BBC Radio 4 have a new series starting this week aimed at "giving you the tools to decode the news." How to read the news" is a series of 15-minute episodes that take a look at key aspects of the way news is made. It's a laudable aim and the first episode was a good listen. But it did rub against some things about journalism that I find quite frustrating. The first ep 'Have you read paragraph 8', neatly used the scandal around CBI and its ex-boss Tony Danker to set up the problem of context in the news. In an interview, Danker noted that people assumed he was guilty of things that happened at ..read more

The recent local elections were a good chance for a quick reminder of how scraping can help quickly release the data trapped in the amber of HTML We’ve just had local elections here in England, so there’s a lot of data sloshing around — counts, turnout etc. When I looked at the results from my area, Manchester, I ran into a problem that most journalists and data people will recognise — A page full of results that’s easy-ish to read but not great if I want to do anything else with the numbers. The results of the local elections in Manchester — trapped in a webpage. There are a couple of bits of ..read more

Journalism startups want to change journalism for the better. But success means you’re still doing journalism. And that's baggage you’ve got to carry beyond the initial pitch. You don’t spend much time in and around journalism without thinking about its future. There’s a perpetual conversation about what the industry is going to do about one thing or another. Sometimes it’s curiosity. Sometimes it's full-on existential panic. And it can feel like it just veers wildly between the two. But cut through the noise and the root of the problem is more often than not — sustainability. How do we keep ..read more

Nick Tomalin famously said all that was required for success in journalism was “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability”. But it turns out a good pair of shoes and a sensible coat help too! I’m doing inductions this week — welcoming students to our journalism courses. As you’d expect the sessions are a weird mix of the administrative and the exciting — “Welcome to a profession that can change the world! Have you registered with the uni GP? Part of the reality of inductions is expectation setting. That’s not just the staff/student relationship. There’s also a big ele ..read more

Earlier in this week I happened to catch the first episode of a podcast, The Great Post Office Trial. It's the shocking (and its really shocking!) story a miscarriage of justice  about managers of over 700 local postmasters wrongly being accused of theft because of a dodgy computer system. At the start of the first episode, the journalist Nick Wallis, explains that we was working in a local BBC radio station and got a tweet from a local cab firm asking to bid for the station's cab account: "We didn’t have a cab account. So I responded, a little flippantly, if any of the firms drivers had ..read more

Exploring the lyrics of Bond themes as a way of exploring code with journalists I’ve been prepping lectures, in particular, a lift-and-dust of my ‘gentle introduction to code’ lecture that I do with my MA Multimedia Journalism students. The aim is not to make them coders, but to introduce them to the concept of coding and how it can help automate the everyday. A good example of that is how code can help us work through mountains of data. Whilst looking for some suitable data, Billy Ailish ‘dropped’ (which is how I believe we have to say ‘released’ these days) the latest Bond theme. Obviously ..read more

A few weeks ago we held an industry event where students got to chat with working journalists and news editors. The inevitable question at these events is ‘what advice would you give students coming into your newsroom’. The answer? Come with ideas. But the ability to turn that into a good story is as much about experience as it is any ‘innate’ news sense. Journalists grow to understand their audience and, equally as important, the tone and range of the organisation they work for. They learn what works and doesn’t work. Fronting up with story ideas is something we encourage our students to do ..read more

This week I've been talking to my MA students about using images. One of the things I wanted to touch on was the way that Google Street view has become a common sight on many local news sites.   The premise is pretty straightforward.  If you've got a story with a strong 'where' element - an accident or crime report - simply dial in the location on Google Maps, switch to street view and take a screen grab. Instant location image! Google Streetview is a common sight on news sites especially for crime/accidents and other reporting One issue with screengrabs from Google Streetview is fr ..read more

A few months ago I found myself on the the Isle of Man for my brother’s stag do.  The stag party had ended up in the seaside town of Port Erin and had barrelled into a pub with my brother in tow, dressed in an inflatable unicorn suit. As I loitered at the bar an older lady (it turned out she was in her early 80’s) called me over. “What’s going on?” she asked. I explained my brother was getting married and this was his stag party. “Oh. We never did anything like this in my day!”. We ended up chatting for the 40 minutes or so it took to get drinks and for my brother to persuade the clientel ..read more

Last week I walked my MA students through a gentle introduction to coding. This week, I wanted to build on that with a real world example of how code can become a tool for repeating and automating tasks.  I decided to look at data from the UK government's Petitions website. The site has been in the news a lot recently with the Revoke Article 50 petition in particular, a bit of a talking point. So I wanted to show how we could use some simple Python (built on the basic principles) to grab and analyse data from the site.   So I set out to do the following: Explore how to grab data fr ..read more