Data journalism in Italy: how did 1,000 prisoners die? -
Journalist Jacopo Ottaviani has been investigating deaths of Italian prisoners, from January 2002 to May 2012. What do his results tell us about the Italian justice system?
Knight News Challenge: Announcing the next Knight News Challenge: Data -
Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken
The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the pace of innovation. Winners of Round 1, which focused on networks, will be announced June 18. Here, Journalism and Media Innovation…
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Actually, aggregation has a long, proud and ethical history in journalism. If you’re an old-school journalist, don’t think Huffington Post or Drudge when you think about aggregation; think AP. The Associated Press is primarily an aggregation service*, except that it its members pay huge fees for the privilege of being aggregated (and for receiving content aggregated from other members).
The New York Times and Washington Post also have long histories of aggregation. In my years at various Midwestern newspapers, we reported big local and regional stories that attracted the attention of the Times, Post and other national news organizations. Facts we had reported first invariably turned up in the Times and Post stories without attribution or with vague attribution such as “local media reports.” I don’t say that critically. When I was a reporter and editor at various Midwestern newspapers, we did the same thing with facts we aggregated from smaller newspapers as we did regional versions of their local stories.
” —Ten Trends to Watch in Journalism - trends that are defining newsrooms today -
The Morgue Lives!
It is a cramped basement annex, stacked high with metal filing cabinets, full of three-fourths of a million pounds of old newspaper clippings and photos, going back 160 years.
It’s simply called “the morgue.”
To get here, a reporter must leave the shiny glass tower that is the 40th Street headquarters of the New York Times, walk a half-block down the street, and descend three levels below the sidewalk. There, in a nondescript tower, she will emerge from a dirty elevator, walk past a janitor’s closet, then past a giant, rusted pump contraption with running water, and finally reach a pair of metal doors. There are glue traps with belly-up cockroaches in the corner.
Local newspapers' crisis: cutbacks are bad for society - and democracy -
He took the trouble to update his chapter - so what follows includes new work - but I have inserted a little more of his original research study because it was so interesting…
Yesterday, millions of people cast their vote in the local elections. Some will have seen it as an opportunity to pass their verdict on the coalition government, others to choose the councillor who will best serve their community.
However there is trouble brewing. Behind the wall-to-wall coverage of phone hacking – with the scandals, resignations and apologies it has prompted – there is a much bigger problem for the British press. Large swathes of it are simply disappearing.
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It’s a cry you hear often from journalists in the West, and it’s easy to see why.
Visualizing the Global Digital Divide By Mapping Internet And Population - Government To You | Gov2U |
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The future of digital advertising:
GigaOM: “Gawker hasn’t really experimented with subscriptions or other models for revenue. Do you have any interest in anything other than advertising?”
Denton: “No.”
GOM: “Is that because you don’t think they will work?”
Denton: “No, it’s because I’m lazy and I like to focus on one thing at a time. I’m actually much more interested in what I would call conversational marketing. That is the advertising that I would buy. The ability to have a conversation with — not necessarily with end customers, but people online who are truly going to influence end customers. And this is probably not the social media elite.”
GOM: “But everyone us saying advertising is dead, media needs to find other revenue models. Do you disagree?”
Denton: “We do fine out of advertising. We have high quality, high income…”
GOM: “Are those ad revenues growing?”
Denton: “Yeah, of course.”
GOM: “Rapidly?”
Denton: “Pretty rapidly, yes. We’ve been profitable for years.”
GOM: “And no interest in other revenue opportunities?”
Denton: “What are we good at? We are great at publishing, and we are great and will be great at creating these special environments [for conversation.] We have the tone of the web. Editorial expertise and technology are the things that marks us out. Clients who are often trying to become publishers themselves, we should be providing them with a publishing platform, publishing services and publishing expertise and publishing consultancy.
” —
Step by step: how to start in a data journalist role | Online Journalism Blog -
Eric Hobsbawm · Memoir: After the Cold War: Tony Judt · LRB 26 April 2012 -
My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory. We were friends, though not intimate ones, and while both of us were politically committed historians, and both preferred wearing informal gear as historians rather than regimental uniform, we marched to different drummers. Nevertheless our intellectual interests had something in common. Both of us knew that the 20th century can only be understood fully by those who became historians because they lived through it and shared its basic passion: namely the belief that politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths. In spite of our differences, both Tony’sMarxism and the French Left and my own recent How to Change the World are dedicated to the memory of the same independent thinker, the late George Lichtheim. We got on well in personal terms – but then Tony was easy to like, and generous. He thought very well of my own work and said so in his last book. At the same time he launched one of the most implacable attacks on me in a passage which has become widely quoted, especially by the ultras of the right-wing American press. It amounted to: make a public confession that your god has failed, beat your breast and you may win the right to be taken seriously. No man who doesn’t think socialism equals Gulag should be listened to. It was no doubt a sincerely felt rhetorical figure in an anti-red polemic. Fortunately practice differed from theory.
