1. Find a source with ties to a specific location

When you go to a venue’s page on Foursquare, you can see who has recently checked in there and who is there the most often (aka The Mayor). Say a popular local eatery recently closed – find a frequent customer to interview for the story.

2. Find a source on the scene – fast

In addition to the venue page, you can use Twitter’s search to see publicly posted Foursquare check-ins in near real-time. Go to search.twitter.com and enter 4.sq AND your keyword to see who’s there right now.

3. See where your contacts are –and where they regularly go

Follow your beat contacts and sources on Foursquare and be opened up to their every move. When a Foursquare contact checks in, you can see where they are or have been under Friends.

4. Alert people as to news at a location

Check in where news is happening and leave a shout message as to what’s happening. You may also want to add a link to a story or your Twitter feed for those wanting more info. If you aren’t at the location, but want people there to see the news item, you can cheat (just this once!) and use m.foursquare.com to leave your shout. Note: People have to be friends with you to see this info.

5. Use your expertise (and drive traffic to your stuff) with tips

Leave a tip based on your knowledge of a venue, neighborhood, landmark or intersection. If you have it, leave a link to a blog post or story you’ve written about it for more info.  (Note: Don’t just use any old post, try to make it actually useful).

More: See what the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bravo are doing on this front.

6. Learn about a location

The tips left behind at venues can be very useful for us as both patrons and profilers. They tell you what to order, what to avoid and what to expect when going there. It may or may not be great for reporting, but it helps when living (trust me).

7. See where the people are

On your Foursquare mobile app, you can see what locations near you have the most check-ins right now. Visiting a site like Social Great can also help you see these trends.

8. Show Where You Go

You can use a Foursquare account to show where you are or where you’ve been in your area, something that could really be of use to neighborhood reporters or bloggers in particular. You can display these on your blog or Facebook page using a variety of available apps.

Recommended Links

• 21 Geolocation Case Studies: Great examples of how brands, media outlets and other sites have used Foursquare, Gowalla and other geolocation applications
• 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare: Mashable offers up suggestions for how reporters and news orgs might use Foursquare
• 4squareoffers.com: Foursquare deals for mayors and check-ins on a simple map
• Big Maps: See tips and check-ins as they happen on a Bing map
• Fourwhere.com: Venues and tips from Foursquare users on a map
• SocialGreat.com: Trending locations (only in some cities)

I don’t think it’ll spoil anything to say we plan to use social media quite a bit in every aspect of TBD, so that training will be very important both before launch and as we go into the future and technology changes. Some of our staff, I imagine, will already have a rich background in social media use, while others may not be as comfortable just yet – so many levels of training will be vital.

I’m in the process of officially updating all of my documentation, so I’m in full resource re-evaluation mode. As I post on training plans, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing and offer your good examples of social media use you think we should take to heart.

Today – Twitter!

So most of us know now that Twitter is a rich way for reporters to connect with sources and readers as well as build their own brands. In addition to the basics of Twitter use, new users need to know how to find the right journalists, sources and locals to follow, using/understanding hashtags and how they can use Twitter for better reporting. I usually point newb reporters to the work of tweeting reporters on Muckrack and use the live presser tweets from @theHyperFix as a good example of live-tweeting.

There are a million great resources on using Twitter. I’ve collected quite a few I like to use.

The next logical step in Twitter training is using it’s vast amount of data to find information, track trends and find sources for stories. Sites like BackTweets, TweetGrid and Twitter’s own pretty formidable search engine can really help a journalist looking for people tweeting about [insert subject here] in their area and beyond.

Web Up The Newsroom recently had a great post about using Twitter search tools in reporting and sourcing that I think may be the best description of I’ve seen geared toward reporters.

Aside from the data search, Twitter’s geolocation data makes it easy to watch trends and tweets as they happen on a map – which is great if, say, news just broke in a certain area and you want to see what’s happening there from afar. I particularly like Bing’s Twitter maps (which can turn into quite a timesuck if you let it). SocialGreat is also nice if you just want to see what places seem to be trending across all the geolocation platforms.

If you’d rather see a list than a map of trending local topics, you could check your Twitter home page – or, better yet – check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). A lot of the time, these are silly chain letter hashtags or obvious news (like how Gulf and Oil are trending here right now), but sometimes you can see reaction to real-time events pop up in these trend searches (check it out right after a celebrity death or during a big sporting event to see what I mean). Trendsmap also has a great visualizer.

If you know what keyword you’d like to track over a course of time, Trendistic has a decent trend graphing application.

Aside from Twitter, there’s obviously a lot of other social media we’ll want to use in our day-to-day operations…but that’s for another post, my friends.

In the meantime, what are your favorite tips and tricks, apps or uses for Twitter I should be sure to pass on as we start training?

In your daily news meetings, listen for how many times an assignment editor or reporter says, “….we’ll have that for tomorrow.” If this is in reference to anything but an enterprise story from the budget, that’s a bad sign. If it is in regard to any event happening that same day, it’s a very bad sign.

I’ve been on the online side of newspapers for my entire professional career and I’ve seen a lot of culture shifts, but the online deadline of now seems to be the biggest gap to cross. It seems that many reporters and editors are no longer driven by competition to be first with the news. Many don’t think there even IS competition.

With so many newspapers closing up shop in the last five years, many metro newspapers (like the Enquirer) are the only dailies left standing in their cities. In smaller areas, newspapers have enjoyed lifetimes of market domination. With the old school competition gone, some news people have simply taken to early in-office retirement.

Where reporters once raced to get exclusive stories into the next edition before the competing afternoon paper could jump aboard, now they don’t see a good reason to rush when the print deadline is 5 p.m. They ask, “Who are we trying to scoop, anyway?”

As online editor I can only say, “Everybody.”

Just because there’s no other printed daily newspaper in town doesn’t mean there isn’t competition. The Cincinnati Post may be dead and gone, but it doesn’t mean we’re the knight left standing. My paper still has to contend with several TV station websites, a “weekly” business journal reporting daily news online and a robust blogosphere that can (and often do) beat us to the punch.

Putting aside the obvious time implications of true breaking news, let’s look at the day-to-day budget – the press conferences, scheduled events and government meetings. How long after such an event has taken place does it take for your publication to have some sort of news online?

If it is more than an hour before this gets online, you’ve already lost to the competition. If it is leisurely filed at 5 p.m. for the next day’s paper, well, you should probably just pack up your website and head home.

The fact is, it isn’t even just about being first, it is about proving your value in a 24-hour news marketplace.

Readers expect information as soon as something happens. Any gap in time between an event happening and when they read about it from the “paper of record” is time spent looking elsewhere, on Google, Twitter, blogs, TV sites, etc. to find out what’s going on. They aren’t expecting a Pulitizer winner in 20 minutes, just the basics.

How relevant is that write-up of a  late night school board meeting in the day-after-tomorrow’s paper? If we as an industry still exist for the purpose of informing the public, we should re-evaluate our relevance if we can’t even get a basic overview of a government meeting to them within a half hour of its conclusion. For breaking news, the deadline of NOW is even more important.

We as journalists want readers to choose us and, preferably, pay for us – but we need to give them a reason to want it in the first place.

The local coverage of this high-profile trial has provided a demonstration in action of how important the very roots of good court reporting still are in this age of social media.

There’s no less than two TV stations live blogging the trial and several outlets and reporters live-tweeting the proceedings, including Enquirer court reporter Kimball Perry. Fox19 has a very interesting Dipity timeline on the case (kudos to them). This is all in addition to the exhaustive video, stories, photo galleries, etc. that we usually are serving up at a trial like this.

Honestly, it’s all gotten to a point where I believe readers may be over-saturated with coverage.

Even with all of this going on, thing’s get missed. Kimball has been scooping the heck out of the people recording the event live right next to him because, well, he knows what’s going on. At one point, a couple of local TV reporters asked him what just happened and what it meant.  They knew he knew – and he was explaining all of it on his Twitter feed (and shooting Flip videos).

This isn’t to knock on TV competition or social media, but merely to underscore how even with all of this technology available and a million ways to describe what’s happening, it is the oldest skill set in the toolbox that has offered one-of-a-kind insight into a difficult case.

This isn’t something Kimball does just for big trials, he’s in that courtroom every day. He found out the defendant was pleading guilty before anyone else because he knew who to ask – and how to ask. A lot of our competitors don’t have reporters in court often enough and long enough to soak up the experience, lingo and legal know-how to cover a trial the way Kimball does.

That’s just what good beat reporting’s all about – and it’s something we seem to have less of all the time as we have to do more with less. Twitter and live blogs and all that are great tools for enhancing the way readers get news, but it’s tough to replace the know-how of an experienced beat reporter.

We’ve also found that the newfangled tools available aren’t always the best options depending on the circumstances.

This fascination with live-blogging at the local level started last spring during a similarly high-profile trial in Warren County, where a young newlywed was accused (and convicted) of killing his young wife. Local TV station WLWT sent reporter Travis Gettys to live blog the trial using CoveritLive. It was immensely popular and Gettys became something of a local celebrity – it was good stuff.

We have Cover it Live and use it for chats and live blogs sometimes. We could have used it in that trial, but we chose not to. Our reporter in that case, Janice Morse, strongly believed her coverage would be better informed and more comprehensive if she were paying strict attention to the trial and not describing the proceedings.

While I think both kinds of coverage would be valuable to readers – we could only send one person, so we opted for the old way. She said that over the course of the trial, those live-somethinging the proceedings had asked her what was going on, what a particular term meant, etc. And rightly so, I know from live blogging past events that you don’t always really take in what’s going on, information sort of passes through you. That can make it very tough to go back and write a comprehensive story at the end of the day.

The live blog is just one tool – and one we don’t always have to use. The same goes for Twitter, video, carrier pigeons and anything else me might try to get out info to readers. When it comes down to it, sometimes you just need someone to help explain stuff. That’s our job.

The Nieman Lab took a favorable look at the practice, and I can’t help but agree it’s something we should be taking a lesson on.

Newspaper and magazine reporters who want online audiences to appreciate the fruits of their labor poured into lengthy watchdog pieces and enterprise journalism should consider writing a shorter, bulleted synopsis version to run online, with a link to the full-length piece.

I know, you’d love it if your prize-worthy story were appreciated by all readers, but you and I know that just isn’t going to happen. If you write a “web friendly” version, those facts you gathered, at least, can get some traction, even if your prose has been trimmed out.

Under the familiar topic of paid online news, the Guardian reported this week on a poll that found web users prefer subscriptions to micropayments. Of course, that’s all entirely based on the premise that they’d have to be paying for news in the first place, as there was no option for “I will do what I can to not pay anything”.

Anyway, the finding isn’t entirely surprising. Most people don’t understand micropayments in the first place and, frankly, it makes sense to those who may be more familiar with print subscriptions to buy all-access for one fee than buying content one piece at a time.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Jack Shafer at Slate made the case as to why Obama should stay out of the fight to save American newspapers. The real issue at hand is a bill from Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin that would allow newspapers to reorganize themselves as non-profits.

The reasons this could be a very bad idea are many. For starters, it seeks to only help newspapers and not any other media. Two, it doesn’t actually fix the primary problem, anyway. If newspapers were to suddenly become non-profits, it wouldn’t change the fact that they lose money. And three, it seeks to preserve a status quo in an industry that needs to be anything but.

A far better solution (IMHO) gets a spotlight from David Westphal at the Online Journalism Review: Creating revenue by selling our best skills as journalists.  Talk surfaced at a recent IRE conference about the prospect of selling journalists’ research skills on a “for hire” basis. This sort of thing has been done for years by the Economist and a few operations (like GlobalPost) have begun trying it out as well.

It’s a simple idea that could really have some legs if done correctly. It would take one of the most innate and specialized skills of investigative journalists – researching and reporting – and sell it to clients who want deep background on, say, a local company, an incident or a piece of legislation.  We all know that anyone can write a story these days, but it takes a certain kind of skill set to tenaciously chase a story in the way an investigative reporter might – so why not market that?

• 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy – As always, Mashable pulls together the tips that can help us all – individuals or businesses and news orgs – better develop our social media strategies.
• Keyword Streamgraphs on Twitter – This site creates a visualization of the last 1000 tweets on a certain keyword. It doesn’t really make anything useful data-wise, but it is a great little thing you can link to out of your coverage of an issue or to track your buzz on an ongoing story. Mine is made for mapping who mentions “Reds” – but you can change the link to be any keyword.
• How to Mine Twitter for Information – Great tips on getting data from Twitter to track buzzwords and trends over time.
• Collaborative Reporting Tools | Publish2 – This new offering from Publish2 – which is a great tool if you haven’t used it – can be used in a lot of ways. It can be used to gather news tips, crowdsource stories and allow multiple people to contribute to reporting.
• JournoTwit – The twitter client that’s not just for journalists… – This tool is still in development, but it has great potential. It is similar too, though not as good as, Tweetdeck – only online-based. If you could make the columns customizable, I’d be switching today.
• Journalism.co.uk : BBC double-checks journalists’ ‘professional’ tweets – I guarantee there are reporters and editor that read this and think, “What a great idea!” No, it isn’t. Twitter is “right now” – not “ten minutes from now.” If you need an editor to make sure your tweets don’t have libel, spelling or factual error, you shouldn’t be tweeting. Period.
• Commentary: Why Twitter won’t save journalism or kill it | McClatchy – A fairly honest overview of Twitter from someone who isn’t “in the tank” like me. While I think it is short-sighted to say Twitter won’t revolutionize journalism (maybe not Twitter – but something like it can and will), it’s at least giving the service a shot.

• 6 Easy To Use ReTweeting Tips | Blog of Mr. Tweet – Good tips for re-tweeting and how to get re-tweeted. They’re no-brainers for experienced Twitterers, but a good quick verview for newbies.
• Comments on news stories a double-edged sword – As a person who manages a newspaper website’s commenting community, I can also attest to the fact that there are very strong pros and cons to having comments on your stories. This is a good study on the subject and worth a read for any journalist.
• Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data – washingtonpost.com – Reporters should be able to take advantage of Google’s data efforts in reporting CAR stories.
• Google Starts Twittering News Headlines — InformationWeek – The Twittering is only the beginning. Content providers that aren’t pushing news now should be very worried.
• Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites – An amazing (and lightning fast) tool that helps you search common usernames across social networking sites. Check to see if your brand or name is available – or sneak a peek at where else your contacts have accounts.