Last week I tried out a tool that I've been familiar with for some time, but that I never really got around to doing. Skellefteå AIK is a northen swedish hockey team that has been very successful this season and last. They won the Swedish championships last year, and they are probably going to do the same this year. They won the last game in the final series 8 goals to 1 against Färjestad. Game 4 out of 7 is to night.
My collegue in Skellefteå, great hockey reporter Robert Tedestedt, did a piece last week on a kid that lives in Stockholm but who is a big Skellefteå AIK-fan. His dream was to interview the players, and Robert let him do that.
This story got me thinking. There must be plenty of Skellefteå AIK-fans all over the world. People that were born in Skellefteå, but that left for one reason or another, or anyone really who is into hockey and likes their play or a player.
So I created a form that people could fill in details of where they live and what team they support. I shared it on our webpage and in social media. Then I made a map by putting the data from Excel into Google maps. It was really very easy, and fast. The only problem was that too many people wanted to sign up so I lost control over the data collected and published over the weekend. Another problem is that settings in Escenic doesn't allow us to embed external files. I'm going to talk to Stockholm about that.
Thanks to @mjenkins for inspiring this!
måndag 21 april 2014
fredag 18 april 2014
People are the same all over the world
A great experience, a battle worth fighting and fantastic journalists.
It's been a few days since returned back home after my US experience. I'm still a bit tired, New York is intense, Brooklyn is beautiful and the flight back was long. But even though it was great to be back in NYC the midwest made a great impression on me. Of course Kipcamp itself, with great training and inspiring lecturers, was the most important experience, but I didn't think I was going to have such a great time while I was learning a lot.
The kipcamp environment is a fantastic forum for interesting meetings and important discussions. I never thought I would get the chance to meet so many talented, experienced and insightful journalists. I've listened to stories and shared experiences of fun, good, bad and horrible and I'm really thankful to the other fellows that opened up to me.
However, the most important thing I learned is that journalists are the same all over the world. We fight the same battle to do good, to expose injustices, to stop corruption and to tell a good story. We face the same problems with cutbacks in our news organisations and in our everyday work we have to deal with people trying to tell us how to do our jobs, trying to stop us from doing our jobs or threatening us because we do our jobs.
This has only strengthened me in my conviction that what we do is important, and that it's worth whatever shit we have to go through. It doesn't matter if you're an investigative reporter or tell stories of local government, if you cover fashion or go to war zones to report. Because also people are the same all over the world and they deserve the free press, human rights and whichever truth we are able to tell them.
onsdag 16 april 2014
tisdag 15 april 2014
söndag 13 april 2014
Apps and tools for journalists
This post is going to be nothing but a list of apps/pages to try out. So here you go:
This allows you to set up a rss-feed or email alert of social mentions. You can export it as a spreadsheet and filter by date/video/pics.
Allows you to filter by time, so you can go back all time. You can use it to see what people tweeted a long time ago or you can see when a story takes off in social media. Alternative: Howlonghaveyoubeentweeting
Does screengrabs.
Allows you to do mapping from an excel sheet. You can also change colour for different categories and such.
A facebook search engine where you can search people for example "American who lives in Umeå" or "photos of people who graduated from Umeå university"
Do advanced search to find experts or former employees. Premium version seems to be the way to go.
With this tool you can do crowdsourced map from info from google forms since it connects to you google account. Alternatives are googlemaps or crowdmaps (you can use subcategories, upload more information, video photo, but is not embeddable) or Ushahidi (sms feature)
Forms can be used to crowdsource material, to get people to share their experieces. Link to them, embed them. They come out as a spread sheet. (Youtube tutorial)
Collect and curate material. You can't add an image or attached file on a google form, but crowdmap and tumblr does that. This is how the Guardian uses tumblr. Interactive and funny.
Can be used to see where a photo comes from, where was it uploaded before? Has it been altered. Also: tineye.com and google reverse image search (Youtube-tutorial).
Survey tool.
I use gramfeed a lot. It's a great tool for finding pictures from places you can't go to. And if you find a photo you also find a photographer. Search by location or hashtag. Alternative: Geofeedia, banjo or for youtube: mappeo (coming soon?).
Collect links and updates from social media. Similar to Storify but I prefer this. Probably because the mouse is awesome!
App that lets you scan the place you're at for photos. Good tool if you arrive late at a place where something happened.
Where are you? Now we know, and this means that we can ask why you where there. A journalist can check in to find sources or information that only local people know.
Gossip. Thoughts. And... yeah that's about it.
Whisper met Instagram and had a baby - that only lived for 10 seconds.
(This is going to look sooo much better when I edit it on my laptop)
(And oh, you're a journalist not a computer, remember to do what computers don't do very well: TALK TO PEOPLE)
Comedian does the data viz thing - and gets stuck in Columbus
This is the story: Andy misses his flight (he also misses his headphones, since he left them at OSU, but thats a different story) and ends up at a really, and I mean really, dodgy hotell for the night. And he tweets things like these:
This is the inside of the hotel shuttle. I don't even know how to respond anymore. pic.twitter.com/5rAldsTCTD
— Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) 11 april 2014Waiting for my airport shuttle from this place. Half-assuming I'm just gunna get in the back of here. pic.twitter.com/QdFaL6gMd7
— Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) 11 april 2014
Now that's not the story here. Andy Boyle is a standup comedian, but he is also an web developer at the Chicago Tribune, and that's why he came to Columbus in the first place, to teach us ignorant journalists that programming can be helpful if you want to crowdsource, do cool graphics or just look good.
So he starts off by explaing the internet to us, the oblivious souls of Kipcamp, like this:
Internet is a bar.
Somewhere, where a lot of guys with neck beards sit, are the server rack.
Your drink is a webpage. So you go "Give me a high quality beer".
Bartender is a DNS, who provides you with that.
And just like getting a beer out of the fridge you get it from your IP.
The different ways you might experience a beer is like viewing a website in different browsers.
Then he goes on telling us how much cheaper everything is now, compared to what it used to be, when it comes to storage, servers and such. We also got great examples of how you could use simple spread sheet information to automatically create lists or even to generate articles from police reports
tisdag 8 april 2014
Today's pictures
The British guy stacked up (that's a lot of free food and soft drinks)
More free food. Omg.
Robert Hernandez has a special relationship to his computer. And check out the glasses!
I hear strange sounds
Today has been really intense.
I just returned to my hotel room and there was music on, that really freaked me out until i realised someone from the hotel had been in here and put chocolates on my bed and turned on the radio.
my head doesn't function normally right now. We have had 4 seminars, to much food, strange/great/unexpected conversations.
First thing after breakfast Knight Kiplinger hosted a discussion about the situation for journalism today, the development the last years and the future. I couldn't really contribute, but it was interesting listening in to the discussion.
In the morning we're inspired by great lecturer Robert Hernandez (@webjournalist), he spoke about social media, why and how we could/should use it. I really don't have the energy to properly write about the lecture right now, but he reminded us of what's important: no matter how useful or attractive social media seems, you're always a journalist, and you have to do your job properly.
Later on Jeff Cutler (@jeffcutler) continued speaking about social media. He presented some tools and practices that I think may be useful in our newsroom.
Around 3 pm my head was already full, and I kind of regret that, because I think that Kevin Z Smiths (@SPJethicschair) discussion about ethics in social media was really interesting. Especially since we do things very different in Sweden. I would like to say that we have higher standards, but thats not really fair, because we really have different standards, and having spoken to Kevin afterwards I have a deeper understanding of how things are done over here, even though I don't always agree.
Now, enough of this rant. Good night.
Best regards from a washed up swede.
söndag 6 april 2014
Pics from a 15 h journey
Conversations for a 15 hours (+) journey
Go west - were the skies are blue.
Pet shop boys were right. It's not just sunny California - but sunny Columbus today. I slept a good 9 hours and woke up early for a run in the campus area. It's quite chilly out, around 35 F, but running in the mornings gives you a good "feel" of a place, of a place itself; the soul of the buildings, their material, the way the sun shines on them from a different angle. And those little things, that tend to get lost as soon as people start to wake up, like squirrels, funny birds I've never seen before, street sweepers.
Yesterday was intense. I woke up 5:40 am and got ready. Flights: 1 hour to Stockholm, waiting around, standing in line, safety, passport control, 8 hours flight to Newark (got to see Wolf on wallstreet - ok film, the trailer was better), passport control (border police asked me why I was travelling alone, "Nobody wanted to come with me" I said, honestly, Him: A pretty girl like you?" Me: Smiled and bit my tongue), toll, bagage check, train, safety check, taxi, take off and landing in Columbus.
The plane Newark-Port Columbus was a sad creature, similar to the aircraft that carries passangers between Östersund-Umeå-Luleå. But I got to sit next to a very nice lady from San Fransisco who was visiting her boyfriend in Columbus. We're wearing the same nailpolish, that's a conversation starter!
In Columbus I had to wait for the hotel shuttle for almost an hour, but I didn't mind really, the weather was great yesterday and I had a stroll around the pick up area. The only green was the fenced dog litter area.
The boy how picked me up was a sweet little thing, student at the unversity (like 70 percent of hotel personnel) he played soccer and studied some kind of physical therapy.
Later that night I had dinner in the hotel lounge where I ran in to another Kiplinger fellow, Stuart from BBC. He turned out to be a nice guy, a fast drinker and a good laugh. Welsh by birth and self-taught sports fan.
We'll probably skip some classes to go watch a hockey game. Go Blue jackets!
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