This is an interesting new resource. Whether or not you are specifically interested in coding – and these days it is being increasingly seen as an a very useful skill for journalists – it throws light on the kind of work that is being done in media organisations. This Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project is called Source.…
TECH TRENDS
The fruits of giving headlines the SEO way
Marrying headlines with SEO techniques is the way to go says this post from Frédéric Filloux in the Guardian, citing an instance from HuffPo. “HuffPo’s editors took no chance: the headline they picked is algorithm-designed to yield the best results in Google. The aggregator invested a lot in SEO tools: I was told that every…
Do you have a transparent corrections policy?
Having a open and transparent corrections policy is going to be more important than before with the advent of third-party tools that keep a close track of story changes on a site. Take a look at the recently-released NewsDiffs to get an idea of what I’m talking about NewsDiffs enables users to keep track of…
A major news site takes to responsive design
It seems that really big news portals too are taking up responsive design – the BBC has just announced how it is going to incorporate it into its mobile sites. I had in a previous post said why news sites should consider responsive design as having solutions to the design problems caused by the diversity…
Two open source timeline tools for newsrooms
The Knight News Innovation Lab has released a new open-source timeline tool, which it says is easy to use and does not involve the installation of server-side software. The tool, Timeline, was created by Zach Wise, a journalism teacher, who found that existing tools did not meet the requirements that he was seeking. It is…
Why news sites should implement rNews
A previous post on this blog had discussed how the use of metadata, or embedded data that helps machines understand the visible layer on data, was gaining ground on news sites. There are different kinds of metadata specifications that could be used and rNews is the name of a new specification that’s being developed in…
Refashioning news elements with data
News organisations that had till recently seen stories as data with a limited shelf life are now trying to find different ways of digging deeper into them. The Nieman Journalism Lab blog featured a post recently about Deep Dive an experimental project of the New York Times that seeks to use metadata (or the data…
Media organizations need to sort out their app problems
About 45 per cent of the iPad apps of magazines and newspapers evaluated sometime last year had glitches said a report in AdAge Mediaworks; it said that the single biggest problem was authentication failure (the apps couldn’t recognize existing print subscribers). This apart, the were other problems as well: "Pages, video and audio can fail…
Using Google Docs for liveblogging and a brief look at some other tools
Some CMSs that are used in the newsrooms have a liveblogging interface built into them but I know of ones that come without such a feature. So, while I was updating my list of liveblogging tools I came across a nifty way of using Google Docs for just this very purpose. The folks at Google…
Using a totally new kind of WYSIWYG editor in the newsroom
Here is an amazing deployment of a new-generation WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor in the newsroom. The editor, called Aloha, capitalizes on the latest version of HTML – the mark-up language used for rendering web pages – to deliver a totally new kind of editing experience. (Correction – added Oct 30,…
ProPublica’s new tool for crowdsourcing document analysis
ProPublica has launched a new tool that allows members of the public to analyze documents and help reporters unearth things that they need to take into account in their investigation. The crowdsourcing of document analysis is nothing new, but the tools that are being used to do that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Called DocDiver it…
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