Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying? a Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis | Salon Life Dear Cary, I am a college journalism professor. When I got into this field a half dozen or so years ago, after 17 years as a journalist, I was excited to enlighten young minds and inspire them. And I have, and hope I still do. The problem is this: I feel like I’m teaching them something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. What the heck am I doing? I feel horribly guilty, wondering what will become of them. I know it’s tough all over, but how can I get past the guilt and continue feeling good about what I do? Feeling Existential Dear Existential, Journalists find things out and tell people about it. If you are teaching your students how to do that, you are not only doing your job, you are giving them the gift of a lifetime. It is not your job to guarantee them stable employment. I’m not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists. Journalists exercise power. Where information is kept hasn’t changed all that much. What?
Visualising MPs’ Expenses Using Scatter Plots, Charts and Maps A couple of days ago, the Guardian’s @datastore announced that a spreadsheet of UK MPs’ (Members of Parliament) expenses had been posted to the Guardian OpenPlatform datastore on Google Spreadsheets. Just because, I though it would be nice to visualise the spreadsheet using some Many Eyes Wikified charts, so I had a look at the data, and sighed a little: in many of the spreadsheet cells was a pound sign, and Many Eyes doesn’t like those – it just wants numbers… So I went in to Yahoo pipes to create a pipe to tidy up the CSV output of the spreadsheet so I could pipe it into Many Eyes Wikified… and drew a blank: I couldn’t get the pipe to work (no CSV – just HTML (it turns out I was using the wrong URL pattern from the spreadsheet – doh!)). So I exported the CSV, reg-exped it in a text editor, adn uploaded it to create a new spreadsheet. (Which reminds me: note to self – create a tidy-upper pipe fed from the datastore and refactor the wikified data page to feed from the pipe…) Enjoy :-)
Journalism.co.uk :: An open letter from the newly launched Investigations Fund Many of the UK's top investigative reporters involved in new venture As previously reported on this site, some of the UK's leading investigative journalists have been holding a series of meetings in London, in order to discuss the crisis in investigative reporting. Now, their project has been formally announced: the Investigations Fund, formed by the newly created Foundation for Investigative Reporting. More to follow from Journalism.co.uk later. Re: Formation of a foundation for investigative reporting c/o The Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1QJ FROM:Antony Barnett, Martin Bright, Heather Brooke, Peter Barron, Nick Davies, Nick Fielding, Misha Glenny, Stephen Grey (editor), Mark Hollingsworth, Andrew Jennings, Philip Knightley, Paul Lashmar, David Leigh, Jason Lewis. Related links on Journalism.co.uk
Forbes new tool tracks advertisers’ corporate reputation Get past advertising. It’s a commodity — and who wants to buy a commodity? But a service — that’s a different story. That’s how Bruce Rogers, chief brand officer for Forbes, says the magazine is thinking these days. Even though circulation has remained relatively stable, Forbes sees an opportunity in thinking beyond selling advertising and diving into broader service areas for clients. In conversations with chief marketing officers at major financial institutions, like Bank of America, it became clear that many of these companies were dealing with a serious corporate image problem. “Corporate reputation was becoming the single most talked about issue when we site down with CMOs,” Rogers told me recently. The tracker survey system was created by the Reputation Institute, a firm that’s been tracking corporate reputation since the 1980s. The tracker doesn’t solve reputation problems, though.
Sources claim Independent could be sold to DMGT Daily Mail and General Trust is considering a bid for the Independent titles, according to James Robinson writing in the Observer. "Industry sources" have told Robinson that the Independent titles could be off-loaded for £1, with DMGT taking on their liabilities. Sources close to Indepedendent News and Media have told Robinson that the papers are not for sale - but that rival groups have offered to take on back office functions such as human resources and accounts. The Sunday Times reports that the Daily Mirror and Independent are in talks to "unify functions" in IT, accounting and sub-editing to save money. It cites sources as saying that a tie-up between in the Independent and Trinity Mirror was possible but that "other groups were also in the running". According to the Sunday Times such a tie-up would have put the Independent titles into the black last year. The Independent titles have lost money since they were bought by IN&M in 1995.
University of Kentucky launches free citizen journalism classes | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog The university’s Kentucky Citizen Media Project (KCMP) launched its website Lexington Commons on January 23 and will begin its free citizen journalism classes from February 14, according to a news release. The four workshops, which are open to members of the local Lexington community, will teach the basics of journalism (e.g. how to find a news story and how to write it), as well as exploring ethical and legal issues. With a focus on multimedia, the classes will teach participants how to upload blog posts and stories, video, audio and images to the Commons site. The project is funded as part of the Knight Foundation’s New Voices scheme. Similar posts: Webb’s top 10 tech trends you’ve never heard of « Reportr.net Amy Webb races through 10 tech trends at the ONA annual conference. Fortunately, she also has posted the list online. First up are 2D, or QR, barcodes and how mobile phones can be used to scan these. The codes are already used in promotional ads but also in magazine ads. Webb talks about how a news outlet could use these point readers to resources online. The easy way to create a Qr barcode is using the Firefox Mobile Barcoder plugin. Next up Wimax, or mobile broadband. Number three is geobrowsing, providing information around you based on your location. The session is running short of time and we are only on trend #4: cloud computing. Trend five is Web OS, in other words, using the web as an operating system, rather than Windows or Mac. Number six is visual search. Trend seven is lifestreaming, for example via FriendFeed, picking up on Scoble’s keynote. Eight is video on-demand is a paradigm shift, argues Webb. Time is running short so Webb is racing through the last couple of trends.
Marshall Kirkpatrick » 5 Minute Intro to Yahoo Pipes I’m in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn’t really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer’s head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you.
Marshall Kirkpatrick » Extracting Data From Otherwise Unused Applications: The Case of the Facebook Birthdays I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I’m glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I’ve extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself. Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader. You have a Facebook (or other) account that you never log in to. But it does a remarkable job of notifying you when it’s someone’s birthday! Dapper Will Extract The Data in That Field For You Select the "create a new Dapp" link. Just Enter The URL of the Page You Want to Extract From Copy and paste in the URL, select RSS feed, then click the "next step" button. Go Ahead and Log In Through Dapper 1.