African Story Challenge

The Story Challenge is a project by the African Media Initiative (AMI), the continent’s largest association of media owners and operators, in partnership with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
Email: info@africanstorychallenge.com
Facebook: AfricanStoryChallenge
Twitter: @StoryChallenge
Google Plus: African Story Challenge Community
Tel: +254 788 279 091

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From the African Story Challenge

"Even veteran journalists must embrace new technologies," says Zimbabwean journalist Gibbs Dube.
Technology is opening up new frontiers in storytelling

Some experts do not need a whole lecture room to impart knowledge to students. Today I can proudly boast that I can scrap some data from websites to generate interesting content for radio listeners, television viewers and newspaper readers.

Makoko: the unique floating community whose days may be numbered

Residents of Makoko, Lagos’s shanty-town on stilts, face an uncertain future as they are caught between preserving their life on the sea and finding a better future for their children.

 A new floating school, built with foreign aid, offers the chance of education to Makoko’s youth. But the government initially prevented it from opening as it wants the residents moved to higher ground.

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/