25 ways to use Facebook, Twitter & Storify to improve political coverage. Social media has become a powerful tool for journalists covering elections. It’s given journalists a way to see how politicians and campaign staffers are interacting with voters and sharing news. And it’s helped them find local voters and get a better sense of what their audience wants in election coverage. As the Republican primary season intensifies, here are 25 tips on how journalists can use Facebook, Twitter, Storify, Google, LinkedIn and other tools to improve coverage leading up to — and on — Election Day.
Facebook See how politicians are targeting local voters. In preparation for the Republican straw poll in Iowa, Michele Bachmann’s campaign staffers launched an ad campaign that targeted local Facebook users who had identified themselves as Christian rock fans and Tea Party supporters. Other politicians, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, have also put Facebook at the center of their campaign strategies. Twitter Keep up with politicians. Storify Additional Tools. Creditor Moves to Dismantle Copyright Troll Righthaven | Threat Level. Marc Randazza The financial woes of Las Vegas-based copyright trolling firm Righthaven worsened Saturday when one of the defendants it unsuccessfully sued for infringement asked a judge to allow seizure of the firm’s assets — with the help of the U.S.
Marshals, if necessary. The legal filing dropped moments after the Friday deadline expired for the litigation factory to pay defendant Wayne Hoehn $34,000 in legal fees. Hoehn successfully defended himself against a Righthaven copyright lawsuit seeking large damages for posting the entirety of a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial to a small online message board. Righthaven had asked U.S. An earlier deadline passed last month, prompting Judge Pro to reset it for Friday, a decision a federal appeals court let stand last week. A filing in the case shows that Randazza wants the court to “authorize the U.S. Righthaven initially was winning and settling dozens of cases as defendants paid a few thousand dollars each to make the cases go away.
News developers worried about new cost to use Google Maps. 10 common video storytelling mistakes (and how to avoid them) Five years after Youtube’s birth there’s probably not a newsroom in the land that isn’t trying to do video journalism in some way or another. I say ‘trying’ because, as you’ll probably have seen, the vast amount of online video produced just doesn’t cut it.
It’s long, boring, technically poor – and amateurish. This is a big shame because online video – done well – has the power to be an art form, to touch people, to make them understand something, to make them care. As well as training journalists all over Europe in how to do video storytelling, and watching a helluva lot of video stories, I’ve also been teaching student journalists at Kingston University how to do video for more than two years. .01 you don’t prioritise sound I’m actually gonna stick this one at the top because it’s probably the most common mistake. Audiences seem quite happy to tolerate poor quality pictures – they don’t mind mobile phone footage for example; but they will not tolerate crappy sound. It’s that simple. Limited use of sharing buttons shows people’s desire to share links privately. Despite the social sharing buttons ubiquitous on news stories and other Web pages, the dominant method of sharing is still the old-fashioned copy-and-paste of a page URL.
AddThis, which provides sharing tools embedded on 10 million websites, says between 70 and 95 percent of all link-sharing occurs by copying and pasting a URL, not by clicking a button on the page. In some cases this has the same effect, if someone copies and pastes a URL into Twitter instead of clicking the embedded tweet button. But the data also show the hidden but popular practice of sharing links privately with specific people over email or IM, said Greg Cypes, director of product for AddThis parent company Clearspring Technologies. “The desire for people to share one-to-one or one-to-few … is much much greater than we originally expected it to be,” Cypes said. Not everyone wants to broadcast every link to their entire network via a Facebook wall post or a tweet. Tags: Online traffic and metrics, Social media. This Sunday: Tweeting the Issue. Let’s take news apps out of the newsroom and create products instead of content. There was a great story in The Onion a few weeks back, right after Steve Jobs announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Apple.
The headline read, “New Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘I’m thinking printers’” Not that there’s anything wrong with printers, mind you. Something has to do the dirty work of printing out all those Groupons. The point is, with all the creative talent Apple has at its disposal, all the cutting-edge skills and resources, the company is probably better served developing cool products, not designing slick new ink cartridges for the DeskJet. Which brings us to news applications. On the one hand, since hacks and hackers started their mind-meld, the combination of programming and journalism has produced amazing work: beautiful maps; rich databases; new ways of telling stories that weren’t possible a few short years ago. But on the other, we’re still thinking printers. Most news apps are still largely subordinate to the narrative story.
There is undoubtedly a spectrum. Meet the journalist behind Tumblr's rise. Tablets Drive Deeper News Consumption [STUDY] Tablet owners tend to consume a greater variety and volume of news on their devices, and tablets' visual, interactive features encourage in-depth exploration, according to a joint study from Starcom MediaVest and the online division of the BBC. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that they read more news stories and follow a greater variety of news topics.
More than three-fourths said that tablets make the overall news experience more enjoyable, and more than a third said they spend more hours per day with media because of their tablets. The findings were derived from six informal, in-depth interviews and a 1,100-person survey of people in the U.S. ages 15 to 54, 88% of whom were already in possession of a tablet. All identified themselves as consumers of news content.
Additionally, respondents tended to gravitate more toward established news brands on their devices over "news aggregators" — a statistic the BBC will no doubt enjoy touting to advertisers. Night owls read news on tablets, as mobile overtakes computer for at-home browsing. ComScore A new report from comScore shows nearly three out of five tablet owners (58 percent) consume news on their tablets at least occasionally. Twenty-two percent do so almost daily. The report also breaks down the times of day people are most active on different devices. The patterns largely confirm conventional wisdom, but the illustration is helpful nonetheless.
Smartphone and tablet browsing spike early, about 8 a.m., as people awaken. Computer traffic peaks slightly later, around 9 a.m. Computer traffic stays strong through the morning, peaks again at lunch time, and falls sharply in the evening.Tablet traffic sags through the afternoon, but surges to its highest point from about 8 p.m. to midnight (notably, tablets account for more news traffic than either computers or smartphones during that period).Smartphone traffic is remarkably even throughout the day.
People use computers, smartphones and tablets at different times of day. Tags: Audiences, iPad, Mobile, Tablets. iPad’s dominance of tablet usage, even 1.5 years later, is astounding. How many dozens of Android tablets have been announced? Plus the BlackBerry PlayBook and HP’s TouchPad? And yet, among tablets, Apple’s iPad represented 97.2% of U.S. tablet web traffic in August, according to comScore. That is incredible dominance, given that it’s already been 1.5 years since the iPad went on sale.
That said, it’s still early. Tablets only represent about 2% of overall U.S. web traffic, I’ve calculated, via comScore’s report. (“The share of non-computer traffic for the U.S. stood at 6.8 percent in August 2011, with approximately two-thirds of that traffic coming from mobile phones, and tablets accounting for much of the remainder.”) At SplatF, about 5% of visits over the past month were on iPads, according to Google Analytics. Over time, I expect Android tablets to catch up a bit. But this should give you a good idea of how the iPad is still the only tablet that matters.
Sure, other tablets may be shipping to resellers and wireless carriers. Paul Berry: HuffPost for Facebook -- The Future of Social News. HuffPost has a long history of deep and innovative integration with Facebook. In 2009 we launched HuffPost Social News, which let Facebook users who are HuffPost fans share more easily with each other and follow their friends' activity across the site. At the beginning of this year we challenged ourselves to build the next generation of this integration.
We were inspired by Zynga, which radically changed the game industry by building from the ground up on Facebook's platform. How could this happen for news and media? The end result: HuffPost for Facebook. This app is in line with a great defining characteristic of HuffPost, which is to combine technology and editorial together to engage our audience more deeply. Over the years we've learned a tremendous amount by diving into machine learning and creating what we believe is the most sophisticated comments system on the web.
The five "breakpoint" widths adopted by the Boston Globe responsive web design. #sndstl. Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s. When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads. " So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire.
It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. The CERN browsers Erwise.