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Andy Dickinson

Andy Dickinson

Andy is a Senior lecturer in Journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University where he is the program lead for the MA Multimedia Journalism.

📍 Manchester

How can you spot a digital native? Check their little finger.

Apropos of nothing really, I got into an interesting chat with some of the third-year journalism students about how our use of social media would evolve. I wondered aloud about how the physical way we access information might change us. [https://i1.wp.com/res.cloudinary.com/digidickinson/image/upload/

The most important code you can learn: the hyperlink

<a href="http://andydickinson.net" > Andy's site </a> It’s amazing isn’t it? How something so simple can be so fundamental. In this world of content management systems, data journalism, javascript, python and all the other coding and technological innovations we

Oborne and the fetish for old school journalism

Like many in the media industry I’ve been confronted with a wall of coverage around Peter Oborne’s resignation from the Telegraph [https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph] . I read his piece when it came out but have sat on my thoughts. That’s mainly because I can

Light the flaming torches and stand back: Are you a good leader of your social media mob?

I’m pulling together my yearly online journalism ethics lecture. It’s the fifth-ish lecture on this module (some previous ones online [http://digidickinson.net/?s=ethics]) and the fast-moving nature of this stuff means I’m really starting from scratch but I always go back to previous ones to

On #adviceforyoungjournalists

[https://i2.wp.com/res.cloudinary.com/digidickinson/image/upload/v1524222953/image_xrrf5c.jpg]

Data Journalism: Meyerism and Vox's new data team.

A few weeks back I wrote a post about Data Journalism and how it was defined [http://digidickinson.net/2015/01/23/when-is-data-journalism-not-data-journalism/] (on Wikipedia at least). So I was interested to read Vox’s take on it when they announced, last Wednesday, that they were creating a Vox data

Is more than 100 likes on Facebook news?

Occasionally we get emails asking if we can forward ‘writing opportunities’ to our journalism students. This week it was for student news site The Tab [http://blog.tab.co.uk/]. For those looking to take up the opportunity, there’s a handy guide for those asking the question ‘what is

Why can't I tag my followers in Tweetdeck?

I was chatting to a @clarecook [https://twitter.com/cecook] this morning – office mate and all round planet brain – and we got onto the subject of how we use Twitter to find people. Clare noted that often she will follow people based on a conference or event that she saw

When is data journalism not data journalism?

When it’s data driven journalism…. I’m doing lit-review at the moment (this might sound academic but it essentially consists of me yellow-highlighter-penning-the-feck out of papers and journal articles) and I came across a little loop in defining data journalism that got me thinking, thanks to Wikipedia. Look at

Elephants and MOWSUC's - questioning the future of media

When I think about where media is going, I think about elephants. For the longest time digital was the elephant in the room. Now media, and journalism in particular, accept the elephant is there. So we don’t ask ‘why can’t we do what we’ve always done?’ (a: