I spoke at the latest HacksHackers London meetup along with three of my other OpenNews Fellows. Also speaking was John Bracken from the Knight Foundation and Bobbie Johnson who successfully started Matter on Kickstarter. Chronic blogger, Martin Belam has a good round up (see links) where he mentions my ‘rallying cry’: “You have no excuse … Continue Reading →
Don’t use it for what it’s made for, understand its functionality and use that I said this over a year ago when I was first using social media tools to gather, filter and verify news. I’m sure it is one of the reasons The Guardian chose me to be its 2012 Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow. And … Continue Reading →
What I Do Data journalism has sprawled into an all-encompassing term meaning new digital journalism excluding social media/community. In other words, news generated from a newsroom which doesn’t solely consist of text print. However, there is a wide variety of fields interwoven and interrelated into the term data journalism. So when asked about getting into data … Continue Reading →
Firstly I’m going nowhere as I am having operations on my feet. The Internet, however, is my only freedom. Painkillers are my cage. Late last year there was a call out by Alex Howard from O’Reilly Radar. In it he asks: …how many data journalists are working today? How many will be needed? What are … Continue Reading →
Last weekend (9-11 November 2012) saw the second Mozilla Festival. Over a thousand people came through the doors of Ravensbourne College, packing 9 floors and hacking to their hearts content. Digital journalism super stars Aron Pilhofer, Brian Boyer, Scott Klein, Miranda Mulligan and the Guardian Interactive Team were in attendance. I optimistically decided to run two … Continue Reading →
Now is the time to experiment. The second decade of the second millennium is all about crises. The stock market, the Arab Spring and the EU. The characters of history will be politicians for sure, but the celebrities, the cultural icon for these harsh and unsure times is the billionaire entrepreneur. Shaking things up, moving things around … Continue Reading →
In an article on the Guardian Data Blog Claire Provost outlined how the recent furore over consultancy spending by the Department for International Development (Dfid) should not be about turning the aid tap off but about making aid work for the donor country. One way to promote development in donor countries is to untie aid, to … Continue Reading →
Being immersed in a passion, an upcoming field, a new area of exploration is of course exhilarating. But living in a bubble of code, data and journalism can lead you to adopt certain assumptions and to fall into naive paradigms. This is often geo-located. I, like most in the West, tend to look to the … Continue Reading →
I do the hard work so you don’t have to! In fact, I need to do it for me. If I am to find my scripts and organize them, I need to structure my project at the start and keep to a standard layout for all my projects. So I’ve made a GitHub repository called skel … Continue Reading →
During my OpenNews Fellowship at The Guardian I am learning some very valuable lessons. Just as a trainee reporter learns the ropes, the beat and how to organise oneself for the steady flow of the news day so the budding data journalist needs to learn the same; only in terms of bits and bytes. So … Continue Reading →