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Andy Dickinson

Andy Dickinson

Andy is a Senior lecturer in Journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University where he is the program lead for the MA Multimedia Journalism.

📍 Manchester

The BBC, Local democracy, hyperlocal and journalism.

I spent the afternoon in Birmingham at the BBC finding out more about their Local Democracy Reporters scheme [http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2016/bbc-nma-partnership]. It’s a project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a number of reasons. The promise of 150 new jobs in

Making Instagram video with Powerpoint

Audio slideshows are something I’ve included in my practical teaching for a little while. The combination of images and well recorded audio is, for me, a compelling form of content and it can be an easy video win for non-broadcast shops.

Mapping Drone near misses in Google Earth*

My colleague Andrew Heaton from the Civic Drone Centre [http://civicdronecentre.org/team/andrew-heaton/] set me off on a little adventure with mapping tools when he showed me a spreadsheet of airprox reports involving drones [https://www.airproxboard.org.uk/Topical-issues-and-themes/Drones/]. In my head an airprox report describes what

Don’t postmortem journalism. It’s not dead. Fix it.

In the aftermath of the Trump win many in the media are looking inward to understand what went wrong. But is it too soon to write off journalism as a failed project? In the very short time we’ve had to get used to the idea that Donald Trump will

Why social media isn't blogging.

I’m teaching first year journalism students at the moment and talking to them about a professional online presence. A phrase that I’ve been using a lot is blogging. The idea of a ‘blog’ and its value to an aspiring journalists is one I’m really comfortable with but

Mapping street level crime in an area

A little while ago I was playing around with the API at data.police.uk looking at a way to pull the data into a google spreadsheet [http://digidickinson.net/2015/06/11/pulling-policing-data-into-google-sheets/] (and some of the issues around the way policing areas are constructed) Yesterday I found myself

How open is open data journalism?

Simon Rogers published a post last week that asked “What does data journalism look like in 2016?”. For Rogers, the winners of the data journalism awards [http://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/programmes/data-journalism-awards/]“give us a great sense of where the industry is right now.” He’s right, the range and

The Panama Papers & trickle down journalism

I’ve been reading a lot about the Panama Papers. As a ‘thing’, the Panama Paper’s is an amazing project. It’s pretty much written the textbook on how to run a 21st Century journalism investigation overnight. The networked nature, the secrecy all of those elements, the recognition of

MOJO on Android?

I’m spending some time with Android doing audio and video. I know, why would I do that when there’s the iPhone? You get strong vibes from the community that Android is very unfriendly to ‪#‎mojo‬. I’m often suspicious of that kind of thing on the basis that’