August 19th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
Last night I headed to London for the first Hacks and Hackers meetup in the country. It sprouted out of the Ruby in the Pub meetings and has been organised by Joanna Geary and colleagues at the Times as a meetup for journalists interested in coding and geeks interested in journalism.
It was very well attended – more than 50 people by my count – and full of interesting conversations to be had about what people are currently doing and what they want to move into. I hope it continues and develops into a more structured, regular meet – and that I don’t have to get up at 5.30am to do an early shift every time I want to get there.
A few things I took away:
- It’s obvious, but it bears repeating: ideas are easy, execution is hard. We need skills as well as inspiration to build what we want to build.
- The corollary: collaboration is key. We don’t all need to know how to do everything – what’s important is building working relationships with people who can make up for our own shortcomings.
- Regional data journalism is a massively different prospect from hyperlocal or national. This is something I need to parse out, probably in its own post, but an important realisation – regional data and its implications and interpretations have their own joys and challenges.
- There are not many regional data journalists, especially in print-first organisations. To my knowledge I was the only person there who works on a regional news organisation, never mind a newspaper. I suspect there are plenty of reasons for this – time, inclination and understanding being just the most obvious ones. If we want to include interested regional print people in these conversations, we might have to take the mountain to Mohammed.
- Practical beats theoretical. If you want to persuade someone that data journalism is important or relevant, creating something is far more persuasive than explaining it. Don’t preach it, do it.
- Start simple. Everyone I spoke to who’s played a part as a tech/social media/digital evangelist in their organisation has said the same sorts of things – start with what’s possible right now, and work upwards from there.
- Not everyone with something to say is on Twitter or participating on blogs. Sometimes if you have a wide circle of social contacts it’s easy to miss voices from outside that circle – and often those voices have something tremendously valuable to contribute.
- People are amazing. Everyone who was at the meetup last night had some incredible ideas and projects on the go. Everyone had something to offer, something to teach and something to learn. At the risk of sounding completely hokey, it gives me hope.
And here are just a few of the ideas that I heard kicked around for what the group could do in the future.
- Hour-long lessons in all sorts of subjects – Ruby and other languages, Freedom of Information requests, story construction, search engine optimisation, data cleansing, social media, and so on.
- Talks or discussions led by people with practical experience covering topics that hit the industry at the moment – monetising online, social media policy (or lack of it), the fallout from the Wikileaks disclosures, for instance.
- A swap shop for people looking for help with projects or for learning mentors – almost a lonely hearts system for hacks seeking hackers and vice versa.
- Practical demonstrations and talks from people with proven experience.
Whatever direction it goes in, I’m glad to have been involved and excited to see what happens next.
August 13th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
I discovered on Wednesday that I’ve passed my NCE exams – and did particularly well on the News Practice exam, winning the Ted Bottomley award. (I love the name. Love it. Probably too much.)
The examiner [pdf] was very, very nice about my paper, saying:
A textbook example of how to tackle the Newspaper Practice paper. A comprehensive law
answer citing relevant cases and law, followed by practice answers that clearly demonstrate
the candidate’s imagination and ability. It is clear from this paper that this candidate is
already putting into practice the skills that the Newspaper Practice paper looks for. One of
the highest Newspaper Practice scores in recent years. A very impressive performance.
I’ve been trying to find the paper I wrote so I could work out what on earth I did right, but so far haven’t managed to unearth it. I’m pretty sure I arrived home and thrust it as far out of sight as possible along with the other papers.
But from what I remember, a staggering amount of what I wrote for the second half of the paper was about the internet. Specific, useful, relevant ideas about how to use it to move stories on, to facilitate comments and let the community take control of the conversation. I talked about topic pages, context as an integral part of news reporting, data journalism in many forms, visualisations, mashups, maps, timelines, social media, FOIs, online reportage in all sorts of guises and the importance of the hyperlink.
Anyone revising for News Practice exams – my best advice is read the links, think about how you can apply the theory to the practical, and good luck. Oh, and know your McNae’s. Nothing can beat that.
March 14th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
This week has been all about trying new things – www.instapaper.com, www.audioboo.fm, www.posterous.com and www.formspring.me, among others. I've also signed up for www.gowalla.com today.
I've been using
www.foursquare.com for a few weeks now. I love the idea, but I've had problems with the iPhone app – it's been intermittently slow, buggy or failed to pick up on connections at all. Hopefully the new update will fix that, but I'm also giving Gowalla a try.
I'm particularly liking the look of the items feature at the moment, though admittedly I haven't tried it out properly yet. Basically, it's a primitive virtual geocaching system. Every time you check in somewhere you have a percentage chance to receive an item. You can swap items for the ability to do certain things – mostly to do with creating new locations, as far as I can see. And people visiting those locations later on have a chance of picking up those items and passing them on.
I don't imagine I'll be using both Foursquare and Gowalla in the long term unless I can find a way to link the services so I only need to check in once. One check-in is worthwhile; two is probably more effort than I'll spend. But I'll be trying them both out for a little while – will report back when a clear favourite emerges.
(Incidentally, this is also another Posterous test post, to see how linking and tagging work…)
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
February 23rd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
After an interesting conversation with @harryharrold and @MrRickWaghorn yesterday, I’ve been mulling a few thoughts on emergent stories and how the social side of the web could make it possible to curate and (to some extent) formalise them.
Continue reading ‘Emergent thoughts on emergent stories’
December 9th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
I’m running my first social media campaign, and so far, it’s working.
Let me explain. I’m one of the two head organisers of a live-action simulation game called Zombie LARP (we wish we’d picked a better name sometimes, but it works) in which a whole bunch of people run around in the dark pretending to be zombies and taking it in turns to shoot the zombies with NERF guns. Think Left 4 Dead in real life.
Continue reading ‘Directing the shambling hordes’
November 16th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
Since I split my Twitter accounts six weeks ago, things have been a bit quiet here for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, splitting the feeds has been a great help for talking to the people I’m writing for. I keep an eye on @edpmary at work, which has made it possible for me to have conversations, properly, without being drowned out by “irrelevant” noise – and it’s caused another shift in how I connect with people while I’m at work.
But at the same time while I’m at work I’m much more cut off from the journalism community. @mary_hamilton is being sadly neglected because it’s more important to keep up with the other feed – the one that helps me do my job day-to-day – than it is to keep up with the one that helps me work out how I could be doing it better.
Secondly, a combination of wedding planning, Zombie planning, impending driving test, a tighter work schedule and a bout of ill health have left me with very little spare time. If I push it I can fit in maybe four hours a week working outside work – tracking journalism Twitter and RSS feeds, reading blogs, keeping up to date.
And that is nowhere near enough. It’s hard to sift through the information to get to the interesting, relevant, thought-provoking details in that time, let alone read them, assimilate them, comment on them, respond to them, converse about them and integrate them into my own practice. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I won a national award. I’m very proud of it and today I went to the Society of Editors conference to accept it along with my fellow winners. We were invited to sit in on the panel discussion on the future of local journalism – a handful of students and trainees in a room full of CEOs, editors and directors.
Something clicked for me in that room. I need to sort out a better balance here. It’s just as important for us lowly types who are just starting out to have those conversations as it is for editors at the highest level. We have to talk about the future of our companies, papers, channels, jobs, careers, at every level of the companies we work for.
We have to integrate that constant conversation as part of how we work. It’s a vital part of what we do, now – projecting the future, working out what’s next, so we can do the best we can to incorporate change – and even, some of us, drive it.
It’s not something we can take or leave. But it’s something most journalists have to compromise in order to get the job done. For many of us, the pressure is constant to turn out copy, to produce stories. We’re writing more stories for more outlets in more ways than ever before, but it is ever more important for us to update our knowledge, understanding and skills – to engage in theory as well as practice. Even the greenest reporter – even folks like me.
I don’t know yet how to integrate learning and theoretical understanding (and engagement with those communities) with doing practical journalism at work (and engaging with those communities too). Over the coming weeks I need to find a better balance so that over the coming years I can maintain it.
October 6th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
There has been a lot of noise recently over the leaked WaPo guidelines for social media use. The restrictive policy has been accused of making Twitter look like a minefield for reporters, shutting down interaction and engagement, and forbidding journalists to have personal lives online.
The guidelines go too far in suggesting – intentionally or otherwise – that it is impossible for reporters to have a private life online, and the argument that individual journalists should not express opinion has met widespread disapproval. But are there other arguments for splitting personal from professional chatter online?
Continue reading ‘Digital identity, space, strategy’
September 16th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
This week’s web work has been almost entirely devoted to fleshing out profiles on various social networking sites – LinkedIn, Wired Journalists – and finally sorting out the blogroll (you can see it there on the right-hand side). Here’s five tips I’ve gleaned for people like me who are just starting up with creating social profiles. Continue reading ‘Five web profile tips for newbies’
August 27th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
I’m off work at the moment, staying with family and preparing with trepidation for a long weekend without mobile phone, internet or even laptop access. I’ve not started any big web-related projects this week, but I have done and discovered a few interesting things.
- Continue reading ‘Webweds: what I did on my holidays’
August 23rd, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
I’m a fairly recent Twitter convert, and there are two main reasons I’m sticking with it. First, it’s short, and second, it’s art.
Continue reading ‘Short is sexy’
