Tag Archives: coding

#MozFest: Six lessons for journalists from the Mozilla Festival

The Mozilla Festival took place this weekend and provided journalists, open web developers and educators with a place to learn and to build.

Here are six tips from the festival, which was called media, freedom and the web.

1. In less than a week there will be a Data Journalism Handbook. Created in 48 hours with contributions from 55 people, the first draft was written at the festival and is due to be published next week. The book provides journalists the chance to get to grips and to learn from some of the key data journalists in the UK and abroad.

2. Journalists can now create web native, social video using Popcorn Maker. Take a video and add web content including tweets, Flickr photos and Google Street View images. This is a hugely exciting development in online video journalism.

3. Expect exciting developments in HTML5 news web apps. Developer Max Ogden presented a live web app in the final show tell which added photos tweeted by the audience with hashtag #MozFest. In real-time the images appeared in the app displayed on a large screen. This type of app has huge potential for news sites and user-generated content.

4. SMS may not seem like cutting edge technology but should not be ignored when it comes to engaging with the audience. Text messages can be automatically sent to Google Fusion Tables and uploaded manually or posted to a map in real-time. Here is an example where the company Mobile Commons enabled San Francisco public radio to map listeners’ earthquake readiness.

5. It will be worth keeping an eye on the five Knight-Mozilla technology fellows being placed in newsrooms at Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, the BBC, Zeit Online and the Boston Globe to see what is produced. Each news organisation selected an individual based on an area of journalism they wanted to develop. The five will now be embedded in the different newsrooms and tasked with bridging the gap between technology and the news.

6. Want to get to grips with HTML5 for journalists? Do you want to start coding but don’t know where to begin? The w3schools site offers guides to HTML, HTML5, CSS, PHP, Javascript. If you want to start scraping data then ScraperWiki, which allows you to scrape and link data using Ruby, Python and PHP scripts, has some hugely useful tutorials. If you simply want to take a look to see how HTML actually works within a webpage then Hackasaurus has an x-ray goggles tool to allow you to do just that.

There were several sessions, including on WordPress, trusting news sources, tools for a multilingual newsroom, online discussions, text edit for audio and real-time reporting, which were were unable to attend. Search for the #MozFest hashtag for further reports from the festival.

Photo by mozillaeu on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Design is key to good online journalism, not just coding and data

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The correlation between good design and good storytelling

It is good to see that the internet’s powerful influence on journalism, while not universally welcome, is being enthusiastically tackled. The willingness of some writers and broadcasters to get to grips with programming is one of the most important aspects of this on-going narrative.

Having written a couple of blogs on journalism and coding recently, I have noticed how much of the conversation revolves around learning the technical skills required for developing new apps, the emphasis seems to be on coding and computer science.

Yet in many ways a digital journalist is more likely to struggle with design than coding. Before you can begin coding you have to have this side of things clear, whether you are working on your own independent blog or developing a complex data rich piece for a much larger news website.

Packaged up for perfection

We can all agree that the internet allows for a highly competitive market in which a good producer of quality journalism can thrive without the support of a big media giant. If you are one of these aspiring indie journalists then you are quite likely to be advised things like: be niche, be hyperlocal, be as specialist as possible.

These are fine buzzwords, but remember that regardless of how good your content may be, the first thing people will experience when they click on your site is a subconscious reaction to how your page makes them feel. If they don’t like it they will probably leave in a matter of seconds, unless there is a compelling piece of information that they cannot get elsewhere.

So how do you help your content to make your site a ‘sticky’ one? Our head designer, Cat Kempsell, believes that there are some very basic design rules to follow:

“Articles on a webpage need space to breath and flow. Don’t be afraid of white space and stick to three columns for a news driven site. Above all, make sure that your headings and sub-headings are distinctive, preferably in different colours – Times Online does this really well. People want to feel comfortable, that they can relax and interact with a website without feeling like they just landed in a maze of words.”

It’s strange to see how many news websites don’t do this. I suspect that it’s a hangover from a print history that encouraged every spare inch of white space to be filled, but on a website it just looks horrible. Someone should tell the Sun.

Making sense of data

Data journalism is another area that we are being encouraged to explore. You can build a programme that scrapes large amounts of data from a website, but how do you then organise that information into an easily accessible set of graphs, facts and stats that will deliver the maximum impact in as short a time as possible?

Making an infographic is quite easy; making a good one is an art form. Infographics are incredibly popular at the moment and many of us feel that it is another area that we need to become proficient in. My opinion is that, like coding, you’ll get the best results when you’re working in a team of professionals; that digital trinity of a journalist, a coder and a designer.

As an online editor for a digital media company, I am aware of just how important coding is, although I don’t believe that journalists and coders will ever meld into the same role. I just think that a modern journalist should be able to understand and talk about web architecture fluently. The same applies to basic design principles.

In a space that’s filled with websites clamouring for the public’s attention, how a site makes you feel when you’re on it really matters. Judging by its new design, the Times recognise the issue. If anyone else wants to start charging for content they’re going to have to recognise it too.

Developers and journalists forging common ground

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Back in April 2009 I listened as a group of bloggers at the G20 protests in London sent in reports using the new Audioboo iPhone application. The rules of the game are clearly changing fast, I thought.

The application allows users to record and upload high-quality sound files in an instant. In the same way that a photo of a plane floating in the Hudson river circumvented traditional channels and made its way around the world online, journalists (including Guardian staff) and bloggers on the ground were able to instantly upload reports on the unfolding activity with the immediacy and colour of front-line reports. I happened to be home ill that day and listened to the action with fascination. Then a contact from ABC News in the States contacted me via Twitter asking me if I knew any of the reporting bloggers and to pass on the direct number of the ABC newsroom. It was quick, energised and direct, and I was immediately hooked.

On the surface, the domain of the journalist and the developer seem poles apart. Journalists trace and shape stories, uncover information, and on a good day bring hidden truths to light. Developers build tools, marshal data and on a good day make the impossible possible. But a convergence is taking place that will ultimately rewrite the rulebook for both camps. Journalists have long been sifting and filtering forbidding mountains of data, looking for a story in the noise. Now they are going further, familiarising themselves with the tools to cohere and present this data, adapting to remain relevant in the new digital space. Developers in turn are doing far more than pushing data around. With rich social media tools and networks available to all, they are starting to report, telling stories with code and changing the way people in the online world relate, work and communicate. It’s a vast social experiment taking place in the production environment of the real world.

Back in March of this year, a small group of developers and journalists met in a pub in Islington to explore this overlap between coding and journalism in an intensely pragmatic fashion – the former teaching the latter the rudiments of web programming over a few beers. Ruby In The Pub was born.

A few days before, I overheard an online conversation between Joanna Geary of the Times and self-proclaimed ‘relapsed blogger’ James Ball. They were discussing the possibility of starting a regular event to get developers and journalists together. They touted Ruby as a possible language and with a speed typical of events incubated in social media circles the venue was sourced and the date decided.

As a Ruby developer (with the penchant for the odd beer) I immediately decided to attend and offer whatever support I could. The first event was warm and freestyle in nature, and the second drew a significantly larger group to the Shooting Star in Spitalfields, including the lead developer of the New York Times. One whole side of the pub was taken over by laptops and energised conversation. Due to the spotty wifi, I hardly managed any teaching at all, but became engaged in a wider discussion around journalism, the digital arena, and the changing media landscape.

Like that difficult third album, the next meet-up will probably define the future of this freestyle session. Ideas will gain traction, people will gravitate to familiar faces or pick up on projects that have been discussed. Karen Barber of Audioboo will be in attendance and has already taken up my offer of help on a project she has been kicking around for a while. We’ll get a drink, sit down, and start building it, responding to feedback from newbies and experienced hackers as we do so. Along the way, the communication channels between both sides will be strengthened and clarified and, what with all the activity on Twitter around the event, feelers of energy will spread out and spark up satellite meetings.

In fact, this has already happened. Paul Bradshaw, a journalist who teaches the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham University, has already activated the wonderfully-named Ruby Tuesday up North and hopefully we’ll see a lot more. In a series of regular posts I will attempt to cover the process as it unfolds, as well as looking at the wider interface between word and code.

There’s no end to this journey, it’s a vibrant buzz of collaboration and exploration. Why not join us?

Working with coders to maximise readership

3i = Immersive, Interactive, Intuitive

These are three words we hear a lot working in technology journalism: immersive, interactive and intuitive. They represent areas in which journalists will do well to excel, especially given the imminent arrival of the iPad and other tablet computers. Touchscreen computing creates a childlike desire to delve into a webpage and explore information like never before, and it will be the publishers producing the right kind of content that will have the heavy traffic.

The general election has been great for this kind of rich content. For the first time we’ve all been able to interact with that famous swingometer on the BBC’s website, while live blogging appeared to be firing on all cylinders during the hung parliament negotiations.

Working with designers and coders to create these apps is great if you have the budget, but obviously we don’t all work for the Guardian or the BBC. So getting some basic understanding of how to go about doing these things is going to be a good career move for many journalists.

From a design perspective, Adobe Fireworks is a great image and graphics software programme. It is perfect for beginners looking to start creating their own basic infographics. Similar to Photoshop, but smaller and more instinctive, it is useful for creating web optimised visual data in both vector and bitmap formats.

Have a look at this infographic from the Guardian on MPs expenses for an idea of what you can aspire to.

Code breaking

Stepping up to the next level and actually developing your own web applications gives you a problem experienced by every newbie developer starting out today: which languages do you learn first?

The good news in that most web development languages today share similarities, so tackle one and you’re going to find the next one much easier. It’s a bit like learning European languages; the more you understand the easier it becomes to make relevant connections.

HTML and CSS are your basic starting points, giving you colours and structure. If you want things to start sliding across the screen and getting interactive then J-Query and PHP (the web’s top scripting language) are the next ones to move onto.

As for getting your content on mobile phones, that is a whole other ball game.

John Hillman is the editor of PC Site which reviews and compares laptops and software. Follow him on Twitter: @JohnjHillman. Read his first post for the Journalism.co.uk editors’ blog at this link.

Dan Nguyen: Coding for journalists – four online tutorials

Bill Thompson (@billt) on two cultures: those literate in code and everyone else

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

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