Back again with a link
Posted on | June 13, 2009 | 4 Comments
Sorry to have been away for so long. Some of you know that I have had some major personal life-type stuff to deal with.
Hey ho, onwards and upwards. Let’s ease back in gently, shall we? Check out this list of resources for writers, which comes courtesy of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
There are a whole bunch of resources in here, organised into different categories including communities for writers, reference guides, and technique. J-school students (and perhaps even the more seasoned writers among us) might find the ‘Beginning Reporting’ link under ‘Genres’ a useful kick-off point.
I am back on my game now and will be writing more here. Whoever heard of a writers’ blogger not, um, writing? Shocking.
Jourknow
Posted on | February 15, 2009 | No Comments
This project, called Jourknow, looks interesting. Although there isn’t a stable release for download yet, goldarn it. It reminds me a little of Ubiquity, the experimental browsing enhancer for Firefox, in its ability to process natural language input. But Jourknow is more concerned with extracting meaning during information gathering and note taking.
Looking forward to seeing stable release code from the MIT-based organisation behind Jourknow, which calls itself Haystack. In the meantime, I’ll be testing out its other project, list.it as an alternative to Evernote and the sticky note widget that I currently use in Google Apps.
Check out the other application from Haystack, called Exhibit. It promises data representation without the coding headaches.
Using Google Maps in journalism
Posted on | January 29, 2009 | No Comments
I’m a big fan of Google maps in general, but it can be particularly useful when you’re trying to illustrate a story about a particular area. I experimented with it here, while writing a story about an alleged attack by the Russian government on Kyrgyzstan’s cyber infrastructure.
This wasn’t a blindingly impressive use of Google maps, but I was just test driving the idea. When logged into your Google account (you do have one, don’t you?) access Google maps and go to the area that you wish to show. Click on ‘my maps’, and create a new map. The extra buttons let you see the editing tools enabling you to create your map.
Check out their tutorial video on creating a Google map for a San Francisco walking tour:
Once the map has been drawn, you can make it public, and Google will then give you both a simple URL to link with, along with HTML that you can embed into your story. I prefer the latter, but as I said yesterday, it can be difficult sometimes to get publishers to do this — all depends on how HTML friendly your editors (or specifically, their IT guys) are.
You can start to see how useful this might be in illustrating your own stories by looking at maps like these:
- This blog took layoff data from Forbes and mapped it (but why didn’t Forbes do it first?)
- Spotcrime provides maps of crime in specific cities.
- Politicalbase.com mapped campaign contributions.
Instead of using maps to illustrate a single news story, the Seattle Times used it to pinpoint news around the world, and to enhance its local news by showing readers where the stories are. The WP used maps in an innovative way to cover the election.
A lot of these maps are more functional, and more customised, than your basic embedded map. Some will be using the Google Maps API to generate maps with searchable, dynamic data. That’s a lot more coding that a lot of freelance journalists will want to do (although I’m looking forward to digging into this - as Charles says, journalism and coding go together these days).
It’s easy to imagine more complex uses of Google maps for your own stories. I’m hoping to do something on the environmental impact of Uranium mining in northern Saskatchewan, for example. And a Google map might be the perfect way to illustrate the path of a product (how does that mango get to your door in the suburbs of Chicago? How many food miles are involved? How old is it by the time it reaches you?) Writing an article on the US nuclear weapons complex and how it’s still thriving? What about a Google map of the various installations around the country, from Livermore through Pantex to Savannah River?
Lifehack has an old but good set of Google Map links here.
Why publishers need to innovate
Posted on | January 28, 2009 | 2 Comments
How effectively are we using digital media in our reporting?
I write regularly for some large news organisations. Some embrace suggestions for including new digital assets within stories. I’ve asked others for the opportunity to do basic stuff like provide extra links at the bottom of a story, and been told by some that it’s not doable because the IT guys don’t know how to format it properly. That makes embedding, say, a Google Street View of a specific site that you’re reporting about a total non-starter. As a journalist who has invested time and effort in the story, it frustrates me that I’m occasionally not allowed to add extras to the text, to achieve things that would be difficult or impossible in print.
A friend of mine who teaches writing at a prestigious university has also run into this problem. He is organising a group of students to write a column, as part of an experiment in collaborative journalism. But he can’t even produce a publicly facing web site for the class without back-flipping through several hoops, let alone start innovating with the things he puts online.
Here’s some of the stuff that I want to be able to insert into my stories:
- Timelines that put the story in context.
- Google Maps that lend a geographic element to a feature.
- Semantic networks that show how elements of the story are connected.
- Audio files with OPML links that let the reader listen to recorded interviews and jump to certain parts of them using hyperlinks within the text.
One of the great advantages of the web is also one of its downfalls: people have too much to read, and too little time to read it in. This is why hypertext was such a good idea in the first place. The truly innovative digital news story or feature should give you the story in an easily digestible and enjoyable form, but should then give you the tools to drill down and find more information. And readers should be able to extract that information from the digital assets that you collected while you were researching the story.
Mostly, what I see in online stories these days are links to stories from the same publication that are related, and the occasional photo slideshow. Useful and occasionally evocative, but at this stage in the game, not exactly innovative. Some newspapers only just seem to be getting the hang of reader comments.
This is an area where larger publishers need to watch out.
It worries me that while some larger sites enmired in bureaucracy resist this stuff, smaller, lone guns can go ahead and try it, unencumbered by needing the go-ahead from multiple layers of management. It means that as we transition to digital reporting, some of the larger players are going to miss out on some innovation that would enable them to further engage their audience.
The future of freelancing?
Posted on | January 17, 2009 | 4 Comments
What’s going to happen to us poor freelancers? Newspapers and magazines are closing or scaling back in record numbers. Budgets are being cut, and writers are getting laid off - which means more freelancers on the market, competing for less work. Chilling stuff, to be sure.
But there’s another problem facing freelancers, and it’s one that’s been around for a while: the limitations of commissioning editors. Don’t get me wrong. I love commissioning editors. They pay my wages. But there are only so many of them, and they only have so much budget, time, and space to go around. I’ve pitched stories to editors that I know are goers, only to be rejected on the grounds of budget (not enough money) issue size (not enough pages) or inclination (not enough interest). Sometimes, an editor just isn’t up to speed on a subject and doesn’t want to take the risk. I tried pitching a story about podcasting to an editor in 2004 before many people knew what it was. “That’s just radio over the Internet, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t get it. Not interested.” Gagh.
With a surplus of freelancers and with a smaller number of publications with fewer pages, that problem is going to get worse. It also means that articles simply won’t get commissioned.
This isn’t just bad for writers. It’s bad for readers too. Local papers, often funded heavily by classified advertising, are getting broadsided by free alternatives like Craigslist and Kijiji. This, in combination with increased ownership by large conglomerates, means that quality often suffers. Canadian media giant Canwest (disclosure: I write copy for their national desk) owns my local paper, and while there is some local news in it, an awful lot comes off the wires. That puts local investigative journalism in a very dark place.
What’s a writer - or a reader - to do?
I was in San Francisco at MacWorld the other week, and I met David Cohn (blog, @digidave). David founded Spot.us, a site dedicated to community-funded, civic journalism.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works: You’re a journalist with an idea. You pitch it to the community of readers that visit the site, and you set a fee that you’d like to earn for researching and writing the article. Readers can then donate money to help you reach your goal. If (or before) you reach your goal, you can get cracking on the story and file the copy for everyone to read.
Readers can also post ideas or things that they’re interested in finding out about to the site. These posts, known as ‘tips’, are essentially story leads, and journalists can choose to base their own pitches on them. That naturally helps with funding because you’re catering to existing demand.
One thing that I like about this concept is that it doesn’t exclude news organisations from participating. In fact, news organisations contributing 50% or more to a pitch can license temporary copyright on an article, giving them first publication rights for a specific time. This is a non-profit venture, so the proceeds go back to the community members that funded the work.
I love the fact that would-be reporters can put together video pitches (you could have real fun with those), and that there’s a mini-blog for each story (even before it’s completely funded) so that the reporter can exchange information with the community. Check out this page for an example of what, at the time, was an almost-funded pitch. Oh, and you can share a pitch on your own blog, too, to help spread the word to get funding for a pitch that you’ve seen.
Spot.us is still in its early stages, but you can see where it’s going. I’d love to see some other things on this site:
- Collaboration tools so that multiple writers can work on the same article. That could include dynamic storyboarding (by integrating with this, for example) so that people (including readers, perhaps) could monitor the ongoing progress of a story.
- Integration with Google Maps for geo-specific civic reporting. This could be useful for geotagging tips where appropriate, alerting reporters to potential stories in their area of the city. It could also be used by reporters to collaborate with each other and create maps illustrating a story. Or perhaps even more powerfully, they could use it to solicit information from their readers. Example: A reporter asks readers to geotag the spot where they have seen a case of cancer reported in the last year. As data floods in, she notices that cancers are clustered near a local chemical plant.
- Source listings, so that multiple journalists and readers can all contribute contacts to a single place.
- A reputation system for journalists. Currently they have profiles, and articles are vetted by Spot.us-appointed fact checker editors, but a reputation system would be useful when people are considering whether to fund a particular writer.
- Dynamically updated stories. One of the interesting thing about local investigative journalism is that stories are often inclined to develop over time. There should be some way of enabling stories to develop using this community-funded system, perhaps without necessarily having to go and re-fund a separate project each time. And imagine the power of somehow showing how that story developed, visually? If events in stories were date tagged, and with the stories themselves tagged by subject, you could create a system that dynamically built timelines on the fly based on subject tags. Searching on ‘Gavin Newsom’ and ’solar’ could produce two timelines showing events related to Newsom, and events related to the development of the solar industry in the Bay Area, for example. That could be extremely powerful.
- I’d love to see a site like this use semantic entities, a la Silobreaker. They’re much more powerful than straightforward tags. Bob Smith is a person. He is the cousin of Jill Jones and the owner of Spudcorp, which is a company dealing in food production. This is coded into the system using semantic tagging, enabling journalists to find connections between Bob and other semantic entities worth investigating. A journalist is writing a story about Spudcorp winning a contract with the school board. The journalist types in the name of school board department head Jim Jones, who the system knows is also a spouse of Jill Jones. It alerts the journalist that:
Jim Jones > spouse of < Jill Jones > cousin of < Bob Jones > owner of < Spudcorp.
Geddit? Civic journalism and semantic web technologies go together like politicians and payoffs.
Anyway, as David says, there are only so many things you can do at one time, and what’s up there now is only about a quarter of what he wants to do. Who knows, maybe some of this stuff is on his list. He’s a smart guy working with some smart people, including Jeff Jarvis (blog, @jeffjarvis) and Jay Rosen (blog, @jayrosen_nyu), both whom I’ve had the privilege of interviewing in the past. I’m sure that a lot of stuff none of us have thought of is on his list too.
As a small venture you have to stay focused. Partly because of his funding, David had to restrict Spot.us to the Bay Area, at least initially. But the thing that most excites me about this is that it’s an open source project. And he says that when the code has been tweaked enough, he is going to release it to the general public to do with as they will. Rough timeline: about three months from now. I’d love to see a version of Spot.us in my community, or even run it. And there’s nothing to stop versions of the project being created for special interest groups (how about a spot.us dedicated to the next election, or focusing on the healthcare industry?)
Freelancers probably won’t be able to make their entire living off this, but it gives them a chance to air the stories that they’re passionate about, and to interact directly with their audience in an entirely new way. Very exciting stuff. Very exciting indeed.
Picture: ‘newspaper blackout poem’ courtesy of Precious Roy. Thanks!
Get yer graph on
Posted on | January 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
Journalists and fiction writers alike often need access to data about all sorts of stuff. Writing a story about how consumer confidence and home prices just nosedived? Might be handy to be able to correlate the two together, over a 20-year history. Maybe you might want to check them against historical employment data. Or the price of food, or the national average per-kilowatt hour price for electricity. You can not only give context to a story by running the numbers, but can sometimes find patterns that could lead you to ask unusual questions.
Not only is it sometimes difficult to know where to find these different data sets, but they are also sometimes difficult to digest. That’s why we like graphs, and the numbers that feed ‘em.
There are a growing number of sites that not only give you access to the data, but also give you the chance to visualise it in unique ways (or do it for you). Infochimps, which is in pre-launch mode, focuses on getting the data up. The organisers are looking for large datasets about pretty much anything (as long as it’s interesting), and then want to hook them together so that you can begin correlating data sets. The wonderful statistigeeks that started the site sum it up perfectly in their FAQ:
Study the physics of baseball by comparing the hourly weather during every single baseball game to game outcomes. Uncover political campaign irregularities by comparing neighborhood per-capita income, historical voter trends, and public campaign finance records. Plan real-estate decisions based on what news-and-other-media keywords rank highly in each area.
There are already hundreds of data sets on the site available for download in common formats like CSV, leaving the user to crunch the numbers as they see fit. You can browse by field and tag, too.
Infochimps points to other sites, including Swivel, which lets users upload data and make graphs from it. They have to cite the data source, so that you can check it’s legit. The service had 13628 data sets at the time of writing and counting. Just looking at the most recent tables is stimulating. You can also blog the data, too. That’s a useful way to bring something a little extra to your to online writing. Here’s that 20 year consumer confidence history, tracked against home pricing data:
Numbrary has a searchable database of stats that it’ll display in graph form, complete with linked sources. And IBM has Many Eyes, which lets you upload, share, and graph your own data.
Even Amazon’s at it, having just launched its public data sets service on Amazon Web Services. This is more for developers, though.
If you’re into statistics (and you should be, if you’re a non-fiction writer, as they can help to give your readers a broader historical view of the subject), then these data playgrounds should give you some useful tools.
Mariner software on sale
Posted on | December 30, 2008 | 2 Comments
Mariner, which publishes writers’ software for both Windows and OS X, has its software on sale for previous customers tomorrow in a 40% off one day only blowout. It’s as good an opportunity as any to give Contour, its screenplay development tool, a whirl.
The company launched Contour 1.0 this month. Unlike many of the writing assistants that I’ve run across, this is purely a structural tool. If you want screenplay word processing and formatting software, best look elsewhere (Mariner’s Montage targets that market, and Contour is designed to integrate with it).
Developed in conjunction with screenwriter and writing coach Jeff Schechter, Contour is designed to let screenwriters structure their screenplay by following a series of steps, organising them around a set of archetypal character types (the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, etc). It mandates 44 plot points, structured into three acts (with act II split into two sub-parts).
Writers have to describe the various stages of the main character’s journey throughout the three acts, which the software then plugs into a template. It provides pre-entered versions of several well-known films as examples of how it works. As you fill out information about the story’s broad character arc and its specific events, you paint a detailed picture of the screenplay and where it’s going. It reminds me a little of the literary semiotics class I did once. You’re almost structuring a script by numbers.
The first information you’ll enter is who the main character is, what they’re trying to do, who (or what) is trying to stop them doing it, and what happens if they fail. You then describe the main character’s arc as they progress from the orphan archetype, through to wanderer, warrior, and martyr.
All of these steps, character types and plot points are explained in depth, in a detailed user guide which is essentially a screenwriting seminar in PDF form. However, the advice in the user guide is mirrored in the software, which throws up information to guide you as you go along.
The thing that I like about Contour is also the thing that worries me about it. The value of the product lies at least as much in the process as in the software. The process is extremely prescriptive, to the point of describing in detail the function of each particular plot point. For writers like me that have difficulties planning their work, this is a godsend. By the time you’ve entered all of your information, you’ve half-written your script. Instead of agonising over character development while staring at a blank page, you effectively get an automated writing coach that guides you through every nuance of the planning process, making structural decisions for you along the way.
This is reassuring for those of us not confident in our structure, and will doubtless increase new writers’ productivity and quality. But what happens when you get good enough to start colouring outside the lines? The program’s rigour doesn’t seem to allow you to deviate from the standard structural framework, and to start judiciously breaking rules (as good, experienced writers are apt to do). Would Charlie Kaufman’s self-referential Adaptation work so precisely in this format? Or Babette’s Feast, or My Dinner with Andre? It’s an open question. Perhaps everything can be made to fit in here, but I would have liked to have seen some built-in ability to flex the framework a little.
As the structural template is so tightly defined, I would also have welcomed some sort of modular system where you could purchase and plug in other structural templates for half-hour radio play development, say, or short story or novel development. That would change the nature of the product and make it more than simply a screenplay story development package. It would probably have required the participation of other experts along with Schechter.
My worry for Mariner is that because the user guide is so detailed, a lot of poor, struggling writers won’t actually use the software. The PDF (available as a free, unprotected download as part of the product trial) and a pre-installed copy of Word would be enough for the cash constrained. Having said that, $45 is the price of about 5,000 sheets of A4. How many sheets do you crumple up in anger because you haven’t nailed down the structure of your script? And did we mention that if you have the promo code, the software’s 40% off tomorrow?
The strictness of the product as it codifies Schechter’s process is also the product’s strength. Kaufman and Coppola might not need to use it - might even find it restrictive - but for those of us struggling to come to terms with classic screenplay structure, it’ll be a useful tool in the writer’s arsenal. Even if you don’t have a promo code, you can download the free trial for yourself and give it a whirl.
Welcome to the Word Herder
Posted on | December 27, 2008 | 1 Comment
Welcome to Word Herder, a blog for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. As a journalist and aspiring fiction writer, I’m an avid consumer of information. I’m always on the lookout for research sources, and for tools that help me to organise and consume that research more effectively. I also constantly search for tools and techniques that help me to write my news stories, features, and fictional works.
As this blog develops, I’ll be posting news and reviews of new tools, advice on better ways to work, and information about new data sources and reports that might come in handy for journalists on a variety of beats. I hope you enjoy the site.
Danny Bradbury
Chief word herder
About
Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine and the trade press. I'm also editor of several computer security newsletters and magazines including Infosecurity Magazine US. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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