Meaning. Blogosphere. Wolfram Alpha and other ways to enhance database journalism. Participants at Matt Thompson’s recent gathering on the Future of Context discussed (among many other things) database journalism — city crime maps, for example — and agreed that they can actually be a disservice to readers. The problem comes in maintaining the data: a reporter or team gathers data, analyzes it, creates interesting presentation graphics — and then often fails to maintain the data, so that it is quickly out of date, irrelevant, and even misleading. As well, a map presented without context or interpretation can lead to erroneous conclusions by readers.
As news organizations look to add high-value content that might form the core of paid-content sections for their sites, compilations and analysis of public (but not necessarily online) information is one of the areas they’re exploring. (See, for example, Steve Buttry’s laundry list of data the Cedar Rapids Gazette is looking to incorporate on its sites.)
As the data imported to the site grows, so does the maintenance issue. Britannica blog on the newspapers and the net. TEMPLE TALK: The front page dilemma: Why newspapers blow it when they act like they’re the first to report a major breaking news story. Based on my reading of four newspapers every morning, I’m concerned editors still think they need to present big stories as if their readers had never heard them before. This approach sends a message - and it’s not a good one. The message is this: We have nothing new to add to what you’ve already heard. I’ve been stewing over this issue since the morning after the rescue of the American ship captain from Somali pirates, one of the most compelling stories of recent months. The story appeared in Monday, April 13, papers.
Here were the headlines: Navy Rescues Captain, Killing 3 Pirate Captors – The New York Times Snipers Kill Pirates, Save Captain – The Wall Street Journal An ‘Easter surprise’ at sea – USA Today Navy snipers’ fire frees U.S. The stories each had essentially the same lede. The problem: Everybody (OK, almost everybody) already knew what the papers were reporting. Why would a young person who hadn’t yet developed the newspaper habit see value in those headlines? The Magnetic Filings and Mother Lode of Twitter. See, if you have 70,000 odd followers, as he does, and you swarm them through Friendfeed, often attracting them with a link that you "like" which then posts that link to Twitter, then you create little magnetic filings.
These filings make some people "stick" -- let's say it's the usual power curve of 2 percent or even 5 percent who post on forums. They "like" what you like, or they argue with you, or they post other stuff. So there you have this little nonce magnetized grouplet, magnetized around an idea, a debate, a picture and they constitute a kind of node, or let's say lodestone, if there are enough of them, that draws others.
If you only have 1200 followers like me, you will find there just isn't enough of a database of people to generate enough comments to make FF interesting. Let's leave aside for a moment the problem of whether that magnetization really has meaning. Scoble talks about the inability to flag content as "high-value" except for the "favourite". How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail. Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked how they could learn about all those developments.
It seems that we should rethink not only journalism, but also journalism education: Tomorrow’s journalists will need to take the initiative to teach themselves about rapidly changing technology. To that end, here are some ways that students can become their own teachers in regards to social media. Bewilderment In both the social media workshops I have organized in our own newsroom and the workshop I held for journalism students, participants were bewildered by the diversity of what we call social media: blogs, micro-blogging, vlogs, forums, wikis… Models to become your own teacher.
Guardian launches Open Platform service to make online content available free | Media. The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet". Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising. A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.
Emily Bell, the Guardian News & Media director of digital content, described Open Platform as a "new chapter in our history and a new foundation for the future of our journalism". She said that Open Platform would allow Guardian content "to be woven into the fabric of the internet" as people outside the organisation saw the value of adding Guardian content to their projects.
Nine ways a journalist uses Twitter « Save the Media. Interactivity, Role Playing in News Games Engage Readers : CyberJournalist.net. 10 Twitter users that every journalism student should follow? UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden. I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off.
This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others: @davelee - former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point? @channel4news - example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable)@jemimakiss – likewise, example of a journalist using Twitter to involve readers in production, as well as just be a ‘real person’ (alternative: Mike Butcher). Over to you – who would you recommend…? Like this:
HOW TO: Use Google Reader Like A Rockstar. Google Reader recently got a facelift; with a fresh look and features, a lot of people are buzzing about the service. Knowing that new users are signing up and veterans are looking for some ideas to make their experience even better, we have put together a quick how-to that should offer something for everyone. Tell us in the comments about what you do to get the most out of Google Reader! History of Google Reader When RSS became a standard for publishing material on the web, the way that we received our information changed very quickly. No longer did users have to go find content; now it could come to them automatically.
With the world at their fingertips, something had to be created to sort all of the information. Google Reader is robust in features, and can be used "out of the box" for those that just want a point and click solution, or tweaked so that power users can play around. Getting Started With Google Reader Google Reader Time Savers: Trends and Keyboard Shortcuts. Explaining Twitter to journalists. A lot of journalists have suddenly discovered Twitter, which figured prominently in some coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks.
And many are baffled. Here's my simple explanation of Twitter: It's like a big caffeine party. Everybody's talking at once. Really fast. But you have magic ears. You only hear the people you want to listen to, and the people who are saying something directly to you. There's more to the technology, of course, and there are nifty features like SMS interaction and hashtags and search. Another service, Pownce, arguably had better technology, and it failed. Adding forums to my blog. Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites. BLOG08 conference - Rockstars of the Web! WebU: Seven Steps to Writing Like a Digital Native. 'New York Times' goes social with TimesPeople | The Social - CNET News.com. CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy interviews two NYTimes.com software engineers for a video in collaboration with Beet.tv.
Note: The spelling of Derek Gottfrid has been corrected. (Credit: Beet.tv) The New York Times has added a new feature to its Web site that takes a few cues from Facebook and Digg: TimesPeople, now in beta. TimesPeople users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. TimesPeople is currently available only as a Firefox browser plug-in, but software engineers told CNET News.com that it would eventually be more widely available and without a download required. Outside NYTimes.com, you can subscribe to a feed of an individual's activity using RSS, or browse your friends' updates with a specialized iPhoneinterface; TimesPeople members can also push their updates to their Facebook profiles by syncing the two.
Virtual Economics: Second-order reasoning comes to user-edited news. If you haven't come across it before, Knewsroom from Kluster is a neat new twist on community-edited news - offering not only to pay contributors for conceiving, creating and sharing stories (surely Jason Calcanis already tried that one with Netscape) but offering a prediction market in which stories and topics will be most popular each day. Springwise, where I originally found the story, explains how the Knewsrooms prediction market works: "Investing...in topics is like investing in mutual funds on Wall Street, Knewsroom explains, offering a lower risk but lower rate of return; betting on stories, on the other hand, is more like investing in individual stocks, with a higher risk but a higher potential return.
Whichever way they choose to invest, readers get rewarded each day at deadline, when Knewsroom runs its matrix algorithm to determine the Top 5 topics and the Top 5 stories in each section. About - Swivel. Google Shakes Up Social Networking. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) is chasing the social-networking opportunity, very much in the spirit of its corporate tenets. News Corp's (NYSE: NWS ) MySpace and privately held Facebook should be shaking in their boots, even as they play a part in Google's expansion plans. Never settle for the best"Focus on the user and all else will follow," and "democracy on the Web works" are two of the basic tenets in Google's philosophy. So rather than designing a social network, and then adding some useful content (think Facebook or MySpace), Google is approaching networking from the other side.
Start with great content, and then make it simple to add some social flavor. Friend Connect (FC) is a very simple, very focused service. It gives site owners an easy way to handle user management and sign-ins, helps us invite more users, and provides a few tools for sharing content, running online discussions, and so on. Connect with further Foolishness: A print publication switches to exclusively online. How far off is the CEO Twittering era? Closer than you may think | Coop's Corner : A Blog from Charlie Cooper - CNET News.com. Amazing how much Twitter is dominating the conversation of late.
So at the risk of "all Twitter, all the time" overkill, I was intrigued when Sun Microsystems' Jonathan Schwartz recently confessed to Tim O'Reilly that, yes, he Twitters, but no, he won't fess up his user ID for public consumption. Sun's CEO twitters? Cool. Then again, he is an early adopter. The more interesting question now is, how far off are we from the day when Schwartz and his fellow CEOs reach for Twitter when they want to get out the message? Q: As it applies to CEOs of public companies, are there any different requirements which might govern their twittering? We've seen more CEOs take to blogging. The example I use is this: When's the last time you learned a new (spoken) language? Are we still far from the day when CEOs will start announcing real news on their Twitter feeds, or do you think it will be more of, "Hey, I just fed the cat" kind of stuff?
Journalism.co.uk :: London School of Journalism to offer lectures in Second Life. Students in the virtual world can attend a series of sessions over the next six months The London School of Journalism has launched a college in Second Life to offer free lectures on journalism to the virtual world. From this weekend, the National Union of Journalists approved school will be opening its virtual doors for members of the Second Life community to attend lectures and Q&A sessions with journalism professionals. "We've already had an enormous response on Second Life, with between 500 and 1,000 people visiting our area each day," LSJ director Michael Winckworth told Journalism.co.uk. "I know of no-one else on Second Life offering open lectures - perhaps we'll find out why on Saturday. " In the real world the LSJ offers a mix of traditional test-based classroom and online study. Winckworth said the school was looking beyond theses simple tutoring methods to explore the possibilities Second Life could offer students.
The first lecture will cover the world of freelance journalism. Social media, an overview. Setting up alerts and joining networks online can be a great way for journalists to get the news to come to them rather than having to chase leads all the time - here are some suggestions about how to do this You're a busy reporter; you have 40 page leads and 132 NIBs to write by lunchtime; but if you're simply going to Google when you need info for a story or a lead then you're missing out on the benefits of the web 2.0-driven internet and wasting valuable time - let that news come to you instead. The combined use of RSS feeds and other social media tools can help bring your way sources and information you might otherwise have overlooked - making it easier to spot leads or put new meat on an article.
It takes a little time to set yourself up the necessary accounts and alerts and then tailor them to your specific needs - but once you are there then the news will come flooding your way. I call it "Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering". Equally impressive are the social features on the site. New Communications Conversations Podcast: Jen McClure Interviews J.D. Lasica. Search functions transforming the news consumption. We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere. Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information provided by any single news source, search has taught us to be active news consumers, so seek out news from the wealth of sources on the web.
I had a close encounter with the increasing influence of search on news consumption thanks to a spelling error. My post last Sunday about about how news sites were covering the breaking news about the Bear Stearns bailout originally had the misspelling “Bear Sterns”. Well, it turns out a lot of other people don’t know that Stearns has an “a” in it. My post was a meta news story, i.e. it didn’t have any real news about Bear Stearns, it just discussed how the story was being covered. How about the New York Times? And why? Twitter why do we use it. Series about online journalism, about brevity. The series about online journalism, this time about adaptability. Guidelines for online journalism, scannability. Twitter and scoops. Earning money with new media.