A guide to help potential contributors develop their skills.
If you are considering contributing to Exeter Observer please see our contributors guide.
More contributor guides:
- News writing
- What is news?
- Objectivity, neutrality, impartiality & balance
- Style
- Multimedia collateral & copyright
- Sources & interviews
- Subediting
- Feature writing
- Local government transparency & information access rights
- Data protection & media law
- Digital information and communications security
Offline resources
Contacts and sources are very important research resources (cf. sources & interviews).
Online resources
- Keep your eyes peeled!
- Distinguish between primary and secondary sources.
cf. local government transparency & information access rights.
Search
- DuckDuckGo - independent compiler, no tracking/personalisation, 400+ sources
- Mojeek - independent crawler, no tracking, UK
- Quant - independent crawler, no tracking/personalisation, France
- Ecosia - Bing+, no tracking/personalisation, plants trees with profits, Germany
- Startpage - Google proxy, European Privacy Seal award, Netherlands
- Dogpile - metasearch compiler with additional features
- Yippy - metasearch compiler with cluster results
- Wolfram Alpha - “computational knowledge engine”
- Google tables - spreadsheets
- Google scholar - academic articles
- Microsoft academic - academic articles
- Companies House - companies
- Charity Commission - charities (new)
- Charity Commission - charities
- Financial Conduct Authority - financial services firms
- Financial Conduct Authority - mutuals
- Trademarks
- Generic trademarks
- Devon & Plymouth Chamber of Commerce
- Exeter Chamber of Commerce
- Google finance
- OpenStreetMap
- Google maps
- Google news
- Google guide
- Google advanced
- Google advanced images
- Twitter advanced
- Twitter list search
- Twitter thread reader
- PolitiTweet
- Archive.Today
- Right Relevance
- Social searcher
- Hashtagify
- Ritetag
Analysis
- Twitter analytics
- TweetBeaver
- MentionMapp
- BuzzSumo
- CrowdTangle
- DomainBigData
- Whoisology
- SpyOnWeb
- DNStoolkit
- MXtoolbox
- DNSlytics
- NerdyData
- AnalyseID
- Maltego
- Netlytic
Data
- UK Gov
- Office for Budget Responsibility
- Office for National Statistics
- Nomis labour market statistics
- Open Geography Portal
- DataShine Census
- Centre for Cities data
Data cleaning/presentation
Monitoring
- Google alerts
- Google trends
- Tweetdeck
- Twitter geolocation
- Twitter geolocation
- Twitter list copy
- Media Cloud
- YouGov ratings
- Social mention
- Visual ping
- Fetch RSS
- Feedity
- Warble
Democracy
- They Work For You
- Democracy Club
- Democratic Dashboard
- Electoral boundary maps
- Democratic Audit
- Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement
- Edelman Trust Barometer
- Britain Elects
- House of Commons library local data
- Electoral Commission past elections and referendums
Fact checking
Source checking
- Open Corporates
- Corporate Watch resources
- Spinwatch Powerbase
- Who Funds You
- Who Comments
- Tax Justice Network financial secrecy index
- Facebook profile search
- Facebook keyword search
- Twitter conversation visualiser extension
- Twitter data downloader extension
- Mozilla link explorer
Image/video verification
- Google reverse image search
- Tin Eye reverse image search
- RevEye reverse image search extension
- YouTube data viewer
- InVid video verification extension
Guides/handbooks/tools/training
- The Social Media Reporter
- Tweetdeck research
- Ethics of online data use
- Tech for Reporters
- Data Journalism
- Data Journalism handbook
- CIJ handbooks
- School of Data
- Story-based Enquiry
- Storytelling for researchers
- Verification handbook
- Accountable Journalism resources
- Global Investigative Journalism Network resources
- Global Investigative Journalism Network tips & tools
- Global Investigative Journalism Network fundraising
- Open Corporates data journalism reading list
- Bureau Local investigative journalism toolkit
- Collaborative investigative journalism tools spreadsheet
- First Draft verification
- Solutions Journalism learning lab
- Open source intelligence portal
- Open source intelligence guide
- Website OSINT
- Network analysis guide
- Visual Network Exploration for Data Journalists
- Network analysis/visualisation with Netlytic
- Network analysis with Gephi