Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: ugc

How to build, manage and customize a Crowdmap

By

On September 24, 2010

In New Technology, Surviving, TBD

So you’ve got a great idea for a user-contributed map you need to launch RIGHT NOW. Ushahidi’s Crowdmap makes it pretty easy, and hopefully this post makes it even easier. All examples shown are from TBD’s Crowdmap for D.C.’s election.

First of all, if you’re mapping a crisis, Crowdmap recommends checking our their Emergency Response Strategy first (pdf).

Also, check and see if anyone else has done your map idea with a Google Search. If someone else has already built a map of what you want to do in the same area, maybe you should just help them out instead of replicating the work.

The Quick Build

Sign up for a Crowdmap account at www.crowdmap.com and log in.

1. Click on Create New Deployment

2. On the deployment setup page, pick a url, name and tagline for your map. Keep SEO in mind here to make it easier to find. (You can edit this later, so don’t sweat it too much). Click Finish.

3. Click on admin dashboard for your map or go to http://yourmapname.crowdmap.com/admin

This is your map’s Dashboard. Bookmark it. Your map is now live and activated. If you need to launch it right now, you can – though there’s further additions and customizations you can do. Note: With the default settings, people will only be able to submit reports on the site.

More after the jump (had to do it for images…)

Read More

Quickly create a collaborative map with Crowdmap

By

On September 21, 2010

In New Technology, TBD

Every election since I started my professional career has led the news organization I was working for at the time to say, “We really should have a map of election problems.” Then we’d build some UGC map held together by virtual duct tape. Sound familiar?

User-populated maps have come a long way in the past few years thanks to lots of free technology available on the web. Google Maps, for instance, was a early precursor that still has a lot of utility today. See my [very impressive] map for free donuts as a good (and yes, silly) example of a quick Google collaborative map.

In 2008, Ushahidi (which is Swahili for “testimony” – the more you know) made its debut in mapping post-eletion violence in Kenya . The mapping tool allowed for user to add reports to the map using SMS, email and on-site forms. They’ve since added support for reports via Twitter hashtag.

While they’ve had great success in mapping international crises (like the Haiti Rescue Efforts) and domestic trends (like the Atlanta Crime Map), the main problem with Ushahidi is that it isn’t altogether quick or easy to get a map set up. The software is free and open source, but you need to have a server and programming know-how to get it going.

Thankfully, Ushahidi recently launched a stripped-down, hosted version of it’s mapping tool called Crowdmap. In about 10 minutes, you can have a user-contributed map up and running with no programming know-how and no server.

WMATA Problem Map

WMATA Problem Map

Reports submitted on-site flow in to a back-end queue that’s easy to publish as verified or unverified reports. Messages sent via email or Twitter can be converted to full map reports by an admin in a matter of a couple of minutes. All reports have an option to add photos, videos or news links to more info. You can schedule reports to publish and certain times, plus designate specific submitters (like your staff) to have their reports be auto-approved.

Crowdmap does have a couple of downsides. For one, it isn’t embeddable on your site. It has to be used on Crowdmap, though you can use a Google analytics tracking code to track traffic. It also isn’t particularly customizable, so you can’t brand it or add significant new features as you can with Ushahidi. Still, though, it’s a heckuva lot better than some of the cobbled-together maps I’ve had to put together before.

I recently built a couple of these maps for TBD.com, one for mapping Washington-area transit issues and another for monitoring polling problems on the day of D.C.’s primary elections. Neither took much time to set up and both had/have decent participation, given that we promote it on our site. We got far more Twitter reports than anything else, which is likely because we put the most effort into promoting it there. At some point, I’d like to expand our reports to include SMS contributions.

I’ll have a post soon that will walk though setting up a Crowdmap, but for now, check out the site and tinker around. It’s super easy.

TBD experiments in community engagement: Week 1

By

On August 13, 2010

In My Work, Social Media, TBD

It’s the end of our first week on business at TBD and, admittedly, I’m completely exhausted. We all are.

It felt like a good first week for us – we got a lot of reviews, positive and negative, from other media sites and blogs. Despite the bugs and occasional complaints, we did have the opportunity to come out of the gates with a few engagement experiments you might find helpful at your own news orgs.

Open discussion on launch day

We had an open Cover it Live chat on the Community Blog from 9-4 on launch day. TBD Community hosts Lisa Rowan, Jeff Sonderman, Daniel Victor and Nathasha Lim took questions, complaints and bug reports from site visitors in an open and honest fashion. They didn’t just address the positive, they also did what they could to assuage the fears of those missing the former websites for WJLA and News Channel 8, now replaced by TBD.com.

Crowdsourcing for breaking news photos

On Thursday, the Washington, D.C. area woke up to severe thunderstorms, high winds, flooding streets – and a lot of damage. While our one full-time photographer was able to get a lot of art, we knew we couldn’t be everywhere. The call was sounded for photos on Twitter and on the site – and readers responded with submissions on-site and via Twitpic.

We ended up repeating this process later in the day with a reported electrical fire near the District’s business center. I first saw reports and Twitpics of the fire on a random Twitter search for “Fire near: Washington DC”. We quickly reached out on Twitter for permission to use the photos – and we were off to the races. It was great to get such good response out of the gate.

Working with bloggers on breaking news

Around 1:30 pm Tuesday, I looked over one of my series of Twitter searches and found a tweet reporting an alleged hit-and-run by a Metrobus in Arlington, Va. I contacted the guy, Matt, via reply and asked him if he’d talk to our Arlington reporter, Rebecca Cooper. He agreed.

At 2:12, network partner site Unsuck DC Metro, who the original tweet was directed toward, had a post up with the tip.

Another partner site, ARLNow, had a story with photos and quotes from the man involved in the accident at 3:07. TBD had a story with the tipster’s report and ARLNow’s report up before 4 p.m, approximately four hours before The Washington Post or WTOP (and a hat tip to the Post for promoting the great efforts of ARLNow).

Without the tip provided by Twitter and the hustle by the bloggers in our community network, there’s no way we could have had such a story so fast. Who says bloggers aren’t journalists? Not us.

Tapping into the crowd for political coverage

Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag

Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag

On Wednesday, TBD TV’s Newstalk program had the Democratic candidates for D.C. mayor on the program for a debate. In the hours before the 10 a.m. debate, we asked readers to submit their questions for the candidates via hashtag on Twitter. The response was more than we could fit on the program, which was great (see right).

When the debate went live on TV and online, fact-checking reporter Kevin Robillard had a live Cover it Live chat where readers could chime in with comments, ask questions and suggest facts to be checked as the candidates said them on the air.

The debate got a lot of traction on Twitter and on the chat. Kevin had some great material for The Facts Machine, which is a TBD blog dedicated to backing up or refuting questionable facts.

We hope to do a lot more projects like this in the future. Not bad for the third day out.

Online news is always TBD

By

On April 22, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, TBD

So our new little metro site for Washington, D.C. is no longer nameless. It was announced today that the name of the site will be TBD – and I think it’s perfect.

As my future colleague Jeff Sonderman wrote,  it really fits with the mission of what we’re trying to do here.

News at the start of the reporting process is “to be determined” – though in the traditional model, many readers don’t get to see it or be a part of it at that point. You get it later, as a finished product in print, online or on-air. If you’re lucky, we’ll let you comment on it or write a letter to the editor when its done.

I truly believe needs to be alive to be relevant. Our goal is to get news out there fast, yes, but we also need to make that news evolve in time with the release of information, the ebb and flow of public opinion and the constant input of those affected by it.

There can and will be several avenues for the public to share in cultivating and developing the news at TBD – and I hope the people of metro DC will be as excited to be a part of it as I am. So far, the reaction seems positive. What do you think?

Weather coverage made easy

By

On February 19, 2010

In My Work, Surviving

Weather is big business for those of us in news, especially when it gets to be extreme weather like just about every state has experienced in the last two weeks.

Lots of news outlets have developed amazing new ways to get out weather information and pull in interaction from readers, but sometimes what’s simple can work in a pinch.

Most of the time when we’ve had snowstorms in the past, we at Cincinnati.Com have had a basic story file set up that we re-top and add to throughout the day as the news changes. Without the occasional total re-write during the course of the news cycle, it can end up reading like a very long Frankenstein of an article, with the possibility of specific items getting buried in all of the text.

I recently set up a basic WordPress blog specifically to handle weather events news to avoid this problem. It has links to all the basic weather info we have available on the site, a way to search all of the posted entries and tags/categories that make posts easy to browse by topic or location. The blog uses the TDO mini Forms plugin that can allow our reporters – and our readers – to submit updates from where they are.

Even though we haven’t yet gotten a lot of reader submissions, the blog has been immensely helpful from a news management standpoint. Reporters can file to the blog from their homes, phones or satellite offices, all we have to do it click “publish” in our dashboard. No re-writes are necessary because as the story develops, we can just add news posts. The format also provides an easy way to “sticky” important posts at the top and generates an easy link for the day’s event cancellations.

This easy method of publishing updates weather news has been a great supplement to our info releases and content on Twitter, on our mobile site, text alerts and all of the usual photos and videos we bring out fr every story. The blog’s been doing great traffic on storm days and, from my view, has been a huge burden lifted from the backs of already busy online editors (such as myself).

Because this info has such a short shelf life, I’ve just been deleting all of the old content as soon as the storm coverage ends. We don’t want readers coming back for new weather updates only to find outdated info from last week’s storm. I know that isn’t the greatest option for the sake of SEO and outside linking, but it has made it very easy to essentially launch whole new blogs for each circumstance. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what they would do to prevent link breaks and confusion.

Anyway, that’s been our publishing plan these past two weeks – and if it’s something you think you could use, go for it. WordPress is free, quick to set up and has lot of plugins to enhance user experience.

What has anyone been doing to cover these storms online? What have you been reading?

Don’t make promises about UGC you can’t keep

By

On November 18, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

It may be old news to media law nerds like me, but the ongoing case of Barnes v. Yahoo has revealed a potential minefield of legal trouble for media websites of all sizes in something as simple as a broken promise.

Dont make promises!

Don't make promises!

As most every media person knows, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants immunity from liability to service providers (including media sites) for user-generated content, even if it is defamatory. The Barnes case re-asserted that protection, but it also revealed a possible loophole in that immunity that can occur if you promise to remove content – and don’t follow through.

The case, in short:

It started with a bad breakup. Cecilia Barnes’ ex-boyfriend put personal info and lewd photos of her in a Yahoo profile soliciting for sex. She tried to contact Yahoo to get the defamatory profile removed and eventually got through to a person who said they’d take care of it. They didn’t.

And it was there that the loophole appeared. Aside from the issue of defamation in relation to the content of the profile, Barnes’ suit has a claim for breach of contract from Yahoo for not taking down the profile as promised.

While U.S. contract law typically requires evidence of a contract, there’s a judicial doctrine known as “promissory estoppel” that makes a promise like that at Yahoo a contract.

[promissory estoppel] allows courts to find an enforceable contract absent consideration where a claimant can prove the following: 1) a promise was made, 2) the promisor, as a reasonable person, should have foreseen that the promise would induce the conduct of the type which occurred, and 3) the claimant actually relied on the promise resulting in a substantial change in his or her position.

So, that broken promise, essentially, is the contract that was broken – and thus, a whole other Pandora’s box is opened.

The lesson for you? If you have comments or other kinds of user-submitted content on your website or blog and someone calls to complain about something in that content, whatever you do – don’t make any promises to remove it if you don’t want legal responsibility for it.

I know from experience on these kind of calls that you want to say you’ll take care of it right away, but don’t. Say you’ll look into it. Tell everyone in your newsroom to say the same.

And finally, for the love of God, don’t put up profiles of your ex-girlfriends on Yahoo – prank calls are far less problematic.

Journalists should fight for the rights of bloggers

By

On October 5, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

That’s right, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Lots of journalists, bloggers and others who work to uncover the truth have been excited at the prospect of Congress finally passing a federal shield bill to prevent reporters from being forced to testify as to the identities of confidential sources. When it came out last week that the Senate version of the federal shield bill would exclude unpaid bloggers and citizen journalists, the enthusiasm was dampened (for some of us).

The Senate version of the bill limits the law’s protection to a very strict definition of a journalist. It would only apply to paid employees or contractors who work for publishers of various media and wire services. The House version, in contract, only limits the law to those who gather news “for a substantial portion of [their] livelihood or for substantial financial gain”.

The good folks at the Citizen Media Law Project suggest this exclusion is due to most senators’ unfamiliarity with citizen journalists. I daresay it also has to do with the fact that citizen journalists and bloggers are not going to get the backing of the big journalism organizations pushing the law in the first place. A lot of big media, I’d expect, would love to have exclusive protections to prevent bloggers and citizen journalists from scooping them on whistleblower-type stories.

In my opinion, the change seems to go against the entire premise for the law in the first place – and we should all be upset about it. To hell with competition from bloggers and unpaid journalists – we need all the watchdogs we can get as the numbers of professional journalists deplete.

Moreover, any professional journalist who agrees that the change should exclude unpaid bloggers should consider that most of us are one layoff away from becoming “unpaid journalists” ourselves. Consider those ex-newspaper employees out there starting their own operations from scratch…don’t your former colleagues deserve the same protection? Doesn’t anyone who’s uncovering the truth?

Aside from the limits of the protection, the White House is trying to push through changes that would make it so the shield does not apply in cases where the confidential source leaks information pertaining to national security. Stay tuned on that front – it just might have legs (or kill the bill altogether).

Submit a post

By

On September 4, 2009

In About This Site, User-Submitted Posts

Eds Note: The experiment has concluded. For now, I’m taking this function down due to spammers ruining the fun for everyone.

I’m trying out a new plugin that allows unregistered users to submit posts to the blog. I don’t know if I’ll actually use it on this blog, but I’m testing it out as an option on another project I’m working on right now.

If you’d like to help me test it – or you actually want to submit a post to this blog – please try it out for me. It could just be a goofy test message (please, make it funny! I need it) – or, if you submit something real, I’ll publish it and see how it looks. Deal?

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén & Hosted by Pressable