With just two weeks until news:rewired – media in motion we’re proud to announce Business Wire as the sponsor of lunch on the day of the event.

Business Wire, which has 31 offices across the world, offers a press release distribution service aimed at public and investor relations professionals. The company also provides news outlets with multimedia content such as images and video footage, as well as company details, via both online channels and direct feeds into the newsroom.

News agencies including Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Thomson Reuters form part of Business Wire’s more than 60-strong distribution network.

For more information on Business Wire visit www.businesswire.co.uk.

Twitter: @BusinessWire

The panel for session 2B featured Turi Munthe, founder, Demotix; Philip Trippenbach, editor-in-chief, Citizenside; Rick Waghorn, founder, Addiply and Henry Peirse, founder and CEO of GRN.

Below is a video of the session, filmed and produced by the BBC College of Journalism:

Below are the slides from Philip Trippenbach and Rick Waghorn’s presentations:

Philip Trippenbach

Journalism.co.uk’s next news:rewired event will take place on 6 October at MSN’s London offices in Victoria.

What’s it about?

news:rewired – connected journalism will look at different forms of integration and collaboration in the industry, both inside and outside the newsroom.

As journalists we don’t work in isolation, and collaborating with our audience is becoming increasingly important. And as the way we do journalism changes, organisations need to think carefully about the way members of staff and different departments work together to produce the best product in the most efficient way possible.

Journalism.co.uk’s next news:rewired event will look at the latest opportunities for collaboration in the newsroom given the evolution of new digital journalism roles, and how reporters can work with the wider community to improve, fund and find the journalism of the future.

Sessions at the one-day conference will include

• a look at the architecture of the newsroom and new opportunities for integration
• advice on how to inspire continued and enhanced engagement from a community
• a guide to some of the top tools and latest digital platforms for integrated multimedia storytelling
• insight into innovative business models being adopted by community-focused news outlets
• a discussion on the importance of collaboration for the future of investigative journalism and how to build the necessary bridges between journalists, news outlets and the general public

In the spirit of collaboration, we are keen to hear about anything you would like to see covered during the day. Just let us know @newsrewired or email rachel[at]journalism.co.uk.

Several speakers have already been confirmed for the event, including:

Kate Day, social media and engagement editor, the Telegraph.

Who’s it for?
news:rewired events are for: working journalists with an interest in digital media; media trainers and students; journalism and communications academics; PR and communications professionals; and anyone interested in the future of the journalism and media industries.

How can I book tickets?
You can book tickets here. They cost £130 (+VAT). For information about tickets and availability email ed[at]journalism.co.uk.

How can I learn more?
You can email rachel [at] journalism.co.uk for more information on the agenda, or to suggest any topics you would like to see covered.

For sponsorship/advertising queries contact stefanie[at]journalism.co.uk or james[at]journalism.co.uk.

Image by WebWizard on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Continuing with our links posts in the lead up to news:rewired – noise to signal, here is a collection of resources for session 2B, which will look at social media strategy – how news organisations and journalists are using social media platforms to report and engage with online communities.

Speakers on the panel will include Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development, the Independent; Robin Hamman, director of digital, Edelman and Mark Jones, global communities editor, Reuters News.

In session 1B we’ll already have looked at how journalists can use social media to source news, and the filtering tools to bring this information into a news organisation, but what should they be putting out on these channels and how can they measure the impact of their online reputation?

Topical blog posts:

• Over on the Guardian Data Blog an analysis of more than 82,000 tweets by journalists and UK media sources, carried out by Tweetminster, offers up a great visualisation showing exactly how the UK media used Twitter to report on different stories and topics in February. You can also access the raw data in the post.
• Similarly in this follow up infographic Tony Hirst uses the Tweetminster API to gather lists of UK political and current affairs journalists, found out who they follow on Twitter and then used free graphic design software Gephi to visualise how they link together – raising important questions about social media networks.
• At the end of this comment article by Jeff Reifman, founder of NewsCloud, he offers some tips on what news organisations can be doing better to “prepare for the future”, including through the use of social media such as by hosting community space on the web for reader interaction around content.
• Back on the Guardian, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger outlines 15 things which he feels Twitter does “rather effectively and which should be of the deepest interest to anyone involved in the media at any level”.
• This post on the Wall Blog speaks to news:rewired speaker Jack Riley about how the Independent managed to boost referrals from Facebook by 680 per cent from January to December 2010, and 250 per cent from Twitter.

Other resources/guides:

• Poynter has a useful post looking at how newsrooms may want to develop social networking policies for journalists – an interesting side of the debate when looking at individual journalists reporting on social media platforms
• It’s time for journalists to promote a better ‘Twitter style’ – the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles looks at how journalists using Twitter (for example) to report could work to promote a certain format for different forms of reporting, such as the use of tags to denote an eye-witness account
• Media Helping Media has used Scoop.it to curate a social media kitbag, offering plenty of tools which may be of interest to journalists working on social media platforms, or looking to bring communities together around content
• Paul Bradshaw outlines on his Online Journalism Blog how to create a Facebook news feed, which could be used by news organisations to promote the work of an individual journalist (with their permission)
• On its developers blog Facebook itself outlines the different ways news organisations have been using the social media site effectively to report on stories and engage with readers, such as through implementation of the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins, or Live Stream for event coverage.

Issues to debate:

• Should a news organisation’s social media strategy differ from an individual journalist’s – and if so, how? And how can both parties work to develop what they do?
• Where do you start in developing a strategy? What should the main goals be and what are the ‘winning’ formulas for getting there?
• Beyond setting up a Twitter or Facebook account, what other functionalities of these well-known platforms should a news organisation be exploiting? And what other platforms are out there to report on in innovative ways?
• What role should a news organisation take in training/drawing up ethical guidelines, for the use of social media by its newsroom?
• And one key question for debate – how can you measure the success, and ultimately the impact, of a news organisation’s social media strategy and its online reputation?

Buy tickets for news:rewired – noise to signal at this link.

Liveblogging has been called a lot of things lately, from the “death of journalism” to the “embodiment of its future“.

However you feel about it, it is a big issue for online journalism. Never more so than now in fact, after an unprecedented glut of fast-moving international stories, along with domestic coverage of civil unrest, have brought the format to the forefront of online news coverage.

Reuters, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, the BBC, CNN: just a few of the major news organisations making liveblogging a significant part of their news operations. That’s not to say that it is restricted to major news outlets, far from it. From regional newspapers liveblogging council meetings to students liveblogging protest marches, the open format has the potential for a far-reaching impact on journalism.

It was liveblogging, the judges said, that helped Andrew Sparrow to a British Press Award this week for Political Journalist of the Year. And it was liveblogging that led his colleague Adam Gabbatt to be highly commended in the Young Journalist of the Year category.

The format isn’t perfect, of course. Some have complained that it is incoherent and lacking in context and analysis. Others that it’s tough to make sense of it if you tune in halfway through.

But the practice of liveblogging is still youthful, the art of it still being honed. It is in that early stage of rapid development and rethinking. Liveblogging clearly isn’t as simple as throwing everything in and hoping for the best, careful decisions need to made about what stories suit the format, what information to include, how to balance immediacy with verification, and how to mix hard news, analysis, and user-generated content without losing track.

So where do we stand today? How is liveblogging affecting the way that journalists and newsrooms work? Is it destined to become the de facto way of covering breaking news and fast moving stories online?

The final session of news:rewired will take a close look at the practice of liveblogging and what it means for online journalism, hearing from those using the format day-to-day, as well as looking at prominent case studies and opening the issue to debate.

Feel free to leave your thoughts or suggestions about the session below, or get in touch with us via Twitter: @newsrewired / #newsrw.

Speakers will include Guardian blogs editor Matt Wells. More speakers will be announced shortly.

See the full agenda at this link.

We’re back with another collection of useful links and resources in the run up to news:rewired – noise to signal, this time looking at session 2A: Developing the data story.

Speakers on the panel will include Michael Robinson, head of infographics, the Guardian and Federica Cocco, editor, OWNI.eu, with more speakers to follow.

I’m going to dive straight in at the deep end with this links post – which will look at developing a data story through visualisation – by linking to a post about visualising visualisations. This being journalism in 2011, the data trend was bound to go in for a bit of introspection sooner or later.

The excellent Guardian Data Blog has taken a look at the kind of things people have been visualising on the widely-used Many Eyes tool, scraped the data, and visualised the results. The result? Visualisations: visualised.

If that hasn’t left you reeling, here are some more blog posts, resources and examples to help get you in the mood for news:rewired’s developing the data story session.

Some useful blog posts

• From an unabashed visualisation celebration to a more cautious note, from the Data Driven Blog, about the dangers of “data porn”. Michael Greenfield asks whether some are sacrificing explanation and analysis for “quick visual gratification”: Data porn – where is the journalism?
• Journalism innovator and lecturer Paul Bradshaw published a book on data journalism last year, and his draft for a chapter on data visualisation is well worth a look: Data journalism pt3: visualising data – charts and graphs.
• An interesting post here from German news site Zeit Online, which used telephone records for Green party politician Malte Spitz (obtained by himself) and combined them with free online information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, to visualise his activity over a six-month period. Zeit Online: Tell-all telephone.
• We linked to parts 6 and 7 of this Stanford University video series on data journalism in a previous post, but take a look at part 2 and 3 about data visualisation and telling data stories.
• The New York Times looks at why data visualisation works, why our brains can comprehend certain things much more easily in visual, rather than lexical or numeric, forms: When the data struts its stuff.

Some free tools

• Many Eyes
• Timetric
• Tableau
• Wordle
• Widgenie.com

Some examples

Time magazine produced this fantastic looking visualisation of population density in the US. More information is available about certain areas by hovering over the black dots.

The Billion Dollar Gram was the result of David McCandless’ frustration with the difficulty of putting into context the billions of this and billions of that that crop up in news stories.

This recent visualisation from XKCD.com puts radiation dosages into context in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis. Sources for the data are built to the image as URLs too – nifty.

The New York Times has taken data describing the US recommended evacuation zones around the Fukushima nuclear plant and mapped the radiation levels and health risks.

Another topical one, this time from the Guardian, which has compared the recently-released data on international executions and death sentences.

Buy tickets for news:rewired – noise to signal are available at this link.

On Friday 27 May Journalism.co.uk will bring you news:rewired – noise to signal, a one-day event for journalists and communications professionals who want to learn more about the latest tools and strategies to filter large datasets, social networks, and audience metrics into a clear signal for both the editorial and business side of the news industry.

The day will include sessions on: the data journalism toolkit and developing the data story; social media strategy, curation and news sourcing; and making the most of information about your audience.

We spoke to three of our speakers to give you a better idea of some of the issues that will be covered on the day.

Greg Hadfield, director of strategic projects, Cogapp, discusses his work on “open-data cities” and the benefits of open data to journalists, developers, and others; Robin Hamman, director of digital, Edelman, talks about innovation in social media strategy and where media organisations should start; and Matt Wells, blogs editor, the Guardian, explains why journalists should be making the most of social media platforms for news sourcing and verification.

Buy tickets for news:rewired – noise to signal at this link.

In the run up to news:rewired – noise to signal, we’re posting useful links and resources for each of the sessions. In the second post in this series, we look at session 1B: Sorting the social media chaos.

Speaking on the panel will be Nicola Hughes, data journalist, Data Miner UK; Alex Gubbay, social media editor, BBC News and Matt Wells, blogs editor, the Guardian.

The panel will discuss the best tools in searching social media and filtering the streams of data available from such platforms for sourcing news, as well as offering examples through case studies of how this data can be brought together to cover breaking news or analysis of an event, while responsibly verifying user-generated content and eye-witness accounts.

Social media platforms can be a bit of a maze for journalists trying to source the latest news or opinion, but establishing an effective process for filtering through the data is an important step to getting the best results. Here’s a reading list of resources in preparation for a dedicated session on this topic at news:rewired – noise to signal.

From Journalism.co.uk

• It’s a case of looking out as well as looking in – BBC News social media editor Alex Gubbay, who will be speaking at news:rewired, outlines the process of using social media sites, networks and aggregators as newsgathering tools and the importance of verifying what comes in
• New curation tool Bundlr sets sights on untangling the web – A blog post looking at new tool Bundlr and how it can be used by journalists to gather content from different social media platforms to present on a single page
• Why are we just doing static things? – Journalism.co.uk talks to Burt Herman, founder of Storify: a tool for telling stories by bringing in the best content published on the web into an embeddable story, or what he called “a future content management system for social media”.
• Journalists’ pride getting in way of user-generated content says Paul Bradshaw - Speaking at one of last year’s news:rewired events, Paul Bradshaw warns that journalists are letting their ego stop them from making the most of user-generated content

Useful blog posts and examples

• news:rewired speaker Matt Wells describes how the Guardian mapped Twitter coverage of protests around the Arab world, in a blog post on the Online Journalism Blog – Matt Wells on The Guardian’s interactive protests Twitter map
• Fellow speaker Alex Gubbay is interviewed in this BBC Newswatch programme, which looks in detail at the broadcaster’s use of social media and user generated content and its verification process.
• The Economist looks at the growing importance of journalists to be able to effectively aggregate coverage from other platforms as a way of telling a story, or more literally outline how to follow a story, as “one of the indispensable elements of journalism”, in this blog post following on from a discussion at SXSW – Meet the curators
• The BBC’s Matthew Eltringham looks at so-called ‘old media’ journalists “being forced to engage with the rumour, gossip, facts and factoids being circulated in places like Twitter and Facebook” and the importance of ‘good journalism’ in the verification of this new media content, in a post titled Social media: What’s the difference between curation and journalism?
• In a discussion on the role of journalists in authenticating user-generated content, Trushar Barot, senior broadcast journalist in the BBC’s UGC (user-generated content) Hub in London, talks in this video post about his view of reporters of the future as “trusted editors” of this information.
• In this video from Beet.tv, featuring footage from its Online Video Journalism Summit, US broadcasters debate the challenge of using user-generated content to cover breaking news, the importance of verification in this process and how they attempt to perform this.

Other resources

• The 10,000 Words blog offers great tips in this post on the different ways journalists can use curation tools to make stories “out of content floating about in the social web”.
• In this series on her Data Miner UK site speaker Nicola Hughes looks in detail at “social searching”, offering a detailed and useful guide to just some of the tools you can use to cut through all the noise and find what you are looking for online on social media platforms. You can hear more from Nicola on this when she speaks at news:rewired – noise to signal.

Image by Marc_Smith on Flickr. Some rights reserved