Developing support networks for your endeavours in online journalism is a good thing to do. Maybe I won’t be able to keep up with every development, every day, but the work I have done around communities of practice is helping me to identify and organize better the resources which are available, on blogs, Twitter, mailing lists, groups and online communities, forums and events.
Blogs
A good amount of my work, inevitably, starts here, in this very blog. At the time of writing, and not counting this one, there are three entries (two of them are quite lengthy) under the Multimedia Journalism category, and four entries in the Data Journalism category. That will make a total of eight.
Because of time constraints and admittedly some poor time managing, some posts went live without much time for discussion to grow around them. But Proyecto Aporta and David Cabo (the developer of the Spanish version of WhereDoesMyMoneyGo) were kind enough to comment on the post where I mentioned them.
I must acknowledge that I had an idea that I failed to implement: I started a weekly roundup of multimedia news (WiMM, the Week in MultiMedia), but I felt it to be quite redundant with what people can find on my Twitter stream, and driven more by the calendar than by the interest of the contents. So I switched to blogging about what I found more interesting, going in depth when needed.
I can say that it is now when I’m starting to find my blogging voice and feeling comfortable about it; blogging about your work and what you learn by doing it, and highlighting the best of what others do, is definitely the way forward, because it brings a personal approach and, therefore, differentiates this blog from others.
Outside of the dominions of samuelnegredo.com, I have just made the Data Journalism and the Online Video tabs in my Netvibes publicly available. The results to date can be seen at http://www.netvibes.com/snegredo#DataJ for the Data Journalism feeds I am following, and at http://www.netvibes.com/snegredo#WebVideo for Online Video.
The first column in the Data Journalism tab includes Paul Bradshaw’s data journalism bundle, Spanish public projects, both local and state-wide, the ProBonoPúblico association, among others. The second column is for RSS feeds of individual data journalists or blogs, such as Conrad Quilty-Harper, Simon Rogers, Brian Boyer, Nicola Hughes, Lisa Evans, Martin Rosenbaum… The third column is for the blogs of the data desks in major news organizations, such as the Guardian DataBlog, NYTimes Open, the Chicago Tribune NewsApps blog, the Propublica Nerd Blog, and recent projects from the LA Times data desk. I included here, too, three quite famous data visualization blogs: FlowingData, Information is Beautiful, and DataVisualization.ch.
My Online Video tab, which admittedly has been growing and shrinking for some time now, is dominated by two Google News streams with online video headlines in English and Spanish. Apart from that, I have here Andy Dickinson’s blog, Adam Westbrook’s, NewspaperVideo.com, FindingTheFrame, News Videographer, VideoJournalism, DSLR News Shooter, the MediaStorm blog, doclab.org… And any that I find of this kind, discussing topics from storytelling to gear and techniques.
As part of this exploration of communities of practice, I started two Twitter lists. The data-journalism list is about “open data, open gov, spreadsheets, databases, charts, visualization and code”, and the online-video list is about “multimedia storytelling, video journalism, webdocs, series, motion graphics.” The former is currently following 80 accounts, and the latter, 72.
I actively sought to include as many relevant accounts as possible, going through my followings, searching for accounts based on keywords, opening the blogs I already subscribe to (in order to find links to their twitter account), and in the case of a few specialists, even going through some their followings.
As happens with blogs, sometimes it is difficult to classify people under certain categories to build lists. There will be inevitably some noise, and I acknowledge that my lists may not be useful for everybody, because they are a product of my own interests, and are geographically biased towards my city and country of origin (Zaragoza, Spain), the city and country where I’m studying at the moment (Birmingham, UK), and the languages I understand.
I only mentioned the lists once on Twitter, because it will take me some time to refine them and make them more useful for people, but they already have a few followers; in fact, it was very rewarding to see some people following the lists from the beginning.
Apart from this, the amount of tweets and retweets about data journalism in my timeline has increased, joining my ongoing discussion of online video. I keep tweeting in Spanish as well as in English, so as not to alienate the majority of my followers. Relevant links were saved to Delicious, such as posts, news and resources about data, the same but for online video, and any video found online that has caught my attention (I am only refering to bookmarks saved during these six weeks, even if earlier and later ones will appear).
Mailing lists
On the straight-to-your-inbox front, I subscribed to the Mediastorm newsletter, to keep up to date with their multimedia features, and to the weekly Proyecto Aporta newsletter, about the re-use of public sector data. I don’t usually like information to be pushed to me, but these are two good projects worth keeping track of.
Groups and online communities
‘Videojournalism’ or ‘data journalism’ didn’t return any relevant results on Google Groups: in the first case, the few groups that did appear had been abandoned and showed no activity. The once successful Newspaper video network on Ning is currently deactivated (as part of the mish-mash of revenue models that shook the platform in the past, I figure).
I think that one of the sites with most potential to gain inspiration and get your work noticed is Finding the Frame, self-defined as “a gathering spot where multimedia journalists can receive feedback on their videos, audio slideshows and multimedia projects from industry professionals and fellow visual journalists”. This description comes from the about page, that also features a directory of reviewers, which I find quite useful too, as a way of identifying more people that know the craft, and looking for them online.
The reviews are very detailed and professional, with technical as well as narrative issues considered. I wouldn’t post my first works there, though, as this is clearly for professionally produced packages, and my videos to date have been mobile or experimental.
I did some following and subscribing through my YouTube and Vimeo accounts, but I have to devote some more time to develop this, as for the moment I can’t see much activity, or there are too many mainsteam media outlets in my home feed.
Forums
Be it digital video or open data, it is good to know some forums in your own country; because of the different timing of launches and availability of gear, in the first case, and to discuss specific topics about what data is released and what specific problems and opportunities it poses. So my exploration of forums is conciously at two levels.
The main piece of software I use for video editing is Adobe Premiere Elements. Of course, it being an Adobe program, the place to go is the software manufacturer’s forums. Adobe has quite a tradition of giving users a space to interact, and they call it a “community” themselves. The official Adobe Premiere elements forum is lively, with more than a hundred new threads every week and an impressive response rate: almost no question is left unanswered.
Be it on purpose or not, the forum shows the downsides of working with an outdated version, as in my case. And even more than answers, I find it useful to read questions that I wouldn’t even have thought of. This helps to go further from the 10-20% of functionality that one uses when trying to get projects done with as little of fiddling as possible.
The Adobe Premiere, Premiere Elements, and After Effects forum on videoforums.co.uk shows reasonable question/answer rate, with about one in two queries solved. But the mix of three pieces of software for quite different users and levels of expertise hampers the usefulness of the site.
And that’s all about software for now; as I’m considering to buy a new camera, it is good to have QueSabesDe.com under the radar. It is a Spanish site specializing in photography and videography, with independent and analysis of gear written by professionals, and a forum where people post questions about several models they are looking at buying, and they get quite a lot of feedback.
On the grounds of open data, the forums of the Abredatos challenge are not very active at the moment, but proved to be a popular meeting point for people working on open data in Spain, and as we approach the second edition in May 2011, it is likely that it will come to life again.
My issues with visualization had to do with the habit of Google naming too many different things as “Motion Charts”, be them actually Google Docs charts, Google Gadgets, the Google Chart API, or even a Google Analytics tool, so it took me some time to realize that the piece of advice I was looking at didn’t apply to what I was doing. In the end, I did find the help site to be, er, quite helpful, and the Google Spreadsheets forums are, obviously, the place to go to learn more about this powerful resource. It is not by chance that this is the most discussed product within the Docs family.
Events
Before I had even started thinking about this assignment, I attended Hacks/Hackers London in October and Hacks/Hackers Birmingham in January. As part of this module, I took part in a meetup of Making a Difference with Data West Midlands, which I briefly mentioned in the post about working with local data from Zaragoza.
I benefited from recordings of an event being uploaded to YouTube, as this post shows, and I also blogged about past and upcoming events around the re-use of public information in Spain. I can’t attend myself for the time being, but it’s good to know when they are held and who is speaking and attending.
I looked briefly into online video events and meetups, such as those sponsored by distribution platforms (e.g., YouTube), and I expressed my interest for a YouTube meetup in Zaragoza, and will get updates if it goes forward, but there are only three of us at the moment. That’s as many as in any other Spanish city, but definitely not enough. I should look further into this sort of gatherings in the future.
Conclusion
I think I made quite a broad exploration of communities of practice around data journalism and online video. Thinking about what you can bring to them is as important as identifying and following the right sources, and as I get more experience on this grounds, the right thing to do would be to collaborate with people and make one-on-one exchanges. But I firmly believe that this should come as naturally as possible, not trying too hard, but just aiming to be useful and helpful.
