If you are ever invited to explain Twitter to someone obsessed with its celebrity aspects or apparently mundane subject matter, here are some suggested responses from the Twittersphere: Continue reading
Soon after I posted my frustration at journalism students being slow to adopt Twitter, I came up with an idea: you only really start using Twitter when there is a social reason – so why not help by creating those social connections? I posted a call-out to Twitter:
Anyone willing to ‘adopt’ a journalism student on Twitter and answer their questions about it?
The response (especially on a Sunday afternoon) was heartwarming – within less than an hour I had more than one ‘Twentor’ (thanks to Scott Keegan for that word) per student – responses below. Two days later and the effect has been noticeable – the majority of students had started chatting to their mentors and you could see the lights switching on. Continue reading
Don’t worry, I’ll get over this Twitter thing very soon, but for now I want to address all of the ill informed coverage that stifles use of Twitter because it can’t see beyond a) celebrities using it and b) the Facebook-style status update thing.
If you’re struggling to think of what to talk about on Twitter, here are some suggestions: Continue reading
That’s the question I posted last night to Twitter – or to be exact: “My journo students have been (mostly) slow to adopt Twitter – can you help by saying why they should use it?”
You may find the replies I received useful: Continue reading
This is something of a bonus following on from my previous beginner’s guide to Twitter. I didn’t have time to deliver this on Monday, but the following is a quick outline of various strategies for finding people of interest on Twitter.
Continuing my practice of putting online journalism lessons online, this is the second part of the week 1 lesson, where I introduce students to Twitter.
BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester has been blogging about the attention that Twitter has been getting from the BBC and some experiments they’ve done with using the open source microblogging platform Laconi.ca:
“I think as the BBC gets its heads around microblogging it will quickly notice that not only is it somewhat promoting a single startup through its wording but that Microblogging is much bigger and like how we don’t host our blogs on wordpress.com, we will want to host it ourselves. There’s all type of things we could do with our microblogging system, things which are forbidden on Twitter or even not possible because of the way Twitter is setup. The obvious example is a children’s microblogging service. This will resolve its self and it will be the geeks who had a hand in the new bright future of the BBC.” Continue reading
How news is produced in a print- or broadcast-only news operation
Above is an image representing how journalism has traditionally been done:
That linear process is pretty much redundant online.
See the diagram below. I’ve found myself drawing this so often recently that I thought I should put it online and save some ink.
Newsgathering, production and distribution are often the same thing in an online environment
The point is clear. Thanks to networked technologies – and RSS in particular – there is no reason why newsgathering cannot also be news production, or news distribution. For example:
I could go on, but here are the implications: 1) a web-savvy journalist or news operation will seek to make as much of their activity visible in this way as possible, adding value to what they do and providing numerous access points for users. It’s for this reason I’m a massive fan of social bookmarking (it also makes it very easy to find things you read previously)
2) Journalism is becoming less polished, more iterative and more networked. Broadcast and print do the ‘finished version’ pretty well – online, we’re often happy with raw information, with the emphasis on ‘raw’.
3) As I’ve said before, the journalist (along with their readers) is now the distributor. You cannot leave that job to someone else. The more active, visible and social you are online, the better for your work both commercially and editorially.
Any thoughts? More examples?
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:
Just to clarify: I have no objection to anyone having personal limits on the number of people they follow on Twitter – only imposing that on others. Here are some of the many reasons people set limits. I’d love to know yours. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 