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.

Advanced Web Journalism - Module Blog - The Critical Evaluations

I've written before about what you need to do for your module blogs. If you need a reminder, click the link.

You also need to add some short posts to your module blog that reflect and evaluate the work you’ve done over the last twelve weeks. The posts you need to do are:  

• An explanation of the ideas behind your individual project and an evaluation of whether you think it works, what might make it better etc. Talk about how you came up with the idea, whether you learned from similar projects online, what might make the project work better.
• An explanation of the idea behind the group site you worked on, the stories you did and the role you played on your site. Again, try to reflect critically on whether the site works and what might make it better. Talk about the sites you looked at when you were developing your site idea. Talk about the target audience for your site. Talk about how you used social media. Talk about what might make the site better.
• An account of the work you did on the news day – you should talk about what you worked on - WNOL, the Inside WNOL blog, the Twitter feed or Facebook page for the site etc, the stories/posts you did. Talk about whether you were able to link what you were doing with what the broadcast teams were up to. Try to come to some conclusions about what you learned from the experience of trying to work in a cross media way with the other students on the course 

You don’t need to write a lot for each of these posts – say around 400 - 500 words for each post. That would make 1,200 - 1,500 in total. Try to be critical and reflective, to show what you’ve learned about working as a journalist online. Don't just document what you did. Try to take a more high level professional perspective.

If your group project didn't go that well and you want to talk about why and don't want to publish that part of the log in a public place (i.e. on your blog), you can email that part of the evaluation to me. 

Remember - the deadline for completing the module blog is midnight Wednesday May 4th.

 

AWJ - Schedule and assessments

Now we're a few weeks in, I thought it was probably about time to set a few deadlines and finalise the timetable for the module.

Here's the current plan - we'll spend the next three weeks both looking at new ways to tell journalistic stories online and building your skills in these areas. We've already done audio slideshows and using maps. This week we're looking at more creative ways to use video. Next week, we'll do live blogging and the week after data journalism. 

The plan is to devote the first five weeks to this. Then the next four sessions will be more open, workshop affairs. I will cover different things each time, but the sessions will be mainly devoted to you working on your individual projects and your group websites. 

Deadlines for delivering these: 

• Group websites should be finished - Monday March 21st
• Individual projects should be finished - Monday March 28th.

The session on Friday March 25th will be devoted to preparation for the multimedia news days. So we'll set up a site and work out what we're going to do and how we're going to work with the TV and radio journalists. 

The last two Fridays (April 1st and April 8th) will be multimedia news days. I'll give you some more detail on what you have to do then in a couple of weeks. 

The module blog should be completed after the Easter holidays. Deadline will be Tuesday May 3rd. The module blog should include critical evaluations of your individual project, your group website and your work on the news day. 

AWJ - Session 7

Today will be more of a workshop session. You all need to get on with your group websites and do some development work for your individual assessments. I'll start with a quick presentation for those of you who are thinking of doing a blog for your individual project... After that, we can get on with the group sites. I'll talk to each of you during the day about your individual ideas too, with the aim of finalising what you're going to do by the end of the day. 

AWJ - Session 6 - Some interesting links

Here's a few links we might look at quickly in class today: 

I know a lot of you weren't that impressed by the live blogs we looked at. The Louse and the Flea sparked an interesting discussion when it laid into The Guardian's live blog covering the earthquake in New Zealand. It drew responses from:

The Guardian's Martin Belam

Journalist/blogger Adam Tinworth

Kevin Anderson, who worked at The Guardian and the BBC

All worth looking at - as are a couple of posts on the subject from Martin Belam, covering talks by The Guardian's bloggers - one from Matt Wells, the overall blogs editor and one from one of the site's leading live bloggers, Andrew Sparrow.

Here's a couple of interesting pieces re visualisation: 

The Guardian's Twitter map of protests in the Middle East. Paul Bradshaw interviewed Matt Wells who was involved in getting the map together.

A piece by Jonathan Stray about the UN Global Pulse Google Map of unrest in the Middle East

A new site called Churnalism, which sets out to show how much of a particular press release makes it into specific news stories...