Journalism at Westminster

AWJ - Session 5

Today we're going to do some more work on developing your group sites. We'll also make a start on finalising ideas for your individual assessments. In the afternoon, Reza's going to teach a session on web design and do a quick intro to Dreamweaver... We're also going to have a quick look at data journalism - though we'll come back to that properly next week... So quite a lot to fit in. 

AWJ - 52 Cups of Coffee

Here's an interesting idea for a blog - another variation on the challenge idea. Meghan Gebhart has set out to have a cup of coffee with an interesting person each week, for a whole year. Her blog covers the process of setting up the interviews and features the final pieces she writes about each person... It is possible, if you want, to do a blog for the individual assessment on this module. But you need to some something innovative and challenging - like this, for example, though I'm not expecting you to set up something that would take a year to complete. 

AWJ - Twitter, Egypt and NPR's Andy Carvin

Our live blogging experiment didn't go entirely to plan last week. It is a difficult thing to do, especially if you're not familiar with the technology. That said, we were online and watching when Mubarak stepped down - and those of you who were tracking Twitter at the time will have seen how many tweets that generated... 

One of the best ways to keep track of Twitter updates about Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is to follow Andy Carvin on Twitter (@acarvin). He works for National Public Radio in the US and has been specialising in curating tweets about Egypt, trying to verify and then retweet key bits of information as they come to him. Lots of people have said he's been developing a new kind of real time reporting. It seems like an extension of the live blogging idea. 

He talked about how he does what he does to The Atlantic - it takes a lot of preparation, a lot of traditional reporting - to build the kind of contextual knowledge that means he can trust and verify the tweets he passes on. PBS also did an interview with him about how he used Twitter to cover Egypt which we might look at in class