tomroyal.com

Category: journalism

  • Make America Kittens Again

    It’s been a weird week. Back in February, someone* asked if I could do a Trump version of my UKIP blocking plugin. About five small code changes later, I had one in the Chrome store: By request: MAKE AMERICA KITTENS AGAIN: https://t.co/Gg7mg3KGKL pic.twitter.com/wf5swmbtzT — Tom Royal (@tomroyal) February 27, 2016 Since then it’s been ticking…

  • What the Robot Reporter learned from 10,000 news tweets

    In January 2015 I put together a simple twitterbot called Robot Reporter. The idea was to see if I could keep track of breaking news by monitoring Twitter for the journalists who use it as a way to find images of newsworthy events. It works a little like this. Something happens, and a user photographs it: Fire…

  • The Buzzfeedification of Bullshit

    Hey, heard the one about the Ugandan President’s daughter? She’s trending on Twitter, and for the best possible reason – right after her father backed some really hideous homophobic laws, she came out as gay. Except, you know, she didn’t. Ten seconds on Google tells you that Diana Kamuntu is, or at least was, married…

  • When bad news makes money, making up bad news is good business

    The other day a message scrolled past in my Twitter feed: Which made me think: if the sea off Fukushima really were boiling, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Except if there were some sort of amazing cover-up, in which case why would NHK (which is, essentially, the Japanese BBC) be showing…

  • Run for the hills – the Facebook Divorce Zombie returns

    I’ve written on a number of occasions about the fascinating-but-flawed ‘Facebook causes x% of Divorces’ story that pops up in the media every year or so.It first lurched around in 2011, and then crawled back out in January. I anxiously await the next outbreak in January 2013, summing up the results of a survey conducted…

  • Lies, Damned Lies, and Daily Mail Headlines

    Every so often I receive an email from the Press Complaints Commission with a list of its latest adjudications. As a tech journalist it’s not as useful as the ASA’s list*, but it is interesting reading nonetheless. And last week, while scrolling back, I came across a really remarkable bit of work. Witness this headline…

  • Zombie News: ‘Facebook Causes Divorce’ just will not die

    Pic: The Telegraph covers the original press release Back in March 2011 I wrote about a sudden flood of news articles claiming that Facebook was being cited in 20% of US divorce cases. After doing a little digging it transpired that the whole thing had sprung from the continual re-hashing, muddling and alteration of a…

  • “Uninhabitable” Japan? No, unchecked sources

    Saw this on the front page of Twitter today. Sounds awful, obviously. The source? This article, from, ahem, ‘Natural News’ (which carries on the same page an advert promising to ‘cure almost cancer for $5.15 a day’). It says: …And senior political official Ichiro Ozawa suggested in an interview with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)…

  • Facebook news: divorced from the facts

    Everyone loves a good Facebook news story – or rather, a bad one. And over the past few days, a classic has emerged: Facebook will wreck your marriage. See for example: Facebook cited in 20% of U.S. divorces (CBC News): “Facebook use has been cited in 1 of 5 U.S. divorce cases, according to a…