Live Blogging

Citizen journalism started when technology started to give people a way to report things for themselves one of the tools that people can use is liveblogging. In 1997 Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog”. A weblog was used to express the different links or websites he found interesting; he would “log” them on his own website. Overtime the term weblog was shortened to blog, and now we have the definition of what a blog is today.

There are different types of blogging websites or platforms that allow users the opportunity to create their own blogs. There are platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Live Journal and more. People create personal accounts, and from there they are able to start “blogging”.

Blogging is done at a personal level. There are many differences between “online writing” and “print writing”. The general rules or ways to blog are a lot more relaxed and flexible for the people to use in any way that they want.

Blogs are created for whatever purpose the user wants. There are blogs on everything imaginable. If a person wants to create a blog about food, then they will create a blog about food. The possible blog topics are endless.

When it coms to writing the blog itself, the users do not have to write the way that journalists for newspapers write. The overall style is more informal or personal. Blogs can be written the way that the individual who made the blog speaks.

Blogs also aren’t organized in a way that has the most important news article or post upfront – this is possible, but that depends on your settings and how your organize your blog. Blogs in general are set up in a reverse chronological order. This means that the most recent blog posts are shown first, and older posts are shown on later pages.

When it comes to writing in general, the writer usually needs sources to back up their information. Live blogging is a new tool that is offered by the internet. With that is he advantage and possibility of having an endless range of sources. The internet gives people access to all types of information from all over the world.

Live blogging also allowed more citizen journalism to happen. There are different blogging tools, not just blogger and wordpress, there are microblogging tools like twitter as well. These sources allow people the report things themselves. So everyone went from being a receiver of information to also having the chance to be a creator or a sender of information too.

People will gain information, they can write about something with that information. People are also able to comment on the things that they see. There is generally a comment section on everything posted on the internet now. People also take up a new distribution role – when they share things on their personal facebook accounts or other social media accounts they are joining the group of distributors around the world.

Print writing, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. It is done with many restrictions. The journalists are more conservative with their writing style. Newspapers in general are also organized in a different way completely. When a news article makes the first page it is because it is the “most important piece of news” and the newspaper gives it the most focus.

Live blogging does give journalists more sources and eyewitness accounts to use when it comes to writing their news. This is where data journalists come in. They are able to gain information from different points of view and then combine all the statistics and tell a final story from multiple view points.

From Journalism to Data Journalism

There are different types of journalism; among them is Data Journalism. Data Journalism is reporting information by using data.

Thanks to the current digital world, data are more than just a collection of numbers on a spreadsheet. Data are almost any possible topic described with numbers in different forms.

Data journalism isn’t like other forms of journalism. As opposed to having something written and traditional to express news or report information, data journalism uses a more visual approach – infographics.

Journalists use programming to gather and combine information from various sources. They can also use different software to find connections between different documents on the same sources.

Through the different documentation of sources, journalists can then create infographics to help display the information in a way that is easily understandable.

Infographics help explain how a story is relatable. It also helps people absorb a lot of information in a limited space.

For example, during the Olympics, there are charts that tell the people the number of medals won by a country. These infographics are also used to show information in a way that displays the different medals won on a scale relevant to each country. If this information were to be typed up, it would take a lot of space to write out each statistic for each country.

Infographics allow people to view the information quickly, in various ways, and in a small space.

Data is more than just information that journalists use for their stories, it can be the source, and the tool used to tell the story. You should keep in mind that any information given will be questioned, but the way it is presented will shape the way that people use it.

Journalists should use data as a tool to be able to verify the information given in their stories. There are news stories the second something happens from a bunch of different sources. Data journalists can collect and filter all these different sources of information, and compile them to create something that views the event through all sides.

Data journalism offers a new perspective on things as it creates the shape of the story. Journalists change their main focus from being the first to report a story and publish it to the public, to being the ones that tell what the story could mean.

Data, and the growing number of sources and “citizen journalism” should not be seen as a threat but as an opportunity.

This allows journalists to show different viewpoints and different affects based on the background of their sources. Journalists can also create personalized calculators that help the readers come up with their own decisions on various topics.

These topics could range from anything from buying a car to watching a movie.

Data journalists are able to analyze the way complicated situations are, and the different dynamics to them. These situations could be riots or problems in the workplace, and give a visual report that help people understand what is going on at an easier rate.

Another positive asset to using infographics is that visuals are easy for people to remember. People are also able to obtain information at a faster rate. The images can also give people more clarity and understanding on the issue at hand.

Apart from the things that data journalism offers to the public, it also gives an edge to the journalists behind them. It forces people to become more knowledgeable in figuring out information and how to transform that information to something visual. That skill is not found with everyone. Data journalism offers a future perspective to things as they happen. It’s more than just reporting on the event at hand, it also offers insight on what could happen next.

For people interested on taking that step from regular journalism to data journalism they have to be willing to go through the proper training. They have to be trained in learning how to work with data in any possible situation or in regards to any type of question that could be asked. Working with data is harder than just dealing with numbers and statistics, it is a puzzle that people need to learn how to assemble before displaying it to the public.