• Google grants $2.7 million to IPI to promote innovation in online journalism
  It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.

  According to a Google blog post on the matter, Google wants to be part of the contest, which seeks to “find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa”.

  (tags: innovation business)
• Press Complaints Commission >> News >> Ms Mullan, Mr Weir & Ms Campbell
  The Commission considers that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from such websites, even if the material was originally intended for a small group of acquaintances rather than a mass audience. This is normally, however, when the individual concerned has come to public attention as a result of their own actions, or are otherwise relevant to an incident currently in the news when they may expect to be the subject of some media scrutiny. Additionally, if the images used are freely available (rather than hidden behind strict privacy settings), innocuous and used simply to illustrate what someone looks like it is less likely that publication will amount to a privacy intrusion. Circumventing privacy settings to obtain information will require a public interest justification.
  (tags: facebook law)
• Press Complaints Commission >> News >> Phyllis Goble
  The Commission has recently made clear that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from social networking websites, even when the material is originally intended for a small group of acquaintances and not publicly accessible. However, this will generally be only in cases where the public interest overrides the individual's right to privacy.
  (tags: facebook law)
• the saatchi experiment // what and why /
  In response to Saatchi & Saatchi’s setting of the brief “get as many followers on twitter as you can” for their 2011 Scholarship, I pretended I worked for them, set up @Saatchi_grads and with a little design and carefully chosen words people began to assume I’m the official twitter feed.

  I think it’s important to reiterate why I’m doing this experiment. There are a number of reasons, primarily:

  1) I thought it would be funny to see how long Saatchi & Saatchi would let me go on pretending I’m them, and how far I could take it – a TV interview would be the pinnacle of success of the project.

• Telegraph to unveil paid-for website in September – Brand Republic News
  TMG is talking to several digital agencies with a brief to overhaul Telegraph.co.uk, which features editorial content from The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
  (tags: business journalism)

• Surviving Facebook's New Fan Page Photo Roulette
  The 5 images displayed are the 5 photos most recently added to your Wall Photos album (aka posted to your wall) by an admin of your page.
  Images in the photo gallery strip display in random order.
  Despite contrary reports, it appears that images posted to your wall by non-admins do not populate the photo gallery strip.
  (tags: facebook)
• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The click of death – Cringely on technology
  (tags: shared)
• So you still think the internet is free…
  (tags: infographics)
• Key departures suggest 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism | Poynter.
  Traditional news outlets have some tough decisions ahead if they believe programming is part of journalism’s future. They need to decide where to place the people who do this kind of work, whether it’s in IT, the department that manages the website (which may be separate from IT), or in the newsroom. They need to figure out how they’ll balance the day-to-day work of running and improving the website against news-related programming. They need to find and retain employees who express an interest in and talent for this kind of work.
  (tags: technology innovation)
• How To Make Data Actionable :: Tips :: The 99 Percent
  “One of the things we have once a month is InDay. It’s on a Friday and there are no meetings allowed; it’s a day where you get to do whatever you want. We bring speakers in, people arrange classes, but you can also just decide that you want to work on a project and you plan it out. And you may get 3 or 4 people that say, ‘That’s a really cool idea; I want to help you with that.’”
   
  “So you get a bunch of guys, and you take a chance on it. And maybe it takes a couple of InDays to get it over the line. That’s how a lot of our innovation happens. A lot of great stuff is created by having time and flexibility to foster the creativity, come together to find solutions, and to make them real.”
  (tags: business innovation data)
• No longer the Apple of every publisher's eye | Media | The Guardian
  (tags: shared)
• Guardian SXSW festival guide published using linked open data
  (tags: shared)
• Meshings – Street Art View
  (tags: shared)

• DataSift: Realtime Social Data Mining Platform
  Taking multiple social and web input feeds, DataSift enables filtering and augmentation of social data, to help you filter out the noise and find the information that is valuable to you and your customers.
  (tags: data socialmedia)
• The building of Articlr – a retrospect « Semantic User Interfaces – The Best Practices
  Hack Days are actually very worth while and have their time and place. They can really produce some amazing stuff in a short period of time and potential friendships and collaborations which can be formed on the day are priceless. I learnt so much in one day and it feels like I just came back from my first ever magnificent school excursion!
  (tags: guardian hackshackers)
• The YamYam’s gooin’ away… « The YamYam Walsall
  "I have been producing the YamYam on a daily basis for the past two years and have reached a point where it is no longer possible for one person to continue working full-time delivering a free service which generates little income."
  (tags: business advertising hyperlocal)

Is there a charitable news (preferably English language) organisation anywhere in the world that might benefit from having a volunteer for two-to-three weeks this year?

Loving travel, but not being a fan of beach holidays, I’d love to spend some time exploring a cool part of the world but being useful at the same time.

What I could offer:

- Trained journalist (short-hand 100wpm).

- Working with technology/new reporting and publishing tools

- Development of online engagement and community strategies using social media.

- Experience of working with both regional and national news brands.

- Energy, positivity, willingness.

I’d pay my way, of course. That’s what volunteering’s all about. I’d just need a place to volunteer, details of how to get there and probably a suggestion of a nice place to stay.

Anyone?

• How folk who tweeted the http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/feb/11/guardian-hacks-sxsw link follow each other | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  sing the BackType API, we can track who tweeted a particular link (or shortened form of it).

  In this Gephi image, we grab the Twitter IDs of folk who tweeted a link to the page www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/feb/11/guardian-ha…
  and then graphj the follower connections between them.

  (tags: data socialnetworking)

One thing all journalists are taught is that the most important part of your news story is the first paragraph. This is because most people don’t read past it. It begs the question: why do we invest so much time and effort creating more than one paragraph?

I spent this weekend at the Guardian offices for the Guardian/Rewired State SXSW Hack Day.

The theme was to look at 21st century tools for journalism, and used covering the SXSW conference as a starting point.

Sorely lacking in any useful coding skills, I think my best input came at the beginning of the weekend when a few developers sought me out to talk through some of the barriers and frustrations journalists face when trying to cover events.

The most interesting of these conversations was with Sym Roe, who came to the event wanting to create something that would have a wider use for journalists beyond reporting SXSW.

We talked over a number of issues journalists face.

One notable one that didn’t make it past the discussion stage was how to filter out noise on Twitter to get to the really interesting stories. This is really needed when you report on an event that has hundreds of social media-savvy people present and (as with SXSW) many sycophants willing to furiously retweet certain folk in the hope they might mention their startup, app or idea.

We decided there might be a very simple tool that could count retweeted links, but then allow you to inspect the results in quartiles. That way you could check for stories below some of the more frenetic retweeting. A hack for another time, perhaps.

However, the idea that got us both really interested was what became known as Fluffbox.

Fluffbox, which was developed by Sym and Premasagar Rose, is designed to let journalists curate from a variety of social sites and file all the interesting stuff they find into one, searchable “box”.

This box then lets you drag and drop the pictures, tweets, links, audio, etc, into a document that renders them all in lovely, clean html.

This is fantastic in two ways: one, it allows us journalists to have one place to store all the little bits and bobs we might want to use for a story. And, two, the clean html also makes the finished document something that can be copied and pasted into pretty much any editorial content management system.

Fluffbox was highly commended, but I personally think Sym and Prem’s work is probably the most practical journalist tool that came out of the Hack Day… but then again, I may be biased!

As if he wasn’t busy enough, Sym also helped me realise a second hack that I’d been wanting to do for ages.  This one, however, had absolutely no practical use.

The Romp-o-meter pulls in all the stories that contain the word “romp” that are published in the UK tabloid press. They are aggregated together, the sport-related “romps” are removed, and then the UK is given a “romp” score, based on the amount of naughty nookie appearing that day. In my unwittingly double entendre-filled presentation, I noted that “romps can go up and down” and that this might indicate then general moral (or morale!) levels of our nation.

Sym had less than 40 minutes to pull this hack together, so I was impressed he even had something to demo! There are plans, however, to make the fully-fledged version. I’m really hoping it will involve a romp-o-meter swing-o-meter.

You can also browse some of the hacks on Rewired State’s project page.

• Newsroom integration: the past taking over the future?
  Bringing together the dominant culture of the legacy media with a younger, less politically powerful culture of digital media has had a predictable effect. There are few examples of digital leaders taking over integrated print or broadcast operations, and there are several high profile examples of almost wholesale takeovers of digital divisions by legacy management. 
  (tags: innovation)
• Daily Mirror's plans for online content charges revealed – Brand Republic News
  Executives at parent group Trinity Mirror are finalising which content to charge for on mirror.co.uk and sundaymirror.co.uk. Final details of the strategy are expected to be confirmed later this year.

  Daily Mirror columnists, including political writer Paul Routledge and sports columnist Oliver Holt, will provide the foundation for the title's premium content strategy. However, the Daily Mirror's general news will remain free.

  (tags: trinity_mirror)
• Guardian Hacks SXSW: exploring innovative forms of journalism | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Partnerships and collaboration, in the spirit of openness, are absolutely key to this structure. That applies internally as much as externally, and was the starting point for the Guardian Hacks SXSW that kicks off this weekend. Even though they are only a floor apart, there are plenty in our editorial teams who hardly know the technology staff. I think that's wrong, and that journalists, as craftspeople, need to start understanding that developers are creatives in their own right; the root of the word 'technology', tekhne, is Greek for art or craft.
  (tags: innovation journalism)

• Truthy – how 'true' is a Twitter meme?
  Truthy is a system to analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter. The Truthy system evaluates thousands of tweets an hour to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavors. The data and statistics provided by Truthy are designed to aid in the study of social epidemics: How do memes propagate through the Twittersphere? What causes a burst of popularity?
  (tags: twitter socialmedia)
• City financing of the Conservative Party doubles under Cameron :: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
  Last year City money made up 50.8% of all Conservative Party donations, a leap from 25% five years previously, when Cameron and Osborne took over the helm.

  The City has donated a total of £42.76m since 2005. Last year City money accounted for £11.4m, compared with £2.75m when Cameron took over.

  (tags: data journalism)