2012 is a big year for Britain, and particularly for London, as the city swings into gear for two enormous celebrations this summer. When exchanging notes with students from my course as we all came back from a month’s work experience, we realised that we had all been working on the same project...

  As part of our course we put together an online blog that addresses the needs of a particular community. The one that I was involved in works on the premise that if you put good career advice on the internet, it is accessible to all rather than limited to a few privileged people....

  In this post I want to look at how data can get recycled once it is published. Specifically, I want to look at how a piece of data that I had gathered through a Freedom of Information request made it’s way into a national newspaper and broadcaster. Way back in November, I was...

  KNIGHT FOUNDATION BLOG   Brian Boyer, news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, describes PANDA in a video by Jon Vidar. Earlier this month PANDA, which helps news organizations better use public information by creating new software that cleans up and helps analyze it, went beta. Users can now test PANDA Project Alpha and give feedback on how it’s doing. Above, Brian Boyer describes the project’s latest developments. Boyer is news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he was the 2010 employee of the year.

  DATA DRIVEN JOURNALISM    The Centre for Investigative Journalism came out with a handbook this year for journalists who want to master the art of interrogating and questioning numbers competently. Being able to work with figures and investigate numbers is not a new form of journalism but a skill that all journalists can acquire. The handbook, entitled Data Journalism or Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR), focuses on an essential tool in a data journalist’s tool belt, the spread sheet.   

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK – By Vali Chandrasekaran Need to prove something you already believe? Statistics are easy: All you need are two graphs and a leading question Correlation may not imply causation, but it sure can help us insinuate it.

Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr. This post was first published on Journalism.co.uk What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts. How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains. Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities. These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject. Playground lets...

  JOURNOMEL.COM: By Mel C Editor’s note: I thought this blog post made a really good point: journalists and hackers should hang out together more. So I decided to share it with you. You can read the full article on Journomel.com. First confesstion: I’m not very good with numbers and I don’t know how to program in Linux, so I’m naturally fearful of the super computer-savvy. Second confession: my impression of a hacker had largely been shaped by a really mediocre 1990′s movie. Great soundtrack, but no way could I do what these folks were doing. Fast forward 16 years and I’m a convert. Partnering with hackers is a natural fit: as...