Noise to Signal – Coding your own newswire

Seeing as tomorrow is Open Data Day and I claim to be a Data Journalist (I think JournoCoder is more suitable) here’s a little data food for journalistic thought. Here is the site showing the US nuclear reactors power output status. Here is the scraper for that site written by ScraperWiki founder Julian Todd. Here [...]

ScraperWiki Screencasts

ScraperWiki has had a little facelift of late so I’ve done a couple of screencasts (one more to come). Enjoy!

Mozilla Festival – Media, Freedom and the Web

To gain knowledge, insight and foresight into the developing media landscape, the best forms of education lie outside the classroom. I am a huge proponent of self-learning through experimentation. So I constantly go to events, lectures, hackathons and conferences. I have recently been to HackHackersNYC and HacksHackerTO, as well as universities and newsrooms in the [...]

Scrape Up, Mash Up, Fuse Up

So I’m in the US, preparing to roll out events. To make decisions as to where to go I needed to get data. I needed numbers on the type of people we’d like to attend our events. In order to generate good data projects we would need a cohort of guests to attend. We would [...]

The Data, The Scraper, The Tweeter and The Bot

Here’s a little experiment in using data for news:

Introducing MoJoNewsBot – helping build a social, data driven, virtual newsroom

Things have been quiet on the blog front and I apologize. What began as a tumultuous year with a big risk on my part has become even more turbulent. Happily with opportunities rather than uncertainties. Trips to Germany and the US have landed in my lap. Both hugely challenging and exciting. I completed the Knight [...]

Coding Update – get the data out there

Just to let you know that the Twitter account @Scrape_No10 which tweets out ministers’, special advisers’ and permanent secretaries’ meetings, gifts and hospitalities is back up and tweeting. You can read the post about its creation here and download all the data the account contains. This account needs more coding maintenance than the @OJCstatements account [...]

Sink/Source Journalism – A News Model for the Digital Age

I consume, code and curate news. I am no longer in the ‘newsroom’ per se, but taking a step back and looking deeper in to the nuts and bolts of the news platform has given me time for reflection. I reflect off hard surfaces. As such, I would like to present three sources of information [...]

ScraperWiki for those who don’t code – the answers

Please read this previous blog post which runs through some quick things journalists who don’t code can do with ScraperWiki. It is a step-by-step guide so please give it a go and don’t just try and follow the answers as you’ll learn more from rummaging around out site. Also check out the introductory video at [...]

Top 10 Things for getting Started in Data Journalism

Although “data journalism” can encompass infographics, interactives, web apps, FOI, databases and a whole host of other numbering, coding, displaying techniques; the road less travelled-by has certain steps, turns and speed bumps. In that sense, here’s a list of things to tick off if you’re interested in going down the data journalism road: Know the [...]