We done a practice of crowdsourcing that week to ask 10 people about the number of sweets in a box they think without opening it. Eudora (Yiying Li) was my teammate. I think it was a very interesting and helpful practice to understand what crowdsourcing is. Everyone we interviewed had their different ideas and answers, but it was magical that the average number was much closed to the correct answers. However, I think the most important thing is that along with the rise of the strength of grassroots, using crowdsourcing is getting significant. 


What is data journalim?


I read an article about Data journalism at the Guardian, here is the link:

After reading, I know an interesting thing that data journalism is becoming part of the establishment. Not in an Oxbridge elite kind of way but in the way it is becoming the industry standard.

I love the fifth point and the last point written in the article. The fifth point said that

Data journalism is 80% perspiration, 10% Great idea, and 10% output. It needs the data journalist spend hours to make dataset work, reformate pdfs and to mash dataset together. The data journalists mostly act as the bridge between the data and the people in the real world who want to understand what that is really about. The last point pointed out that data journalism is not graphics and visualisations but still all about stories. It is about the appropriate way to tell the story: sometimes that will be a visualisation or a map, sometimes it is a news story, and sometimes it is enough to just publish the number. In conclusion, it is no longer unusual, and is just journalism.



Is it ture or false that young people don’t read the LEP any more they go to the website?

Following are the data from, my answer will be it is false that young people don’t read the LEP anymore. They not just go to the website.

– Total readers are 12,572, 8881 (14.87% percentage) of 15-24 year olds in Preston

– 11% of 15-24 year olds in Preston are using the website. The figure shows that the    rate of young people using website even less than other generations such as 16.12% of 25-34 year olds, 18.57% of 35-44 year olds and 22.03% of 45-54 year olds are using the website.

– 15-24 web users only make up 5.65% of the readers of the paper.
– 15-24 web users only make up 4% of the total website users

– 48% of 15-24 year olds over the world are reading the paper.

CASE STUDY: Rupert Murdoch’s Paywall

Who is Rupert Murdoch?

According to NNBD

AKA Keith Rupert Murdoch
Born: 11-Mar-1931
Birthplace: Melbourne, Australia
Gender: Male
Religion: Christian
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Business
Nationality: United States
Executive summary:
Founder and CEO of News Corp


Born in Australia, raised in England, now an American citizen, Rupert Murdoch is the founder of News Corporation, named for his first newspaper, Australia’s Adelaide News. With subsequent expansion to Europe and America, Murdoch’s News Corp is the parent company of an interlocking media empire that includes television, movies, cable networks, book publishing, satellite TV, magazines and newspapers operating in the United States, Australia, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific Basin. Beyond his hundreds of newspapers, Murdoch’s best known brands include 20th Century Fox, Fox Television, DirecTV, Harper Collins, and MySpace.

What is a paywall?

A paywall is a system that prevents Internet users from accessing webpage content (most notably news content and scholarly publications) without a paid subscription. There are both “hard” and “soft” paywalls in use. “Hard” paywalls allow minimal to no access to content without subscription, while “soft” paywalls allow more flexibility in what users can view without subscribing, such as selective free content and/or a limited number of articles per month.

How paywalls came into being?
According to Wikipedia

In response to print media’s decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during 2000s, Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from on-line news, although this has been criticized by some. There is a correlation between Paywall projects; they all look like an attractive business opportunity, although there were similarities of Paywall not working.

Can paywalls work?


Some implementations of paywalls proved unsuccessful, and have been removed. Experts who are sceptical of the paywall model include Arianna Huffington, who declared “the paywall is history” in a 2009 article in The Guardian. In 2010, Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) reportedly called The Times’ paywall “a foolish experiment.” One major concern was with content so widely available, potential subscribers would turn to free sources for their news. The adverse effects of earlier implementations included decline in traffic and poor search engine optimization.
Paywalls have become controversial, with partisans arguing over the effectiveness of paywalls in generating revenue and their effect on media in general. Critics of paywalls include many businessmen, academics such as media professor Jay Rosen, and journalists such as Howard Owens and media analyst Matthew Ingram of GigaOm. Those who see potential in paywalls include investor Warren Buffett, former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Some have changed their opinions of paywalls.

Felix Salmon of Reuters was initially an outspoken skeptic of paywalls, but recently expressed the opinion that they could be effective. Renowned NYU media theorist, Clay Shirky, was initially a skeptic of paywalls, but in May 2012, wrote, “[Newspapers] should turn to their most loyal readers for income, via a digital subscription service of the sort the [New York Times]” Paywalls are rapidly changing journalism, with an impact on its practice and business model, and on freedom of information on the Internet, that is yet unclear.

VOXPOP： how do you get your news?

We made a voxpop about how people get their news. My teammate was Eileen Huang and we done our interviews with people of both sexes and different ages from around 18 to 70.

There were two questions we asked:
1. How do people get their news?
2. The reason why they use their preferred medium?

Producers: Eileen Huang and Julianne Zhu

After interviewing people to gather their answers, I found out that the ways of most the young generations to get their news are rely on Internet like the social network twitter, Facebook and other news websites because they think it is easier, faster, and convenient. Besides, people of middle-aged prefer TV and newspaper as they get in habits before the population of Internet. However, most old people like the way holding paper to read the news.

Whether the newspapers will disappear in our future? My own answer is “yes”. However, newspaper will disappear, but journalism will never disappear.

Introduction of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media mainly for business men which was founded in December 2002 and started in 2003. The purpose of the website is to maintain their registered users get to know and trust their contacts in business contacts. Users can invite the people who they knew to become “connections”.

It supplies effective and safe social services with business value. It is a suitable SNS tool for white collars, especially for those who have international business enterprise employees or self-employed. However, it was not befitting students because Linked pay much attention to work experience and educational level. But according to the development of LinkedIn, it gradually becomes the communication bridge between undergraduates and enterprises.

LinkedIn’s Chinese name is a similar pronunciation “Ling Ke Yin” which means the voice from the friends and guests of neighbours in Chinese. A deeper meaning is that the voice of the friends and guests which from all over the world just like from neighbours. Anyway, this Chinese name has gotten a lot of praises from the Chinese users.
linkedin logo Picture screenshots from

Via this well-connected network, Users can:
1. Manage and public the information about your subject;
2. Look for and recommend yourself for the potential clients, service providers or to recommend other professionals to a related area;
3. Create and cooperate the projects, collect data, share documents;
4. Find business chances and potential partners;
5. Set up a discussion broad to the professionals who are in the same camp;
6. Find a wider interpersonal connections and expend the range of work and trade;
7. Paste or distribute the occupation information for job hunters, recruiting and so on;
8. Publish personal work experience;
9. Set up the engage relationship between person and enterprise;
10. Searching matching between basic relationship and material’ setting;
11. Spread the information in a specific relational network;
12. Know the working developments of friends;
13. Recommend or be recommended a working chance;
14. Do research of the company or worker which you are interested in;
15. Hunt a job;
16. Ask working opinion from friends;
17. Launch a poll;
18. Search the staff with specific skills, background and experience;
19. Search employment status with specific skills, background and experience;
20. Classify personality, hobbies, and occupations, provide targeted information service, the organize theme activities.

LinkedIn is not only a social media but a business network. Its commercial and some special functions has become the sailing channel of some business website.