Journalism at Westminster

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. 

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.

 

 

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 presentation - some useful multimedia links

In the powerpoint on Multimedia Journalism which I used in today's session, I mentioned a couple of writers whose work is really worth looking at in more detail, if you want to think more about this whole area.

Henry Jenkins has his own blog, where he talks over his current research. His book - Convergence Culture - has been out for a while. When it was first published, he put some introductory notes about it on his blog.

Paul Bradshaw runs a brilliant blog about online journalism - his guide to the BASIC principles of online journalism is on his blog. The series covers brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity and community/conversation.

In the powerpoint I focused on adaptability and linked the ideas there to some of Paul's other writing about how news organisations should change to respond to the net - in particular his ideas about the news diamond. That post is part of a larger series of posts about the 21st Century newsroom, which are also worth looking at.

Another writer you should definitely follow when it comes to online multimedia is Adam Westbrook - his blog regularly highlights really interesting multimedia and online trends in general.

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - News stories and multimedia

Here are a few links we might use in class today: 

The BBC on the Coalition proposals for welfare reform

The Guardian on the same story - specifically Ian Duncan-Smith defending his proposed benefit cap

The Telegraph on Ian Duncan-Smith's welfare reforms

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - Useful multimedia links

In today's powerpoint, I talk about building on Paul Bradshaw's ideas about adaptability and the news diamond and thinking about how to combine different media types to tell news stories more effectively...

There's lots of experimentation going on in this area at the moment. People are trying out new combinations of media and new ideas to see what works.I mentioned some sites that are good places to go to keep up with what's new:

• Multimedia Shooter
• Interactive Narratives
• KobreGuide
• 10,000 Words
• Media Storm

As for some specific projects you could look at, I mentioned a few in class:

• Jonas Bendiksen's The Places We Live - there are a few technical glitches with this site at the moment, but when it's working - which it seems to be at the time of posting, it's really interesting
• The New York Times' One in 8 Million
• Going to the End of the Line - more from the New York Times
• No Such Label - an interactive feature package from Flyp Media
• The people behind Flyp Media are now in Zemi - also doing lots of interesting multimedia work
• The Guardian's Riot rumours on Twitter
• The Guardian on the Costa Concordia's route

What I'd like you to do is write a review on your blog of an interesting/innovative multimedia journalism project. You could review one of the projects mentioned above.

But it might be more interesting for you (and me) if you find a new project. One way to do that is to look around on Multimedia Shooter and the other links I mentioned above. They showcase interesting lots of interesting new work. 

One you write something you like, write a short review - no more than 200 words - saying why you like it, why you think it works well online, why it's innovative. Remember to link to the work you're reviewing.

Do this in addition to the other short posts I suggested you write as a way of getting started on your blogs.

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - Images Online

Today we're going to look at how to put images on your blog. Not something that seems that hard, really. Just fire up Google Images and you're away. However, there are problems with using the pictures you find that way. We'll talk a bit about that today and about how to find images online that aren't copyrighted.

We'll look at Flickr, which is a great photo-sharing site and a brilliant source of non-copyright images - via the Flickr Creative Commons page. We'll look at Creative Commons a bit and what it means and go through some ways to find images there. In the meantime, there's an old but still useful guide to finding images on Flickr on Skelliewag.

There are various sites online that have stock photos you can use for free. The best known of the stock photo sites is probably stock.xchng. EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for free photos online - it's not a bad way to find copyright free images online. However, the best way is to use Google's Advanced Image Search and then, after entering your search terms, scroll down and tick the radio button next to 'Only images labelled for reuse'. This is a great way to find rights-free images on Flickr - much better than the site's own search engine. Lots of photographers on the site make their images available under the Creative Commons license.

However, you should make sure you look at the terms of the license they're using and when you put images on your blogs which you've found on Flickr or elsewhere online, you should always put some kind of credit link - a caption which acknowledges the source for the image and links back to it. The best way to do this is to put a caption at the end of your blog post, referring to the source of the image and linkng back to it. 

It also pays to put some kind of general disclaimer on your blog, pointing out that it's a student project and not a commercial effort and that any kind of copyright infringement is accidental...