An infographic from hackcollege.com on smarter ways to find things using Google. It’s aimed at students but is useful for anyone.

 

Created by: HackCollege

Updated Nov 26, 2011

A few links on some of the ways media (and a few other organisations) covered the build-up and election night of the general election and referendum in New Zealand (Saturday Nov 26 2011) – #votenz.

The (preliminary) election result

The (preliminary) referendum result

Today’s main papers/news sites:

NZ Herald/Herald on Sunday | Stuff | Radio NZ | Dominion Post | TV3 | TVNZ | Maori TV | Listener | Scoop | interest.co.nz | Waikato Times | Southland Times | Taranaki Daily News | Otago Daily Times | Sunday Star-Times | Sunday News

Overseas coverage – the day after

Daily Telegraph UK |BBC | Al Jazeera English | The Sunday Telegraph (Australia) | Sydney Morning Herald | Straits Times | China Daily

Livestreamed election night coverage online

• Maori Television livestream from 7pm. Other coverage here.
• TV3 livestream from 7pm.  (Streaming available worldwide.) Other coverage here.
• TV1:  TVNZ  from 7pm. (Streaming available worldwide.) Other coverage here.
• Radio NZ National from 7pm - Kathryn Ryan and Simon Mercep. Listen online. Other coverage here.
• RadioLive from 7pm – Mitch Harris, Andrew Patterson, David Slack and Finlay MacDonald. Listen online. Other coverage here.
• NewsTalk ZB from 7pm – Mike Hosking, Barry Soper and Sean Plunket. Listen online. Other coverage here.

Live TV and radio election night coverage

Freeview listings here.

• TV1 from 7pm
• TV 3 from 7pm
• Maori TV from 7pm
• Backbenchers special edition at 8pm on TVNZ7
• Radio NZ National election special
• RadioLive election special.
• NewsTalk ZB election special.

Other coverage on election night

Updates after 7pm on NZ Herald | Stuff | Dominion Post |Listener Live | Scoop | Radio NZ | TV3 | TVNZ | Maori TV | interest.co.nz |  TalkBack ZB | RadioLive | NewsWire.co.nz (Whitireia journalism students)

The Electoral Commission updated election results here as they came in, and referendum results here.The official results will be available on the same sites by December 10, 2011.

A number of news sites embedded these tables in their own coverage.

By region:

Southland: southlandtimes.co.nz ran live updates out of Invercargill and surrounds.

Wellington: dompost.co.nz focused its live updates on Wellington and surrounding electorates with some national overview too. Whitireia journalism students had live updates on newswire.co.nz.

Manawatu: manawatustandard.co.nz ran live updates on Palmerston North electorate as well as national overview.

Taranaki: taranakidailynews.co.nz ran live updates from electorates in its region.

Waikato: waikatotimes.co.nz had live updates about Waikato and surrounding electorates.

Auckland:  AucklandNow wasn’t running much and nzherald had more of a national focus on the night.

The Press ran national coverage (via Stuff) and I couldn’t see anything happening on Nelson Mail, Marlborough Express or the Timaru Herald.

APN appeared to run a single live update with a national focus across all its regional sites on the night, which include The Aucklander, Northern Advocate, Daily Post, Bay of Plenty Times, Hawkes Bay Today, Stratford Press, Wanganui Chronicle, Wairarapa Times-Age, Star Canterbury, Oamaru Mail.

Twitter, Twitterfall, Google+

We seem to have settled on #votenz as a hashtag. Here’s #votenz on Google+ and here’s a #votenz search on Twitter.

Twitterfall might be good to have running – add a search for #votenz in the lefthand column. It might take a little while to load.

(The Electoral Commission asked people not to post comments on blogs, news sites and social media during the day which could influence voters, but it remains to be seen how people responded to that request).

Visualising the results as they came in

Scoop ran an interactive map created by @keith_ng which was updated as results came in. It also ran on electionresults.co.nz.

NZ Herald had a visualisation of the make-up of the 49th House in Parliament, updated for the 50th as results came in.

Stuff and dompost.co.nz also had a results map being updated through the night.

Radio NZ was updating results in a bar chart and table.

Electionresults.co.nz had been visualizing predictions on the make-up of parliament, outcome of the MMP referendum and other questions. They ran the Stuff election map tonight.

Kudos to Whitireia Journalism School

As far as I could see Whitireia was the only journalism students running live udpates on election night – on newswire.co.nz.

Google.co.nz doodle for #votenz day 2011

Keeping track in the run-up to the election

Toby Manhire and Philip Pinner did a grand job collating  live coverage of the election over at the Listener – daily wraps of what’s in the papers, and a live update format for the day’s events, links to political blogs, radio interviews, TV and other coverage. They were also tweeting @ListenerLive. Excellent example of why linking out is a smart policy – these guys created such a useful starting point for following a topic (in this case, the election) that I found myself going back again and again. (Scoop does a nice job of linking out too.)

Listener Live was blogging live on election night too.

Most of the larger news sites had an Election 2011 or similar tab in their main nav and/or a fat pointer near the top of their homepage to point to election coverage. (If so, they appear in this list; if not, they don’t):

NZ Herald | Stuff | Radio NZ | Dominion Post | TV3 | TVNZ | Maori TV | Listener | Scoop | interest.co.nz | Waikato Times | Southland Times | Taranaki Daily News | Otago Daily Times |

Listening in

Radio NZ National compiled audio interviews broadcast during the campaign season:

Policy summaries

Most news sites had some kind of summary of policies. Here are a few.

• Radio NZ had policy summaries here.
• dompost.co.nz posted some bite-sized summaries of main policy points here.
• 3 News had policy bullet points here.
• interest.co.nz had collated policy summaries taken from party websites here.

The parties

• ACT New Zealand
• Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party
• Jim Anderton’s Progressive
• Conservative Party of New Zealand
• Libertarianz
• Mana
• Māori Party
• New Citizen Party
• New Zealand First
• New Zealand Labour Party
• The Alliance
• The Green Party of Aotearoa/New Zealand
• The Kiwi Party
• The New Zealand Democratic Party for Social Credit
• The New Zealand National Party
• United Future of New Zealand

The party lists

Again, quite a few sites had the party lists posted. Elections.org.nz and radionz.co.nz are as good as any to check out.

Electorate maps

NZ Herald had a very good interactive map that lets you drill down into electorates to find candidates, previous results, polling places, demographics and more.

You could also use a pull-down menu to see candidates for each party. Would have been nice to click on images to see information on each candidate though, rather than clicking through to electorate information. This screengrab is the result for the Maori Party:

Maori TV also had an electorate map, for the Maori electorates, and while not as comprehensive as the Herald’s it’s still useful, links out to official electorate information, and there’s video of the Maori electorate debates televised over the past few weeks.

Readers’ reporter

Stuff ran a Readers’ Reporter series during the election build-up, inviting readers to submit questions about the issues of most concern to them. Then the Readers’ Reporter asked the question of the main parties.

How the parties have voted

Theyworkforyou.co.nz has a visualisation of how closely parties have voted on issues in the 49th parliament and how often they agreed on bills.

The referendum

In addition to the general election, there was a referendum to determine which voting system New Zealanders would prefer to use in future elections.

Most news sites carried explainers on the referendum and the voting systems on offer. Most referenced Election NZ’s referendum.org.nz, which is as good a place as any to go for the details.

Referendum.org.nz had a tool designed to help people decide which voting system best matches their beliefs.

So did Public Address.

NZ Herald had a quiz testing readers’ knowledge of the various voting systems.

Way back then 

NZ on Screen has some great video in its NZ Politics section of politicians in action down the years, including the 1984 leaders debate, Norman Kirk talking to David Frost in 1973, and the 2002 Spin Doctors election special.

Te Ara, the encyclopedia of New Zealand, lets you explore the history of political parties, Maori representation and explains parliament and the voting systems.

This post comes courtesy of the Guardian’s news feed WordPress plugin, which I’m having a play with and have found very easy to set up and use (although the ad seems to be playing up at the bottom).

The British Library is one year into its plan to digitise pages from its very large collection of newspapers. Impressed that “fewer than a dozen staff clean, copy and upload roughly 8,000 pages a day – about enough to cover a football pitch”. Also interested in its take on copyright:

The British Library is cautious in its approach to the thorny issue of copyright, initially drawing the line at digitising post-1900 material. The “national memory” still bristles at the mention of James Murdoch, who described himself as “very, very concerned” about the library’s plans in May last year. However, archiving a wealth of material from the first world war and Britain’s burgeoning suffragette movement remains the ambition.

This article titled “British Library creates a “national memory’ with digital newspaper archive” was written by Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Monday 30th May 2011 06.00 UTC

“It’s an absolute fact. The history of the newspaper publishing industry is the history of failure,” says Ed King, the charismatic head of the British Library’s newspaper collection. King paints a bleak picture – but he is overseeing the library’s ambitious attempt to make millions of pages of yesterday’s chip paper available online for the first time. This, he claims, could give “short-lived, ephemeral titles” a second birth.

The library is one year into its plan to digitise 40m news pages from its vast 750m collection, housed in Colindale, north London. This autumn, the library will reinvent its cavernous vaults as a website, where amateur genealogists and eager historians will be able to browse 19th-century newsprint from their home computer.

“This is going to be a huge bonus for us,” says King, one of Britain’s most celebrated librarians. “It’s been available for 80 years here. It will now be further available much, much more widely than just here, so people don’t have to come up the Northern Line.”

About half a million newspaper pages have been scanned to date. Fewer than a dozen staff clean, copy and upload roughly 8,000 pages a day – about enough to cover a football pitch. When it goes live, the site aims to display more than 1.5m pages, with 4m pages uploaded by the end of next year.

But the website – which will be freely accessible for Colindale visitors, but charge a modest sum to online users – is intended to be more than an internet archive of centuries-old newspapers. It will be an evolving encyclopedia of historical events, a compendium of stories of how people lived and died. In short, it will serve as a “national memory”, King says.

For example, a census search for Sarah Ann Selway turns up a nondescript record of a woman, living in Bath in 1901. A further search at findmypast.co.uk reveals that Selway died two years later, aged 62. But the Bath Chronicle, now owned by Northcliffe Media, reported on 17 December 1903: “Annie Selway, daughter, said her mother had a very bad cold two days before she died. On Thursday night she complained of shortness of breath, and finding she did not get better she called her landlady. Her mother got a little better, but shortly after passed away.” Selway, a widow, died of heart failure on 11 December 1903 – a hitherto locked away piece of genealogy.

The British Library has created a partnership with Brightsolid, the online publisher behind Friends Reunited and five family history websites, for the ambitious project. It is not difficult to envisage how three centuries of searchable newspaper archive could co-exist with its existing sites, including Genes Reunited, ancestorsonboard.com and 1911census.co.uk.

Tim Martin, the managing director of Brightsolid, says plans for exactly what the website will do are in the early stages – but he is hopeful. “[Searching family histories] gets even more exciting. Once you get these pages online and you evolve them, you get ‘someone looked at this, who also looked at this’, and you’ll get people sharing things, potentially tagging content and making comments on it. That takes it in really exciting directions.”

The British Library is cautious in its approach to the thorny issue of copyright, initially drawing the line at digitising post-1900 material. The “national memory” still bristles at the mention of James Murdoch, who described himself as “very, very concerned” about the library’s plans in May last year. However, archiving a wealth of material from the first world war and Britain’s burgeoning suffragette movement remains the ambition.

Martin, on the other hand, likes the idea of digitally archiving the 73-year history of the Beano. Brightsolid is owned by the Beano’s Dundee-based publisher, DC Thomson. “We’ve got some good discussions going on. We may well do some of the family things – that’s an even easier copyright discussion,” he says. “I would like to bring this forward and do stuff from the first half of the 20th century, but we’ll only do that when we’ve got the green light from copyright holders. But there’s plenty to be cracking on with from the 18th and 19th centuries.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

I liked this thread in Frank Chimero‘s talk at #Webstock last week. He talked about the power of storytelling (and we’re all about that at allaboutthestory.com:) and particularly about how to get people to tell stories about themselves.

Forgive the blur, I grabbed these pics in a hurry.

We come across forms on websites all the time. Registration forms, payment forms and social media profile forms. These forms contain questions. “Good questions get good answers, bad questions get bad answers.”

This kind of question is simply too hard to answer:

“Where do you start?” asked Frank.  How do you summarise your whole existence right there?

On Twitter, that “About me” profile question turns into “Please summarise your entire existence on earth in 140 characters or less.”

So you often get people offering up a list: I’m a father, husband, friend, designer, bartender and snowboarder.

“I think we’re more interesting than this,” says Frank.

And Twitter also has a great example of a good question:

What’s happening? __________________________

With this kind of question, he said, “you capture someone’s Id. Here’s what I’m thinking, doing right now.” Politics, dogs, sandwiches, feelings.

Frank went on to think out loud about what happens if we change the question.

“What if we ask: What did you care about when you were nine? What’s the last thing you changed your mind about?”

That could be much more interesting.

#foodforthought.

I’ve just created my first combined RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes –  a collection of RSS feeds of news about New Zealand media which you can see under the News tab on this blog. There are only a few feeds in there at the moment but I reckon I’ll add more in the next little while.  Suggestions welcome.

Not sure why it’s taken me so long to get round to this. I was impressed with how easy Yahoo Pipes was to use.

Here’s some useful advice on Pipes from Paul Bradshaw that I posted a while back. And here’s another piece from him on how to create mashups using Yahoo Pipes.

Here’s a how-to video from the Yahoo people on how to use Pipes.

This is a round-up of some of the apps I’ve seen news & other orgs using online to help people understand and engage with the mid-term elections in the US. It’s not an exhaustive list, just things that passed in front of my eyeballs on election day. The images are all linked.

First up, Mashable was reporting at 11am November 3 NZ time that interest in the mid-terms is breaking web traffic records:

It will still be at least a few hours before we know all of the results of today’s mid-term elections in the United States, but interest in the proceedings is apparently so high that a long-standing (in Internet time) Web traffic record has already been broken.

According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News, traffic to 100 top news sites (powered by Akamai’s content delivery network) has already peaked at a higher level than Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential election victory – 4.6 million to 4.2 million page views per minute, respectively.

Google meanwhile was tracking search terms:

On Hot Trends at 1pm PT today, 13 of the top 20 searches were election-related, most of which had to do with figuring out where to vote. Terms like [polling place locator], [voting locations by zip code] and [where do i vote] have been popular all day, as well as state-specific searches like [nc board of elections] and [where to vote in minnesota]. Others are turning to the Internet to ask how long they have to vote, with searches like [what time do the polls close]. And earlier today, we even saw a handful of hot searches like [am i registered to vote in texas] and [voter registration]—apparently some well-meaning citizens have left one important part of the process until the last minute!

Of course, many people are also looking to make decisions about how to vote. The terms [vote smart] and [voters guide] have been popular today, indicating that people are trying to squeeze in some research before heading to the polls. Naturally, searches for various candidates, from [bill white] of Texas to [charlie baker] of Massachusetts, have increased today as well. Other searches like [massachusetts ballot questions 2010], [oklahoma state questions] and [amendment 4 florida] spiked this morning as people look for information about statewide measures. And at 1pm PT, three of the top 20 terms on Hot Trends had to do with California’s proposition 19.

Google was among a number of providers to offer election apps for iPhone and iPad that helped people find polling places and follow results.

The Washington Post sponsored the #election tag on Twitter on election day and its tweets appeared at the top of my timeline with a yellow banner that read: Promoted by the Washington Post.

The WashPo provided previews of each state and used an interactive map to let readers drill down to the state and county they were interested in. The map and tabs made it a tidy viewing experience.

And it had an interactive map keeping track of vote counts as they came in.

The New York Times also had a results map, which let you switch between the House, Senate, Governors and Caucus.

The New York Times built a dynamic app that showed how many tweets were mentioning various candidates names at any given time.

And it curated its own tweets.

Reuters embedded in its election page a feed of tweets from influential Twitter accounts in each state.

LifeHacker made it easy to find your polling station by typing in your address.

Facebook built an app for finding polling locations.

Project Vote Smart made a really slick app that showed which candidates in each state were most aligned with your views on key issues such as healthcare, gun control, immigration and the economy. (You can turn off the sound once you click through the first screen. Mute button is bottom right of page.)

Good magazine ran a competition to design an infographic about the election, a story about a McDonald’s store owner who advised staff to ‘vote for the right people’, and this infographic showing the issues Americans have been hot on in past elections back to 2001.

Talking Points Memo ran a poll tracker.

Politifact rated the claims made in election advertising ‘barely true’.

After rating hundreds of claims in the 2010 election — from TV ads, debates, interviews and mailings — we’re giving an overall Truth-O-Meter rating to the campaign.

We rate it Barely True.

In a majority of claims checked this fall by PolitiFact and our eight state partners, we found a grain of truth, but it was exaggerated, twisted or distorted. (We define Barely True as a statement containing some element of truth, but it “ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.”)

The Sunlight Foundation used Coveritlive to keep track of election tweets.

The Washington Post offered up election night bingo as a bit of light relief.

Lauren Kirchner did a round-up of election graphics run by smaller-circulation news orgs on Columbia Journalism Review:

Earlier this week I did a quick rundown of some eye-catching interactive graphics that newsrooms at papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal rolled out for Election Day. It would be unfair, though, to only focus on heavy-hitting sites that have dedicated interactive staff for such time-consuming projects. Across the country, smaller-circulation newspapers had to make the same decisions about how to visualize the data coming in on Election Night, but they had to make those decisions with far fewer resources.

Politico, NYT provide regular video updates

10,000 words wrote about:

Cable and broadcast anchors weren’t the only ones giving on-camera commentary on the 2010 midterm elections on Tuesday night. You can add Politico and The New York Times to the list of traditionally non-broadcast news outlets providing live commentary and updates.

Other sites worth looking at:

Center for Public Integrity

OpenSecrets

BallotPedia

Guardian Politics API

I’d quite like to develop this post into a reference site for election coverage apps and ideas, so please add any links you have in a comment and I’ll add them to the post. Thanks!

I enjoyed this post from Lauren Rabaino on 10,000 Words about the use of kinetic type in video storytelling and how it can be used in journalism.

There’s huge value in being able to tell a story that people will read all the way through– from start to finish– and then share with all their friends and family. Kinetic type lends itself to exactly that kind of attentiveness and shareability.

I’m not alone in watching those videos all the way through, every time. We’re of a visual era. We like seeing content in a way that engages us, a way that attracts our full attention. These videos are addicting — but not just because they’re fun. You walk away from them with a new wealth of knowledge that is easily digestible and thus easily retainable.

She provides a few examples including the well-known Did You Know videos and this one from Good magazine about the cost of war to the US.

As an aside, while I was checking into the numbers used in the video I came across costofwar.com, a running (and rather sobering) counter of the cost of the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan (based on funds allocated by Congress).

Lauren finishes her post with a how-to list. Here are the first three suggestions on her list:

1. Before you get started, fully flesh out the exact copy you want to use. It’s a pain to go back and change even one word, especially if you’re going to narrate.

2. Keep the text simple. Short sentences. Think about which words and phrases are important from the start so you can later highlight them with a different color or motion.

3. Watch a few tutorials to get a feel for how it will all come together in the end. There are kinetic type tutorials all over the web. I recommend this thorough, step-by-step video tutorial as a starting point.

You can read the rest of the list and Lauren’s post here.

Mindy McAdams pointed in the comments to The Girl Effect video as another great example of storytelling.

And I like this one on Malaria (also by Good magazine):

Pleased I made time this weekend to watch this documentary on data journalism by Geoff McGhee. I came across it on Flowing Data (thanks guys:) who name-check some of the people interviewed:

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viègas kick things off with some of the work they did with IBM. Then it’s Ben Fry from Fathom, then Jeffrey Heer from Stanford, and then Steve Duenes, Matt Ericson, and Amanda Cox of The New York Times. Later on, there’s some Nicholas Felton on his Feltron Reportand Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen, with several others.

You can watch it below, but I recommend viewing the annotated version which adds links and references as you go. It’s really nicely done.

I grabbed a few links provided in the tools section:

• Protovis: composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
• Knight Foundation Tutorials on Data Visualisation
• Manyeyes.com
• Uuorld.com : Explain the world with maps
• Google Charts.
• Journalists’ Toolbox: Writing with Numbers
• Just Plain Data Analysis

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

While we’re on data, New Zealanders have an opportunity to hear from data journalist David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful, in February when he appears as a speaker at the Webstock conference. I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s David doing a TED talk:

I came across this via a link on Twitter (can’t remember who, sorry) and thought I’d post it for my students.