A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists | Tim Radford | Science.
Twitter pour les pros, le dossier complet. Social media editors. Hacks and Hackers: The Time Was Right. “Hacks and Hackers,” our young organization focused on bringing journalism and technology closer together, seems to have struck a chord. Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group’s first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our “question-and-answer” site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications. Here’s the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night (June 2). There are now more than 160 people who’ve confirmed they plan to attend. "I’m thrilled with the way this group seems to have hit on something right at the right time," said Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times, co-organizer of the meetup and one of three founders of Hacks and Hackers.
Fresh eyes: what can journalists learn from a web coder? « Adam Westbrook. Fresh eyes: what can journalists learn from a web coder? What happens when you ask a film maker or a musician about the future of journalism? What skills can the next generation journalist learn from a branding expert? As part of Fresh Eyes experts in non-journalism fields cast their eye over the digital revolution and offer their wisdom. Michelle Minkoff, journalist and web coder Studying at Northwestern University’s School of Journalism, Michelle is on a mission to see how data and technology can come together to help the public. Photo: Stewf on Flickr As journalists, we spend our lives pursuing “the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media,” how Merriam-Webster defines journalism. Another way to put that is “the collection of information that matters.” That’s not because I work with numbers a lot (although I do), but because I see the field as the craft of telling stories by organizing information in interesting ways.
Three facets to data journalism Reporting. Will journalists of the future need to know how to code? | Media. People say that if you want to become a journalist you have to blog or use Twitter – to show to the world that you have something to say, and that you are desperate to get it out there. Well, that's old news. Now, if you want to become a journalist you need to be able to code. There is a certain logic to this. Up until now, as a journalist you worked with information, researching facts and figures which then you passed on to the reader. In fact, more and more younger journalists code or are starting to learn how to do it.
Coding for them is simply a way to hand out the information in the best way possible, and can sometimes lead to a multimillion-pound venture. Former Daily Mail journalist Greg Hadfield founded Soccernet and sold it four years later for $40m. Do all journalists now have to learn how to code? So not all journalists need to know how to code, but writing or recording is not the only way of delivering information. Yes, there will be a debate about it. Programming, Not Coding: Infoskills for Journalists (and Librarians..?! A recent post on the journalism.co.uk site asks: How much computer science does a journalist really need? , commenting that whilst coding skills may undoubtedly be useful for journalists, knowing what can be achieved easily in a computational way may be more important, because there are techies around who can do the coding for you… (For another take on this, see Charles Arthur’s If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code, and this response to it: Learning to Think Like A Programmer.)
Picking up on a few thoughts that came to mind around a presentation I gave yesterday (Web Lego And Format Glue, aka Get Yer Mashup On), here’s a slightly different take on it, based on the idea that programming doesn’t necessarily mean writing arcane computer code. So here we go…. An idea I’ve started working on recently as an explanatory device is the notion of feed oriented programming. Some RSS feeds might not change over time. So what do we learn from this? How blogging creates new opportunities for journalists « Reportr.net. If any journalists had doubts about the benefits of blogging, hopefully this guest post by my friend Scott Elliott will put them to rest. Scott was an education reporter with the Dayton Daily News and has just taken on a new role as columnist for the paper.
He started a blog about his beat, Get on the Bus, shortly after a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan three years ago. As he relates, blogging ultimately did create new opportunities for him: “Let me start off with a joke – four months before I launched what would soon become one of the best known education blogs in the US, I didn’t know what a blog was and had never visited one. That often gets a laugh when I am speaking to reporters about blogging, which is fairly often these days. But I can’t help but feel a little bit like I am at the center of a joke whenever I am introduce as a blogging “expert.” The speaker that day was a fellow named Dan Gillmor. So of course, I’d never heard of him.