SocialMedia JournalistsGuide. Navigating the journalistic seas this past year has been a particularly challenging/exciting task. As many a publication foundered in the economic benthos, others rode the wave of new technology into previously uncharted waters. Mashable has been there through it all, stepping in to provide journalists with touchstones and compass directions to help them do everything from tell more compelling tales through alternative storytelling to make the most of their Twitter accounts. It's not enough today to have a good rolodex of sources (seriously, who even has a rolodex nowadays?) And a solid recorder, journalists need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today's almost real-time media landscape. It's time to add another factor to the boot leather equation.
Here's how: Add Social Media Tools to Your Belt The Journalist’s Guide to YouTube The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook The Journalist’s Guide to User Generated Video The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter. TheGuardian OpenPlatform. Media Guardian Changing Media Summit 2010 | Changing Media Summi. What is OpenPlatform? The Guardian. Edit This overview will give you some idea of what data is available, how to find what you need, and what you will see when you make a request to us. To access the API, you will need to sign up for an API key, which should be sent with every request.
Plus, once we have your contact details we will be able to give you notice of any upcoming changes. The easiest way to see what data is included is to explore the data. You can build complex queries quickly and browse the results. If your application needs to regularly poll the API for updated content, there are a few things you should know. Endpoints We provide several endpoints to retrieve different items: ContentTagsSectionsEditionsSingle item For each endpoint: results can be filtered using parametersresponse contains minimal detail by default but more data can be exposed using parametersresults are returned as paginated list of containing, by default, 10 entries per page Paging Through Results Example:
Guardian Crowdsources Data to Create Trending Stories for iP. The Guardian’s recently launched iPhone app has received rave reviews. One of its many game-changing features is its constantly updated list of ‘trending’ stories. Here, The Next Web takes a look at just how this list of trending stories is created… but first, that word ‘trending’. The use of the word ‘trending’ as a verb has been with us for a long time and at least for as long as the World Wide Web which reaches the age of 21 this year.. However, in social media terms, ‘trending’ has really fallen into common parlance with the arrival of Twitter and our ability to search discussions taking place in real time in order to track the key topics on people’s lips.
This ‘super-sensing’ ability has come into its own as the world has discovered a way of following major events around the globe simply by following the key words being used most often in the millions of tweets sent every hour of every day. We asked Nik Silver, The Guardian’s Head Of Software Development, just what was going on. TheGuardian’s iPhoneApp Hits The Store – At A Price! The Guardian‘s long-rumoured iPhone app has at last hit the iTunes App Store and brings with it a number of attractive features. However, compared to competing UK news apps, it comes at a price, weighing in at £2.39 in the UK iTunes store, compared to free apps from competitors The Telegraph and The Independent. The Guardian’s app is sophisticated, with content fully search-able by Topic, Section or Contributor (each of whom has their own bio-page which features a chronological list of their articles).
Each headline carries underneath it a small yellow icon which reveals a floating sub-menu which serves up context related links. High quality images are stored in the Galleries section with each set of photographs viewable as a set of thumbnails. All of The Guardian podcasts, along with additional audio snippets are available in the Audio section and all content can be ‘Favourited’ using Star icon which appears throughout the app. Nik Silver (pigsaw) Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com. Spot.us - Home. Spot.Us: Lend Journalism a Helping Hand. All across the country, newspapers are shuttering and those that remain are closing down bureaus and pulling correspondents left and right. More and more, media outlets are relying on fewer sources for their information because of a lack of funding, but a number of websites have appeared to solve this problem.
One such crowd-funded website, Spot.Us, has released a series of new features today in its efforts to save us all from the closed-minded future we’re currently facing. First, here is how it works. Spot.Us gives freelance journalists a space to pitch their story idea, which the website’s users can then invest in. Then, if the story is purchased by a news organization, the donations are reimbursed. It’s like a micro loan service for journalism. In an interesting twist, Spot.Us has recognized that there may be more to funding journalism than money itself, and now its users can pledge talent instead of cash. Bart brouwers (brewbart) Bart Brouwers - Dead Trees Living. 1988, the national Dutch soccer team celebrates their European title in the canals of Amsterdam. (C) NOS Not only in case of a Dutch victory in tonight’s Soccer World Cup Final, the city of Amsterdam is preparing “strong crowd management” for the next couple of days.
“When we will become world champions, or even when we lose after a heroic battle, we consider asking non-residents to stay away from the city”, a spokesperson told city newspaper Het Parool. Amsterdam expects at least 1.5 million visitors in case of a victory. The city has already advised car owners not to park their vehicles alongside the canals in any case for the next days. Some smaller bridges will be closed in order to prevent their collapse should the crowds swarm over them.
UPDATE: Hours before the beginning of the World Cup Final (and even days before an eventual celebration), the mayor of Amsterdam has declared his city “full”. TheInk-Stained Wretch anonymous source. Newspapers 4square. Canada's free daily newspaper, Metro News, has just unveiled a content partnership with mobile check-in game Foursquare. It's the first location-based editorial partnership for the startup, who is already partnering with city transit and universities.
As part of the partnership, Metro has created a robust Foursquare presence that includes restaurant reviews, city tips, to-dos and even articles that mobile app users can stumble upon as they traverse Canadian points of interest. Metro readers and tourists alike can think of the editorial content inside Foursquare as a travel guide book that highlights useful articles and unlocks the best a neighborhood has to offer. Foursquare's even created a special badge for Metro, who's using that to encourage readers to check in wherever they pick up their copy of the publication. To grease the wheels a bit, the news outlet is also giving away an iPhone 3GS to five lucky individuals who unlock the badge. NYT Foursquare Partner for the Olympics. Wow.ly. Reuters. The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and P. Illustration: Stephen Doyle Christian Muñoz-Donoso is going to make this job pay, he’s got to move quickly. He has a list of 10 videos to shoot on this warm June morning, for which he’ll earn just $200.
To get anything close to his usual rate, he’ll have to do it all in two hours. As he sets up his three video cameras on the rocky shore of a man-made lake in Huntington, Massachusetts, he thinks about the way things used to be. He once spent two weeks in a bird blind in his native Chile to capture striking footage of a rarely seen Andean condor. Today’s topic is kayaking. He climbs a flight of stairs to his studio above a strip mall, unloads his gear, and keeps up his breakneck pace. Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. End OfHand CraftedContent. Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc. Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail.
Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing. But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 So what really scares me? Audiences aren’tStupid. Quality’s not dead. 13 December '09, 11:50pm Follow There’s been a lot of doom-laden talk today about ‘The Death of Hand-crafted Content‘. If you believe Michael Arrington, quality online writing and video is being pushed out by ‘Content Farms’ that publish endless articles and clips about whatever is trending highly on search engines.
For background on content farms, see this Wired article. It’s a ‘race to the bottom’, apparently. While it’s true that the reduction in cost of content creation in recent years has led to a flood of poor quality content, I take the optimistic view. Audiences aren’t stupid. Cream always rises to the top and ‘quality’ content will find its target audience thanks to a combination of search engines, content aggregators and sharing services like Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Digg and Stumbleupon. Even if you think I’m full of nothing but blind optimism here, there’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. [Image credit: Zappowbang] HowGoogle CanCombat Content Farms. In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at – Demand Media alone pumps out 4,000 new pieces of content every day.
The solution is of course for Google and other search engines to find better ways to surface quality content, whether that be from traditional news media, blogs or even Demand Media (not all of its content is poor quality). So how can Google evolve to identify quality content better? Quality! Pah, Does Google Need to Bother? Perhaps we should first answer the question: why should Google be worried about the quality issue? As I wrote yesterday, Reuters is onto something with its subscription business model. The subscription model is making inroads, because the users themselves are flocking to it. What Google Can Do. Are Content farmsDemonic. I first became aware of Demand Media by reading this feature by Daniel Roth in the November 2009 issue of Wired [Ed: ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about it in August]. In fact, Roth alerted me by email that his piece was about to come online, because he thought I would find it interesting. He was dead on.
I found it fascinating, and also scary. Since then the discussion of these "content farms" (what ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus called them recently) has picked up a lot intensity online. For a good round-up, see Jason Fry's recent post The Furor Over Content Farms. In the following interview with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, I explore this new online phenomenon. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and blogs at PressThink, which won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award. I've been discussing Demand Media a bit on Twitter, always referring to it as... Now, when you wrote to me, you said I didn't get the mission of Demand Media. Rosenblatt: OMG. The Furor Over Content Farms « Reinventing the Newsroom.
I’m glad to see I’m not alone — the agitation over content farms (my term was vapidmedia) is increasing among digital-media thinkers. Here’s a rundown of recent takes on the issue, what it means, and what — if anything — should or can be done about it. To reiterate my point of view: I don’t think Demand and other vapidmedia mills deliberately try to produce low-quality content, but I think their business models virtually ensure that they will do so. Nor is my primary objection that they turn content creators into Chinese factory workers. I don’t like that, but if the market wills it, so be it. Rather, my primary objection is that vapidmedia clutters up search with low-quality content designed to game Google’s algorithms, making better-quality information harder to find.
To review, the article that kicked the issue into high gear is Dan Roth’s Wired magazine profile of Demand Media. Here’s the fusillade I wrote about Demand Media after reading those two articles. Like this: Like Loading... Winners 2007-08-09-10 | Knight News Challenge. Crise des medias. Journalism. Journalism. Médias. Petit labo des médias. Robot Reporters. One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me.
Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It's like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl was founded by a team of ex-newspaper reporters and engineers. The company put up a demo page for Portland, Oregon news that anyone can look at today.
User Experience is Hard For Robots Unfortunately, there are two big issues here. There have always been people who like to listen to police radio scanners. Rupert Murdoch 'out to lunch' on internet strategy, says Michael. NRC Lux - cultuur webwinkel van NRC Handelsblad en nrc.next. Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room. SalaamGarage citizenjournalist. Citizen journalism. Ervaringsdeskundingen vinden – nrc.next. Study Claims That Newspapers, NOT Blogs, Still Dominate The News. Murdoch news block-out continues. The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations. BBC tells news staff to embrace social media | Media | guardian. How the New York Times and CNN try to keep up with the tech comp.
Futurejournalismproject.com. ScibeMedia FutureofJournalism Project. Introducing the Future Journalism Project. BBC News website gets a new look. Twitter and Facebook built in. The Editors: BBC News website redesign (1) APOLLO - HOME. Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’