The Evolving Newsroom

How YouTube thinks about copyright

Here’s what I want from news orgs

A conversation this week got my brain fizzing again about news. (Nice to fizz rather than funk). The conversation ranged through what is perceived to be wrong with the news business, what’s right about it, what impact it’s having on society, what journalism graduates need to know, who journalists need to be. The usual stuff. [...]

Data, labels and the power of microformats

Somehow a week’s slipped by since the Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest in Wellington without me giving an update here. It was a great event with around 150 people putting their heads together on the Saturday to brainstorm the why, where, who and how of making more government data readily available to the public [...]

Why I’m sponsoring Open Govt Data Bar Camp

First of all, what’s Open Govt Data Bar Camp? “The New Zealand Open Government Bar Camp is an “unconference” for people who are interested in making government-held data more freely available for others to re-use. An “unconference” is an alternative participant-driven event, that avoids aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored [...]

MSNBC acquires everyblock.com

Everyblock.com announced this week that it has been acquired by news organisation MSNBC.com. Everyblock.com takes data from local government, libraries, police, emergency services and many more sources and ‘arranges it’ geographically so that visitors to the website can get a picture of what’s happening on their street. They can see figures for house listings, crime, [...]

Tim Berners-Lee on link data

Tim Berners-Lee on link data.

Bird’s eye view of planes, trains and phone lines

Clips from the BBC's Britain From Above series.

My favourite new site is: flowingdata.com

I love good data visualisations and look forward to seeing them used more often on news sites. I was delighted to come across www.flowingdata.com the other day via a Twitter link to this visualisation of people tweeting about President Obama's inauguration (links to flowingdata.com)

First step in bringing change: find the believers

Erik Ulken has posted a must-read top 10 list of lessons learned while setting up the data desk in the LA Times newsroom.The data desk's job is to take detailed information that's dreary to read in text or table form and make it useful by presenting it in compelling and interactive formats. A well-known example is the LA Time's Homicide Map.

News companies could do more to lead the conversation

I can't remember where I picked up this link to Seth Godin's post on how the New York Times could do better, but it's a goody. A couple of points from it: 1. Use their influence and brand to enable users to spread their content. Why, precisely, aren't the Zagats guides a NY Times product? Or Yelp? That's a quarter of a billion dollars worth of value that the paper with the most influential restaurant reviews page didn't create. Why didn't they build Wikipedia? Or a platform to influence the way politicians govern?