7-800000 page impressions

Started getting arrest data London acquisition (theft) north was violence

But then started to get data from ministry of justice and started mapping

Overlaid poverty index and showed people arrested in Manchester coming from poorer areas

Got [...]]]> Simon Rogers from Guardian talking about creating google fusion table as journalists reporting on events

7-800000 page impressions

Started getting arrest data London acquisition (theft) north was violence

But then started to get data from ministry of justice and started mapping

Overlaid poverty index and showed people arrested in Manchester coming from poorer areas

Got front page stories in the paper

Talking about the Detroit project and how that became reading the riots

Used transport data to map how people travelled into the riot zones

Now set to look at criminal justice process

Rather than a rucksack full of tools, [...]]]> Ever since I’ve been involved with the ideas of online/digital/data (delete as appropriate) journalism – I’ve been using the metaphor of Batman’s utility belt as a way of thinking about a journalist’s skillet and how it can evolve over time.

Rather than a rucksack full of tools, the Caped Crusader was able to easily change items in and out of his belt pouches to solve the issue at hand.

The constant debates about the skills required to operate in a mediasphere that has rapidly change and will continue to do so for some time to come (unless the departures of Simon Waldman and Will Lewis should have all of us involved in paid journalism worried) have brought me back to this idea.

A while ago some 79 people kindly helped answer a mini survey around this core idea of what skills journalists need. I posted up quick graphs of the responses in a Flickr set, but haven’t had a chance to get to grips with the full responses… yet. (If you fancy getting in on the act, I’ve not closed the survey.)

But one question I asked was: how important do you feel programming and development are?

Colombia set to manufacture robo-journalists

Not really – in case you hadn’t heard, Colombia have created a joint masters programme allowing journalists to develop computer science
skills. It will be interesting to see what they get out of this five-semester course which has some pretty interesting potential.

But how much of these kinds of skills are enough, or too much? Or should it be about enough coding to understand?

My own view is based around experiences gleaned during my master’s degree in elearning technologies with the computing department at Portsmouth University.

During the course we had to learn: some JavaScript, HTML (I tried to be a smart arse and went for XHTML to make my life a bit easier), CSS, Flash, learn about the issues behind interface design and usability, issues with accessibility, educational theory, syllabus design, content design/delivery options, psychology and project management.

I worked out quite quickly that developing takes me a very long time – although I do enjoy it. (Disclaimer: I sat down in 1981 with a BBC Model B, a portable TV for a monitor and what turned out to be a very buggy book on games programming in Basic – and gave up after typing up some 2,000 lines of code that didn’t run, because I didn’t know anyone in my hometown who could help).

I quickly swapped the focus of my studies from building things (which was fun, interesting and useful) to using open source tools and plug-and-play sites powerd by dataportability – and how these can foster learning communities and networks of practice.

On a day-to-day basis though, it is more the understanding of the basic principles that I’ve found useful. And I wonder, given the tight deadlines in MSM newsrooms, whether this is more realistic?

Recently I’ve got a bit of pup combined with the HTML and CSS, which help me unpick some WordPress theme issues.

I’ve started learning some MYSQL, Ruby (a twitter chat with Joanna Geary and James Ball about learning Ruby were something that got me going there), a play with Django (inspired by Adrian Holovaty and Aron Pilhofer) and I’ve downloaded the iPhone development SDK and been having a look at the ITunesU course from Stanford.

I may never be good at any of these, but I’m certainly interested to see how they work.

But Tony Hirst, browser-bashing guru from the Open University (amongst many other things), believes that learning to write for frameworks is not always a good thing – as there are already tools and ways of working that will allow journalists to put ideas together using existing tools.  Have a look at his post on Programming not coding…

He’s done some really interesting work in this area – using googledocs spreadsheets for housing/mashing data, linking rss feeds into Yahoopipes and Many eyes wikified to name just a few – here’s a link to the audio and presenttaion he did at the first news:rewired event.

And it is an interesting thought – does everyone need to know everything?

The simple answer is no – but what do we learn?

There’s a really good post from Aron Pilhofer on different frameworks, and how who you talk to will influence what response you get (sounds obvious but read Aron’s post and you’ll see what I mean and why it is still in line with my utility belt metaphor).

Things journalists can should learn from developers

One of the key things I took from my course was some underpinning ideas of developing objects, content, sites etc. I’ve been reading up around Agile development and the Lean business framework as a result. And not being afraid to try things, and get them wrong – now that is an expensive luxury in journalism, but in the right context it is vital (Health warning: obviously not in a story which contains the risk of defamation!!).

And in one of the slew of interesting posts coming in through my twitter feed I found that Martin Belam, information architect over at the Guardian, has been talking about this very issue regarding how journalists think and what they can get from understanding some ideas behind programming.

And he makes this very interesting point about the attitude towards sharing space/knowledge:

“Contrast that with the statement issued on behalf of some sports journalists in Scotland galled at having to sit near ‘bloggers’. Instead, tell a web developer that a bunch of journalists are interested in learning code, and it seems that the most likely reaction is “Yay! How can I help?”.”

The guerrilla approach

I’m guessing that refers to Rubyinthepub – a kind of self-help group (although given my masters I’d rather say learning network or network of practice) that came out of a conversation between Joanna Geary and James Ball on Twitter.

It’s a very simple idea – journalist goes to a pub with a laptop, some beer and a friendly developer. Lo and behold, instant informal learning sessions.

And it’s this kind of approach to journalism (and learning [read continuous professional development if you are an educator]) that I find so encouraging.

So where from here?

We’ll have to wait and see – and to an extent I think it depends on how you perceive journalism (in both its paid and unpaid forms) and what the journalist perceives their role to be.

Colombia’s course sounds pretty interesting, but on a smaller scale most of us who teach journalism are looking at some of the interesting and innovative solutions around at the mo.

But just in case you think development knowledge is not for you, have a think about these examples:

• Interested in data/computer-assisted reporting?  Maybe a bit of SPSS and Ruby would taste good with your Access or Excel. Or go the googledocs mash-up route for some very tasty visualisation fun.
• Part of a hyperlocal team? How about hacking a WordPress install or even using Everyblock code (DJANGO) to create your own scraper site?
• Understand usability and accessibility? Then just maybe you can think about how your content is delivered and consumed and adjust your design and writing accordingly (and proper ALT tags help massively here).
• Got a basic idea of how (if) the iPad works? Then you can start looking at the business models arguments and see where that takes you.

But there is a simple underpinning concept for me – what is the best tool for the job?

Shark repellent or batarang - your choice?

After all, you may be able to use a batarang to chin a shark – or you could just scare it off with your shark repellent bat spray.

Related articles by Zemanta

• An Alternative Future for Journalists (onemanandhisblog.com)
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• Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer [The Future] (gawker.com)
• Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• How much computer science does a journalist really need? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

As a long term WordPress user I’m a bit biased when it comes to simple, out-of-the-box CMS software. I’m currently starting to play around with the coding required to make themes work for a number of personal and work-related [...]]]>

As a long term WordPress user I’m a bit biased when it comes to simple, out-of-the-box CMS software. I’m currently starting to play around with the coding required to make themes work for a number of personal and work-related projects. I’ll be collating links and sharing WordPress hacks as I go along.

One of the simplest things I’ve found, that has made my life a lot easier, were suggestions for a virtual development server. As a Mac user I know that I’ve got one built in – and have used Terminal to play around with Django, which meant kicking in the server. But this was a little complicated.

After a bit of digging, I found suggestions for using MAMP (Mac) and XAMP (Windows) as a dev server – so I can hack around to my heart’s content.

The only issue I found was working out the web address for the project – the MAMP site left me scratching my head, so I did a bit of searching on how to set up MAMP for a WordPress install.

Basically you drop your site into the appropriate MAMP folder and set up the WordPress config file as per the instructions. Then just run the installer at http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

I’ve started digging around in the theme folder – I’m currently looking at magazine-style themes and looking at Arthemia and Scarlett, both of which offer some interesting possibilities but neither of which quite do what I’d like them to do. Hence the reason for starting to hack around.

Starting points

I’m currently reading .net magazine’s issue 199 which has a good article on WordPress and an old .net article on WordPress Themes for Designers.

Related links

Digging into WordPress

WP Recipes

WP Engineer

WordPress Tavern

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