Tony Hirst has created two basic tools that allow you to search for data supplied in response to FOI requests: this search tool for local counci...

Maha Rafi Atal started her talk at Hacks/ Hacke by describing the cognitive dissonance of studying to be a business journalist, with the ethics a...

Yesterday I announced the next project I'm going to work on which will focus on mobile news consumption (Circa). As a result, I've been thinking a lot about...

I grabbed Panorama editor Tom Giles at the So You Want To Be a Journalist event to get his tips on what people should do when they start Film...

Recently I left Spot.Us. My original plan was to take some time and collect myself before hopping onto the next thing. But the fates had a different plan for...

At the Columbia Alumni weekend there was a panel on the 2012 elections and one of the speakers was Pat Buchanan (apparently alumni of the J-school). Most of ...

Jon Walker is the political correspondent of the Birmingham Mail and Post, and Coventry Telegraph. Here he explains how to look for leads a ...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Inv and Radio WM talks about how some investigations simply...

My career since roughly 2006 has been about the process of journalism. It was around this time I stopped being a technology reporter and began managing proje...

This is my contribution to the Carnival of Journalism. In usual style I'm altering the question just a bit. I'm also relying on an old post I wrote at the Re...

The Stirrer was an independent news website in Birmingham that investigated a number of local issues in collaboration with local people. Oninto t...

This came across my social media feed this morning: 'Google Unveils New Revenue Option for Web Publishers.' In short: It's a simple technology where readers ...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Inv talks about an investigation int">...

Have you seen the new Rick Santorum advertisement? It could be comedic gold except �" there is nothing left to exaggerate. Nothing Left to Satirize: I'm alw...

By Ian Silvera (...

Here's a part by part guide to how you can follow different 'streams' of information as a journalist to understand what's going on in a par...

George Monbiot's piece in The Guardian about Britain's 'shadow gov' is a perfect illustration of the importance of looking at the groups of peopl...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on challenging...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on finding inf...

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on some of the...

The Los Angeles Times has announced that it is going to unleash a metered paywall. The journalism world goes bonkers. They get the TechCrunch coverage and ev...

For this month's Carnival of Journalism I am going to invoke the rule of 'no apologies' and change the question a bit. Host Steve Outing asks: 'What emerging...

Neil Smith is an investigative researcher and open source intelligence trainer. In this interview for Help Me Investigate he gives his ti...

Why do technology journalists sometimes act like they're in an episode of Jersey Shore? Everything is dramatic and personal. Priorities are all outtawhack. I...

One of the barriers that student journalists often come up against is their lack of contacts in a particular field. Here is a guide to buil 1. D...

Following up on our post about new FOI guidelines, Cleland Thom has compiled a list of excuses sometimes used by officials to refuse an FOI reque...

NHS whistleblower Dr Rita Pal has written a post for Help Me Investigate Health on the issues for journalists to consi">...

For 35 years Paul Dale reported on Birmingham City Council for the local press. As this first interview for Help Me Investigate, he giv ...

Anthony Barnett ...

As I wrote yesterday, each day seems to bring a small step forward on improving public access to legislative information, with two notable developments toda...

NEWS ROUNDUP Government Revolt emerges against earmark ban: The GOP backlash against their own earmark ban is continuing to build momentum. A group ...

Plus: The debate over coding for laypeople, Twitter's new email digests, and everything else that went on this week in media and tech.

World leaders, diplomats and hundreds of journalists -- as well as protesters with a wide range of grievances -- are coming to Chicago this week because of t...

This week's Tools for Transparency post is part of a two-part mini-series by guest blogger Justin Grimes. Justin (@justgrimes) is a PhD candidate at the Uni...

Public access to legislative information could get a boost this Friday at a House subcommittee hearing. The Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee w...

NEWS ROUNDUP Government Hatch Act 2.0: Witnesses urged lawmakers to address technology and social media issues when considering reforms to the Hatch A...

Yesterday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted, in essence, to sanction the practice of secret “pay-to-play� in the awa...

TPM's Josh Marshall says he now views what was launched as a website as a bundle of knowledge and expertise that "exists inherently on no particular platform...

Journalism and education are both about knowledge. Could their post-disruption business models start to blur?

Users already spend a lot of time in the Flipboard app, and if past data is any indication, audio could keep people "flipping" a lot longer.

I recently made a mistake that turned into an object lesson on the limits of technology but also �" and more importantly �" on the limits of government op...

Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google's approach to news and information disc...

NEWS ROUNDUP Campaign Finance McCain back on campaign finance train? Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is reportedly working with Democrats on an effort to req...

MTV, the Knight Foundation, and a collection of news organizations are teaming up produce a fantasy-football-style election game.

Semantically, legal codes are smooth, shapeless balls of text. They're programmatically inaccessible, useless to software -- and most people. There's simply ...

By Robert Niles: Journalists can be their own worst enemies when they try to interact with their audience online. If you think that the online medium somehow...

If the early campaign-season barrage of negative advertising is any indicator, the 2012 election is going to be a decidedly uncivil one. According to the We...

Yesterday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrated that it gets the need for greater transparency of money in politics. In a ...

Oops: An Adweek article was not supposed to force users to share it through social media before they could read it, Google says.

It's probably a good sign that this feels totally normal and natural.: A live sports show produced by the Boston Globe, on the Internet at noon a few days a ...

Over at the Interchange Project I detail �" and I mean detail �"my iPad setup, which is a key part of my writing workflow: A big part of what I do is write...

This was originally posted over at the Interchange Project. This is my second day using the Das Keyboard full time. I can’t tell if this is on account of m...

Over at the Interchange Project, I write about how I wanted to watch a movie on Friday night that I had purchased and was storing in the cloud but couldn't b...

Late last night, I finished reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, the first book on my reading list.That list, a few of you might remember, was put together f...

Levon Helm in Santa Cruz, 1976.

Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology: Follow me around the Internet long enough, and you’ll notice I love to pass along links like this. I su...

Because you need a motion control system for your iPhone’s camera, using your iPad as a remote control. Sort of. Maybe you don’t think you do, but you do...

“I know calling things “blogs� has some cultural cachet, as if a blog is somehow more up-to-date than your normal news content. But again, that’s prob...

LG begins mass production of first flexible, plastic e-ink displays: There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have completely bought into this and fre...

This is where the Empire State Building came from. (via Atlas Obscura)

The Search for the Google of The Social Graph: Completely inconclusive, but worth a quick read if you spend any time at all thinking about things like this. ...

Filed under: This is ridiculous but I want one. (via Blacked Out Military Gizmon iCA Case for Apple iPhone)

I am flipping through Tumblr this morning, waiting patiently for 'HOMELESS PEOPLE USED AS WI-FI HOTSPOTS AT SXSW (UPDATE: AD AGENCY BEHIND IT)' and 'KNIGHT N...

(via Holga digital camera concept)

Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis: Useful for those researching data visualization, academics included. (via flowingdata)

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?: I would have desperately needed this information had I started graduate school just two or three years later t...

(via BLDGBLOG: Discipline & Punish: Papillon (1973))

I'd like to go to NICAR next year. Can't let you nerds have all the fun.

Completely amusing: At my house, we recently upgraded to the Netflix plan that involves both DVDs and unlimited streaming. We also picked up a new DVD pla...

While Gunfire Echoes Inside Syria, A Cry For Help From A City Under Attack: Did you hear this on Morning Edition today? I’m sure I’ve heard reporters int...

We’ll just leave this giant white canvas here for you, street artists… (via Mad Men Falling Man Street Posters Humorously Altered)

OLD FRIEND YESTERDAY: i'm enjoying your new teenage girl blog persona ME: OMG. ME: great.

What were you doing seven years ago tonight? Odds are it was more fun than what I was doing -- which was sitting at my desk and launching this blog. ...

As I said in a post a few weeks ago, I don't intend to blog here at the rate I once did. But as I promised in that not-quite-a-farewell post, "I won't aba...

My Samsung Verizon MiFi hotspot continues to drop connections �" sometimes several times in a half hour. (Other times it's fine for several hours of uninter...

There are important reform bills in California and New York, and perhaps elsewhere, that would allow online-only publication of legal notices. Newspaper publ...

I'm ten years burning down the road  Nowhere to run aint got nowhere to go  �"Bruce Springsteen The 10-year anniversary of Rhetorica has come and gone w...

I just reamed an ITN producer who emailed me this clip about Google seeking a patent for using background noise in audible search requests and wanted to talk...

The semester's over, so now it's time for the professor to hit the books... OK, so perhaps I'll also find time to tune up the banjo, guitar and ukulele, rest...

I'm very disappointed in Consumer Reports for falling into the moral panic about privacy and social services. Today it issues a survey and a Reefer Madness r...

By adding an organ-donation tool to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is setting up a dynamic of social pressure for virtue. Is that always good? Now getting us to s...

I wonder whether we should be teaching journalists to embed themselves and their abilities into the world rather than always making the world come to them. T...

♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from edge & flow

Help me figure it out. Here are five explanations, each of them a partial truth. As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a 'great ...

at our friends' house, Anchorage. ♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from edge & flow

Final approach to #Anchorage took us over a lone skier on the Costal Trail. Still beautiful; plenty of snow. ♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from ed...

At long last, and by popular demand (and disgust at my old design), BuzzMachine is reborn thanks to my son and webmaster, Jake. After I'd let my old design g...

Second LP dump in the alley. ♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from edge & flow

♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from edge & flow

Good news at CUNY: My colleague Sandeep Junnarkar has been promoted to my old post as director of the interactive journalism program. I've been pushing for t...

I wonder if you have to audition for the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Columbia? I wonder if there will be a sing-along at the national SPJ ...

Photo by our pal John Griffing ♨ flavors.me/ howard Posted via email from edge & flow

I just read a fascinating book by Douglas W. Allen, The Institutional Revolution, which attempts to explain England's transition from its apparently illogica...

I got a call today from ABC.com's Joanna Stern about Google's Goggles. She's very nice. But I had a fit when she started by asking me about all that could go...

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung. 1. ...

In my recent Couchiching Conversation in Toronto, I hoped to spark a discussion on how social media is reshaping how our basic human need for news. We are i...

Welcome to the 49th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil as co-hosts. Today is the day for the Facebook IPO, s...

Now we have a date (May 18) and a price range ($28 to $35 per share) for what could be the biggest initial public offering in the history ...

The best stories of the week from across the web on e-books and self-publishing 1. ...

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung. 1. ...

The days of skateboarding dogs holding sway on the web may be numbered. Technology companies and advertisers are professing their belief i Port...

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung. 1. ...

On June 3 of last year, MediaShift published the article "Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship' on the harassment journalists a...

That a story can give voice to a cause and incite a social movement is an old concept. But at a recent gathering of more than 100 documen...

The best stories across the web on journalism and digital education 1. Students with computer scienc">...

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung. 1. ...

In Africa, where mobile news and digital innovation are growing but startup capital is too often scarce, innovators have a unique opportun The ...

This post and infographic originally appeared on the Nielsen blog Nielsen Wire . It is reused here with permission. Moms are often at the cente...

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung. 1. ...

Since September, police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists around the country for the "crime" of trying to document politic...

Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, on the need to separate signal from noise. Speaking at the BBC spring briefing in London on May 4, Rosenbaum t...

The British Council has posted a wonderful video on the production of an issue of The Times during the Blitz in the 1940s. The film, called Morning Paper, fo...

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become part of a reporter's toolkit. Yet research shows that media outlets and journalists tend to a...

Here is the presentation I gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin of our paper, Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of And...

Here are the posts covering some of the highlights of the International Online Journalism Symposium for 2012 at UT Austin: Japan tsunami photos highlight hum...

In the final research panel at ISOJ, Rosellen Downey, Erika Johnson, and Bailey Brewer, University of Missouri, looked at the coverage in photos of the Jap...

The last keynote at ISOJ was Raju Narisetti, managing editor, Wall Street Journal Digital Network Narisetti said the big challenge faces journalism is turni...

Here's the media release on the research I presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin on Saturday, April 21: A new study sh...

Angelica Peralta Ramos, multimedia development manager, La Nación in Argentina, gave an insight into the challenges of doing data journalism. In her ISOJ ta...

Knight Foundation | Common Sense Journalism Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight, didn't hold back in his criticism of the state of journal...

An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette writer offers a playful correction to a mistaken book title: Leave it to a middle school librarian to catch us. Those people not...

The Los Angeles Times mistakenly turned an oral exam into a 'moral' one: State bar: An article in the May 17 LATExtra section about the California Supreme C...

CNBC | Forbes Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham, who sits on Facebook's board of directors, has added about $31 million to his fortune of $500 million ...

Reporter fired after attributing lack of softball stats to �coach’s bullshit and laziness’

Odessa American | Orange County Register | Freedom Freedom Communications announced the sale today of its Texas newspapers, including The Brownsville Herald,...

In some ways Jerry Sandusky's trial on sexual abuse charges is familiar territory for news outlets. Most have policies against naming alleged victims of sexu...

It's Jeopardy's 'Power Players' week, and J! Archive (which is the type of site that will make you believe in the Internet all over again) has clever intera...

CNN | GigaOm | BuzzFeed | The Atlantic Facebook's IPO just created a lot of billionaires. Probably not that many of them work in journalism. But journalists,...

As NPR struggles with declining revenue, the public radio organization will have to consider staff changes, but no programs have been targeted. “The [Washi...

MSNBC's Morning Joe is one of the few places on cable news where you can find genuine ideological cross-talk.  It's not surprising then that the program hos...

Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about 'energy independence'

Time's titillating cover overshadows article's substance

--Guest post by Declan Fahy, AoE’s Science and Culture correspondent. Can popular science writing help diagnose a medical condition? It did for me. ...

But flawless coverage about happenings in Antarctica has been rare

As part of the American University project documenting the history of investigative reporting, School of Communication professor Charles Lewis asked Bob Wood...

To say that we tend to demonize oil companies is an understatement.  And for good reason, given the role in the past of companies like Exxon Mobil in sowing...

The San Francisco Chronicle's muddled swipe at GE crops

My brother Erik Nisbet, a professor of communication at The Ohio State University, will be giving a free webinar today on climate change communication, spons...

As I wrote last week, the Breakthrough Dialogues launched in 2011 as one of America's top new thought leader forums, in part because of the cross-cutting ide...

On Saturday, the Obama 2012 campaign officially launched with rallies held at Ohio State and Virginia Commonwealth University.  Amy Gardner and Felicia Sonm...

If President Obama is re-elected in the Fall, he is likely to face a Congress even more polarized than today, with the ideological divide greater than at any...

TED meetings, Aspen Institutes, SXSW, and Sundance are all billed as “thought-leader gatherings� where “rock stars� emerge from their “silos� to lea...

Most media treat BSE discovery with appropriate concern

Tim Caulfield, author of The Cure for Everything, and who spoke at American University last week, has some terrific insights over at the Huffington Post on c...

Articles about neuroscience push ideology, inflame divisions, study says

But reporters will probably have to keep asking

Article overlooks green group's close ties to Walton Family Foundation

Some articles fail to stress bottom line of electric-vehicles report

The 100th anniversary of one of the world's most-covered stories

From red meat to white rice, not enough skepticism of observational studies

The recent Oakes Award winner talks about how to keep climate on the front page

Local reports present a war of words without much fact checking

Resources to help journalists stop the spin

Media forecast a gloomy future for the nuclear industry