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