJournal.
You can edit and update existing posts and also schedule posts for the future (if your blog allows that). You can also delete posts, save drafts, tag, categorize and upload images, and post to multiple blogs at once.
Tipster: @onlinejourno
9. WikiTrust (Safari and Firefox)
Journalism students are no-doubt told never to rely on information form Wikipedia. This handy add-on goes some way to help you understand the online reputation of authors and content, however. Click the installed tab (within Wikipedia) and the intensity of the colour highlighting the text will tell you the degree to which it has been revised by high-reputation authors.
An orange background indicates new, unrevised, text, white is for text that has been revised by many reputed authors.
Tipster: @the_claus
10. Greasemonkey (Firefox)
This Firefox add-on allows you to “customise the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript”. For example, use other people’s code to do things like remove the Facebook side ticker.
Journalist Mary Hamilton, who recommended the add-on said she uses it to automate really simple tasks and auto-refresh web pages.
Tipster: @newsmary
There was an interesting discussion going on at Cardiff University today, as Darren Waters, a social media producer in the BBC Wales newsroom, joined students for a discussion on community which, according to the hashtag on Twitter (#cjscomm), included a topical discussion on the issue of immediacy in online reporting.
Recent events, specifically in relation to court coverage, have demonstrated the issues this can raise for journalists and news outlets working in the online environment, with the pressure and power of immediate publication at their fingertips. Earlier this month several news outlets mistakenly reported that Amanda Knox’s conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher had been upheld, when the judge was in fact returning a guilty verdict for a charge of slander. The murder conviction was overturned, but once the word “guilty” had been heard several news organisations quickly sent out their stories and the Guardian made the same mistake on its liveblog.
Another specific challenge related to this is the delivery and sharing of breaking news on platforms such as Twitter, where journalists face making important decisions of when to share certain information and when to hold back.
In December last year England and Wales’ most senior judge published new guidelines which gave journalists greater freedom to file live reports and Twitter updates from court. As I write this a number of journalists are covering the Vincent Tabak trial live, with the issue of what a journalist should and shouldn’t report from a court case (and the wider approach to using Twitter) being simultaneously highlighted in the Cardiff University discussion.
http://twitter.com/#!/egrommet/status/126977274489737216
http://twitter.com/#!/trouse11/status/126979679524634624
http://twitter.com/#!/elenacresci/status/126978519996710912
http://twitter.com/#!/EMD1990/status/126980685570392064
http://twitter.com/#!/joeloboUK/status/126976995283320835
Follow the hashtag to read more from the debate and advice offered by Waters. And feel free to tell us what you think. Where should the line be drawn in court reporting, especially during the hearing of detailed evidence, and what considerations should journalists make before pressing the button to submit? Share your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter @journalismnews.
The Guardian expects this weekend will see the millionth person install its new Facebook app, exactly a month since it was launched.
The app, which allows Facebook users to see what their friends are reading after a single sign-in when they agree to share their viewing habits, was launched on 22 September at the London leg of Facebook’s F8 conference.
Content sales and marketing director at the Guardian Chris Lawson gave the prediction at the newspaper’s Media Guardian Changing Advertising Summit 2011, which is underway in London.
Less than two weeks after launch, on 5 October, the Guardian reported 129,000 app installs generating over 600,000 story reads.
That figure is likely to grow significantly when the Guardian release up-to-date statistics, which it plans to do in the next few days.
Six months ago the Guardian Media Group called time on its regional news pilot Guardian Local, but it is continuing to experiment in the local market, its latest venture being n0tice, a location-based online notice board to share and read news and notices.
The hyperlocal website and mobile site is currently in private beta, with a team of three at GMG along with an army of contributors helping to shape the online version of the village notice board. Others who want to get involved will soon be able join.
n0tice was born out of a Guardian hack day and has SoLoMo, a trend towards social, local and mobile, at its heart, but as it does not currently have Guardian branding it feels more like an independent start-up than a child of the news outlet.
The platform is a space for people to buy and sell, like the classifieds section of a local newspaper, and can be used for general notices, local news and liveblogs or updates posted by citizen reporters as community news breaks.
It is like a reverse Foursquare, where rather than checking in to a business or venue, you allow your computer or mobile to grab your location information and the site finds the community groups, items for sale and news near you.
How is it going to make money?
Listing on n0tice is free but users get the option to pay for a featured post. Pricing is yet to be confirmed but the figure currently being worked with is a charge of £1 for each mile radius from the seller’s location per day.
The site, which can be used worldwide and white labelled, will be given free to hyperlocals and sold to commercial ventures, such as anyone who wants to use the technology to set up a location-based site, according to community strategist at GMG Sarah Hartley, who was head of online editorial at the Manchester Evening News and later launch editor of the now defunct Guardian local experiment.
And of course, being a Guardian platform, it has an open API.
Along with Hartley, who this week spoke about n0tice at the Brighton Future of News Group, two others are working on the development of the platform: Matt McAlister, who is director of digital Strategy (who in May announced n0tice with this thorough explainer) and developer Daniel Levitt (whose blog is here).
One of the areas the team is looking into is how to best reward users who contribute, with a current system in place of an ‘Editor’ badge which goes to the first user in an area.
The next round of users will be invited into the platform soon soon, with a planned release of the site next year. You can sign up to be one of those by entering your email address here, you can follow @n0tice on Twitter and get involved by joining this Flickr group and “celebrate noticeboards” by contributing photographs.
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Liam Fox, Occupy Wall Street and BlackBerry
for the week ending Sunday 16 October
Covered lots
Covered little
Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)
Celebrity vs. serious
Arab spring (countries & current leaders)
Who wrote a lot about… the Joanna Yeates murder trial
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