EveryBlock Makes Code Available

Hyperlocal news and info site EveryBlock has released its source code online.

This means thousands of news websites around the world can now make use of the technology to power their own location-based news services.

It is this code which has enabled EveryBlock (launched in January 2008) to provide a hyperlocal news and info service for some 15 cities across the US.

Visitors can search for news by postcode or area and can get access to civic records as well as breaking news stories.

The company also has a number of partnership deals with news groups, including the New York Times.

Announcing the release of the code on their blog, the EveryBlock founders said: “We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work.”

Find out more on the Editors Weblog.

[HT – Martin Stabe]

How-To Videos On YouTube Channel

A YouTube channel dedicated to online journalism is building its stock of videos from industry experts and practitioners.

Launched in April, the YouTube Reporters' Center already holds more than 30 videos offering tips on key aspects of digital journalism.

Categories include Expert Videos, Interviews and Profiles, Investigative Reporting, and Ethics, Law & Fact-Checking.



Among the industry insiders offering the benefit of their experience are veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward, CBS news anchor Katie Couric, and HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington.

In addition to these general advice pieces, there are also technical instructional videos such as this one from Reuters.com about filming effective video interviews.



And this video from Bloomberg TV gives some valuable tips on how to tell a story with numbers.



YouTube says of the citizen reporting resource: “The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news.”

MPs' Scandal Adds 1m Users

Telegraph.co.uk’s exclusive coverage of MPs' expenses brought more than 1 million additional users to the site in May.

According to a report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the website boosted traffic by 1.4 million unique visitors compared to the previous month.



The expenses coverage also helped the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) improve its print circulation performance during May.

Plus, advertising revenue received a boost as a direct result of the newspaper’s expenses coverage, reports Forbes.

And it is likely that June’s figures will see impressive growth too with the publication of the unredacted data in a pullout special distributed with the Daily Telegraph.

A searchable database holding details of all the expenses claims then went live on Telegraph.co.uk towards the end of the month.

TMG’s digital editor, Edward Roussel, told the Guardian that the publisher’s exclusive and in-depth coverage of the scandal has been of interest to a global audience.

“Our MPs’ expenses coverage brought new audiences to our website, helping to extend the Telegraph brand in the UK and across the world.”

Kent Paper Launching War Archive

Life in Kent during the Second World War is the focus of a new digital archive poised to go online this autumn.

From September, visitors to Kent Online will be able to view thousands of articles and photographs published by the Kent Messenger during the war.

According to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, the archive will also have advertisements from the time and a search function enabling users to search by dates, places and names.

“The KM’s war pages provide a first-hand account of every day life as well as the remarkable courage and tenacity of the people in Medway and Kent who endured so much for so long,” said Ron Green, managing editor of the KM Group.

Meanwhile, web users who fancy a read of something a little older should take a look at a new online newspaper archive from the British Library.



The British Newspapers 1800-1900 digital archive houses over two million pages from local and national newspapers published during the course of the century.

Find out more from the British Library website and on HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk.

Compelling Community Content

A blueprint for community newspapers in today's media environment, offered by Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is attracting a lot of attention.

The `C3' or `Complete Community Connection' plan, as summarized by Nieman Journalism Lab (and available in full from Scribd), is an implementation of ideas that Buttry developed while working on the Newspaper Next project at the American Press Institute.

Although it is a family-owned paper, the Gazette is otherwise very comparable to UK regional newspapers such as the Lancashire Evening Post or other Johnston Press dailies.

Among the areas around which Buttry suggests compelling community content can be created are:

* Driving: Features such as gas price mapping, traffic text alerts, databases on bridge inspections, parking offenders, gas pump inspections and a pothole map `can help drivers and car owners regularly over time.'

* Home: `Answerbases' can be created on such topics as property taxes, sales transactions, mortgage foreclosures, delinquencies and ratings of contractors.

* Conversation: Buttry urges newspapers to immerse themselves in social networking: incorporating blogs and Facebook Connect, developing discussion leaders to turn commenting into conversation, and offering rewards for high-value contributors.

* Calendar: A great calendar ('what's on') system is central to the idea of facilitating transactions such as reservations and ticket sales, he says.

* Local Knowledge: In Buttry’s vision, this entails a `place where people of our communities and perhaps across Iowa turn for answers to their questions about this state and its communities: databases, community resources, services, history, unique aspects of local life (attractions, institutions and events) and a user-generated encyclopedia of local knowledge.'

* Personal content opportunities: These include expanded user-contributed content areas for births, milestones, school, graduations, college life, military service, weddings, parenthood, divorce, jobs, health, pets, food, interests, retirement and other stages of life.

Buttry's blog contains the complete blueprint in a series of posts. It's well worth a read.

Regional Business Site Launched

A website dedicated to business news for the south-west of England has been launched by Northcliffe.

SouthWestBusiness provides breaking business news by sector or by area, which is pulled in to the site from the regional publisher’s newspaper titles in the region.

The new website also offers business directories for Bristol, Bath, Gloucestershire and Somerset.



According to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, the main feature is the site’s comment section which aims to help create an online community of users.

Trinity Mirror Opens Business Directory

A new directory of local businesses has been launched online by Trinity Mirror.

LocalMole.co.uk is a searchable database with details on almost two million companies – such as plumbers, gardeners and hairdressers.



HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reports that the directory also features an interactive element as visitors are encouraged to rate and recommend the businesses they use.

The directory can be accessed directly from its home page or from Trinity Mirror’s local newspaper websites.



“By combining detailed business information with user ratings and reviews - supported by powerful online and in-paper promotion - we aim to develop LocalMole.co.uk into an indispensable service for local audiences and advertisers,” said Chris Bunyan, digital director of Trinity Mirror Regionals.

Site To Cover Parliament Debates

A new website providing comprehensive coverage of the goings on within the House of Commons is to be launched next month.

The brainchild of Tony Grew, I Spy Strangers describes itself as the product of “a non-partisan, not-for-profit group” which will provide an accessible record of parliamentary debates.

Speaking to Press Gazette, the former editor of Pink News said the website will provide the kind of coverage not offered by the mainstream media.

“At the moment, only the BBC provides that sort of coverage - and we don’t think that’s acceptable in a democratic society,” said Grew.

He added: “There’s a gap in the market for people interested in democracy, but who haven’t the time to go through Hansard.

“We want to go back to accurate, engaging reports of what was said. We think there is a lot of good stuff that’s missed.”



Set for launch on April 20, I Spy Strangers is currently staffed by volunteer journalists, photographers and web designers.

Grew aims to employ salaried workers in the future and is working to secure funding from organisations committed to widening public access to democracy.

Guardian Opens Up Online Content

This month has seen The Guardian making some of its content and data freely available to developers through its Open Platform project.

Launched as a commercial initiative, Open Platform enables people to access its articles and data sets in order to create new applications and online offerings.

The beta trial makes the content available through the Content API and Data Store channels on Guardian.co.uk.




Visitors to the Data Store can access statistics on a range of subjects, from the cost of military engagements in Iraq to the makeup of the British population and the tax-paying habits of some of the UK’s biggest firms.

And developers can share their creations through a blog dedicated to the data applications built using Open Platform.



Several partners are already working with The Guardian on the project, including OpenStreetMap which is hoping to work with users to create a map of geotagged Guardian content.

Director of digital content Emily Bell believes that Open Platform is a great way for the newspaper to interact with the wider world on the Web.

“We try very hard and spend many pounds a year to put our journalism in from of a wider audience: this is another way to do that,” she writes.

“We also recognise that by opening up what we do to more people who have more expertise than we do, we can improve what we do and change the Guardian’s relationship with the web and the internet.”

And she stresses that such a project works well as an accompaniment to more traditional journalism.

“This ‘showing your insides’ approach to publishing might seem like a million miles away from the relatively controlled world of top-down journalism, but it is strangely complimentary.”

A number of news organisations are starting to make some of their content available online to developers, including the New York Times which launched its first API last year.

Visit Guardian.co.uk for more details on Open Platform.

Patch Launches NJ Hyperlocals

New Jersey residents are spoiled for choice with hyperlocal news coverage as another three sites are launched.

Just a couple of weeks after the New York Times went live with its community news sites in New Jersey, the newly-created Patch.com unveiled its websites covering Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn.

According to Lost Remote, each Patch platform is “deeper than NYT’s effort, featuring a business directory, video and data mapping, to name a few”.

The sites also offer interactive events listings and announcements, searchable directories of local restaurants, local facts sections and links to schools and colleges in the area.



According to its About Us page: “Patch is a new way to find out about, and participate in, what’s going on near you.

“We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.”

Funded by private investors the Polar Capital Group, Patch.com is managed and staffed by media professionals and has plans to become a nationwide network in the future.

How To: Plan Online Projects

A step-by-step guide to creating online journalism projects has been published by academic and blogger Ryan Thornburg.

On The Future of News blog, Thornburg has posted a six-point guide to producing an online news feature which takes journalists from the initial brainstorming stages through to execution and realisation of the project.

Here are his six stages:

*A product concept

In its simplest form, Thornburg believes this means starting “with a good question”.

But getting to this good question takes in finding out who your audience is and what they want to know.

*A storyboard

Thornburg writes that the storyboard’s “real power lies in its ability to get you thinking about non-linear storytelling - stories through which each consumer can choose his or her own path”.

He adds that when storyboarding “you’ll also want to note the medium you’ll use to tell that part of the story.”

*Asset management

Comprises several elements including file-naming conventions, version control and stylesheets.

*A clear workflow

Using a dedicated software package or Excel / Google spreadsheets, this helps organise who’s doing what tasks etc.

*A financial budget

“Even if you don’t have to worry about the financial costs of building something, it’s important to keep a constant eye on the opportunity costs.”

*A testing and quality assurance procedure


Visit Thornburg’s The Future of News blog for the full post, which contains links to some useful planning resources.

NYT Joins EveryBlock On Micro Politics

New Yorkers can now check on the political activities of their local representatives via EveryBlock thanks to a new partnership deal.

The New York Times has joined with the micro-local news site to provide the service on its political news items page, reports Journalism.co.uk.

Visitors can view media coverage of their council, state, senate, and congress representatives and find out what they’ve been up to on behalf of the electorate.

Articles can be searched by borough, neighbourhood, zip code or by date of publication.



Founded by Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock offers news feeds for each block in a number of cities across the US.

Obama Pledges Tested Online

Journalists at the St Petersburg Times are holding the new president to account with their all new topical Obameter.

Featured on The Times’s PolitiFact.com website, the Obameter will measure Barack Obama’s success in meeting some 500 of his pre-election promises.



To create the list of promises, reporters had to plough through transcripts from speeches, TV interviews and more during Obama’s campaign to find the things making up his future to-do list.

PolitiFact explains the process: “To make sure we selected promises that could be measured, we set some definitions.

“We said a promise ‘is not a position statement. It is a prospective statement of an action or outcome that is verifiable’.”

Journalists then track the progress of these promises putting them into categories: Promise Kept, Promise Broken, Compromise, Stalled, In The Works and No Action.



The site’s editor Bill Adair told Editor & Publisher: “Although we rely on the new technology of the Web to publish our work, our mission remains a simple and traditional one: to empower democracy.”

PolitiFact.com was set up by the St Petersburg Times to fact check the statements of politicians via its Truth-o-Meter checks.

Dallas Boasts Hyperlocal Websites

A collection of hyperlocal websites have been launched by the Dallas Morning News.

The newspaper’s site now has about 50 community pages offering neighbourhood news, opinion and information, reports Editor & Publisher.

Each hyperlocal site has news headlines, crime stories, a going out guide (through GuideLive.com), and information on local schools and residential properties.

In addition, user-generated content relevant to each area is presented in a blog style format using content from the Morning News’s dedicated UGC site – neighborsgo.com.

[HT - Martin Stabe]

Washington Who’s Who Launched

The Washington Post has unveiled a website dedicated to the people and personalities that make up the city’s political class.

WhoRunsGov.com has currently launched in a beta version, boasting in-depth profiles of America’s senators, representatives, Pentagon officials and administrative staff.



For example, each senator profile provides a career biography of its subject as well as information on their views, voting records and key collaborators.

According to PR Inside, the aim is to provide a free online resource holding policy biographies on all the key decision-makers working in politics, law, and the military.

In addition, the site notes that the first group of profiles has been created by a dedicated editorial unit within the Washington Post.

The website’s creators plan to enable users to upload their own profiles of government figures in the future when the resource becomes more of a moderated wiki.

“The site gives political, business and opinion leaders, as well as students, educators and engaged citizens, a destination for crucial, real-time information on Washington’s key players,” said Rachel Van Dongen, the editor of WhoRunsGov.com.

She added: “This is the first phase of a new venture to create a uniquely collaborative and rich information resource that demystifies the individuals behind Washington’s policy-making process.”

The site also includes a regularly updated Washington politics news blog entitled The Plum Line.

[HT - Editors Weblog]

Trinity Titles Launch Multimedia JLR Campaign

Securing a future for Jaguar Land Rover is the aim of a new multimedia cross-title campaign from Trinity Mirror.

Newspapers in Birmingham, Coventry and Liverpool are taking part in the action, using both print and online outlets to gather support.

Each of the titles has a Support Jaguar Land Rover Now/Save The Motor Industry home page with links to innovative features including an interactive timeline on Dipity.



The campaign also has a Save Jaguar Land Rover Facebook group - which has attracted almost 4,000 members since its launch last week.



The Birmingham Post has also registered an online petition to save the company on Downing Street’s e-petitions page.

Audio and video is a key part of the campaign site, which boasts an exclusive video interview with prime minister Gordon Brown and with JLR’s chief executive.

Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson said that the campaign shows the combined strength of print and online products.

Writing on his blog, he noted that “together, the traditional printed editions AND the web can make the ‘press’ even MORE powerful.”

More information on the campaign can be found on the websites of the Birmingham Post, the Birmingham Mail, the Coventry Telegraph, the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post.

BBC Maps UK Teen Killings

The BBC has produced a map and searchable database of all known violent deaths of teenagers in the UK last year.

Head of its website Specials Team, Bella Hurrell, said the multimedia project aims to “tell the complete story of teen killings in 2008”.

It includes a database with details on each of the 72 deaths of young people aged from 10 to 19, which can be searched by the victim’s name, age and location of their death.



Locations of the killings are also shown on an interactive map and further information is displayed on a statistics page.



Writing on the Journalism Labs blog, Hurrell added that this is the first version of the database project and it will be developed and updated during the course of the year.

Data Project Shows School Air Quality

USA Today finished the year with a large-scale data project showing impact rates of industrial pollution on the nation’s schools.

“The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools,” took eight months to put together and includes searchable databases of pollution statistics and a map showing schools with the highest levels of toxic air.

Visitors can search the results by school, by city or by state to see how the air quality at any given institution compares to others across the country.

In addition, the feature has video reports including interviews with industrial pollution experts.



USA Today says it has analysed data covering a total of 128,000 public schools across the United States.

Further details can be found at Editor & Publisher.

New Roles For Multimedia Newsrooms

The changing nature of information means that the role of the journalist must also change, according to academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw.

So he has come up with a set of six new roles which journalists could fulfill as part of his vision for A Model for the 21st Century Newsroom.

His six suggested roles are:

1 – THE AGGREGATOR SUB

“To collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.”

2 – THE MOBILE JOURNALIST

3 – THE DATA MINER

“The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics.”

4 – MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER

“An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.”

“They may not do all the work themselves ... but they can see the possibilities.”

5 – NETWORKED SPECIALIST

“Now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.”

6 – COMMUNITY EDITOR

“Building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.”



Check out the Online Journalism Blog for the full post.

Newspapers & The Net’s Five P’s

Journalists should concentrate on delivering four of the five P’s of the Internet, according to a new media chief in the US.

Rob Curley from Greenspun Interactive says effective content on the net can essentially be split into five categories:

Passions – Think travel, sport, shopping etc

Practical – Information such as opening times, maps and so on.

Playful – This is YouTube and similar.

(As Curley puts it: “How many times have you heard someone say, ‘You know, I was on YouTube last night, and I just lost myself. I must have been on that site for two or three hours.’

“Now when was the last time you heard someone say, ‘You know, I was on my local newspaper’s website last night and I just lost myself. I must have been on that site for two or three hours.’”)

Personal communication – Such as social networking, instant messaging and all that jazz.

Porn – No explanation required!

Curley, who is president and executive editor at Greenspun Interactive, continues: “Here’s what is wild: With the exception of porn (and probably personal communication), newspapers should really be able to deliver on these things.”

Writing on his blog, Curley suggests that newspapers should take a look at the non-news things that work in print and try to “embrace those sorts of equivalents with new media”.

So he considers some of the initiatives followed by his newspaper – the Las Vegas Sun – and how they match two of the magic P’s:

Passions – Examples at the Sun include boxing features and entertainment news and gossip from the Strip.

Practical – At the Sun this comprises information features such as restaurant guides and crime data.

Most importantly, Curley writes that these changes have had a very positive impact on the site’s traffic figures with a growth of 300% in the past six months.

And of particular interest is that he includes in his write-up some of the projects that so far haven’t elicited the kind of page views initially expected.

Visit Curley’s blog for the full post.