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The Future of Social Media in Journalism This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details. See how it works here. The future of social media in journalism will see the death of “social media.” That is, all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another.
Independent Media Center West Papua: Neglected genocide - 29 Nov 2013 Indonesian police use Shootings, killings, beatings, arrests on West Papuan independence rallies Indonesian police have opened fire on peaceful protesters in Jayapura, with at least four gunshot wounds and one death. West Papuan activists and families have been forced to flee to the jungle for safety. Indonesian security forces are conducting scores of raids, sweeps and offensives against West Papuan civilians.
GOING SOUTERRAIN Underneath Paris is a parallel universe of tunnels, caverns, bones—and party venues. Will Hunt spends a few days and nights down there with a band of urban explorers From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2012 SOME YEARS AGO, I sat on a stone-cut bench in a dark chamber in the catacombs of Paris wearing a headlamp and muddied boots, and listened to the strange story of Félix Nadar, the first man to photograph the underground of Paris. In 1861, Nadar invented a battery-operated flash lamp, one of the first artificial lights in the history of photography, and promptly brought his camera into Paris's sewers and catacombs. Over three months, Nadar—41, moustachioed, with unruly red hair—shot in the darkness beneath the streets.
Baltimore NewsTrust - Blog: Join the Truthsquad and fact-check O'Malley's claim about Maryland schools This week, we're excited to kick off our first local Truthsquad on NewsTrust Baltimore. Truthsquad is our community fact-checking service, where our community helps us research controversial claims from politicians, pundits and public figures. For the next two weeks, we'll fact-check a claim by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, about the state's public schools system.
Tech. People. Money. The Hubris and Despair of War Journalism by Susie Linfield What Martha Gellhorn teaches us about the morality of contemporary war reportage. Images courtesy of Peter Van Agtmael/Magnum Photos War correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was a household name—epitomizing bravery, glamour, and political commitment—to previous generations of Americans, especially in the 1930s and ’40s when she covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Nuremberg trials for mass-publication magazines such as Collier’s. Gellhorn is no longer well-known outside of journalistic circles, but that may change due to a mini-revival of works by and about her. Her 1940 novel about the fall of Czechoslovakia, A Stricken Field, which Eleanor Roosevelt, admittedly a friend, called a “masterpiece,” has recently been reissued by the University of Chicago Press.
Rockville Central drops website for Facebook, offers eight lessons on Facebook news publishing A little over 100 days ago, a community news blog in Rockville, Md., took a big leap. Founder and Publisher Brad Rourke and Editor Cindy Cotte Griffiths moved the entire operation of Rockville Central to a Facebook page. “Facebook is where people, by and large, have decided to go for their first-stop online community activities,” Rourke wrote in the announcement post. “Which begs the question: Why have a separate site, and try to drag people away from Facebook? Why not go where they are?”
Community: A New Business Model for News A few years ago, Public Radio International coaxed its most popular host, Ira Glass of "This American Life," into digital cinema. Ira had already expanded his famed radio program into a traveling stage show that toured a dozen cities a year. With this new idea he would perform one show and beam it live to hundreds of movie theaters around the United States at the same time. Efficient, yes, but would it be appealing, Ira wondered.
Are Americans becoming more isolated from each other? Maybe, Pew says, but don’t blame Facebook The accusations are familiar: The Internet is making us sad. The Internet is making us lazy. The Internet is making us lonely. Pew has taken all of those ideas head-on with a new study, “Social Networking Sites and Our Lives” — the first national, representative survey of American adults on their use of social networking sites. Pew interviewed 2,255 of those American adults, 1,787 of them Internet users, between late October and late November of 2010; the survey group included 975 users of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The survey builds on Pew’s 2009 report on technology and isolation, which found that, while there’s been a correlative decline in the size and diversity of people’s closest relationships since the advent of digital technology, the decline hasn’t been caused (whew!)
Three kinds of engagement: outreach, conversation, collaboration What happens if I click the ThankThis button? You are shown an exclusive local deal or a sponsored message, which rewards you and the content sharer with Patron Points, which you can donate to your favorite charities, and also pays the content creator. What is ThankThis? A 5-minute framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections Last week, my news organization announced we were evolving our online commenting practices a bit to improve the quality of discourse on NPR.org. Our comment threads drew some attention recently when a comment thread about the brutal assault on CBS Correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt went awry, prompting the removal of dozens of comments and an editor’s note reiterating the discussion guidelines. Meanwhile in another corner of the Web, a related discussion of sexual harrassment of women in Egypt unfolded with civility, thoughtfulness, and occasionally even erudition (and also – fair warning — some profanity here and there). What gives? Why are these two online conversations so different?
‘Comments are content’ for local news sites: 8 tips to build community, coverage What types of stories get comment traction on hyperlocal sites? Block by Block (BxB) surveyed independent, community news site publishers about their top reader engagement tools, and 100 percent of respondents said the comments feature on their CMS platform is enabled, making it the #1 tool for reader engagement. The BxB independent publisher community recently chatted on Twitter about the value of reader comments on their local news site: It’s a treasure-trove of news tips, community building and engagement, and site innovation. Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog said it best: “Comments are content.” Publishers who weighed in were: Tracy Record at West Seattle Blog (WA), Ben Ilfeld at Sacramento Press (CA), Andre Natta of The Terminal (AL), Mark Loundy, media consultant and former content editor of Backfense, Debra Galant of Baristanet (NJ), and Tammy Daniels of iBerkshires (MA), and Mike Orren of Pegasusnews (TX).
Nick Diakopoulos » News Commenting Systems During my stay at the Sacramento Bee in 2009 I began studying the commenting system that the online paper was using, called Pluck. I became interested in how the newsroom dealt with quality issues in the online comment discourse. This was an important issue to the newspaper as they perceived it as impacting their standing and credibility in their community.
Highlights from the 2011 journalists engagement survey What happens if I click the ThankThis button? You are shown an exclusive local deal or a sponsored message, which rewards you and the content sharer with Patron Points, which you can donate to your favorite charities, and also pays the content creator. What is ThankThis? ThankThis is a new way to say “Thanks” online, one which benefits society and people's pocketbooks.