Following my presentation/panel discussion on social networking the other day, here’s the analysis I gave of what I see as a three-step strategy when getting involved in social networking. Continue reading
Here’s another lovely use of wikis: BivingsReport have one on ‘Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites’. Simple principle, just add your suggestion to the list (or refine others). Worth watching.
Many thanks to those who contributed to the first Facebook journalism experiment, which has proved pretty successful in providing a range of useful sources for online journalism news (both for myself and members of the group). The discussion forum is still open for ongoing contributions.
Now I want to do something which news organisations resist more than anything: turn over the agenda of this blog to you. What areas of online journalism are you most interested in? And are there any particular stories you want more coverage/analysis of? Post your responses here.
I will then try to respond to the results in my coverage…
Note: I could have set up a poll for this, which Facebook charges 25 cents per response for (you can set a maximum number of responses), although this would have been to all Facebook members, I’m guessing. Maybe another time.
Note 2: Or there’s the “Surveys, Petitions, Votes, Polls & Questionnaires” Facebook application to create and respond to surveys, votes & petitions on Facebook… http://apps.facebook.com/questionnaires/
I was speaking at an event last week on social networking when a fellow panellist made the point that Facebook was, in many ways, an operating system, and that we may in years to come think it archaic that Windows/Mac OS didn’t know who our friends were, interests, feeds, etc.
Now South Africa’s Mail and Guardian shows a glimpse of the future on that platform: an application to let Facebook users add their headlines to their profiles. Of course, an RSS feed might do the same thing, but this makes it easier.
In other FJ (that’s Facebook Journalism) news: Reportr.net on Using Facebook profiles as a source for stories (and the ethics of exposing the voting intentions of the 17-year-old daughter of a presidential candidate):
“Part of the issue is what Danah Boyd has called intended audiences. When someone posts information on a social networking site, they may not intend for the material to be consumed beyond the intended audience of their friends.”
Thinking about the weeks of coverage we’ve had in the UK of the worst floods to hit the country in decades, it seems to me there’s been a missed opportunity by news organisations to create a resource that would have been hugely useful to the hundreds of thousands of residents affected: a wiki.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, a wiki quickly sprang up where people could exchange information on survivors, places of safety, and other useful information. Of course, it may be that something was created for the UK floods, and I’m not aware of it. If so, let me know.
Reminder: my wiki on wiki journalism is still welcoming contributions. If you know of examples, literature on the subject of participatory journalism/wikis, or have analysis of your own, please visit http://wikijournalism.pbwiki.com/ – the password to contribute is ‘wikiwiki’. All (non-anonymous) contributions will be acknowledged.
Another must-read post for the list: The Press Will Be Outsourced Before Stopped is the most coherently argued case I’ve heard yet against the desperate/unconsidered rush to online, video, podcasts, etc. etc. I’ll quote at length:
“A lot of publishers suffer from these presumptions. They see less and less people reading printed publications, more and more of those people reading things online, and believe that all they need to do is shovel their printed editions over to online (and add video and audio) to reverse their newspapers’ declines in readership.
“These presumptions ignore the fact that newspaper readerships have been declining for more than 30 years and that approximately half of those declines occured before the Internet was opened to the public or the public had any online access. Shouldn’t that give publishers a hint that the major cause of their readerships’ declines isn’t the Internet or their content not being online?
“And is adding video and audio to that content (so-called ‘multimedia’) going to reverse those declines? Consider that television station’s news viewerships have been declining for more than 20 years and that radio station’s news listenerships have been declining for even longer. Do you think that if radio or television stations add newspaper-like texts to their own websites that this will reverse the declines in their viewerships or listenerships? So, why do publishers think that newspapers adding video and audio to their own texts online will reverse newspapers’ declines in readerships? Adding together two or more declining media do not an ascending new-media make.
“The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn’t that your content isn’t online or isn’t online with multimedia. It’s your content. Specifically, it’s what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you’re giving them, stupid; not the platform its on. But I digress.”
I’ve added one point: community. Newspapers in particular have been increasingly losing touch with their communities as their resources became increasingly stretched; this not only affects the content, but the trust between reader and paper, and therefore how many people buy it. Newspapers need to realise they are increasingly a service industry, and less a product industry, and in that situation trust becomes increasingly important.
There’s a great journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing over at the OJR, which is close to being added to my must-read online journalism blog posts due to this quote: “Ultimately, journalism is social science, and journalists who want to make best use of crowdsourcing need to get familiar with the mathematics of social science.” Here’s some more:
“if you want to attempt a true crowdsourcing project, someone in your newsroom will [need programming skills]. Free online survey tools and mapping websites can help you collect and publish great reader-contributed data. But if you want custom information to move from survey form to published report in real time, you can’t do that yet without a programmer on your team.
“… The interviewing and document searches of 20th-century investigative reporting will look incomplete as savvy journalists and newsrooms learn to harness the Internet’s wide reach and interactivity to gather massive databases that only formal social science techniques can effectively manage and analyze.”
The Online Journalism Blog Facebook Group (does OJBFG sound any snappier?) announces the first of its Experiments in Facebook Journalism (that’ll be OJBFG:EFJ then).
Starting simple: I’ve begun a discussion forum on ‘Your top RSS feeds’:
“Who’s top of your RSS list? Where do you go for online journalism news? Where do you go for debate? For advice? And for sheer fun?”
The concept behind this is simple: ‘my audience knows more than I do’. Please contribute and help a) create a useful resource for readers; and b) improve this blog’s sources.
More experiments to come…
Press Gazette reports on the BBC using Google Maps to organise flood reports:
“After a few hours of work on his laptop, [broadcast journalist Oliver] Williams had created an interactive map plotting audio files of BBC Radio Berkshire reports — along with pictures and YouTube videos being sent in by the public — to the locations around the county that they referred to. Over the following days, BBC Berkshire journalists were able to add additional reports to the map as the story continued, including new flood warnings as they came in to the newsroom.”
Online Journalism Blog 