In case you missed this a couple weeks ago:
Today, the Sunlight Foundation has unveiled a tool that will help us all with this work. “The tool is, essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine,” web developer Kaitlin Devine explained to me. It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected “churn” and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side. You can also use it to check Wikipedia entries for information that may have come from corporate press releases. The tool is based on a similar project released in the United Kingdom two years ago, which the Sunlight Foundation supported with a grant to make it open source. Churnalism will be available both on the website and as a browser extension. Its database of press releases includes those from EurekaAlert! in addition to PR Newswire, PR News Web, Fortune 500 companies, and government sources.
Walter Cronkite’s Home Office of the 21st Century (circa 1967)
Check out the Smithsonian’s Paleofuture Blog (which documents the history of the future than never was) for a full tour of the home of 2001.
Video: via paleofuturist Matt Novak.
Google’s Evernote
It’s called Google Keep and it’s pretty neat. Internet surfers can hoard digital artifacts. Organizations can organize digital information. Yes, many of us already do this on Evernote. (Keep is arguably cuter, though.)
Some people, however, aren’t too excited. Here’s why:
It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.
I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.
Regardless of whether you actually want to create a storify. David Higgerson describes 12 tips with examples so read through his post.
Short version:
An addendum to #12: this post by Steve Buttry on how to verify information on Twitter.
Related: This piece on Andy Carvin, the “one man Twitter news bureau” and his social media news process.
I can answer but my biases proceed me since a) I’m on a Mac and b) we have partners who help us out. If I mention them I’ll acknowledge them below.
How to learn them all?
Start with each publisher’s site and then with general online searches. These will usually lead you back to communities on YouTube that provide tutorials.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for take out a subscription at Lynda.com. Lynda’s a learning community that provides screencast tutorials on both multimedia production and code development.
Better, the monthly subscription is inexpensive and your can cancel as soon as you’ve finished what you want to learn. For example, sign up for a month, learn a piece of software and then cancel until you need to learn something new again.
Anyway, that’s the biggie picture. Hope it helps. — Michael
We want to make journalists’ lives easier through software. From what we’ve heard, transcription is one of their pain points and while Transcribe can’t do the transcription automatically for them (at least, not yet) we could make the transcription process a little easier for them through our tool.
Online Journalism Blog, Interview: the team behind the Translate audio transcription app
The free app is here.
PANDA is Waiting for You
2011 Knight News Challenge winner Christopher Groskopf announced at the PBS MediaShift blog today that he’s releasing a stable 1.0 verion of the PANDA Project.
PANDA is a data library for newsrooms where reporters can upload data sets to share with others. Instead of hunting through endless spread sheets, PANDA provides search capabilities to quickly find what you’re looking for.
An immediate benefit of using PANDA — or a searchable, data storage tool like it — is increased information at your keyboard while reporting.
Via the PANDA Project:
PANDA encourages serendipity in the reporting process. By having access to all the newsworthy data in your newsroom you will uncover information you might have otherwise overlooked. For instance, a search for the name of a state senator might return a dataset of his political affiliations, a record of his graduation, a list of bills he has sponsored and a brother who is an energy lobbyist.
It also improves overall knowledge retention across an organization:
By providing a single place to store all your newsroom’s data PANDA will encourage knowledge sharing, prevent the loss of information and slow knowledge attrition when reporters retire or change jobs. Never again should more than one reporter FOIA the same dataset.
Congratulations on the milestone.
Today’s Digiday Buzzword Tracker looks at the evolution of the word “curation”. For example, in the 14th century “curate” referred to spiritual guidance.
With the rise of self publishing platforms, so too came a lot of thought about curation’s pros and cons. For example, as Digiday Points out, Jeff Jarvis’ 2009 post about the journalist as curator. Most important, since we live in and contribute to a curated digital world, we highly recommend reviewing Curator’s Code by Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova and designer Kelli Anderson.
The two created the site last winter and walk through issues of respect, attribution, the nuances between “via” and “hat tip” and even offer a browser bookmarklet that generates links and symbols to indicate to site visitors how and where you found your newly published piece of awesome.
As they write, “The internet is a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery. Acknowledging where information came from helps keep the rabbit hole open and makes the Web Wonderland better for all of us.”
Couldn’t agree more. — Michael
Mobile Reporting Field Guide
Students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism have put together a great field guide for mobile reporting.
Available as a PDF or iBook, the guide walks through and evaluates a number of audio, video and photography apps.
Via the Guide:
During the Spring semester of 2012 a small group of students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism enrolled in an eight week mobile reporting course to experiment to see how far they can go only using their wits, drive and the smartphone in their pocket…
…A lot of attention in the news industry has been given recently to the idea of using mobile devices for reporting. This class decided to serve as a case study on how well these devices, apps and third-party accessories work in the creation of multimedia. We attempted find all the accessories that had potential to aid a mobile journalist in the field, then we bought them all…
…This field guide is the result of the hard work of students, Casey Capachi, Matt Sarnecki and Evan Wagstaff.
Each item is presented with a brief review, followed by Pros, Cons and a final rating. Where appropriate we also included sample videos, images and audio so you could judge for yourself.
Multimedia Shooter, Mobile Reporting Field Guide.
Jonathan Gray, editor of the Data Journalism Handbook, in a Q&A with O’Reilly:
Broadly speaking, “data journalism” is a fairly recent term that is used to describe a set of practices that use data to improve the news. These range from using databases and analytical tools to write better stories and do better investigations, to publishing relevant datasets alongside stories, and using datasets to deliver interactive data visualizations or news apps.
Precisely where one places the emphasis depends on what one thinks is important. This is why in the book we have several sections in the introduction where we’ve asked leading practitioners, advocates and scholars what data journalism means to them, what makes it distinctive and why they think it is important.
Regarding the need for the book: Quite simply, data can help us to answer questions about the world. While it certainly isn’t a panacea, or an objective reflection of the world, data is an increasingly important part of our information landscape. Rather than relying on the analysis of public bodies, public relations agencies, or experts for hire, journalists and their readers should be able to explore, interrogate and critically analyze databases for themselves. The handbook is our attempt to encourage journalists to increase their own data literacy, and hopefully the data literacy of their readers.
FJP: The Data Journalism Handbook is a free and opensource reference guide. Download it here. It’s a very useful resource. We’ve talked about a few other data journalism tools in the past. See some posts here.
Image: Click-through to keep reading the Q&A.
Sometimes You Just Really Need a Burrito
Well, I do. And so I was terribly excited when I first saw this on GOOD:
Have you ever dreamed of a warm, tortilla-wrapped bundle of joy after a long night out or on a bleary-eyed morning, only to find your favorite taco shop closed? Maybe you just have an unhealthy addiction to these penny-saving, bean, meat, cheese, oranything-filled savory and cylindrical meals that will fill you up pronto.
If you can relate, you’re in for a treat. The customizable, 3-D Burritob0t prototype will print your dream burrito ingredients straight onto a tortilla. The invention is the work of interactive designer Marko Manriquez, who created the project while studying at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and he hopes to bring it to life with a Kickstarter campaign.
Manriquez calls his Burritob0t “Tex-Mex 3D Printing.” The b0t features disposable syringes to print ingredients including beans, rice, cheese, sour cream, corn, guacamole, and of course salsa picante. As long as it’s in paste form, any ingredient can be attached to the printer.
The machine is connected with a smartphone app, which offers the burrito-lover flexibility in controlling the meal. The user selects the level of each ingredient according to a numbered scale. The app enables Manriquez to track user taste preferences in a database and visualize the data.
Curious to see the Burritob0t in action? Manriquez plans to hold a public demo this summer in New York City. He is also working on a 5-course meal exhibition: each course will be prepared (or printed) from the syringes of a different bot.
FJP: The concept is completely genius and I have burrito cravings often enough to seriously appreciate a burrito-maker connected to my smartphone, which is connected to my brain, which is connected to my tummy, which causes my insatiable burrito cravings. On the other hand, syringes freak me out a little and I don’t know how I feel about my food coming out of them. But still, innovation & burritos. Two keys to a happy life.—Jihii
Data Journalism Is the New Punk
Simon Rogers of the Guardian data blog draws comparisons between the emergence of DIY tools for practicing data journalism and the founding ethics of punk.
The underlying question is if you learn a few “chords” (eg., Google Fusion Tools, Gephi) can you start making your data hum.
Says Dan Sinker, head of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership and former Punk Planet editor, in response to Rogers’ hypothesis:
While I agree with the premise - it’s never been easier to do this stuff than it is right now - I think there are a few steps beyond just learning three chords when doing data journalism. For one, Legs [McNeil, who coined the word ‘punk’] didn’t really say a band needed to be *good* but I’d like to think we’d require that for data journalism
Check the article. Rogers provides links to free data tools and curates a great discussion about the reasonable skills needed to getting started.
Image: Now Form a Band, from British punk fanzine Sideburns in 1977. Via the Guardian.
Check One, Check Two: Our Webcasting Checklist
Next Wednesday we’ll be Webcasting GigaOm’s paidContent 2012 event from the Times Center in New York City.
From past experience, Murphy’s Law dominates the production of these type of things. If the Webcast is supposed to start at 9am, everything will work until 8:58 and then all hell breaks loose.
To prepare we take things apart, put them back together again, start streams, stop streams, figure out how and why things break, and figure out how to put everything back together again.
The gear we use runs as follows:
I’ll post next Tuesday where people can watch the event. The lineup looks great and includes WordPress founder Matt Mullenwag, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo, Condé Nast president Bob Sauerberg and News Corporation CEO Jon Miller among others.
The agenda: explore “business models and debate the best ways to keep content meaningful and profitable in an ever-changing digital environment.”
The New Renaissance Journalism Website
If you’re not already familiar, Renaissance Journalism, a program of San Francisco State University’s Department of Journalism, is a great resource on the future of news (especially for those in the Bay Area). Also see their new media toolkit for curated tools and tutorials. Some new features include:
What’s New?
- A new blog called “Media Matters” by Jon Funabiki, Renaissance Journalism’s executive director, who weaves together insights from a career that spans journalism, philanthropy and academia.
- Bay Area Ethnic & Community Media Map: Based on a 2011 Renaissance Journalism survey, we’ve charted the more than 140 ethnic and community media organizations in the Bay Area. You can narrow down your search by primary language or search by a news outlet’s name.
- Resources page, where we’ll be posting studies, research and writings on media innovations—from Renaissance Journalism and other journalism and media organizations—as well as links to many of our partners’ and collaborators’ websites.