The Guardian is gathering spectators’ photographs from the 2011 Tour de France by partnering with citizen media agency Citizenside.
The Tour de France 2011 page of the Guardian’s website features a slideshow dedicated to sharing the experience of being a spectator.
Citizenside is paying the citizen photographers using fund from the Guardian, editor-in-chief of Citizenside Philip Trippenbach told Journalism.co.uk.
The slideshow includes shots from local eyewitnesses from every stage of the race and spectators are encouraged to post pictures by a series of geo-targetted campaigns.
The Guardian has so far used 645 spectator photos from Citizenside, averaging 38 photos per stage for the first 17 stages of the Tour de France.
In a release, Philippe Checinski, co-founder of Citizenside said:
We’re very excited to be providing our members with such a great opportunity to share their experiences of the Tour de France. It’s not every day that locals from those remote towns get their own photos published on the fifth most visited news site in the world.
Matt McAlister, director of digital Strategy at the Guardian, added:
Working with Citizenside has given us a chance to explore some new ways of partnering with other communities and platforms that share our approach to openness.
Much has been written about Google+over the past few days as it continues to grow at a record-breaking pace. Here are a few links from around the web on how Google+ is shaping up, plus this post on tips, tricks and tools for journalists using the social network.
But “Google’s social juggernaut is beginning to show signs that it’s losing steam”, according to this post on Mashable.
In the Guardian article Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, said his calculations suggest Google+ is gathering 750,000 new users per day.
Allen explains his methods: “I don’t have access to log files or to a massive consumer panel. I’m simply measuring how many Google+ users there are of various randomly selected surnames every day. Last week I increased the sample of surnames that I query from 100 to 1,000.
Over a four-day period, the 100-surname sample showed a Google+ growth rate of 28.4 per cent. The 1,000 surname sample showed a growth rate of 28.5 per cent. [That’s] statistically insignificant.
Google+ is dominated by young adults. Its biggest age group for the four weeks ending July 14 was the 25-34 age bracket, which accounted for 38.37 per cent of all visits. The week before, the entire 18-34 age bracket made up just 38.11 per cent of total visitors.
Looking at the broad social landscape, Weiner said LinkedIn was for professionals, Facebook for family and friends, and Twitter for broadcasting short thoughts and information.
He noted that these three networks coexisting made for an “understandable landscape”, but when Google+ gets added to the mix, people have less time and will have to start making choices about where to spend that time.
“All of a sudden, you say ‘where am I going to spend that next minute or hour of my discretionary time?’ and at some point, you don’t have any more time to make choices,” Weiner said.
[He added] Google+ could follow Twitter in attracting celebrities and other well-known figures to help it become a more competitive service.
Some celebrities have already joined, and a couple are among the most followed people on Google+.
The Telegraph has been looking at who has the most followers. Many are Google bosses, plus there is blogger Robert Scoble and actress Felicia Day.
It’s all about the circles. Google+ actively encourages you to have ‘work’ and ‘friends’ as your circles. It’s a mindset shift. If you think about the user experience, Facebook is about sharing with friends and family. LinkedIn is about professional connections. Twitter allows you to choose for yourself what it’s about (see Getting past the Oprah Barrier for more about this). The Google+ user experience is all about the networks.
The Google+ experience is all about creating sub-networks of your life (circles) and populating those appropriately.
This means that users will gravitate towards having complicated, overlapping circles and the Google+ stream is a mix of personal and professional connections. This also means that the Google+ share box becomes a place where it is much easier to inadvertently share inappropriate content than perhaps the LinkedIn share box. From a policy perspective, that’s a whole lot of scary.
If you are a journalist and not yet on Google+ and would like an invite, fill in this form and I will attempt to invite you.
Police are investigating allegations that a News International executive deleted millions of emails between News of the World editors from an internal archive, the Guardian claims.
The newspaper, which has uncovered much of the phone-hacking scandal, states the deletion of emails is an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry.
The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005, revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International.
According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted ‘massive quantities’ of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a small fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January this year, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair.
The Guardian investigation also reveals News International:
• infuriated police by leaking sensitive information in spite of an undertaking to police that it would keep it confidential; and
• risked prosecution for perverting the course of justice by trying to hide the contents of a senior reporter’s desk after he was arrested by Weeting detectives in April.
The article goes on to explain the background to the emails and claims they could not be accessed or had been lost en route to a data centre in India.
The original archive was said to contain half a terabyte of data – equivalent to 500 editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica. But police now believe that there was an effort to substantially destroy the archive before News International handed over their new evidence in January. They believe they have identified the executive responsible by following an electronic audit trail. They have attempted to retrieve the data which they fear was lost. The Crown Prosecution Service is believed to have been asked whether the executive can be charged with perverting the course of justice.
Despite rumours that folding the newspaper in favour of a seven day Sun had been on the cards for a while (TheSunOnSunday.co.uk, TheSunOnSunday.com and SunOnSunday.co.uk were all registered on July 5, albeit by a private individual), a source at News International confirmed today that a Sunday edition of the paper wouldn’t be on the cards for several weeks to come.
This morning Times today led with a story that the collapse in advertising was due to online protest and the final nail in the coffin for the paper.
The withdrawal of advertising appeared to be in response to a public backlash that had been led primarily on the internet. Thousands of people had used Twitter and Facebook to express their outrage at allegations of phone hacking at the paper.
This was after a list of the News of the World’s advertising clients had been published online, encouraging people to send Twitter messages to the companies to express concern at the activities of the paper’s journalists.
You can read the full article here (behind the paywall).
Emily Bell, director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism and former director of digital content for Guardian News & Media sees the decision as part of a long line of bold and audacious moves from the Murdochs, from the bid to buy the Times, to the launch of Sky News, and recently the proposed takeover of BSkyB.
James’s Wapping moment sees him making a gesture he hopes will be grand enough to soften the focus of any phone-hacking inquiry, bold enough to allow the company to extricate itself from present trouble and, in the process, allow him to reshape News International around the digital television platforms he feels both more comfortable with and which are undoubtedly more profitable.
But what about the wider implications? Many are agreed that the decision is brutal and the loss of 200 journalists terrible, but Andrew Gilligan, London editor for the Sunday Telegraph, argues that it could also give way to a muzzled British press in the future. As talk turns to how press regulation should be managed, Gilligan says:
For be in no doubt: hateful as the behaviour of some journalists has been, we may now face something even worse. For many in power, or previously in power, the News of the World’s crimes are a God-given opening to diminish one of the greatest checks on that power: the media.
Regulation was also on Alan Rusbridger‘s mind yesterday, when he took part in a live Q & A regarding phone hacking (before NI announced the News of the World’s closure). Rusbridger drew attention to alleged weaknesses of the PCC (the code committee of which Rusbridger quit in November 2009) and the quandary of state v self-regulation. Today the Press Complaints Commission sought to defend its work following calls for it to be scrapped by both Labour leader Ed Miliband and prime minister David Cameron.
This hasn’t been a wonderful advertisement for self-regulation. The short answer is that, no, the PCC can’t go on as it is. Its credibility is hanging by a thread.
We did say this back in November 2009 when the PCC came out with its laughable report into phone-hacking. We said in an editorial that this was a dangerous day for press regulation – and so it’s turned out.
The PCC has this week withdrawn that report and has a team looking at the issues and at the mistakes it’s made in the past.
I don’t know how Ofcom could do the job without falling into the category of statutory regulation. Does anyone else?
On her blog former Channel 4 presenter Samira Ahmed also draws some comparisons with the past, saying that the affair is “only my second major moral outcry against the news media” during her twenty years in journalism, the first being the death of Princess Diana. Hugh Grant has won public approval over the last week or so because of his overt opposition to phonehacking, but Ahmed is wary of putting people like Grant on a pedestal.
Many celebrities understand the privacy trade-off with press coverage, or get their lawyers to settle a payoff. Incidentally we should be wary of deifying celebrities, such as Hugh Grant, who have publicly defended the principle of rich people taking out superinjunctions to cover up their bad behaviour, when there might be a legitimate public interest. But I’ve met ordinary people over the years whose suffering has been deeply compounded by salacious press intrusion.
A journalist working for the Guardian in Pakistan has been badly beaten by men in police uniforms, according to the newspaper.
According to the report, Waqar Kiani, a 32-year-old local journalist, was stopped while driving through Islamabad and beaten with wooden batons and a whip.
The alleged attack follows an account, written by Kiani and published five days before the attack, of torture and abduction by suspected Pakistani intelligence agencies.
The attackers then reportedly said: “You want to be a hero? We’ll make you a hero”, and: “We’re going to make an example of you.”
Kiana told the Guardian: “I don’t feel I did anything wrong. Journalists can’t be silent forever in Pakistan,” he said. “If we don’t bring up the facts, then it’s no longer journalism – we become spokesmen of the government.”
This is the second time that Kiani has been targeted, according to the Guardian, which reported last week that he was abducted from central Islamabad in July 2008 and taken to a safe house where interrogators beat him viciously and burned him with cigarettes.
Earlier this month, Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, who was investigating links between the military and al Quaeda before his death, disappeared. He was found dead two days later.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has been widely accused of being behind the death but has fiercely denied any involvement. Note: we also recommend trying the VAT calculator from our developer Antony Kidless. This handy online tool will help you calculate tax in one click.
Last week, Guardian journalist and newly-elected Labour councillor for Southwark Rowenna Davis used Twitter to liveblog the heart operation of a two-week-old girl at Great Ormond Street hospital.
Her updates were also posted on the Guardian’s NHS liveblog alongside photos she took during the surgery (see above) and tweets from followers.
The comments that follow the CiF post are almost overwhelmingly negative, with Davis’ live coverage of the surgery called, “mawkish”, “ghoulish”, “a stunt”, “revolting sensationalism”, and more.
An interesting point of comparison for the coverage, which has been raised in the CiF comment thread, is broadcast, but it is hard to see people reacting quite the same way about a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
A few commenters suggested the problem with Davis’ liveblog was that it was live, and that the risk to the girl’s life made that inappropriate (according to Davis the operation carried a 1 or 2 per cent risk). Whereas a documentary, commenter davidabsalom said, would be recorded in advance.
But Channel 4 screened a series of programmes in 2009 that showed live surgery, during which viewers were invited to interact with the surgeons using Twitter, email and the telephone.
Channel 4’s David Glover said at the time that the programme was designed to “demystify surgery, encourage discussion and help viewers to understand their own bodies, as well as showing the care, dedication and skill that goes into modern surgery”.
Ofcom archives show no record of any complaints about the programme (less than 10 complaints are not recorded).
The Surgery Live patients were adults, rather than children as in this case, but Davis obtained consent from the girl’s parents. And the operations – brain, heart, and stomach surgery – seem no less risky than the one in this case.
So I can’t help but wonder whether the discrepancy between the responses on Twitter and on CiF stems from the medium itself, with those who use Twitter – and so responded via the network – much more likely to see the coverage in a positive light, and those on Comment is Free more likely to construe it negatively. (I can’t assess how many of those who commented on the CiF post use Twitter, so this is something of a shot in the dark).
Davis has responded several times in the comment thread to defend the journalistic value of her coverage, including this post:
I think one key dividing line about whether this is defensible is intention. If you’re just blindly seeking ratings for entertainment value, that’s pretty grim. But if your aim is to offer some kind of insight into the reality of the job surgeons face and the trials families have to go through, that seems quite different. Especially when it helps bring to light the importance of the health service, and how vital it is that we get the reforms right.
That said, I think the points you are raising are valid, and it’s important to raise them. There are certainly ways in which I could see this being done insensitively.
Predictably, speculation about potential job cuts at Guardian News and Media (GMG) has been rife since yesterday’s announcement that the company was seeking to make £25 million in savings over the next five years.
A spokesperson for GMG flatly refuted the number in the Telegraph article and told Journalism.co.uk today that yesterday’s statement “was not a redundancy announcement”. He refused to rule out job cuts, however.
“Yesterday’s briefing was not a redundancy announcement. We shared with staff our current position and a strategy to transform the organisation, and said we would work with staff and unions to achieve it. Of course no media company can rule out redundancies in the current climate, but we will talk to staff about issues like that first.”
The world’s media (well, some of it at least) is eagerly anticipating the release of tens of thousands of emails sent by Sarah Palin while she was governor of Alaska.
The emails, which date from her inauguration as governor in 2006 through to her selection as John McCain’s running mate for the 2008 Republican presidential campaign, will be released at 6pm today.
The release looks set to spark a race between news organisations to dig out stories (or, let’s face it, plain old gossip).
In an affront to everything modern and digital, Palin’s office will release the 24,199 emails in printed form, in six boxes. That means, of course, that journalists will have to visit the courthouse in Juneau, Alaska to collect the documents and trawl through them on paper or scan them in.
The major US nationals will be on the courthouse steps at the appointed time of course. But it looks like there will be at least one UK newspaper represented – with the Guardian’s “crack correspondents” Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington due to be “holed up in a Juneau hotel room combing through thousands of Palin emails as fast as they can read”.
The Guardian will then follow its MPs expenses app model by putting the trove of documents online and asking its readers to help analyse them.
The release comes just ahead of Palin’s visit to the UK and follows her recent bus tour of the east coast of the US. She is currently refusing to be drawn on whether she intends to run for president, and it remains to be seen whether the release of these emails will shed some light on a potential bid, derail it, or reveal no new interesting information at all.
Palin’s email was hacked back in 2008, with Anonymous, the group behind pro-WikiLeaks attacks on Mastercard and Amazon, thought to be responsible.
The speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow described the Daily Mail as a “sexist, racist, bigoted, comic cartoon strip” yesterday, according to a Guardian report.
Speaking at an event at the Guardian offices in Kings Place, Bercow also apologised for breaking the trade descriptions act in calling the Mail a newspaper.
Bercow has been on the receiving end of strong criticism in the past from the Daily Mail political sketch writer Quentin Letts, who recently described him as a “preening, sycophantic, short-tempered and grotesque”.
Bercow was also quizzed about injunctions at the Q&A session with the Independent’s chief political commentator Steve Richards.
Despite warning John Hemming MP in the house recently over his naming of Ryan Giggs in relation to a privacy injunction, Bercow told Richards that “no super-injunction should be preventing colleagues from trying to debate issues”, adding that “it would be very sad if the sovereign nature of parliament as a whole and the House of Commons in particular was eroded by the judiciary.”
He did criticise Hemming at the event however, noting that: “Debating principles and issues is very different from violating an order to score a point.”
Google Fusion Tables allows you to create data visualisations including maps, graphs and timelines. It is currently in beta but is already being used by many journalists, including some from key news sites leading the way in data journalism.
Below are screengrabs of the various visualisations but click through to the stories to interact and get a real feel for why they are great examples of data journalism.
1. The Guardian:WikiLeaks Iraq war logs – every death mapped What? A map with the location of every death in Iraq plotted as a datapoint. Why? Impact. You must click the screen grab to link to the full visualisation and get the full scale of the story.
2. The Guardian: WikiLeaks embassy cables What? This is a nifty storyline visualisation showing the cables sent in the weeks around 9/11. Why? It’s a fantastic way of understanding the chronology.
3. The Telegraph: AV referendum – What if a general election were held today under AV? What? A visual picture of using the hypothetical scenario of the outcomes of the 2010 general election if it had been held under the alternative vote system. Why? A clear picture by area of the main beneficiaries. See how many areas are yellow.
4. WNYC: Mapping the storm clean-up What? A crowdsourced project which asked a radio station’s listeners to text in details of the progress of a snow clean-up. The datapoints show which streets have been ploughed and which have not. There are three maps to show the progress of the snow ploughs over three days. Why? As it uses crowsourced information. Remember this one next winter.
5. Texas Tribune: Census 2010 interactive map – Texas population by race, hispanic origin What? The Texas Tribune is no stranger to Google Fusion Tables. This is map showing how many people of hispanic origin live in various counties in Texas. Why? A nice use of an intensity map and a great use of census data.
You can find out much more about data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, an event held at Thomson Reuters, London on Friday 27 May.
