Zombie Journalism » Industry News & Notes

B.S. Detection for Journalists

Mandy — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:20:07 +0000

Eds Note 10/5: It was brought to my attention that the links in this slideshow are not clickable in the embed here. I included them all below this post.

Ever see a tip that’s too good to be true (it probably is) or a photo so amazing you just can’t believe it (don’t)? Sometimes you can’t just [...]

ESPN goes back in time, bans breaking news on Twitter

Mandy — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:12:20 +0000

ESPN's reporters have a reputation of breaking sports news on Twitter, but the company's new social media policy has banned it. [...]

Facebook comments can’t guarantee a lack of anonymity

Mandy — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:52:30 +0000

There’s a conventional wisdom out there in the online journalism world that: 1.) News site comments will automatically be better if people have to use real names, and 2.) Using Facebook for your comments will accomplish this.

I’ve said many times before that I don’t think anonymity is the problem. My campaign on that seems to be [...]

Sarah Palin’s emails and a call for collaborative journalism

Mandy — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:05:54 +0000

If you were committing an act of news on Friday, June 10, chances are every national news organization missed it.

Why? We all had boxes and boxes of printed emails of an ex-political official to go through. From the New York Times to Mother Jones/MSNBC/ProPublica, the Washington Post and my own employer – many national news sources spent enormous amounts [...]

The Bin Laden story and real-time engagement

Mandy — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:13:51 +0000

Please allow me to think aloud on the past 15 hours.

We all acknowledge that the news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke on social media. We’ve all got stories about Twitter’s impact, roundups of Twitter reactions, tweet timelines and Storification galore – but did anyone in the heat of the developing news last night start engaging readers on [...]

Four key things TBD did right

Mandy — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:33:36 +0000

Despite how it all ended, there are positive lessons to be gleaned from TBD's build, launch and brief life. Here's a few things I hope other news orgs won't shy away from trying in the future [...]

Transcript: What does a social media editor do?

Mandy — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:09:06 +0000

Here’s the transcript of my journalism jobs chat on Poynter.org Tuesday. There were a lot of great questions about what I do as a social media editor, the workflow, metrics, handling criticism and managing corrections.

We had more than 200 participants and more questions that I could get to in one sitting. If anyone has a question [...]

Link roundup: Twitter news, tech tools and a shameless plug

Mandy — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:07:32 +0000

On the Twitters In their “The science of the hashtag” post, Twitter charts the lifecycle of a hashtag and spells out just what and who propelled it to popularity. In short – celebrities > media, as if you didn’t already know. An alleged Twitter expert says research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet [...]

Ruling or no, always ask permission before re-using images on the social web

Mandy — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:20:50 +0000

If you’re to believe Agence France-Press – and many journalists who I’ve personally met – “regular people” don’t have the same copyright protections on the web as journalists. This isn’t true and hasn’t been true – and I’m glad a court said so.

AFP tried to argue in court that by uploading his photos to Twitter/Twitpic, a [...]

New media ethics, same as old media ethics

Mandy — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:36:33 +0000

Earlier this week, the Patch site in Palo Alto apologized after a freelancer plagiarized a story from another website. An apology posted on the site stated that copy was lifted from VentureBeat, an online tech news site. It doesn’t state if the freelancer will continue to work for the site, but the apology includes this:

The writer has been [...]