Comment, analysis and links covering online journalism and online news, citizen journalism, blogging, vlogging, photoblogging, podcasts, vodcasts, interactive storytelling, publishing, Computer Assisted Reporting, User Generated Content, searching and all things internet.
In a guest post for OJB, James Hickman pulls together a set of basic best-practice guidelines for creating data journalism videos on TikTok, from length and location to animation and style. Short-form vertical video is quickly becoming a key format for telling all types of news stories — and data journalism is no exception. As a data journalist, I wanted [ ]
The latest wife of headline — ITV News s report on the actor Lisa Faulkner revealing that she has undergone surgery after a cancer diagnosis — is an opportunity to get journalism students exploring how different forms of bias might shape news reporting — and not just the obvious ones. An opening question might be why a [ ]
Sending FOIs to multiple bodies across the country to get the big picture on an issue sounds like a great idea — until the responses start to trickle in. Differences between responses often make mass FOI projects extremely time-consuming as you try to get everything into a format that allows you to ask journalistic questions [ ]
Using visualisation on TV and video is very different to using charts and maps online. In video, the audience has very little time to absorb the information contained in the chart — so you need to get them to that information as quickly as possible. Every bad example of charts in videos forgets this. And [ ]
Some essential reading by Agnes Stenbom Swedling explores how news organisations integrate AI into their workflows and the idea of the human in the loop . Many newsrooms, she points out, are not optimised for what humans do best , and so far the introduction of AI hasn t involved a critical consideration of whether we want to [ ]
One of the most powerful ways to generate original journalism is to look at the systems behind stories — particularly the points where those systems fail. For investigative work, those points are central. Surface-level scandals often stem from deeper systemic problems. So what tools do we have for recognising those patterns? Donella Meadows s classic book [ ]
At this year s Dataharvest I delivered a workshop on using Python in QGIS to automate the process of exporting maps for multiple locations. Here s how to do it (you can find a GitHub repository with materials and links here). Making a map for a story is cool — but what if you could make a map [ ]
In this latest post in the FAQ series, I am sharing some responses to a radio interview about AI s impact on journalism. Q: Is the continuous growth of AI-generated content online a danger for journalism? It is certainly a problem yes, in three ways: it makes reporting harder, it makes it harder to support journalism financially, [ ]
Documents and other collections of text can be goldmines for data journalism — if you know how to approach them as data. Here are some techniques and inspiration for your next data project. From stories about political speech and song lyrics, to street names and social media chatter, data journalists now have a wide range [ ]
One way to ensure you generate a wide range of potential sources for a story — or for potential story leads — is to use a checklist. The PEER framework is just that: four categories to help journalists generate more names on any given story — and think more creatively about whose voices might add [ ]