Sarah Hartley

I was recently invited to talk to regional editors at a Society of Editors conference held in the Midlands. It covers a couple of the major projects we’ve been working on at Talk About Local which are all about using mobile technologies to explore useful community information.

The first example is an Augmented Reality prototype we’ve been developing which means publishers of any size – from solo bloggers to news organisations – can easily move geo-tagged content into an AR environment.

The second is the ongoing evolution of the geo-tagged, mobile first suite of publishing tools n0tice and the launch of its whitelabelling service.

It’s a mark of the fast-changing pace of these sort of technologies that this slideshow was already outdated within a day of me presenting it. In terms of publishers using AR, The Independent last week launched its innovative use of the technology. Talk About Local’s William Perrin reviews that here: http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/tag/the-independent and in the video at the end of the page.

When it comes to the n0tice development, the day after the presentation saw a major launch for the technology when Guardian Witness went live. Obviously I couldn’t mention this to the editors at the time for risk of spoiling the announcement from Joanna the GW team, but the full details of how publishers can now use these powerful geo-tagged tools for their own products are here: http://vip.n0tice.org.

I grabbed a quick word with some of the participants at the end of the first data journalism camp we hosted in Istanbul. Here’s how the journalists found the experience.

The next two days will be taken up with DJ Camp 2013 in Istanbul. This event is part of a programme created through Uclan’s Media and Digital Enterprise programme and will see Francois Nel, Megan Knight, Patrick McGee and I working with a group of journalists in Istanbul.

It’s all about data journalism – from sourcing information, work on verification and different outcomes including mapping and other visualisations.

The work comes at an important time for the development of an open data culture for the city. Late last year, Istanbul’s links with representatives from Manchester’s digital community kicked off discussions about the challenges and benefits of opening civic data sets during a visit from Julian Tait and Adrian Slatcher.

Now, in this separate initiative, we will pick up on that conversation again and look forward to hosting a panel event with representatives from Istanbul city council as well as prominent editor and columnist with national newspaper Milliyet, Mehves Evin tomorrow evening.

During the two days of workshops and coaching, there will be a liveblog running which you can see at the Uclan Made blog here:http://uclanmade.blogspot.com/2013/01/djcamp2013-coming-to-you-live-from.html
and I’ll hope to do more updates here and on the Flickr group for MADE Turkey here.

The hashtag for the event is #djcamp2013.

Responsive Web Design on the agenda
The Digital Editors’ Network (DEN) is hosting an event looking at RWD or to put it simply – design that works across a variety of devices – in Preston next month.
Introducing the session, the François Nel, Director of the Journalism Leaders Programme, says:
“Sure, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the approach to web design that intends to provide an optimal viewing experience — easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. But we’ll also be thinking more laterally about what Responsive Design means.”

The free event includes an in-depth case study from MNA Digital development manager Mark Cadman and electronic editor Abigail Edge who led the team that charted the Express and Star and Shropshire Star’s route to responsive web design will be lifting the lid on that innovative project – and how their efforts have paid off.

#ResponsiveDEN Digital Editors Network Winter 2013 meetup is on Thursday 21 February from 12:45 PM to 6:30 PM at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. Tickets need to be booked here.

Crisis? Help at hand in York
Former BBC chief media spokesperson Donald Steel has been confirmed as the keynote speaker at a leading business event in York this spring, reports OneandOther.
Donald Steel was, for 11 years, the BBC’s chief media spokesperson, where he handled some of the most prominent media stories of the decade, from the murder of BBC presenter Jill Dando and a terrorist bomb attack on BBC Television Centre, to the Hutton Inquiry.

The evening lecture, Crisis Communications – an investment in company value, will be held at the Hospitium in York on Thursday 7th March 2013 at Museum Gardens. Tickets cost £15+VAT for IoD members and £25+VAT for non-members.Book at the IoD website.

Opportunities and challenges in Manchester
Insight Thirteen from Don’t Panic is a one-day seminar with lunch that takes place at The Studio, Lever Street in Manchester on Friday 25 January 2013 between 10am – 4.10pm.
The event will examine potential opportunities and challenges for 2013 and will feature leading industry speakers from the digital, marketing and communication arenas sharing their insights on trends they believe these sectors will see in the coming year. Each speaker will give a thirty-minute overview presentation and then join an interactive Q & A panel session.Tickets here.

‘I was wrong’
Journalism lecturer Richard Horsman proves he’s big enough to admit he may have been wrong in his initial assessment of the BBC Radio England which is due to launch from Leeds next week. He blogs:

This is going to be awkward. Not as awkward as the Mayans trying to explain away January, admittedly, but still difficult……….

Being away from ‘hubs of creativity’ should bring benefits. There’ll be less temptation to recycle guests, as has been known to happen with BBC Breakfast and Five Live coming out of the same building. Producers are more likely to rub shoulders with and pick up the concerns of real  50-summat C2DE local radio listeners in Leeds bus station or Kirkgate Market, the Beeb’s immediate neighbours, than they are in Costa Coffee amid the Disneyworld perfection of Media City. So I for one am prepared to give this version of Radio England a fair chance.

Let’s get together
The north’s digital events calendar gets back to work next week with Manchester’s Social Media Cafe on Tuesday and the north east’s Refresh Teesside on Wednesday. Update Mon 7 Jan: This event has been cancelled but will be back in February.

It’s all about the community running the community. It’s always about the people. That’s why the people who do the talks are from the community. They’re all giving back to each other and working together.

Refresh Teesside organiser James Mills explains what’s behind the networking event that’s approaching its first birthday – even though it’s nearly four years old! He explains more here at Betarocket.

Wednesday’s first event of 2013 includes a talk by Charlotte Considine about the Urban Pioneers project. Book your free ticket here.

Meanwhile Smc_Mcr goes informal with a ‘simple get-together, down at The Britons Protection from 6pm onwards on Tuesday 8 Jan. Details here.

Get Leeds reading
The Yorkshire Evening Post is going to run a three month long programme in conjunction with charity Beanstalk to help primary school children with their reading.

Features editor Jayne Dawson tells HoldtheFrontPage:  “There is nothing more vital in education than learning to read, but a distressing number of children in Leeds leave their primary school without this basic skill.”

Beanstalk CEO Sue Porto say it aims to recruit 40 new Reading Helpers to double the number of children supported in Leeds from 120 to 240 and aims to raise at least £40,000.

This is the presentation I rather rushed through in the two minutes alloted at the News Rewired event in London yesterday. It really wasn’t long enough to go into any details about the Talk About Local project to experiment with public service content in the augmented reality environment so see below for some links for more info.

Slides 2 and 3: Ar selling sofas with CSL
Slides 4 and 5: Heinz prompts a recipe book using ingredient.
Slides 6 – 10: mainstream publishing using AR from News International.
Slides 11 – 15: What the Talk About Local project looks like in the AR layer.

After producing and testing the prototype to to feed hyperlocal content into the AR environment, the work with Talk About Local continues to expand this further to help people achieve an easy to use and low cost solution.

Progress and further information is available at the project blog here: www.talkaboutlocal.org/ar.
Journalism.co.uk is featuring AR at this week’s podcast which inlcudes an interview with me about Talk About Local’s work and also representatives from The Times, the LA Times and The Telegraph.

The city will play host to the first hackathon event starting this evening in an usual partnership of digital types and the city council. I don’t know whether it’s the first time a council has reached out to its local developer community to work on data for a city – it’s not something I’ve come across in other places that’s for sure.

In these times when the word ‘council’ seems to be attached to ‘cuts’ it’s great to see some innovative digital moves and I’ll be keeping a close eye on the projects which will emerge from inside the magic of the MadLab.

To help do that, I’ve set up dedicated noticeboard which is available for anyone to post to from the event. See it here: http://mcrhack.n0tice.com.

In addition I have a little robot friend on the team – conference bot will automatically import tweets and Instagram pictures with the hashtag #mcrhack into the board providing users allow their location to be enabled. n0tice.com is all about geo-coding, that’s how it works!

PS. any developers interested in geo stuff at the hackathon can find the n0tice api and the source code for latest n0tice app HashGordon here and here respectively.

Letting the hacking commence!

Data journalism isn’t a much-used term in Turkey where I’m currently coaching on a weekend for news entrepreneurs as part of the #MADETurkey project.

The country is advanced in its Internet use – it’s the fourth biggest worldwide user of Facebook for instance – but journalism is still very much in a transition process to digital and the opportunities scrutinising data offers to journalists just beginning.

After giving a short introduction to data journalism session yesterday, including three very different examples of projects in other parts of the world – wikileaks, HomicideWatch and ArtCast – it was time to demonstrate something practicle and this is the proof of concept that Megan Knight from Uclan put together.

See the mapping here.

Using a few of the figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists’ The map was created in a very short space of time to illustrate that points that 1. The tools to create something like this area freely available and 2. The skills required are ones all journalists have ie. gathering and processing information, albeit using slightly different tools.

The demo map was created using publicly available data and n0tice.com in a process which is described step-by-step here.

The risks journalists take working in Turkey can’t be underestimated. Just last week, the International Press Institute described the country as having “ ever-growing climate of fear and an alarming deterioration in media freedom“.

The last reported figures show that 76 journalists are believed to be in prison in the country.

Against this backdrop a group of independent news entrepreneurs will be getting together to work through startup ideas this weekend.

The MADETurkey initiative is from University of Central Lancashire backed by Google IPI and funds coaching in every aspect of running a news enterprise.

In addition to participating in a workshop about community and social media, I’m also running a session to introduce aspects of data journalism to the group.

This afternoon’s sessions include lessons from Turkish case studies before delegates get stuck into the business planning aspects with Stuart L Morris, Henley Business School from Henley Business School and Gillian Morris, e-commerce entrepreneur and independent consultant.

I’ll be keeping tabs on the whole event at the dedicated Noticeboard www.made.n0tice.com and tonight’s proceedings start here at 5.30pm in Turkey (3.30pm UK)

The story  of the open journalism toolkit n0tice.org became the focus for a session at one of Europe’s big broadcast conferences that I was invited to attend this week.

The Multimedia Meets Radio event for members of the European Broadcasting Union looks at initiatives in other countries and media which could spark ideas, inspiration and innovation in radio as broadcasters move towards a more digital, engaged relationship with listeners.

This is the sideshow I presented during a session on the theme of User Generated Content and interactivity. The other speakers were Brett Spencer of BBC Radio2 and Yan Luong, social media manager at RTS. (There’s some notes from their presentations and others here under the #mmr12 tag).

A few explanatory points to accompany the slides:

- slides 1 – 14 look at some of the thinking behind the n0tice project, its beginnings at a hack day trying to solve the problem ‘what’s happening near you’ , the general environment it operates in and again making the point that it’s a platform and not an editorial product for one publisher – a point I often find difficult to properly get across due to the fact n0tice is supported by GMG.

- slides 15 – 27 show some of the current user case studies, namely the noticeboards for bridport.n0tice.com, the Guardian’s crowdsourced investigation privatepublicspace.n0tice.com, the ability to collaborate and crowdsource  by the platform’s tagging ability eg. #yarnbomb, #streetart and finally the Northern Landscapes photography challenge.

- slides 28 – 32 gives brief details of upcoming initiatives for the n0tice team such as experimentation in augmented reality environments with Talk About Local, assisting local Uk campaigners with important community issues such as High Street renewal and finally , of course, spreading the word more widely.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the tools available at n0tice.org for your community project, news enterprise, major media organisation or whatever it is you do, please feel free to contact me.

Happy to take questions here on the blog, via email ( sarah@n0tice.com) or arrange workshops or talks with you.

(This blog post is cross-posted from the n0tice blog where there’s also more user case studies, how to guides and news).