May 2011

Posts published in May 2011

#newsrw: Heather Brooke – ‘How do any journalists in the UK do their job?’

Getting hold of meaningful data is the great battle facing British journalists, Heather Brooke said in her keynote speech at news:rewired – noise to signal. The Freedom of Information campaigner urged journalists to challenge the ‘unhelpful attitude’ of public records being withheld

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Channel 4 News: ‘Liveblogging isn’t replacing other content, it adds value’

Liveblogging enhances the journalistic process, according to Anna Doble, social media producer at Channel 4 News and a site editor for Channel4.com/news.
At Channel 4 News liveblogging sits alongside other content ‘adding value’ to the work carried out by the teams working on the television programme and on the website rather than replacing it.
Liveblogging allows for constant breaking news updates throughout the day as well as greater engagement with viewers.
Anna will be discussing these issues on the panel for the liveblogging session at news:rewired.

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Links: Session 3A – #opendata at a local level

Some of the biggest stories of the last few years such as MPs expenses and WikiLeaks have been driven by information discovered in spreadsheets.
At the other end of the spectrum there is a whole host of open data available to regional and local journalists seeking to unearth stories of interest to their communities.
Here ahead of the open data session at news:rewired we take a look at how data has been used by regional organisations and some of the open data sources available in the UK.

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#Sparktweets: Wall Street Journal visualising data in tweets

The Wall Street Journal has started using simple data visualisations in tweets using an online tool called Sparkblocks. Basic block shapes create the graphics in what are becoming known as “sparktweets”.
Zach Seward explains in his blog how the Wall Street Journal started using sparktweets to illustrate unemployment statistics and how developers battled to make the images both PC and Mac friendly.
Others have picked up on the trend which can be tracked with the use of the hashtag #sparktweets.

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Who’s signed up for news:rewired so far, and where from?

Using some simple tools used by data journalists to illustrate stories reporter Joel Gunter has made a couple of visualisations to illustrate who is coming to news:rewired – noise to signal.
A Wordle illustrates some of the groups and companies sending representatives to our event.
We have also mapped the locations some of our delegates to show the distances some people are traveling, including visitors from Romania, Norway and Portugal.

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