Map of Preston news.

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For the Map skills test on my Digital Newsroom module at University I have embedded a map containing the areas of four prominent local news stories in the City of Preston on 21 October 2009.

Each of the pointers contains links to the web version of an LEP story and another relevent link, plus a brief summary as to why the area was in the news on this day.

Button is F1 Champ - but is he a great?

Over the weekend Jenson Button became the latest driver to win the Formula One Drivers Championship title.

In doing so he retained the British grip of the Championship previously held by Lewis Hamilton last season.

His success is all the more remarkable when you consider that his construction team, Brawn GP, struggled to secure the finances to compete in this years event and were on the verge of folding just days before the seasons first race in Melbourne.

Button becomes the first driver to win the Championship having taken over 100 career races to secure his first victory. In fact, previous to this campaign he had only one solitary race win to show for 9 seasons of racing.

The chart below has been compiled to delve into just how tough a ride Jenson has had this season and how his haul of Championship points compares to all of the other F1 champs from down the years:

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/2009/oct/19/jenson-button-formula-one-championship-winners

Related links and websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenson_Button#Complete_Formula_One_results

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/default.stm

http://www.formula1.com/

Editing Pictures for the Web

This is a copy of the origional image I took of Lancashire County Council:

As part of a task for a Digital newsroom assignment I had to edit this picture into a 100x100 pixel thumbnail picture:

I also had to change the dimensions for a 400 pixel wide X 300 pixel High version:

Finally, I then had to create a version of 200 pixel wide X 500 pixel high, by again using crop and edit features on photoshop:

5 rules for breaking news

I have converted an article about headline writing for the web, by Jakob Nielsen, into five easy to remember (and implement) rules:

1. Use a maximum of five words, keeping the title short and concise.
2. Make sure the title can be understood out of context, in order to suit search engines.
3. Be sure to convey the article's most important point in the headline - to grab the 'scanning' reader.
4. Use numbers wherever possible (e.g. 5 not five), as people prefer this method on the web.
5. Start with the keyword first, e.g. the name of the celebrity or country being written about. Again this is good for both search engines and the 'scanner'.

Three sites which show these rules to be both useful and operational include the following:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8294365.stm
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6284424/Barack-Obama-surprised-and-humbled-by-Nobel-Peace-Prize.html
• http://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/01-10-2009/109614-tsunami%20-0

The first of these links shows the use of both a celebrity name and numbers to grab the readers attention, whilst the second link shows that the scanning reader can be drawn in by using the familiar name at the beginning. This is also good journalistic practice for suiting search engine requirements. Finally, the last headline uses the keyword first 'earthquake' to clearly convey the stories most important point from the outset. This way the reader can get the gist of the story without even needing to read on any further than the headline.

In conclusion I believe that the 5 rules are a useful tool and can be implemented into web headlines fairly easily - although not all at once!