Mapping street level crime in an area
A little while ago I was playing around with the API at data.police.uk looking at a way to pull the data into a google spreadsheet (and some of the issues around the way policing areas are...
View ArticleWhy social media isn’t blogging.
I’m teaching first year journalism students at the moment and talking to them about a professional online presence. A phrase that I’ve been using a lot is blogging. The idea of a ‘blog’ and its value...
View ArticleDon’t postmortem journalism. It’s not dead. Fix it.
In the aftermath of the Trump win many in the media are looking inward to understand what went wrong. But is it too soon to write off journalism as a failed project? In the very short time we’ve had to...
View ArticleMapping Drone near misses in Google Earth*
My colleague Andrew Heaton from the Civic Drone Centre set me off on a little adventure with mapping tools when he showed me a spreadsheet of airprox reports involving drones. In my head an airprox...
View ArticleMaking Instagram video with Powerpoint
Audio slideshows are something I’ve included in my practical teaching for a little while. The combination of images and well recorded audio is, for me, a compelling form of content and it can be an...
View ArticleThe BBC, Local democracy, hyperlocal and journalism.
I spent the afternoon in Birmingham at the BBC finding out more about their Local Democracy Reporters scheme. It’s a project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a number of reasons. The promise of 150 new...
View ArticleWhy open data needs to be “Citizen literate”
A “data literate” citizen isn’t someone who knows how to handle a spreadsheet — it’s someone who inherently understands the value of data in decision making. So says Adi Eyal in a piece very much worth...
View ArticleLocal votes for hyperlocal #DDJ
There’s a good deal of interest in my feeds in a BBC report Local voting figures shed new light on EU referendum. The work has been a bit of a labour of Hercules by all accounts. Martin Rosenbaum...
View ArticleIs Data Journalism any more open?
Last year I wrote about how the 2016 Data Journalism awards illustrated that journalism hasn’t quite got to grips with the full meaning of open data. So I thought I’d take a look at this years crop and...
View ArticleTwo fundamentals that define good data journalism
Defining data journalism is a hostage to fortune but as I start teaching a data journalism module I’ve boiled it down to two things visible methodology and data. I’m teaching a module on Data...
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