Tag Archives: facebook

Four ways journalists can use Facebook (and other social networks)

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The following are answers to a question posed by Greg Manset (via Facebook, naturally):How can journalists use Facebook?

  1. As a great way to find contacts. For example: say you cover the health industry and you add 20 of your contacts to Facebook – by looking at their friends you may be able to find other contacts you wouldn’t otherwise have met. Now, you obviously have to be careful you don’t add whistleblowers or anonymous sources and risk their anonymity, but for most day to day work this can be really useful. I should add that LinkedIn and Twitter can be used in the same way. Continue reading →

Patterns for designing a reputation system

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Yahoo! have released a family of Reputation patterns:

“They don’t tell you how to lay out a page or where to put an interactive widget. Instead, they address how to design a reputation system for your social software.”

Why is this important? The patterns are a wonderful resource for any news organisation looking to plan a community element in which reputation performs a role. In my experience, reputation systems are pretty important in encouraging users to keep coming back to your online community – you could argue, for instance, that the number of friends in Facebook or followers in Twitter is one simple example. Plurk more explicitly uses ‘karma’, as does (in a much better way) Slashdot (for more on Slashdot and karma systems I thoroughly recommend Gatewatching by Axel Bruns).

Yahoo say these are “the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we’re working on,” so worth keeping an eye on what comes next.

Four more social media psychological complaints

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Following my post on the Seven psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts, it appears there have been more syndromes identified. Here they are:

Meme Orphanism

Identified by KerryJ, sufferers exhibit intense feelings of alienation after missing out on viral ‘event’, e.g. Twitter Cartoon Day. See also: FOOcamp anxiety.

Wit Anxiety Gloom Syndrome (WAGS)

Identified by Sarah Hartley: “The sufferer feels what they have to add to the world is so humourous it must be shared – but only after every one of the 140 characters has been considered in depth. Stems from a deep-rooted phobia of “comment shame”.”

Community Disconnection Attack

Patient experiences disorientation upon becoming stranded from social media ‘anchors’ such as Facebook groups, Twitter, blog community etc. Triggers include: service outage; power or battery failure; loss of wifi signal.

User Account Phantasm

Patient is haunted by the ghosts of user accounts created but never used, or long since abandoned. Symptoms include random friend invites from imaginary MySpace users; emails from Plaxo; and Pownce files from the ghostly Dave Winer.

How useful could Seesmic be for journalists?

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See this video and respond on Seesmic

I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.

It isn’t.

It’s social. Continue reading →

Five questions from another journalism student

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A third year BA Honours Journalism student studying at Middlesex University and based at the Journalism Centre Harlow College has emailed me the following questions. As always, I make the responses public.

1. What effect do you think the increase in Internet news sites will have on newspapers?

It’s already had an effect – increased competition, increased immediacy and reduced costs. But it’s not just news sites – the internet enables people and organisations to communicate with each other without needing news media to do it for them. That’s a real challenge. Continue reading →

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut)

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The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. Continue reading →

Seven psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts

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In my capacity as amateur psychotherapist to the blogerati, I have discovered a new raft of complaints as social media addicts adapt to the demands of new technologies and fluctuating social structures. The syndromes identified include:

Comment Guilt

Patients complain of an overwhelming regret that they are not commenting more on other people’s blogs, and ‘engaging with the online community’. Feelings of worthlessness and frustration. Continue reading →

A web presence without a website?

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Sarah* is a final year journalism degree student who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine.

She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.

“I don’t have a website,” she replied.

“But you have a blog?”

“Yes.”

“Facebook?”

“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”

“So you do have a web strategy.” Continue reading →

Ten ways journalism has changed in the last ten years (Blogger’s Cut)

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A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with… Continue reading →