The Evolving Newsroom

Simon Willison on Guardian crowdsourcing

A look back at Guardian crowdsourcing project

I meant to point to this ages ago but somehow it got buried in ‘Drafts’ and time marched on. Earlier this year the Guardian in the UK turned heads when it used crowdsourcing to sift through mountains of documentation about MPs’ expenses and expense claims. The story, about questionable expense claims made by MPs, was [...]

Meg Pickard on hecklers and engagement

For the longest time I’ve meant to write up more of my notes from Webstock in February. Now I realise the good folks at Webstock have posted videos of the speakers on Vimeo, which is even better. One of the people I wanted to write more about was Meg Pickard, director of user and community [...]

Guardian opens up its data and content

The big news on the evolving news scene this past week has been the Guardian creating an open API. What does that mean? It means the Guardian has opened up its stories and databases of information in a way that allows other websites to use Guardian content in new and interesting ways.

What Facebook does when you die

Staying with the 'what happens when you die these days' theme, the Guardian has a story by Dave Lee looking at what Facebook does when a member dies. Interesting.

Telegraph.co.uk claims top spot in UK

My former colleague at the Telegraph in London, communities editor Shane Richmond, writes a surprisingly restrained blog post noting that the Telegraph overtook the mighty Guardian in the April ABCe audience figures.

100pc growth encourages Guardian to add more community content

The Guardian is increasing community content as part of the ongoing redesign of its website, working closely with social media company Pluck, according to journalism.co.uk.

Reason to love guardian.co.uk #23

The embedded media player that lets you listen to podcasts on the page you're reading. Much nicer than those swirly patterns normally served up with audio.

Page numbers add context for online readers

I notice the Guardian has added a nice little feature at the bottom of stories which shows which page the story ran on in the paper, if it did, where it was first published and when it was last updated online.

Guardian puts its correspondents on the map

The Guardian has a Google map showing the locations of its staff around the world. To be fair, it's probably one of few papers with enough foreign-based staff to warrant using a world map. But still, it's a nice idea and would work just as well with a national or regional map.