Twitter vigilantes hijack the Daily Mail | Media Money January 9, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farPeter Kirwan notes a twist on the media's recent obsession with Twitter (forming part of it himself, of course…). He says a majority of the early followers of the spoof Mail account were Guardian journalists: ?"Last weekend, the Mail On Sunday attacked the phenomenon of celebs using Twitter. In response, someone has created a fake dailymail_UK username on the site. The result has been a small avalanche of tweets directed at Britain’s finest mid-market tabloid.
Some of them appear to be mildly satirical…"
Bad Science » The Daily Telegraph misrepresent a scientist’s work, then refuse to correct it when he writes to them. January 9, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentBen Goldacre on the trail. University press release might be partly to blame.?
“To my mind this is poor quality journalism followed, more importantly, by cowardly editorial decision-making. This article could very easily be retracted or corrected, clearly and unambiguously, in the newspaper.”
Journalism meets data: J-school seeks professor, journalism seeks techies January 9, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, NYTimes, Newspapers, USA, database, journalism education , add a commentAn interesting vacancy at Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern University, Illinois), which is advertising for a professor of database journalism “to teach data analysis and interactive deployment of data”. Good stuff. According to the vacancy note:
The successful candidate will have expertise in analyzing data for journalistic work and will be expected to teach students how to create and deploy database-driven applications on the World Wide Web and other digital platforms.
I imagine this role will complement the Journalist-Programmer scholarships at Medill, set up by Rich Gordon (and funded by a Knight News Challenge grant). The scholarships are geared towards programmers or web developers who are interested in journalism.
Bringing people with an IT background into journalism, rather than vice-versa, echoes the experiences of Aron Pilhofer, head journo-techie at the New York Times. Eric Ulken wrote up some interesting points from their discussions, including:
When I throw out the old question about whether it’s easier to teach a journalist programming skills or to teach a techie the principles of journalism, he tells me it’s not so much a question of trainability. Rather, he says, “there are more programmers out there that will find journalism interesting to learn” than vice-versa. He tells me that, with a couple of exceptions, the people on his team have either “very limited journalism experience or none whatsoever.”
There’s another interview with Pilhofer here, on Old Media, New Tricks.
Cheap laugh or reminder of juxtapositioning risks? January 9, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : journalism education , add a commentTake your pick which (or choose both) but it was hard to resist this, from the Media Guardian site today.
Salvation Army meets Daily Sport
Makes perfect sense, with the War Cry going tabloid…
…except that the pic was intended to go with the item below it, about the £18.2m loss by Sport Media Group, publisher of the Daily Sport.
On a slightly less frivolous note, those horizontal rules between articles (but absent in this case — perhaps obscured by the pic?) do have their uses. And awkward juxtapositioning is arguably harder to avoid online; I recall a few clangers, particularly with ads.
But it does provide a bit of light relief from news about job cuts.