Are newsrooms the new starving garrets?

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Andy

: Image by amos1766 via Flickr

I thought as a writer you could just get paid to write

I heard that phrase in the cafe to day as I was working on lectures for next week. It was a small group trying to get their heads round arts council funding and realising that despite all the agreements in place for minimum fees the money doesn’t match the reality.

It was obviously a frustrating reality for some of the group who realised that they can’t just get paid for what they do without getting involved in all the other aspects. You can’t just write the play. You have to involve actors and put the play on. A writer can’t exist in a vacuum

I felt really sorry for them.

It’s clear that the shrinking pot of money and the way the funding worked was forcing them to compromise at the expense of the professional standards (at least professional standard rates). Just because it’s the arts it doesn’t mean that you should do it for free.

It made me think about journalism.

It echoed a phrase I have heard repeatedly over the last few weeks: “people will pay for good writing” .It was always in the context of paywalls – the latest idea in funding journalism – and in my opinion its one the emptiest phrases I have heard in a while. The reality is that good writing, on its own, is not enough. There are other actors on the journalism stage now and everyone needs to be writing to involve them.

The solution for the group in the cafe was to scale back on performances and start the painful process of finding match funding and sponsorship to offset the cost. Key to that was the relevance to the community. The Police, council and other organisations are looking to fund writers and creatives who get in the heart of the community. The idea that all the money would come from above is well and truly dead. Much as the writers wanted the distance they couldn’t have it.

Sound familiar?

Are paywalls our arts council? Are the community our match funding? I don’t know.

One thing is certain. The reality of how we pay for this doesn’t match our professional expectations and definitions. Much as we would love it not to change it already has.

Video bullies its way on to the updated CNN website

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Andy

The new CNN homepage

CNN have updated their website. I like the layout although I think the boxed content and the ad on the right are a little to similar and the movement of the ad is very distracting. But they aren’t going to move their ad’s around are they.

There is a shift in emphasis towards video on the site but the international version doesn’t get a link the Newspulse beta which is a shame. But few things did catch my eye with respect to video and multimedia in general.

The first thing was a neat little feature of their video player. If you drag the play head around on the video it overlays the running time . Not groundbreaking but a nice little touch.

The player overlays the running time as you drag the playhead

On the article pages themeselve many stories now have an integrated slideshow at the top. This is nicely done but it will be interesting to see how many articles get this treatment.

The integrated slideshow is a nice touch

The last thing that caught my eye was the use of video embedded in the article page. Video is presented as thumbnails in the left-hand-column which ‘pushes’ everything out-of-the-way on the page when clicked.

Video bullies its way on to the screen when clicked

I have mixed feelings about this. In one sense I’m pleased to see video in with the article but the overlay on the article feels wrong. Many times when watching embedded video I will start it playing and listen to the content – it’s more often than not packaged content (script etc) so I can keep reading and dip back in when the video sounds interesting. (who says men can’t multitask!) This approach seems to bully its way on to the page and does little to integrate. This is made worse by the use of packaged content rather than clips with little or nothing to signpost the link between the article and the video.

I think a better option would be to go with the clickable thumbnail approach of video. Align the images more appropriately to the text and the expand your player from that point.

Still. Lots of interesting new tweaks and experiments.

Advice on using your flip to shoot video

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Andy

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’m doing a lot more video this year as part of my digital teaching. One reason for that is we have bought a boat load of Flip video recorders to play with. That means we can do video without the big camera issues.

Whilst pulling together resources for video (I’m expecting the students to do a lot of reading around the basic technical stuff) I came across the Flip video spotlight site.

Flip Video Spotlight provides steeply discounted access to selected Flip Video products to qualifying charitable organizations. To start, charitable organizations apply online to become a Participating Partner. If approved, Participating Partners join our online community and receive access to the Flip Video Spotlight storefront. For each Flip Video Ultra camcorder purchased through the storefront, Flip Video Spotlight donates a free unit.

How nice is that.

As part of the site there are basic tips on storytelling, shooting, production and distribution. They also have a couple of neat videos offering guidance for using for the flip. So even if you don’t fit their criteria you can still benefit from the advice

Making an RSS feed where there isn’t one.

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Andy

I’m very taken with the general move towards more data from primary sources. Councils, government orgs etc. putting stats, facts, figures and information online for us to use and mashup. Those orgs who are savvy enough to drive this stuff through RSS make it even easier for us to harvest this stuff and add an extra dimension to our news gathering.

Of course the public sector moves slowly when it comes to IT and it’s no surprise that there are still a majority of orgs that hide their content away on static pages. No RSS feed to help there. So what do we do?

Well we could resign ourselves to adding them to the list of pages that we bookmark and visit. A bit like those regular calls we make to keep our contacts book fresh; no bad thing. But another solution is to use on of the many RSS services on the web to ‘scrape’ the page for content and convert it in to a feed.

Preston city council (the council nearest to me at work) has a few feeds but none around the basic operation of the council – meetings, decisions etc. This kind of thing would be great to get a feed of. So I thought I would give it a go with their published decisions page using Feed43

No feed for the dull stuff!

The first thing I did was set the search so that it showed all results. That way any new ones would show up by default. I did this by using an * in the search box. The * is a standard operator for a wild card or ‘any matches’. So it seemed a logical punt to try it.

The next step was to copy the web address to feed my RSS maker. The URL looks complex but it contains all the information needed to drive the search.

Feed43 grabs the whole page for you to explore

The first step with Feed43 is to feed it the URL then click Reload. It pulls in the whole page and then you get the hard bit. The idea with feed scrapers is to give it enough information about the way the stuff you want is presented that it can ‘spot’ the stuff and ignore the rest. This means trawling through some HTML.

You get two options

The global search pattern looks for HTML that ‘wraps’ the content you want to make in to a feed. It could be the whole table that contains the search results. But this doesn’t really help in this case.

Better to go straight to the second option which defines the specific things to look for to define an item to be added to the feed. Here’s what I put.

<td > <a href=”{%}” title=”{*}”>{%}</a></td>

In feed43 language {*} means this could be anything, just ignore it. {%} means this is important so store it.

So I can saw from the HTML that each decision in the list looked like this

<td > <a href=”http://preston.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=348&displaypref=0″ title=”Link to decision details for North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation”>North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation</a>

So I told feed43 to look for anything between the <td> </td> tags regardless of what ‘class=’ said. Then I told it to grab the href link as the actual weblink, ignore the title and then grab the text between the <a> tag to use as a title.

Finding the useful bits on the page means working through the HTML

Clicking extract will filter the content and show you the results. You can see they are split in to {%1} for the link and {%2} for the title of the decision.

The filtered results display in a list

The last step is to define which of these makes up the key parts of the feed. You can see it’s pretty straightforward to fill the gaps at this point. Your feed is then ready to go. All you need to do is subscribe in the normal way

The filtered results can be added to the feed template

Moving beyond the basics

The thing that makes scraping pages difficult is picking through the HTML. Feed43 makes this easier by limiting the number of options to filter by. But if you need to push further in then you will need to explore other options. One to consider is Yahoo pipes which has a page grabber option. But you will also need to invest some time in understanding regular expressions.

I think this kind of stuff is more an more important for orgs and journalists especially when it comes to councils and government orgs. We all know how ‘mundane’ many see this stuff (important as it is). So making it in to a feed would be more conducive to newsgathering by stealth. Encourage more ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ as Paul Bradshaw once described it.

Creating dynamic charts using Google docs

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Andy

I recently posted about how to add a quick form using Google docs. Kasper Sorenson left a comment asking if it was possible to update an image dynamically

Sometime ago, I wanted to create a dynamic chart based on values that were being entered into a database (in this case we used Google Spreadsheets). Basically if I was to export the chart as a static image, it would be outdated after an hour.

The chart created in the spreadsheet can be embedded instead of exported as an image so in principle you could update it. But I thought I would give it a try.

So, here is a form made using Google docs forms.

Loading…

That drives a spreadsheet that drives an image:

Update: Well, I hope there is an image there but there seems to be this weird thing were you can’t see the image if you aren’t logged in to Google docs. Odd!. It seems you need to be quite specific about how you share the sheet before you then share the image. But you can also add a chart as a gadget and this seems less temperamental. Down side is that this is also a little unpredictable for updating. Not ideal but still, it’s free.

Add your data to the form and refresh the page and you should see the graph change. Okay the page refresh is not ideal but hey, it’s free.

How does it work

Selecting the whole column means you pick up new entries

It works by picking the whole of the results columns the graph rather than specific data cells. With very little info in it it looks pretty sparse but as the results come in it will change. So not a perfect result but not bad.

When to use it
It might be useful if you were tracking fuel prices over time. Add the data and map the timestamp against the price. Add a postcode field the form and you could also output it as a map.

A quick look at charts

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Andy

Most of my teaching today has been about the basics of online presentation – online writing etc. As an exercise I pulled some council news from the web to give us something to work with. It was a simple story, a local council by-election. But it had some nice angles to explore – turnout etc – and it was on a patch I was interested in as part of the Bespoke project running out of the University.

I was really pleased to see some of the third year print students immediately looking at tables and graphs as a way of displaying the result. They were using Word to hack out the copy and used the Chart generator to make pie charts. A few things tripped them up.

The first was the generic colour scheme for the charts. The election results included Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. But you can see that the biggest result was formatted as blue – a bit of a problem when it was a Labour win.

A win for Blue?

Changing the colour of the data is pretty easy in Word 2007. Just right-click the segment and pick Format Data point. Pick Fill from the list then check Solid fill. Pick and colour and click close it’s done.

That's better. A win for Labour.

But then comes the next problem. You have to get the image out of Word.

In principle this is not too hard. Simply highlight the image, copy it and then paste it in to an image editing package to save it for the web. Of course it’s that last bit that is the pain – especially if you don’t have a decent editor to hand. And often the image is squashed or distorted.

Using online services

As an alternative solution to using Word or needing an image editor, I suggested using Google docs. The spreadsheet option allows you to create a chart which you can then share or export as an image. Easy to do

Enter the data
Select the data you want to work with
Use the Wizard to make the chart

Easy to use but limited

When the image is saved there is a neat option to export the image

Getting an image out of Google docs Google spreadsheet chart

The image it chucks out looks pretty good but you can see that we have the same problem with colour, that we had with Word. Unfortunately there isn’t much we can do about that.

The Chart API

One option is to delve a little deeper in to the thing that helps make the google charts – the Google Charts Api. Unfortunately the code is a little arcane and often needs a little more effort to understand the construction of the chart than a visual hack around. Luckily there are plenty of third party sites that offer wizards for google charts.

Jon Winstanley has a great little app for quick charts and it also allows you to pick colours for your data. It still requires a little concentration around the data structure but it works well.

Another is James B. Allen’s chart generator which has a more of a WYSIWYG feel to it.

Google Chart

Appropriate use.

There are other chart apis and chart builders but the open and free tools from Google are really tempting and, with the help of people like James and Jon, some easy to use third-party apps.

Graphs and charts are an obvious and easy way to show people data, especially as they scan for detail. Of course in all of this chart magic, one thing is worth noting. Perhaps the best way to present the information is the simplest:

Labour: 656 Votes
Conservatives: 283 Votes
Lib Dems: 239 Votes

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Monthly Archives: October 2009