For the inception of a BBC’s R&D project to explore alternatives to conventional news formats, the BBC’s Tristan Ferne conducted a review of the landscape of digital news, looking for innovations in article and video formats online. Here’s the 12 categories he came up with — along with a few others that didn’t quite fit his model.
Here are the top data journalism tweets for Apr 3-9, per our NodeXL mapping: #fakenews guide (@PublicDataLab); election bots (@d1gi); data story rules (@surendranb); China climate risk (@nytimes); UK jobs (@sole24ore); #PerugiaPledge (@dw_innovation); & more.
Hundreds of what appear to be Twitter bots are artificially inflating the retweet and favorite counts of tweets with links to articles from some of Russia’s top news agencies. Lawrence Alexander discovered that these same fake accounts have previously mass-posted links to scores of pro-Kremlin LiveJournal blogs—themselves part of a network of thousands. In this piece, which originally appeared on Global Voices, Alexander walks us through his research process.
Web scraping is a way to extract information presented on websites. As I explained it in the first installment of this article, web scraping is used by many companies. It’s also a great tool for reporters who know how to code, since more and more public institutions publish their data on their websites.
With web scrapers, which are also called “bots,” it’s possible to gather large amounts of data for stories. But what are the ethical rules that reporters have to follow while web scraping?
$8 billion in just a few hours earlier this year? It was because of a web scraper, a tool companies use—as do many data reporters. A web scraper is simply a computer program that reads the HTML code from webpages, and analyze it. With such a program, or “bot,” it’s possible to extract data and information from websites.
