The Financial Times has reported that “one of James Murdoch’s closest advisers” has resigned. Alice Macandrew was Murdoch’s spokesperson but reportedly handed her notice in back in July.
She becomes one of the first senior executives to quit News Corp voluntarily over disagreements with the company’s approach, which saw the publisher contest phone-hacking lawsuits brought by celebrities and other public figures in 2010 and early 2011 and close the News of the World in July.
Google+ users can now share their circles, one of the key features of the social network which launched in private beta three months ago and is now open to all.
Users create their own circles and give them a name, such as ‘journalists’, ‘city councillors’ or ‘PRs’. They can then read news from members of a particular circle and share updates with one or more specific groups.
A link now appears when you hover over a circle that allows you to share it with a contact. Your circle remains hidden and confidential from others and is not updated in your contact’s account when you add more individuals.
The video below explains more.
Help us create a master list of UK-based journalists on Google+
Journalism.co.uk will now create a master list of UK-based journalists on Google+. When we have built the circle we will share it with those who request our circle.
We will be doing this from John Thompson, owner and managing director of Journalism.co.uk’s account as Google+ does not yet allow news sites or brands to create an account. You can connect with John at gplus.to/JohnCThompson and fill in the form to let us know you would like us to share the Journalism.co.uk master list with you.
Visual.ly allows news sites and blogs to embed the uploaded visualisations – in the true spirit of the open data movement.
The visualisation has a timeline on the evolution of APIs and the release of public data, including facts and figures on Data.gov.uk, a site where journalists can access and work with public data which launched in public beta in January last year.
What is it? A platform to allow you to search and analyse documents as data.
DocumentCloud works by encouraging users to upload documents, it then pushes them through the Thomson Reuters-powered OpenCalais, a “toolkit of capabilities” that can be used by news sites for semantic analysis. Document sharing is good practice that many news desks have adopted and something all journalists should consider to enable data to be shared and searchable.
How is it of use to journalists? Journalists can search for keywords and analyse documents as data.
For example, try searching for “phone hacking” and you are presented with a series of parliamentary reports, the text of speeches and letters contributed by the Guardian, New York Times, the Lens and the Telegraph.
You can then dig deeper, view the documents on a timeline and find related documents.
There are two articles that are essential reading for anyone who has a news site or blog, and interesting to anyone who cares about the data they are sharing online.
The first is this excellent article by James Cridland, managing director of Media UK. In his post “It’s a matter of privacy” he explains why his site has stripped out code and moved away from the official Twitter and Facebook buttons.
Whenever you see a tweet button, that means that site owner has added a small piece of code from Twitter onto their page. Load the page, and, whether you like it or not, Twitter is aware that someone has just loaded that page. If you’re signed in to Twitter, Twitter know that you’ve visited it. You don’t have to hit the tweet button or do aything else.
The same goes for the Facebook like button. Any page which uses it loads code from Facebook: and if you’re logged in (or even if you’re not), Facebook knows that you’ve seen that page – regardless of whether you click on the like button.
And the same goes for the Google +1 button. While there’s no evidence that Google Analytics knows who you are even if you are signed into your Google Account, Google +1 certainly does. Once more, simply by loading a page with a Google +1 button on it, you signal back to Google that you’ve looked at that page.
Cridland also points out that the collection of data slows the page loading time too.
Short argues that by relying on social media sites business, including news sites, are poor tenants ruled by the whims our rich landlords. He too discussed how all social media sites pose privacy questions to sites and illustrates why Facebook, which launched a new type of Open Graph apps last week, is worth studying.
Facebook’s abuse of its Like button to invade people’s privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We’re on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So far, so predictable.
What most people don’t know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button, Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn’t put anything on your wall, but it knows where you’ve been. This happens even if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites, so every time you visit one you’re doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account. (And you know how easy that is.)
The article goes on to explain that most users accept the dropping of cookies and the collection of data as a necessary part of browsing. However, Short highlights an important point:
What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it’s a third party to the deal. It doesn’t need this data to run its own services. Moreover, Facebook’s aggregation and centralisation of data across all our disparate fields of activity is a very different thing from our phone company having our phone data and our bank having our finances. Worst of all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you’d need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook’s activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they’re doing with your data.
Short recognises that business – including news sites – rely on social media for their success. And he doesn’t offer any solutions.
Perhaps the first step is to follow BBC News and Media UK in using unofficial Twitter and Facebook buttons.
Facebook has confirmed that the way it collects information from its users may result in the transmission of user data from third-party websites, even when they are logged out, but has asked for users to trust the company and will fix a total of three cookie-related issues within the next 24 hours.
David Frost’s memorable encounter with Richard Nixon in 1977 has been voted the best broadcast interview of all time by readers of the Radio Times.
The magazine held a poll in conjunction with the BBC College of Journalism’s Art of the Interview season, asking readers to vote on a shortlist of around 50 interviews.
The Frost/Nixon interview came first by a decent margin, winning 19 per cent of the vote. In second place was Kirsty Young’s 2009 Desert Island Discs interview with Morrissey, which received 12 per cent of the vote.
Ken Clarke’s calamitous interview with Victoria Derbyshire earlier this year – in which he appeared to suggest that some types of rape were less serious than others – was in third place, and Jeremy Paxman’s famous 1994 interview with Michael Howard, in which Paxman asked an evasive Howard the same question 12 times in a row, was fourth. Skip to around 3:50 to see Paxman embark on his quizzing Odyssey.
The full list:
David Frost/Richard Nixon (1977) 18.6%
Kirsty Young/Morrissey, Desert Island Discs, Radio 4 (2009) 11.6%
Victoria Derbyshire/Ken Clarke, Radio 5 Live (2011) 10.8%
Jeremy Paxman/Michael Howard, Newsnight, BBC2 (1997) 7.8%
Becky Milligan/Anthony Steen, The World at One, Radio 4 (2009) 6.5%
Melvyn Bragg/Dennis Potter, C4 (1994) 5.5%
Michael Parkinson/Muhammad Ali (1971) 4.8%
Martin Bashir/Princess Diana, Panorama, BBC1 (1995) 4.6%
Diana Gould (Nationwide viewer)/Margaret Thatcher, BBC1 (1982) 4%
Sian Williams/PC David Rathband, Broadcasting House, Radio 4 (2010) 3.2%
Michael Parkinson/Emu (1976) 2.8%
Bill Grundy/Sex Pistols, Today, ITV (1977) 2%
Jon Snow/Alastair Campbell, Channel 4 News (2003) 1.7%
John Freeman/Gilbert Harding, Face to Face, BBC TV (1960) 1.4%
Gordon Wilson – Enniskillen (1987) 1.2%
Paxman Meets Hitchens: a Newsnight Special (2010) 1%
Owen Bennett Jones/Michael Caine, The Interview, BBC World Service (2011) 1%
Michael Parkinson/Meg Ryan, BBC1 (2003) Awkward 0.9%
Jon Snow/Zac Goldsmith, Channel 4 News (2010) 0.8%
Jeremy Vine/Gordon Brown, Radio 2 (2010) 0.7%
Katie Couric/Sarah Palin, CBS (2008) 0.7%
Tom Bradby/William & Kate, ITV News (2011) 0.7%
Graham Norton/Lady Gaga, The Graham Norton Show, BBC1 (2011) 0.6%
Robin Day/Japanese Foreign Minister, ITN (1959) 0.6%
Russell Harty/Grace Jones, BBC (1981) 0.6%
Robin Day/John Nott (1982) 0.6%
Oprah Winfrey/Michael Jackson (1993) 0.6%
Melvyn Bragg/Francis Bacon, South Bank Show, ITV (1985) 0.6%
Baroness (PD) James/Mark Thompson, Today, Radio 4 (2009) 0.6%
Adam Boulton/Alastair Campbell, Sky News (2010) 0.5%
David Frost/Kenneth Tynan & David Irving (1968) 0.4%
Hugh Stephenson & James Bellini/Sir James Goldsmith, The Money Programme (1977) 0.3%
Paula Yates/Michael Hutchence, Big Breakfast, C4 (1994) 0.3%
Peter White/Christopher Reeve, No Triumph No Tragedy, Radio 4 (1999) 0.3%
Dan Rather/Saddam Hussein, CBS (2003) 0.3%
Jeremy Paxman/Mark Thompson, Newsnight, BBC2 (2010) 0.3%
Redhead/Nigel Lawson, Today, Radio 4 (1987) 0.2%
Jenni Murray/Monica Lewinsky, Woman’s Hour, Radio 4 (1999) 0.2%
Ruby Wax with Jim Carrey, BBC1 (2003) 0.2%
Fern Britton/Tony Blair, Fern Britton Meets, BBC1 (2009) 0.2%
Piers Morgan/Cheryl Cole, Life Stories, ITV1 (2010) 0.1%
Brian Oprah Winfrey/Tom Cruise (2005) 0.1%
John Wilson/Bob Geldof, Meeting Myself Coming Back, Radio 4 (2011) 0.1%
Adam Boulton/George & Laura Bush, Sky News (2008) 0%
Jenni Murray/Sharon Shoesmith, Woman’s Hour, Radio 4 (2009) 0%
There could be no doubt: someone had broken into my flat. Three months after arriving in Russia as the Guardian’s new Moscow bureau chief, I returned home late from a dinner party. Everything appeared normal. Children’s clothes lying in the corridor, books piled horizontally in the living room, the comforting debris of family life. And then I saw it. The window of my son’s bedroom was wide open…
The Online News Association’s annual conference and awards took place in Boston at the end of last week.
Here is a round-up of the must-read blog posts which will help you sort though the noise of an event that saw 21,000 tweets sent by around 1,200 journalists.
The second screen is literally what it sounds like — the screen readers look at in addition to the TV. This could be an iPad, a laptop or a phone.
According to [Patrick Stiegman of ESPN] stats about Internet consumers, 85 million Americans consume both TV and the web simultaneously. This provides a huge opportunity for news organisations to serve fans in real time, alongside live events.
One particularly interesting area for UK news sites to consider is how the New York Times, which doesn’t control the first screen, competes with eyes for the second screen.
The post explains how Brian Hamman and Tyson Evans of the New York Times have observed and outlined the cycle for event coverage online:
1. Event cycle: What’s happening, how much can I get about the event before it happens?
2. Analysis cycle: When event is started, what does it all mean
3. Conversation cycle: What are other people and my social circle saying and how can I chime in?
To accomodate for all three cycles of these major events, the best project to point at is The New York Times’ Oscars coverage, which was a dashboard built with three streams.
And the post explains how you can do it all for free:
If you don’t have a team of developers to spend three months building these tools (as Evans and Hammans spent on the Oscars site), there are free tools you can use to achieve the same thing:
If you were unable to take a trip to the US to attend #ONA11, you can learn about key developments in journalism at news:rewired – connected journalism, which takes place in London on 6 October.
Google News unveiled a new feature during a session at the Online News Association Conference in Boston at the weekend which will allow publishers to highlight their top content and give “even more credit where credit is due”, according to the Google blog.
At present the so-called “standout content” tag is only available on the US edition of Google News and it is not clear from the Google blog when it plans to roll out the new feature in the UK.
The Google blog explains how news sites can flag up top content:
If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:
Standout content tags work best when news publishers recognise not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognised as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.
Google is asking news sites to use the tag a maximum of seven times a week so that it can recognise what is exceptional content.
The 10,000 Words blog was at Online News Association Conference and has more on the launch of the feature.
