Who? Mark Woodward
Where? Mark is group head of websites at Johnston Press. His LinkedIn profile is here.
Twitter? @MarkWoodward
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, 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 sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Twitter has issued advice on keeping your account secure.
It follows a recent case of the Fox News politics Twitter account being hacked.
Hacking is rare, according to Twitter’s blog, but phishing, when a spam message ask for your password, is relatively common.
Here are some recommendations from Twitter.
- Use a strong password with at least 10 characters and a combination of letters, numbers and other characters for your Twitter account. And use a unique password for each website you use (email, banking, etc.); that way, if one account gets compromised, the rest are safe. A personal email account that is compromised is the second most likely way an intruder gains access to Twitter accounts.
- Use HTTPS for improved security on Twitter. This is the same encryption technology that allows you to safely make payments online. Learn how to do this here.
- We recommend linking your phone to your Twitter account. Doing this could save your account if you lose control of your personal email and/or password. Here’s how to do it.
- If you think your account has been compromised, visit our help page for compromised accounts to find out how to fix it quickly.
For advice on protecting your phone, see Journalism.co.uk’s How not to get your phone hacked blog.
Visual.ly is a new platform to allow you to explore and share data visualisations.
According to the video below, it is two things: a platform to upload and promote your own visualisations and a space to connect “dataviz pros”, advertisers and publishers.
Visual.ly has teamed up with media partners, including GigaOM, Mashable and the Atlantic, who each have a profile showcasing their data visualisations.
You will soon be able to create your own “beautiful visualisations in minutes” and will “instantly apply the graphics genius of the world’s top information designers to your designs”, the site promises.
Plug and play, then grab and go with our push-button approach to visualisation creation.
The sample images are impressive, but journalists will have to wait until they can upload their own data.
You can, however, “Twitterize yourself” and create an image based on your Twitter metrics.
Who? Ed Walker
Where? Ed is a multimedia producer with Trinity Mirror Regionals. He blogs at www.edwalker.net
Twitter? @ed_walker86
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, 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 sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
The Economist has launched an iPhone and iPod app based on its World in Figures book, which is published annually.
The World in Figures app, which costs 69 pence, has data on 190 countries.
It is of use to journalists who need to access country stats, and of interest to a much wider audience, despite some of the data being a little old.
The app includes ‘ranking topics’, with stats on daily newspapers per country and press freedom. Data – whether it be cinema visits, Oscar-winning films, aid donors, or stats on disease – can be shared by email or posted to Facebook.
There are also a series of trivia flashcards, which can also be shared by Twitter.
Last month, the Economist released figures to say its news iPhone and iPad apps had been downloaded two million times.
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.
for the week ending Sunday 24 July
For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe
US-based designer Andy Rutledge has written an excellent post on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to news site design and navigation. It is a must read for anyone remotely interested in how to present news on desktops and mobile.
You need to click though to this post in order to see all his comments when he describes what is wrong with the New York Times site. Here are a few points he makes after considering a number of digital news contributions.
- Headlines should describe, inform, and be powerful. They should be the workhorse of the publication.
- There is no ‘edition’. All news is global. All news is local. ‘Global Edition’ and ‘Local Edition‘, etc… are non sequiturs. Navigation and filters should be rational and easy to use.
- There is no ‘most popular’ news. There is news and there is opinion and they are mutually exclusive. Popularity of stories is something not contextual to news sites, but to social media sites.
- News is not social media. If it is, it fails to be news.
- Those whose news reporting is of low quality avoid the marketplace and instead concentrate on the mob/opinion arena.
Rutledge goes on to make a case for charging for content saying “quality news is valuable” and “must therefore have a cost”. He then questions journalistic content.
Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach. For instance:
- ‘Featured’ sections are irrelevant, opinion-shaping editorial promotion; not news.
- Headlines matter and can be scanned; intro text does not and compromises scanning.
- Author, source, and date/time are important.
- Opinion or Op Eds are distinct from news.
- Article ratings or ‘likes’ are irrelevant in the context of news.
- Comments are not contextual to news, but to social media
- Media types (video, gallery, audio) are not sections. These are simply common components of each story.
Hat tip: The Next Web
LinkedIn has launched an ‘apply with LinkedIn’ button allowing companies to recruit using the social network.
Job seekers can then use the button to submit an application and are able to see other employees of the firm and make contact with them.
Prospective employers will be able to see your connections so this new functionality is another reason to get your LinkedIn profile in order and gather a good quality, rather than quantity, of contacts.
There are tips on how journalists can best use LinkedIn in this podcast, which includes advice for news organisations setting up profile pages.
The LinkedIn Blog states:
We’ve put an incredible amount of effort to rethink the job application process from end-to-end to make it a one-click submit for any professional. The first step was simple: put the functionality everywhere our members need it. That means packaging it as a simple button that you can recognise anywhere across the web. We’ve made this simple enough to implement so both companies and developers can easily include it on their corporate websites.
Here is the code for adding the ‘apply with LinkedIn’ button.
The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade reports today that book deals relating to the phone-hacking scandal have already been signed.
This includes one for Guardian journalist Nick Davies, of which is said to be “provisionally” titled Hack Attack.
It’s scheduled for release in autumn next year. So it looks as though Labour MP Tom Watson will get in first because his tome, for Penguin Press, is due to be published before the end of this year. It is being co-written with Martin Hickman of the Independent, a former journalist of the year.
Greenslade adds that “there is not the least sense of competition or animosity between Davies and Watson”, with the story big enough for the two of them, if not more.
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has spoken out after being cited in a manifesto believed to have been written by Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik and sent out shortly before Friday’s attacks.
Phillips is quoted twice by Breivik in the 1,500-page manifesto, which is severely critical of journalists in general and included detailed plans for a possible attack on a journalism conference.
Writing on her blog, she hits back at Liberal Conspiracy blogger Sunny Hundal, who flagged up the references to her in a blog post yesterday. Hundal’s post included a disclaimer stating that “there is no suggestion that his actions were inspired by Melanie Phillips, nor am I making that claim”, but Phillips accuses him of singling her out by only referring to her and Jeremy Clarkson being quoted, and none of the other writers, philosophers and politicians who are also mentioned by Breivik.
The manifesto also cites Winston Churchill, George Orwell, Edmund Burke, Muhatma Gandhi, and John Locke, among others.
Phillips goes on to accuse Hundal of a “crude attempt to smear me by a writer who has long displayed an unhealthy obsession with my work”.
Golly. Is Hundal suggesting that my writing provoked the mass murder of some 93 Norwegians? Doubtless with one eye on the law of libel, he piously avers:
“…there is no suggestion that his actions were inspired by Melanie Phillips, nor am I making that claim”.
Yet apart from a glancing reference to Jeremy Clarkson, whose remark about the flag of St George is also cited in this ‘manifesto’, I am the only person to whom Hundal refers to in this blog post, quoting at some length both my article and Breivik’s comments on it. He therefore gives the impression that I play a major role in this supposed ‘manifesto’, which he describes as warning of the ‘Islamic colonisation of western Europe’.
But in fact, there are only two references to me or my work in its 1,500 pages. Those references are to two articles by me published in the Daily Mail, a mainstream British paper – one on mass fatherlessness in Britain, and the other on the revelation by a former civil servant of a covert Labour government policy of mass immigration into Britain. There is no reference whatever to my writing on Islamisation.
Phillips also accuses the left of “wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it”.
According to her post, she has already received emails from members of the public relating to the manifesto, including one saying “I congratulate you on your part in the Norway massacre”.
Breivik, who has admitted being behind the deaths of more than 70 people in a bomb and shooting attack on Friday but denies criminal responsibility, appeared in court yesterday behind closed doors. Reports suggest that the press were banned from the hearing in part due to a fear that he may attempt to convey coded messages to accomplices.