Journalism at Westminster

Advanced Online Media - Data Journalism

We talked a bit in the lecture last week about data journalism, when Tom Hannen showed us his inforgraphic work for the BBC. I thought we'd look at it a bit more today. Datajournalism has a bit of a hot topic in online journalism circles for the last couple of years with lots of developers and journalists experimenting with different ways to find stories in data. 

A good place to go for an introduction to the field is The Guardian's Datablog - The Guardian has been experimenting for a while now with making data available to people to use in various ways. Their best known efforts include their coverage of the MPs' expenses scandal and their ground-breaking experiment in crowd-sourcing investigative analysis and, obviously, Wikileaks.

A debate has been going on for a few years now, linked to the growing availability of data online, one that suggests that journalists need to be more than storytellers now, that they need to know how to work with data in different ways. A couple of years agi, the new media pundit Jeff Jarvis asked the question, 'Is Journalism Storytelling?' Adrian Monck tackled the same area around the same time, arguing that the future of journalism was maths, or rather 'presenting mathematised knowledge'. The story is now redundant, he suggests...

These are rather extreme positions - perhaps what Wikileaks shows is that data on its own isn't enough - that to reach a larger audience there needs to be some sort of story there, or narrative frame... Martin Moore has a good introduction to current thinking about the field - he argues that data journalism is about coping with information abundance and that it means lots of different things - it's not just about database programming.

If you want go deeper, Paul Bradshaw has published some excellent early drafts of a chapter from his book on online journalism, covering data and what to do with it - have a look at his general Data Journalism posts too. He also wrote a really useful intro for The Guardian. Jonthan Stray published a good list of links to further reader on data. 

One thing you can do online is find new ways to present data... There's a growing interest in data visualisation, in mixing data, maps, charts and text to explore and communicate ideas and issues...If we get a chance, we'll talk about this, I hope. 

We'll have a look at David McCandless' work in this area - his site has lots of great information and some brilliant interactives you can can play with (e.g Snake Oil?). We'll also look at his TED lecture. 

 And we might watch this: Alex Lundry's Chart Wars

Advanced Online Media - some links re data and storytelling

Here are a few more links re data and story telling: 

Nieman Storyboard on maps, charticles and stories

The American Journalism Review on the rise of the charticle

Nieman Storyboard on Cutthroat Capitalism - a ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism by Scott Carney, done as a series of graphic/visualisations and then turned into game online. The piece ran in the magazine last year and is still online. Carney talks about how he did the story on his blog - it was a lot of work. 

The New York Times' interactive data-driven story, How Different Groups Spend Their Day, which sounds a bit dull but is just brilliant. Related to this, Nieman Storyboard on 'statistics as story'.

The 'how are you doing today?' project

Here's a nice example of using infographics to get a story across - So You Still Think the Internet is Free

Here's an interactive visualisation of the way organised crime works, from Wired Magazine

 

Advanced Online Media - Some examples of live blogging

Perhaps the best way to learn how to live blog (and to learn what you can do and what kinds of things you can write) is to look at some real life examples. A good place to start is the The Guardian's Minute by Minutes page, which showcases all the live blogs they have running at any one time. Have a read of some of their liveblogs and think about the types of post they feature, the different media and news inputs a journalist uses as they live blog and how they can prepare, as writers, for this kind of job. 

AWJ - Google Maps and journalism online

Today we're going to look at how to use maps in your online journalism. Sometimes this is about telling a story in a new way. Sometimes it's about infographics - about getting across information in a clear and engaging way. We're going to look at various examples of online maps and then you're going to work on creating a few Google Maps.

Here are a few links we might look at:

Google Maps and the unofficial Google Maps Mania blog

• 10,000 words on how to make a Google Map in 30 minutes 
• More recent stuff from 10,000 Words - 7 Innovative online maps
• Engadget with a more geeky/demanding guide to creating annotated Google Maps
• Word Herder on using Google Maps in journalism

Here are a few maps and some stories:

• The BBC Berkshire Flood map
• Heron Sightings in Grantham
• The Homicide Report map from the LA Times
• The Crisis Map of Haiti
• The History Pin map
• Nieman Storyboard on maps, charticles and stories
• Dinty Moore's Mr. Plimpton's Revenge
• Travis Fox's Hard Times
• The American Journalism Review on the rise of the charticle

Some of these examples are a bit old now. But they show you some of the things people tried as the ideas of using maps in stories online developed. Now map-based stories are very complex - they blur with timelines and infographics in general and involve some serious programming and Flash animation. Reza will show you a bit of this in class today. You can also find state of the art map stories via the Maps Mania blog mentioned above. 

Advanced Online Media - My Instapaper RSS feed

I mentioned this in the morning workshop today - I use Instapaper to save articles for reading later. At the moment, I'm mostly saving stuff that's relevant to the work you're doing on this module. I do bookmark some of the pieces I on Delicious eventually. But another way you could get access to the pieces I'm reading is by subsribing to the RSS feed for my Instapaper Unread folder. I'm not completely sure this will work. But here's the link:

http://www.instapaper.com/rss/706847/CCG66Bk2giXLqXEFCwgIcmM91Rc

You could try copying that and then pasting it into the Subscribe box on Google Reader. Let me know if it works (or doesn't).

 

Advanced Online Media - Audio Slideshows

One thing we're going to look at today is audio slideshows. Some of you may end up doing slideshows for your individual projects on this module. Slideshows are everywhere online these days. The audio slideshow, in particular, is a really interesting storytelling form, one that seems native to the web in some way. 

It's pretty easy to put a few pics together and call it a slideshow. It's harder to do something where the images and audio work together to really explore a journalistic idea or story.

We're going to talk a bit about today about how to do them well. Reza will take you through some of the technical side of things too. And we'll try to put together some very simple audio slideshows.

Here's a few examples to look at in class:

Water Dance from the New York Times

One in 8 Million, also from the NYT (we looked at this one last year). There are loads of different slideshows here, all of them excellent. 

The Month in Photography from The Observer's New Review

The Guardian actually has a whole section on its website devoted to audio slideshows.

Here's a profile of the artist Jeremy Deller and of Cyra, a young teenager who's spent her life in care. 

Last year, The Guardian ran a slideshow about the recent Alexander McQueen menswear show, which goes for a more ambient approach. 

Another example from last year in The Guardian - To Obama, with love from... This has no sound but uses captions to create a kind of list feature.

The Atlantic has a really good example of kind of slideshow journalism - Twitter from @A to @Z - there's no audio here but it shows how to combine slideshows with a story. It followed it up with more of the same - Twitter from @0 to @9.

Finally - back to more traditional audio slideshow fare - One School's Struggles - from The Washington Post

I found some of these via 10,000 Words, which has some really useful posts on audio slideshows - for example, a guide to five mistakes to avoid.

Essential Journalism - Delicious

One research site we might look at today is Delicious - it's a social bookmarking tool - which means it allows you to store bookmarks online and then share those bookmarks with other Delicious users...

The site has recently be revamped by its new owners - the guys who started YouTube. They bought Delicious from Yahoo around a year ago. Before that it had been left to languish a bit. The new owners have added new social features and made the site a bit more visual. There are lots of other sites around that do similar things - for example, Diigo and Pinboard. It's worth playing around with them and seeing which one works best for you. 

Today we'll talk a bit about how best to use social bookmarking tools as part of your approach to research online.

 

Essential Journalism - Online research - Google Reader and Google News

The net makes it really easy to find and consume a wide range of media. I'm not just talking about pure news here. You can read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.

But, obviously, you already know that. However, are you really taking advantage of all the information that's out there?

One of the key skills you need to develop as journalists (whatever medium you work in) is media literacy and news sense. Whatever your interest (music, sport, fashion), you need to read widely and really get a sense of what's going on in your field, what stories are being covered by who and why.

Here are a couple of tools that will help you broaden the range of media you consume:

RSS Feeds You can use special news reader programs to subscribe to news feeds. It's a good way of scanning a lot of news/information in one go. You can also use web-based services to do something similar. We'll try out Google Reader as an easy way into using feeds.

News Aggregators Google News is the best known of these sorts of sites. It automatically gathers news stories from sources all over the world and organises them according to various categories. News aggregators can give you access to a wide variety of perspectives on big news stories (but not always - we'll talk about this in class). There are various other new aggregators that build on what Google News does - for example, Silobreaker and Newser. NewsMap is an interesting attempt to visualise the flow of stories on Google News

We're going to do a couple of things today. 

I'd like you to set up Google Reader and subscribe to a few news feeds. Over the next week, I'd like you to use the service to track stories in a field/subject/area that interests you.

Also, I'd like you to personalise Google News.  Set it up to track news stories you're interested in and use it over the next week or so. Next week, we''ll talk about how useful you found each service. 

 

Essential Journalism - Research online

You're probably already brilliant at finding stuff (and people) online. But so I can find out what you know, let's try a quick research exercise. Here's a quick brief.

Imagine you've been asked by the editor of The Guardian to write a feature piece on old people and the net. It's going to go in the technology pages. You need to deliver tomorrow - they need 1500 words. Someone's let them down and they have space that needs filling quickly.

First of all, you need to decide what you need for a piece of this length. Next - can you find what you need online? Then you need to find it.

 

 

Essential Journalism - Preparing for the group blog assessment

The assessment task for this bit of the Essential Journalism module is to work together in groups to create a small blogzine and run it live for a week. 

Today, to get you started on thinking about this, we're going to look at some of the commercial blogs and blog networks out there, to give you some idea of the kinds of things you could do. Here's a few links to look at:

Gawker, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Jezebel

Engadget 

Tech Crunch

Luxist

Federated Media, including Boing Boing, Tech Dirt and Dooce

Tech Digest, Electric Pig, Pocket Lint

Midas Media 

Handpicked Media

Core 77, Design Observer, Uncrate, Fashionista, We Make Money Not Art

Have a look at a few of these sites. Some don't seem very blog-like any more - some are still very bloggy...They have that reverse chronology of posts and the blog layout and look and feel.

Successful commercial blogs are often either very niche or specialist or they target an audience that's particularly attractive to advertisers or they feature a distinctive perspective or voice... 

At the moment, have a look at a few of these sites and think about what kind of group blog you'd like to work on. We'll talk about it a bit in class.