Categories
General

User research is statistical significance

User research is to design and product development as statistical significance is to data. You can’t be confident in figures if you haven’t carried out significance tests. And you can’t be confident in a design or product change if you haven’t carried out user research. Yet businesses that baulk at treating data as gospel without […]

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About Writing

The 5Ws and whodunnits: a Chinatown character exercise

A whodunnit is a genre of film where, as the name suggests, we want to find out who did it. But knowing who is not just enough, we also want to know the why, where, when, what and how. In journalism these points are generally known as the 5Ws (even though ‘how’ makes it 5W1H) […]

Categories
News

Daily Mail v The Guardian: equally angry?

This week two British media giants, the Daily Mail and the Guardian, got into an inter-title fight about who encourages hate and negativity. The Press Gazette best sums up the story, which started when the Guardian implied that the Mail and Sun are to blame for the recent attack on a mosque. The Guardian published […]

Categories
Scientific Research

Explaining the news: is Vox top?

There are thousands of news sites out there. But what if there was a way to find out which site is best for giving you a good overview of news stories. I’ve analysed newspapers before, but this is different. At the recent News Impact Summit (NIS), I heard an interesting talk by the engagement manager for Vox, a newish online […]

Categories
Research

Four reasons why sentiment analysis matters to you – part 2

Sentiment analysis matters. That’s why last time we looked at three good reasons why, now we’ll look at the final reason and sum it up. You can find out why sentiment analysis matters, otherwise read on for the final reason and summary.

Categories
Scientific Research

The clockwork internet

A little (okay, a long) while back I described how I planned to analyse newspaper columnists in order to find out if there was a variation between newspapers in terms of tone. Well, I have finally done this, or at least got the bulk of it out the way – 12,000 UK newspaper editorials and […]

Categories
Opinion

Why Mad Men’s Megan has to be cheating on Don Draper

I think Megan Draper is cheating on Don in Mad Men. There, I’ve said it, I’ve spread salacious gossip and this isn’t Heat magazine, but it’s okay, because it’s about fictional characters. Worse – or perhaps typical for gossip – I have no firm evidence other than a gut instinct, but again, that’s never stopped […]

Categories
Research

Columnists – opinionated or sentimental?

Newspapers have become more opinionated. Not’s not my opinion, it’s a fact as proved when I spent a long time in the British Library’s newspaper section going through past opinion columns. In this sense, opinionated means ‘having more opinion columns’. Back in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s there were just a handful of […]

Categories
Write Heroes

Professional Heroes

A hero of profession may not have degrees, practices or medals, but they still flaunt their expertise. Following my previous post I believe that the great heroes of profession, inspiration for treating writing professionally, are not ‘pure’ writers who have spent their lives solely as novelists and storytellers. They are not ‘pure’ because they came […]

Style Guide

The Golden Rule of Considered Words: A good point well made. Language & General Keep the audience in mind from the very first word to the very last If the audience won’t be informed, educated or entertained with both the words and the content then edit, edit, edit until they will be Show over tell every […]