HOW TO REFINE YOUR DATA

This short tutorial will show you how to use Refine for cleaning your data. The data being  used are not real, but created in such a way that it represents a practical situation (information downloaded from a database) and at the same time shows the most important possibilities of cleaning data with Refine.
See also and republished: Paul Bradshaw Online Journalism Blog

Crowdynews is the new social media news wire

Twitter works as the alarm bell for journalists. Journalists follow for example hashtags like #disaster or #breaking, and receive tweets about an earthquake, a plane crash or riots in a certain city. These tweets puts them on the story.

Most newspapers/media are already crowd sourcing; that is using content from the public. They ask for example the public to send photograph or story ideas. The Guardian has an app for that: guardian eyewitness app. Let's take this one step further and use a selected twitter feed for adding the latest news to stories; like automatic additional content. A software program selects items based on keywords from the Twitter feed or other social media, and adds this content to news stories. That is the business of Crowdynews, a Dutch start-up founded by Edwin Kuipers, an academic working at the University of Groningen in the field of artificial intelligence. The goal of Crowdymedia is: “to improve stories with the best content of the social web”. The business model is not based on selling software or a license. Crowdynews cooperates with the publisher, and is sharing the income of the page views with the publisher.

Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/11/meet-crowdynews-the-social-media-news-wire-every-journo-should-use/

Tabula to get your data out of a PDF

DATA JOURNALISM
You all know it; working on a data journalism project; finally found the data.....but it is pdf format. How to get the pdf data in a spreadsheet? Well there are some web services like cometdocs or pdftoexcelonline. Or you could try to build a scraper yourself, but then you have to read Paul Bradshaw, "Scraping for Journalists" first.

Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/11/the-5-minute-guide-to-scraping-data-from-pdfs/

How news organizations are using data to tell stories

Re-Inventing Journalism

Lecture voor studenten journalistiek aan de Universiteit van Leuven.

DATA SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Key note speech at Highway Africa Conference Sept 2 2013, Grahamstown South Africa.

Data speaking thruth to power. Keynote at Highway Africa Conference 2013 from peterverweij

Read tthe story at Memeburn http://memeburn.com/2013/09/the-future-of-journalism-lies-in-data-highway-africa/

TEAMVIEWER: Share your android phone with your laptop

Do you want to connect your android phone to your laptop?
Download the prog from teamviewer and install on your desk or laptop. Go to the  playstore and download the app. Here are some screenshot.
Oh you want the other way around,  control your laptop from your phone; try Droidmote

5 IMPORTANT CHANGES AT SCRAPERWIKI

Scarping is an important tool for data journalists. Sometimes you are lucky, and can download your date or copy-paste them from a website. Bad luck; then the data journalist has to look for heavy tools: a wrench like Outwit Hub could do the job. But if this fails too there is only one last resort the crowbar of scraperwiki, where you can code your own scraper. Paul Bradshaw payed much attention to Scraperwiki in his book 'Scraping for Journalists', reviewed in Memeburn.

Recently scraperwiki has been updated and we we are not talking about look and feel of the website. Luckily you can still continue to use the recipes of Paul Bradshaw.
Published on Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/07/data-journalist-heres-how-to-deal-with-the-changes-to-scraperwiki/

SCRAPERWIKI VERNIEUWD

Scraping is belangrijk gereedschap in de datajournalistiek. Het importeren van data in een spreadsheet vanaf een webpagina of een database, lukt niet altijd met simpel copy-paste en download. Outwit-Hub is een aardige tool om deze klus te klaren, maar ook die schiet soms te kort. Dan zelf maar een scraper maken. Scraperwiki is de place to go. Paul Bradshaw besteedt daar in “Scraping for Journalists” uitgebreid aandacht aan (http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/05/paul-bradshaws-recepten-voor-datasoep/) .

Onlangs werd scraperwiki vernieuwd en dat gaat niet om een nieuw jasje of een nieuwe interface, ook de opzet is anders. Gelukkig kun je de recepten van Bradshaw blijven gebruiken.
Gepubliceerd op Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/07/scraperwiki-is-vernieuwd/  
Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/07/data-journalist-heres-how-to-deal-with-the-changes-to-scraperwiki/

Model Curricula for Journalism Education: A Compendium of New Syllabi.

This publication represents an important instalment in our UNESCO Series on Journalism Education. It comes at a time when journalism education globally is undergoing significant changes, especially following the ongoing technological evolution as well as the global financial and economic crisis that surfaced in 2008.

Since then, media institutions, particularly in developed countries, have come under pressure to adjust to the new realities. More importantly, however, this new global reality poses important challenges for journalism education and how it can take such challenges on board, particularly in a strategic rethink of journalism curricula. In many ways, this present publication is UNESCO’s response to these challenges, which, if not seriously taken up, will have dire consequences for media practice and journalism education in the developing world.

Recipes For Data Collection

It was work in progress, but after almost one year and 40 'versions' later, it is published: Paul Bradshaw's Scraping for journalists. Bradshaw is teaching at City University of both London and Birmingham and a respected data journalist. You can order the e-book version, available in PDF, Mobi or Epub. Leanpub, where you can obtain a copy, has an interesting concept, it offers all the tools for the production and for the publishing of a book. And, not unimportant, the royalties are higher compared to traditional publishing. Bradshaw: “I have become a huge fan...The format combines the best qualities of traditional book publishing with those of blogging and social media”.

Gepubliceerd op De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/05/paul-bradshaws-recepten-voor-datasoep/ .
Gepubliceerd op Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/05/aspiring-data-journalist-this-book-is-a-must-read/ 

Running Android 4.2.2 on Samsung Galaxy S I9000

Why buy a new Samsung Galaxy S3, which is too big and too expensive, if you update your S1 to Android 4.2.2. I used the Tsunami X custom rom successfully.

IS D3 DE TOEKOMST VAN DE DATAJOURNALISTIEK

Wie nog denkt dat journalistiek niet over cijfers gaat heeft het mis. Cijfers op de redactie zijn belangrijker dan ooit. Sinds we achter de computerschermen zitten en databases geen hogere wiskunde meer zijn, worden er meer data verzameld dan ooit. En die data dienen allemaal voor het uitzetten van beleid en besluitvorming. Dat komt ook tot uitdrukking in de persberichten: het nieuws staat nog net in tekst maar vaak hangen er hele tabellen aan of verwijzingen naar tabellen. Neem bijvoorbeeld een persbericht van de ECB over de daling van het aantal financiele instellingen. (http://www.ecb.eu/press/pr/date/2013/html/pr130121.en.html). Al die data kunnen interessant voor de journalistiek; bijvoorbeeld om het beleid te checken of voor een eigen analyse, vanuit een nieuw gezichtspunt. Bijvoorbeeld de regionale verdeling van werkloosheid zoals de Volkskrant publiceerde (27/12/2012).
Gepubliceerd in De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/04/is-d3-de-toekomst-van-de-datajournalistiek/
Gepubliceerd in Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/05/why-data-driven-documentation-is-the-future-of-online-journalism/  

FT Legends part 2

Google Fusion Tables finally solved the problem of adding legend to a map. Produce the map you want and choose Change map styles, and then for Legend. You can choose the position of the legend on the map

Raspberry Pi

                               Running Raspberry Pi in a virtualbox.

Twitter Journalism: Lessons from #OscarPistorius

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It was an exciting Valentine's day this year. On Febr 14, in the early morning, the news that Oscar Pistorius had killed is girl friend Reeva Steenkamp hit Twitter. The social media newswire exploded again when Pistorius had to appear in the Magistrate's Court in Pretoria, because TV and photographs were not allowed during the bail hearings.

What can journalism learn from this mayor news event on Twitter?
The complete story is published on De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/03/twitter-geeft-de-individualisering-van-de-journalistiek-een-zetje/ 

Legend in FT maps

Google Fusion Tables is a great tool to visualize data on a map. But there is no legend to the map. Of course you can mouse over the map and get the data for a point or polygon. A legend explaining to the reader what is shown would be better.

Data Journalism Tricks

Scrapping data from the web is not easy. Google spreadsheets in Google drive are a great help. Here are some tricks.

Importing a table
Let's start easy. I was doing some research about Dutch municipalities and their mayors. Question was: Is the distribution of political parties over the mayors resembling the distribution in the parliament? So you need a list mayors and their party. Wikipedia is an option and works fine as example. Here is the page: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland . Now there are several possibilities to get this in a spreadsheet: copy/paste or using OutWit Hub. Directly importing it in Google spreadsheets goes like this. Open a new spreadsheet and type in the first cell:

=ImportHtml("http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland","table",2)

Some tech things

Browsing on the Internet is serendipity. You don't find what you are looking for but something different and interesting shows up. Here are a few:

Android

Of course I want to run Linux on my Samsung. But can also do it the other way: running Android 4.1 in a Virtual Box in Linux. Here is the recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2012/10/run-android-411-jelly-bean-on-virtualbox.html . I used the android file for tablet with Google apps. Simple, just import the file as appliance in Virtual Box. Of course we run Android as root as you can see from the snapshot

If you don't like the Virtual Box and want to run Android directly on your machine. No problem, just download the Jelly Bean .iso and install on an USB drive and boor from the drive. Here is an other recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2013/01/how-to-run-android-x86-jelly-bean-iso.html. You want to try an other Android .iso. Here is the download page: http://www.android-x86.org/download .