Average Canadians say goodbye to “Smiling Jack”

There has been an outpouring of emotion today as Canada mourns the death and celebrates the life of NDP leader Jack Layton. Noble thoughts have been conveyed and fine words spoken, none more eloquent perhaps, than the tributes paid by average folks.

Amongst the flowers at the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill, an incongruously placed can of Orange Crush, a symbol of the NDP’s rise to Official Opposition status under Jack Layton:

A fitting farewell from a local restaurant to the politician who took up the cause of small business:

A message from his constituents:

A note posted on the door of Jack Layton’s house:

Average folks attending vigils across the country to honour the guy who fought for average folks:

Messages on the walls of Toronto City Hall where Jack Layton burst into politics in 1982:

It was inconceivable three months ago that election posters would be used for this:

The NDP leader’s inspirational final words to Canadians transformed into posters within hours.

(By Art Director Stuart Thursby, and available here.)

Tough to separate truth from fiction on Twitter about Birmingham disorder / riot

I have more than a passing interest in last night’s disorder/riot in Birmingham, as I lived there for six months this past year, have many friends there, and developed a real affection for the city.   Growing increasingly concerned at the end of the work day here in Toronto, I logged on to Twitter and found it virtually impossible to get factual real-time information.   Initial reports, corroborated by photos, of about 200 young people rampaging and looting in City Centre quickly escalated into a torrent of alarming reports about fires and escalating violence which were tweeted without verification and then retweeted extensively.

A major case in point, was the claim that Birmingham’s Children’s Hospital was on fire:

 

 

 

 

This was, of course, not true:

 

 

People tweeting responsibly were outnumbered by the ill-informed as well as trouble-makers, who rushed to liken what was happening in Birmingham with London through the use of conjoined hashtags #londonriots #birminghamriots.

Consider the many tweets about the fate of the iconic bull statue in front of the Birmingham Bullring shopping mall:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone went to a lot of trouble to post that photo but I didn’t find out the truth until the light of day:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on and on it went.  This post is about a bookstore outside of City Centre, very close to the flat where I lived:

 

 

 

 

 

All of this misinformation made it difficult to know the truth when people started tweeting about a police station being set on fire in Handsworth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one turned out to be true:

 

 

 

I’d like to believe that most people are smart enough to seek reputable sources of information during a crisis, but from my vantage point it appeared that trusted sources were few and far between, and often behind the news.  I read many tweets from Birmingham residents who couldn’t find out what was happening locally because they said local television coverage was focussed on London.

And then there was this:

 

 

 

The lack of information led many people to follow Redbrick, the University of Birmingham’s student newspaper, which was liveblogging and attempting to curate information.  They did a particularly good job of debunking reports of the violence spreading outside City Centre.

 

 

 

People were also following live updates from @caseyrain at

http://birminghamriots2011.tumblr.com/

In the end, I sorted through all of this mess by tweeting people I know and trust who live in Birmingham who responded with the following:

 

 

 

 

 

When I logged on to Twitter today, it appeared that legions of Birmingham citizens had arrived in City Centre this morning to help with the clean-up, but found their services not necessary.   Meanwhile, there are rumours of more public disorder tonight.

An account from West Midlands Police about what happened in Birmingham last night can be found here.

For other blog posts about the riots and Twitter, you may want to check out Adam Westbrook and Andy Dickinson.

Three cool things I learned at Hacks and Hackers Toronto

I attended my first Hacks and Hackers Toronto meetup this week and was amazed by the turnout — it was standing room only as more than 100 people gathered to share information and inspiration and generally bridge the divide between journalists and computer programmers.

As someone who’s spent most of her career in msm I’ve discovered there’s much to learn by rubbing shoulders with the techno wizards — either directly through the talks, by chatting one-on-one or through osmosis. It’s an excellent antidote to intimidation!

I picked up a lot of information, but here are three cool things that stuck out.

Winnipeg rules at comment moderation

During an interesting talk about story comments by Jennifer MacMillan of the Globe and Mail (13,000 comments per day) and Kim Fox of CBC News Online (300,000 per month) I learned that both media powerhouses contract out their comment moderation to a company called ICUC.  Go figure — the world’s leading online content moderation service is based in Winnipeg.  I checked out their website and saw that their other clients include NPR, CTV, Rogers, Virgin, Moson, Unilever, Calvin Klein, JCPenney and the Government of Canada.

Salmon will make your comments “swim”

James Walker and Paul Osman walked us through a demo of Salmon, a new open source protocol to make UGC “swim” to other sites instead of sitting in silos.  It’s about data ownership in social media and allows people to have a record of their comments and keep conversations unified.  What it does not do, according to Walker, “is solve the problem of stupid people on the internet”.

Innovation by TVO’s The Agenda

I wish more TV people could have heard the talk by Mike Miner of TVO’s The Agenda because Steve Paikin’s current affairs show is truly innovating when it comes to integrating television and online content.   Amazingly, I found out that anyone is allowed to embed The Agenda in their blog.  “It’s yours”, Miner said, but he added that they don’t want people to steal it and throw it on YouTube.   Public broadcasting at its finest.

I’m going to do it right here and now.  Because I can.

(I’ve had to link instead of embed because my WordPress blog is not self-hosted. But trust me, it works, because I tested it here on Blogger)

I also learned a lot by chatting with the guy next to me, Michael Pereira, who works at CBC  and is doing data visualization for the corp’s new votecompass, a really interesting interactive online tool that you should try out, if you haven’t already.

As I left the event and pulled off my red name tag (journalists were wearing red name tags and the programmers blue) I was feeling enthused, inspired and smarter about online journalism than when I walked in.  I’ll definitely go to the next meetup and I encourage other journalists to slap on a red name tag and join in because it was definitely worth it.

Audio Slideshows: an assignment on new media forms and communities of practice

I decided to study audio slideshows because in the practice of multimedia online journalism, it’s important to choose your tools based on the information you want to communicate.   There is a wealth of content and a story that needs to be told buried in a dusty, moldy vault  at our local public school in Birch Cliff, where I soon plan to launch a community news website.  The school’s 100th anniversary is approaching and I’ve been toying with the idea of exploring the archives for the better part of ten years.  I’ve joined forces with a member of the parent council, Tamara Hermann, who has started digitizing the  old photos, diaries and newspaper clippings and the best way to get them online is through audio slideshows.

I’m also interested in the genre because, as a journalist who’s worked in television for many years, I was intrigued by the concept of audio slideshows in general — why use audio when you can use video?   My first step was to explore the wealth of audio slideshows online in order to determine best practices and find slideshows that work just as well, or better than video, which I blogged about here.

What makes a good audio slideshow?

It was interesting to discover that the criteria for excellence is the same in both television and audio slideshows:  great visuals, compelling characters,  good stories, emotion, lots of natural sound, behind-the-scene access, brevity and innovation.   They key difference,    according to Benjamin Chesterton of BBC Radio and Duckrabbit:  revolves around the way the viewer processes the information:

With moving video, the viewers eye is centred – broadly, locked to the framing of the video camera. With still images, the eye roams. It stops and moves and stops and moves. Frozen gestures and expressions kick off a cognitive process – thinking – that moving images simply never do.

It’s one thing to blog about best practices and another thing entirely to utilize them yourself, as I discovered as I set about to create my first slideshow.

Do’s and Don’ts

I read extensively about do’s and don’ts from some of the masters of the craft including Paul Kerley and Duckrabbit,  Colin Mulvany and Joe Weiss. I explored the biggest mistakes in creating audio slideshows and identified examples of common problems on my own such as this piece about Irish fog horns which could have benefitted from better pacing.

Communities of Practice

What I had trouble finding, however, was communities of practice in terms of independent forums (as opposed to platform-sponsored) where I could ask questions about the relative merits of Soundslides vs. Vuvox for example.  When I saw that Andy Watt was struggling with the same issue and had established his own Linked In online audio group, I finally completed my Linked In profile, joined his group and asked my questions there. I also attempted to generate discussion through my blog by asking people to recommend other great audio slideshows as well as forums, but met with limited success.

I’m pleased with the content of my first slideshow which can be found here but there are some technical issues which I will address.

Technical Hurdles

Determined to follow the best practices I had researched, I decided not to employ wall–to-wall music and use soundbites to improve pacing.  Once I started editing in Audacity, however, I realized why so many slideshows use music from start to finish because my approach, coupled with a difficult interview, made for a complicated project that took an inordinate amount of time to edit.  At one point I had nine timelines open.

I would have been lost without the excellent Audacity tutorial by Mindy McAdams which ran on the background of my laptop for two days.  I realized towards the end of the edit that I had made a technical error with my attempt to use background audio from the vault — instead of cutting it into the interview I should have opened a tenth timeline. Going back to fix it would have shifted all of the timelines and involved more risk that I was willing to assume so I left it in.

The interview subject is very soft spoken and there were other technical problems with the audio levels that will disappear once I become more familiar with my new Zoom H2 recorder as well as  the audio controls of Audacity.

Although Soundslides is very user friendly, there is lack of flexibility with the platform, particularly in that the photos are up for a uniform length of time and you can’t alter the pacing.  Embedding the project in my blog was very difficult and in the end I could only generate a link through Dropbox.  I’m going to try my next project using Vuvox even though it appears to be more diffifult.

Public Domain Music

One of the problems I had anticipated was finding appropriate music in the public domain but was thrilled to discover that I could use Duke Ellington.   According to my research (here too) anything published prior to 1922 in the US is public domain while the threshold is 70 years in most other countries in the world.

I was also very careful with the copyright of the material in the vault itself.   I joined the Scarborough Historical Society and met with their lead archivist who indicated he had been through the vault and salvaged all of the material required by law for the City of Toronto as well as the Toronto Board of Education.

Assignment 2:  Specialist Portfolio

It is my intent to complete my MA by Practice by launching the Birch Cliff Blog and for my Specialist Portfolio, I plan to create a wealth of audio and video content in order to draw traffic to the site and generate community.

I have only begun to scratch the surface of the history of Birch Cliff and plan to complete several more audio slideshows including:

• A general history of Birch Cliff featuring the chief archivist of the Scarborough Historical Society
• A feature about the history of Birch Cliff told through the eyes of elderly residents
• A feature about schoolwork in the 1920’s based on a remarkable portfolio in the archives by a young student named Leslie Whitford
• A feature about Birch Cliff and World Wars I and II which (I hope) will tell the stories of students who died in both wars.

The video content will include:

• A story about environmental protection measures for the significant landmark in our neighbourhood — the Scarborough Bluffs
• A piece about Rosetta McLean Park.

Data Journalism: An assignment on new media forms and communities of practice

As I began my exploration of data journalism and its community of practice, I was cognizant that I needed to examine the craft from a broader perspective than I had in the past.  My previous efforts were focused too narrowly on data journalism tools, which is perhaps understandable coming from someone with a lengthy reporting career who finds the journalism easier than the technology.  When exploring new media forms, however, it is important to remember that while the medium is the message, the message or information can’t get lost in the medium.  In other words, the goal is still journalism.

My approach to this assignment, therefore, was two-pronged:  to continue my exploration of increasingly sophisticated data tools but to let the content decide the form in order to ensure that the end product conveys new and interesting information.

Infographic:  Who earns what at Birmingham City Council?

It wasn’t long before my simultaneous search for a story and an appropriate data journalism tool yielded results.  Acting on a directive from central government, Birmingham City Council released the salaries of its top executives just days before voting on an unprecedented austerity program that would cut approximately 10,000 jobs  and lower the earnings of thousands of lesser paid employees.

It was a great story and I knew immediately that a flow chart visualizing how many executives earn top dollar would best convey the information to Birmingham voters.  I searched for hours for a free data tool that would generate the flow chart automatically but found that my spreadsheet was too large and so I created the visualization by hand using Google Drawings.  Although it was a new skill, it was not my first choice as it was laborious and didn’t completely meet my goal of learning to use more sophisticated tools.  That being said, this infographic is the sixth most viewed story on our website Birmingham Budget Cuts and generated quite a bit of commentary on Twitter.

The benefit of belonging to communities of practice was immediately apparent, as Paul Bradshaw commented my blog post suggesting an alternate data tool.  I also solicited feedback from Michelle Minkoff, a data journalist I had been following on the NICAR discussion group who had not only visual advice but suggested that I could go further with the journalism.

The next step I’d like to see on this would be to visualize the differences between the salaries.  Maybe have a little bar chart in each box that shows each person’s salary in relationship to the top executive.  It’s telling that Hughes makes about twice that of some of the people listed only two “levels” below him (ex: Sheila Rochester.)  Another way to look at this data, that might fit even better with the story, would be to compare these salaries to the “poor” or what the “disabled” receive from the government.  How disparate are the financial differences between the people making these decisions and those the decisions might affect?

My exploration into communities of practice in the field of data journalism has been an enlightening yet daunting experience, as I am a journalist with emerging skills trying to enter a world dominated by programmers and already cross-skilled reporters.   It’s useful to read online forums, but difficult to contribute when the ethos of the group requires posting specific, practical questions and answers about issues beyond my skill set.  Building a public profile is hard work and takes time and resourcefulness. My membership in the DataTO Google Group led to a recommendation to NICAR where I found Michelle Minkoff who has provided extensive advice via email which I then blogged and she then tweeted.  I have also joined Hacks and Hackers Toronto and Toronto OpenStreetMap in the hope that upcoming meetups will help bridge the divide.

Toronto Council voting record

My search for communities of practice led directly to my second open data project as I found Socrata, a US website specializing in open government data that interestingly had an out of date spreadsheet on the spending of members of Toronto City Council.

I went to the Toronto open data site and there were no current expense reports for City Councillors but I found their voting records.   The resulting data project met my journalism criteria because my ward has a new councillor with no track record at City Hall and I knew my community would be interested in how he’s voting.  It was also a technological challenge because the file is csv, a format I have vowed to conquer.

You can view the spreadsheet here.

With the assistance of Paul Bradshaw I edited the file name to delete .xls and then used Google Refine to split the document into readable columns.  I imported it to Google Docs and cleaned up the messy columns using the formula =split(G2, ”, ”) and then uploaded it to Google Fusion Tables.  At first I was unable to post it on my blog and once I learned from my Fusion Table Users Group that spreadsheets were unembeddable I transferred it back to Google Docs and created a link that way.

This post, which I published on Facebook led to the most local reaction I’ve had yet on my blog and also had the desired effect of publicizing the fact that I’ll soon be launching a hyperlocal website in Birch Cliff.

My tweet was retweeted by Nik Garkush, the Open Source Stratagy Lead at Microsoft Canada who also made a very interesting comment on the blog in that it echoes the advice from Minkoff:

Looking forward to your hyperlocal news!! Re council voting & open data, are there any useful insights that you’ve derived from the data? Its what we do with the data and how we interpret it & share out that make the open data ‘come alive’

His comment is interesting because I made a very deliberate decision to simply post Gary Crawford’s voting record and allow users to peruse the data and draw their own conclusions, although I did colour code to help identify hot button issues.  As my blog post indicates, my goal was to make “the invisible visible”  and experiment with removing the mainstream media filter I’ve become accustomed to using for the last 30 years.  If I was still in Birmingham, I’d be interested in having a class discussion on the value of this approach.

A Thread to the Past in Birch Cliff

I’ve created an audio slideshow about the history of Birch Cliff Public School, in the heart of the neighbourhood.   It’s a piece featuring  Tamara Hermann who’s done a fantastic job preserving the past by tending the archives at Birch Cliff.   It is the first of what I hope will be many multimedia pieces that will wind up on the Birch Cliff Blog — coming soon to a neighbourhood near you.

In order to view the slideshow click here.

Excellent advice on data journalism for those of us who don’t code

In an effort to further develop my data journalism skills I’ve been exploring communities of practice in search of technical help, feedback, advice and inspiration.  As a journalist who doesn’t code (yet) I’m finding it daunting to infiltrate a field dominated by programmers and already cross-skilled reporters whose expertise level surpasses mine.  It’s useful to read online forums, but difficult to contribute when the ethos of the group requires posting specific, practical questions and answers about issues beyond my skill set.

I decided to try the direct approach by emailing Michelle Minkoff after reading her tweets and posts on the NICAR discussion forum because she seemed approachable and I could relate to her approach to data-driven storytelling at PBS:

We’re pioneering the concept of DataStories, which combine the visual power of data visualizations with the structured organization traditionally associated with data applications, and add a layer of editorial contextualization to enable Web users to learn something new about their world that is most relevant to them.

Michelle was kind enough to respond with excellent advice which I’m passing along here for other people who may be in the same position as I am.  I’ve stripped out most of the specific feedback about my work, but if you’re interested in the context, you can see it here, here and here.

Showing people what to look at

From your work, it sounds like you’ve been concentrating a lot on tools.  Your experimental portfolio does a really nice job of walking through different story forms, but in addition to changing forms due to technical limitations, try different forms and see which fits the story best.  To understand more about how this process works, and gain more background on using data viz to tell the story, as opposed to adding it on as a sidecar (all too common in the journalism world these days), I would suggest watching Amanda Cox’s talk here (http://nmd.arkena.tv/012898356641464/go-figure).  It’s very inspiring and has a lot of great information.  Cox is a member of the graphics team at the New York Times, but comes from a statistics background (she previously worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, analyzing economic data and summarizing for the public), and she’s exceptional at thinking about the best way to visualize the story that the data tells.

Data provided in technical forms

You’ve done a great job using a variety of non-technical tools to perform data journalism tasks.  When you mention that you really need a drive to get this done, you hit the nail on the head.  Whether it’s finding tools, figuring out what the heck XML is, or figuring out how to Web programming — none of these skills are magic.  But you do have to keep pushing at them. I would think you’d be hard pressed to encourage a data source to make its data more accessible to journalists without technical backgrounds.  The technical formats are actually extremely helpful in terms of enabling a journalist to analyze the data, once you figure out how they work.  We’re lucky that so much data is available, and able to be manipulated.  I wish I had an easy answer for you, but you just have to figure it out.  Open up a file, look for repeatable patterns. Structured data should have a pattern — if it’s good data.  You can open an XML file right in a Google spreadsheet — maybe even JSON, too.  But even just start looking at the files in TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows).  Start to figure out what the rows and columns would be, and try to wrap your head around how it works.

What to learn next

In terms of data analysis, your next big step should probably be figuring out a way to ask questions of the data.  In a city budget, which category is getting the most money?  Which category has the biggest change from last year?  The biggest dollar/pound/other currency change?  The biggest percent change?  A great book to read that will introduce you to simple math that will help you find stories is Sarah Cohen’s Numbers in the Newsroom book. Learn how to manipulate data, either by starting to understand formulas in Excel, or looking into something called SQL.  SQL will get you into the world of how to query, or ask questions of, a database.  So, if you have a list of many salaries, and want a list of people receiving more than $300,000, you would write something like: SELECT * FROM salaries WHERE salary > 400000;

If you’d like to look into that, the easiest database to get started with is Sqlite, which also comes as a Firefox extension, so you can work with it right in your browser.  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/ Work through the tutorials here should give you a handle on the actual SQL language (SQL stands for Structured Query Language)  http://sqlzoo.net/

As for visualization, start looking into some things called Google Chart Tools (static graphs, http://code.google.com/apis/chart/) and Google Visualization API (interactive graphs; http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html).  They do require some coding, but reading examples and following them will teach you a lot about visualization.  Both tools have something called a Chart Playground or Chart Wizard, which lets you adjust examples to see how the charts work.  http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/chart_wizard.html I still use these tools almost every day, even though I can now “code for real” — whatever that means.

Thank you Michelle!