I’ve got to take the hat off to Nick Petrie over at Redbrick (the paper of Birmingham University) for doing something I wasn’t aware could easily be done: creating an iPhone app for his paper.

The app is powered by a service called MotherApp, which takes content from RSS and Twitter feeds and plugs it directly into a pre-established template. Simple, yet effective. The app splits advertising revenue 50/50 between MotherApp and the content provider, or it can be taken ad-free for an annual subscription of $99.

Now, it’s not exactly perfect. There’s only an option for a single RSS feed, so far as I can see, so there’s no way of splitting content into news/sport/features etc. But for a starting point, it seems like a great and cheap (even free) way to dip into the mobile sphere. Now, there’s obviously the problem that it requires a consistently up-to-date web service, which, sadly, is a challenge for many student papers (my own included). But, if you are running a tight online ship that’s keeping your visitors coming back for more between publication dates of your print issues, it might e something to consider.

And, of course, it’s easy to point out that this functionality could be made available via a mobile web browser.But that’s not the point- Petrie is giving his audience options, and maybe many of them will appreciate having a dedicated app for the purpose. And, short of having a programmer to hand or employing one (who knows Cocoa, Objective-C etc.), simple yet effective services like this are the only real way for the student press to do this kind of thing.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism •Resources •Tech
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There’s an excellent piece published on The Guardian today, titled “Waking up to press slaughter”. In it, Jim Boumelha, President of the International Federation of Journalists, argues that the press need to take more responsibility for publicising the plight of their own kind, and mount pressure on the international community to combat the targeted assassination of journalists. There’s an interesting point to be made here. From the above-linked article:

For many years the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has been publishing on the first of January the list of journalists killed in the past year, but it’s rare for commentators to show the slightest interest. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record, with the IFJ listing 137 journalists and media workers killed across the world. Only a few newspapers, among them the Guardian, bothered to report it. Imagine if these were killed politicians or killed policemen. In almost every corner of the globe, journalists continue to be targeted, brutalised and killed. Some say they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But journalists have a duty to be on the spot when news is in the making.

On a day when most media headlines and blogs will be devoted to the decision by Google to stop censoring its search results in China, I thought I’d encourage you to read the piece and think about the genuine dangers of a career in serious investigative journalism.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism
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This is something that was pointed out to me a while back, but I’ve only noticed it myself now. Both Trinity News and The University Observer are being indexed by Google News, apparently since the start of this academic year.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons- I know with Trinity News never specifically added itself to Google News. Yet, somehow, we’re recognised as an information portal. We’re currently running on Joomla, whereas the Observer is running on WordPress- meaning that the choice of CMS seems to have little to do with compatibility. Inclusion also raises the stakes for student publications here, as any error or possible defamatory statement could, in theory, be carried in Google News Alerts, delivered by e-mail directly to those whom they refer to. While I’m not suggesting that student papers shouldn’t take due care, it’s a reasonable concern for institutions with such limited resources. I’d also see it as an indicator that Google is listening to all the critics who have been pushing for a focus on hyper-local news.

With some major news organisations complaining about Google’s aggregation, etc, I feel rather privileged to have my institution deemed important enough to join its ranks.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism •Tech
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On October 26, EllisLab announced some more details of ExpressionEngine 2.0: crucially, the licensing options. There’s zero mention of a free option, which now seems to be replaced by “Freelancer” which is “only for web professionals,” though how they judge this is lost on me.

As many of you know, this site runs on EE. It’s not beautiful by any means (it runs off a default template), but that’s down to my own lack of attention and time. The backend, I assure you, is an absolute pleasure to work with.

I know EllisLabs has probably decided to focus on the professional market rather than fight with WordPress, but I think it’s a dire mistake. I can wholeheartedly recommend EE to anyone (and I frequently do) and would most likely have used it if I had input into any commercial projects. Now, I’m going to be forced to switch CMS and learn a new system.

Ellis Labs say they’ll continue to provide security support, in a vague way: “It really depends on how long it takes for the significant majority of the community to switch to 2.0.,” according to Leslie Camacho, President of the company. The example timeframe he uses is about 2-3 years; that’s a lifetime in web terms. The technology will be antiquated long before that.

I’m just resigning myself to the fact I’ll have to jump ship. Little as I do post these days, I’m getting my workload under control and was going to dip my toes back into web development. Such a pity that the only WP-beating blog platform is no longer an option, particularly since it could have introduced a generation of developers to the product, if EllisLab had ever chosen to go down that route.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Tech
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