Tag Archives: Top tips for journalists

#Tip of the day for journalists: Read Storyful’s new ebook on social newsgathering

Leave a reply
Image by IsaacMao on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Image by IsaacMao on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Social news agency Storyful has published an ebook on social newsgathering.

It has been edited by Claire Wardle and includes articles previously posted on the Storyful blog.

The ebook is in PDF format and is free, allowing you to learn things such as how to spot a fake or hoax image, how to verify content from social media, and how and why your should use Twitter’s own version of TweetDeck.

The Storyful blog has become one of our favourite tips sites, with practical advice shared by working journalists on how to get the most out of social newsgathering. Save this PDF to your tablet or phone and your next train journey will be an educational one.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

Hat tip: Mark Little

Poynter: How journalists can get to grips with API

Leave a reply

Poynter has a very helpful beginner’s guide for journalists who want to understand API documentation.

It helps journalists understand the terms used by sites with an open API (application programming interface) and follows an earlier article on four reasons your news org should use APIs.

One really useful part of this post is that it allows you to hand-build an API request by taking you step-by-step through an example using the New York Times API (you will have to register with the NY Times to request an API key).

For example, let’s try getting New York Times reviews for the “Harry Potter” movies as an XML-formatted response. Use your favourite search engine to find the New York Times movie reviews API. This API is not perfect (it’s in beta, after all). The steps below can be compressed with shortcuts once you become more experienced, but since we’re assuming this is your first time, we’re going to take the slow road.

Click here for the rest of Poynter’s guide to follow the example.