In Slovakia two new publishers have joined Piano Media's national paywall. One publisher that already collaborates with Piano has also agreed to put Slovakia's largest regional publication behind the wall. This mean that, in total, 12 Slovakian publishers and over 50 websites are now taking part in Piano's Slovakian single-payment system.

The publisher Petit Press, which already works with Piano, is adding Korzar, a daily paper covering Eastern Slovakia, to Piano's paywall. Piano's Chief Executive Tomáš Bella is quoted in the official press release about the expansion, saying: "we couldn't be happier that Petit Press agreed to include Korzar's daily paper into our offer. They have really great coverage of eastern Slovakia and that fills a big need for our readers who don't live in Bratislava."

Publisher The Rock is adding the English-language weekly the Slovak Spectator to the paywall. Paying users will gain access to the latest PDF edition of the paper and to the Slovak Spectator's archives. 

In an interview with Paid Content, Piano CEO Tomáš Bella supported the idea of only placing premium content behind the paywall: "we do not think putting 100 percent of the content would even be a good idea. So we are not advising them to do this and no-one is doing it. They are putting more and more in, but still on the level to be able to keep 100 percent of existing advertising revenues."

Under Piano's system, revenue is split between the publications taking part: 40% of profits go to the site where a user bought his Piano subscription, 30% is allotted to sites where users are spending their time online, and 30% goes to the Piano Media company. Subscribers pay €2.90 per month or €0.99 per week to access the Slovakian system. 

Piano seems to be expanding at some rate. This is the second time that the company has negotiated to put new content behind its Slovakian wall. What's more, last month, Piano launched a national paywall in Slovenia. Bella told the SFN blog at the time that Piano has plans to launch in three to four more European countries this year. 

Sources: Paid Content, sfnblog, Press Release

Working with numbers is becoming more important than ever for journalists. 

Vast amounts of data are being collected online, investigative journalism outfits like ProPublica are doing more and more work with large sets of publicly available data, and data visualisations are increasingly becoming a standard part of reporting. At the end of last year, Amy Webb, CEO of Webbmedia, named 'Big Data' as her first prediction of a major tech trend for 2011. 

Tools already exist for journalists to exploit this growth in data. Nieman Lab reported earlier this week on Weave, an open-source internet platform for creating visualizations of "any available data by anyone for any purpose". Another example is Tableau Public, a data visualization tool that was billed by Journalism.co.uk as requiring "no technical ability" and being "easier to use than the wizard options that allow you to create graphs in Excel".

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.editorsweblog.org

But although there are many excellent and informative visualizations like this one by The Guardian out there, there's also an important question to be asked. How many times have you shared a data visualization because it looks pretty, rather than because you know the findings to be accurate? In the rush to provide readers with data in a pleasing format, journalists may be tempted/pressured to create or share visualtizations, without know that the data that they are based on is really clean.

Unreliable data abounds, and not just in the context of visulaizations. To take one example, in this blog post, Tony Hirst describes Facebook 'laundering' data to make claims about the economic benefits that it has brought to Europe. Hirst describes the process: "We have some dodgy evidence, about which we're biased, so we give it to an "independent" consultant who re-reports it, albeit with caveats, that we can then report, minus the caveats. Lovely, clean evidence. Our lobbyists can then go to a lazy policy researcher and take this scrubbed evidence, referencing it as finding in the Deloitte report, so that it can make it's way into a policy briefing." 

This is not a new phenomenon, but it may be one reason why a campaign from the UK's Royal Statistical Society called Getstats, is particularly welcome. Headed by former journalist David Walker, Getstats is campaigning to make numeracy an important part of a journalists' training. Walker has proposed twelve points about understanding numbers which every journalist should know. 

The first point advises reporters: 

"You come across a number in a story or press release. Buyer beware. Before making it your own, ask who cooked it up; what are their credentials; are they selling something. What other evidence do we have (what numbers are they not showing us?); why this number, now? If the number comes from a study or research, has anyone reputable said it is any good?"

Other points include asking what kind of average is being quoted, understanding whether a sample of data is representative of a wider group, and checking whether results fall within a margin of error. 

Journalism.co.uk reports that Walker has said that his twelve points are "a starting point" and that he would "welcome feedback from journalism lecturers to help shape the minimum standards of an understanding of numbers". As big data becomes more important, these kind of conversations should become more and more productive.

Sources: ProPublica, Nieman Lab (1) (2), Journalism.co.uk (1) (2) (3), The Guardian, Tony Hirst, 

"So... What are you working on?" 

Now some Guardian journalists are prepared to give us the answer to that question, as yesterday the paper unrolled Newsdesk live, a blog that promises to "bring you the news as we break it, explain how we choose what we report and why - and ask you to get involved."

This new blog from The Guardian's national news team puts the audience at the heart of the news-writing process, asking them to get in touch via comments, emails or Tweets to provide editors with ideas and information to help create stories. 

Newsdesk Live takes the whole project one step further, both incorporating the Open Newslist and allowing readers comment on what's happening on the news desk at length within a live comment thread. It is written by Guardian journalist Polly Curtis, who also works on the Reality Check blog. 

Jeff Sonderman at Poynter responds positively to Newsdesk live, which he praises for providing "a pleasant mix of facts, analysis, process and discussion -- an illustration of news as a process, not a product."

Sonderman notes that reporting on journalists writing stories as they unfold has lead to a few glitches. He quotes the writer, who had to make a "couple of corrections" to a post about university enrollment applications "as we dig further into the figures."

Still, his reaction is generally highly positive - he finds it "refreshing" to hear editors "share how they are learning what they report."

Sources: The Guardian (1) (2) (3) Editors Weblog, Poynter

"No comment".

Business executives had become more and more adept at hiding behind this phrase, argues David Carr of The New York Times in an article published on Sunday. Not only that, but major figures in business are often obscured by "communications" teams that are anything but communicative. But now, suggests Carr, "Twitter has the potential to cut past all that clutter". 

Carr writes that thanks to Twitter "there's a chance to get a glimpse into the thinking of otherwise unapproachable executives, and sometimes even have a real dialogue with them". 

He uses Rupert Murdoch as an example. The News Corp executive joined the microblogging platform at the very end of last year, and has since made the headlines several times with Tweets that Carr calls "devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and prone to crankiness, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know". 

Commenting on the US Republican presidential primaries he urged Iowans to "think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country". 

Carr calls Murdoch's account "a fine opportunity for the rest of us to hear what's on the mind of a man who controls vast swaths of the global conversation". He is generally impressed by Murdoch's Tweets: "after a month of reading Mr. Murdoch's posts, I have to say there's something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it."

But as public figures start self-publishing, journalists also face major challenges. Mathew Ingram wrote an article for GigaOm yesterday, reporting that Brian Stelter of The New York Times, had highlighted the more disruptive side of "sources going direct" at a social media conference at Columbia University. According to Ingram, Stelter called the problem the "generational issue of our time for journalists", adding that it "keeps me up at night".

Ingram doesn't give much context to Stelter's statements, but he tells us why he thinks about why sources "going direct" could cause major disruption: "it removes the need for the journalist as middleman or information gatekeeper," he writes, "In the past, a journalist could have made a pretty good name for themselves by simply getting access to Rupert Murdoch and quoting his thoughts on Barack Obama or Google -- but now, he is providing those himself."

Yet in the end, Ingram is confident the shift "should be good for serious journalism". In the long term, it will mean good journalists move away from trying to get scoops, and towards filtering information and providing context and analysis, he argues. 

The growth of Twitter is not just providing a publishing platform for executives, but for brands too. PBS Mediashift released an article last week noting that brands have moved on from making adverts where the message is just "Buy our stuff". Now they are actively creating and self-publishing their own content. Author Amy Vernon picks out the example of HBO, which created a custom video app for Facebook called Immortalize to promote the show True Blood. The app allowed users to integrate themselves into a scene from the popular program and it "took off" on Facebook. Vernon wrote that the campaign "wasn't advertising at all. It was creating interactive content for fans".

Brands creating content for social media may put traditional publishers in a similar position that business journalists find themselves in when they look at Rupert Murdoch's Twitter stream; in some ways, their role as the middleman has been cut out. Does this mean that traditional content producers will be left behind? Not necessarily, argues Vernon: "It just means that we all need to make sure we're providing some sort of value to our readers." 

"For the so-called content creators -- writers, photographers and videographers -- it actually means more opportunity, not less," she concludes.

Sources: The New York Times, Huffington Post, GigaOm, PBS Mediashift