Charles on… anything that comes along

Thanks to Bobbie for pointing me (and every other hack on the nationals) towards the endlessly fascinating Journa-list.com (foolishly, they haven’t set it up for http://journa-list.com - come on, people), which

is an independent, not-for-profit website that makes it easy for people to find out more about journalists and what they write about.

Oo.

It is the first UK website to offer a fully searchable database of UK national journalists (who write under a byline), with links to their current and previous articles, and some basic statistics about their work.

It allows you to build up your own tailored list of journalists whose views you respect and trust. You can search through their back catalogue of articles, and link to other articles on the same topic by different journalists. And, if you want, you can be alerted each time any of them writes an article.

That’s scary, right? No, no, for PR people, it’s brilliant. Sort of. We’ll come to its failings (which are few) in a second.

Right now there is no website that pulls together the work of individual journalists and aggregates it to make it easy to search and link. If you search on the internet for a journalist the chances are you’ll find one of three things: a link to an article of theirs on a news website, a brief bio on the news website (or, if well known, on Wikipedia), or their own website / blog (very rare in the UK).

So, who you got in there, eh?

It contains all journalists from 12 national newspapers - The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Mirror, The Sun, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Mirror, The Observer - and BBC News Online. The site can only index those articles which have bylines. We started indexing the articles in May 2007.

That May start date means that it doesn’t have that much authority, but hell, you have to start somewhere. (Possibly they’ll be able to work backwards and add content from earlier, using search engines or something.)

Here’s my profile:

Charles Arthur has written...

• More about ‘apple’ than anything else
• A lot about ‘linux’ in the last month
• More bylined articles than the average journalist

Based on 44 articles since April 2007

Well, OK, sorta. If you look up Katharine Viner, though, you’d think she was a bit of a waster: one article since May. Except that disguises one thing: she’s the features editor on the Guardian, so wields much more power than you’d think from her “output”. That’s the weakness here: it only measures what can be measured - which is words and length and a rough parsing - not influence, which is more important in many regards. Plus it doesn’t include blogging, which has some influence too, surely.

Still, it’s a good start by the Media Standards Trust.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Two techie things I'd like to do but can't - can you? (27 June 2005; score: 46.03%)
• Philosophical thought for the day (6 February 2005; score: 37.1%)
• How Google News penalises exclusive journalism (27 July 2004; score: 33.34%)