Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: mashable

Recommended reading: Investigative social media, new ideas and tools

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On November 24, 2010

In Recommended Links, Social Media, TBD

Sorry it’s been so long, but it’s been crazy busy as TBD’s preparing for the holidays and other events. This’ll be a quick one, just a few links I’ve been reading of late. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks.

Social media roundup

  • How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media – Great ideas from several resources gathered by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable on how to use social media in investigative reporting and newsroom projects. Includes tips on Crowdmap, Storify, Twitter crowdsourcing, data searches and more. A great post to pass on to the social media haters in your newsroom.
  • RockMelt: The User Manual– If you don’t know about Rockmelt or want to know more on how to use the new social browser, here’s a great guide from the NY Times.
  • 6 innovative uses of Tumblr by newsrooms – The big media companies are only now getting into Tumblr, but there’s a lot of possibilities out there for it.
  • Engaging Facebook fans with clever, conversational updates – Great ideas from Web Up the Newsroom for writing interesting status updates on a media outlet’s Facebook page to drive traffic to content and drive discussion online.
  • In this disturbing bit from FishbowlDC, a Washington Post editor says “crediting the original source of a scoop isn’t “a requirement or even important” because “all news originates from somewhere” and “unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work.” Hm.
  • How News Organizations Are Generating Revenue From Social Media – Another great Mashable rundown of the top ways online media is generating revenue using social media and more to hit new audiences.

On the TBD Front

Uses for Foursquare in news reporting

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On July 9, 2010

In Location Apps, Social Media, Surviving

Aside from all the fun marketing options, Foursquare can be very valuable for reporters, bloggers and other news organizations. Here are a few suggestions:

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

Recommended links: Freemium models, ideas and more

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On November 30, 2009

In Online Revenue Models, Recommended Links

Oh, Rupert

News Corp’s Murdoch says he’ll hide his content from Google very soon. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if he does do it, how long will it take for regret to set in?

Pay Models

Alan Mutter points to the indicators and recent comments from newspaper execs that all point to a continuation of free news online at most outlets. A few places are going freemium, most notably the Star Tribune, who is mimicking the success of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a premium sports service. The discussion in the comments is good too.

More on “freemium” content at the SF Chronicle and BusinessWeek.

Social Media

STATS: Has Twitter Flatlined Just Short of Mainstream? – For a long time, Twitter was gorwing exponentially, as was Facebook. But then Twitter evened out and Facebook just kept going. What happened?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans – Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media – Nothing new here, but it is a nice little overview of how far the news industry has come in using Twitter. Mashable also has a shoutout for social media’s effects on local news.
Mashable has 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases for those who still aren’t sure what to do with those invites.

Speaking of Wave experiments, RedEye has ventured onto Wave. As much as I applaud experimentation with news technology, I really have to question RedEye on this approach. It’s like advertising that you’re having a party, but only a few of your readers will actually be able to go. They seem to forget Wave’s still in preview mode and not everyone has an invite.

It’s time to cut off support for Digg

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On July 21, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

Digg.com has been into more shenanigans – prompting this content provider to ask: Have they gone too far? And if so – why do we in online media continue to support them?

On Monday, Mashable confirmed that Digg surreptitiously changed the behavior of its short URLs in a fashion that diverts web traffic intended for content publishers’ sites to Digg.com.

The move has the social web in an uproar – and should have media websites shaking in their boots. It seems that social media site many of us in online news have taken to caring and feeding with the content that makes it so popular has turned on us in a big way.

Digg URLs are/were very popular with users of Twitter and other microblog services wishing to share links. Then, without alerting its users, Digg has made it so those shortened external links no longer go to that great blog entry or article you wanted to share – but rather it links to directly to Digg.com. Do not pass go, do not collect your page views. In short, the Digg URLs are not shortned URLs at all, but rather a Digg-exclusive traffic driver.

Only tonight has Digg at least somewhat rolled back this change to restore previously used Digg URLs to their original destinations. Even so – they intend to go forward with the traffic diversion plan despite the outcry from users.

I suppose we in online news should have seen this coming. It wasn’t the first sign of aggression from Digg.  I’d say Digg has more than proven that it is a direct threat to content publishers – so why are we still supporting it? Oh, you didn’t know you were supporting Digg? Better take a look at your site.

Check out the articles, blogs, photos and any other content you create. Chances are, there is some method for sharing that content online with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and, yes, Digg. Sometimes that is a button that says Digg, other times it may be a service like the ShareThis button you see on this blog.

See, at one time, Digg was a real boon for online publishers. If your story was popular on Digg, the influx of page views coming from its army of users could be staggering. We wanted everything to be on Digg. In fact, we made it as easy as possible to get our content listed on their site by making these links as prominent as possible.

But it turns out in doing all that reaching out – we contributed to the creation of the very bully who’s stealing publishers’ lunch money. Even though it might not make much of a difference,  we in the online news biz need to take back our tiny corners of the web and at least remove Digg from our pages.

Aside: I know I seem like a hypocrite calling for this, being that I haven’t figured out what to do with my own blog yet, but bear with me.

I’ll fight with online naysayers ’til the cows come home about aggregators and Google – but Digg is a credible threat. It’s time to let them go. Besides, if your site is like that of my employer – they are a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter and Facebook these days anyway. Good riddance.

Recommended reading for April 24th

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On April 24, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for April 24th:

Recommended reading for April 20th

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On April 20, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for April 20th:

The Diggbar: Friend or foe to news sites?

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On April 13, 2009

In Doomsayers, Social Media

When Digg released its Diggbar a couple of weeks ago, I had a “Where’s the outrage?” post all ready to go. Now I’m cautiously optimistic it isn’t the end of the world (so I’m glad I never hit ‘publish’) – though I’m very much on edge.

Digg, as most people know, is a social bookmarking site and social hub that is an unbeatable traffic driver for news content sites. People share, rate and comment on news stories (among other links) and thus, visit your site when you’re “dugg”.

A couple of weeks ago, Digg launched the Diggbar, which makes it easy for Digg users to shorten and post links to Digg, as well as jump from story to story within the Digg umbrella. The big WTF moment, came when we all noticed that all of Digg’s links no longer went to the original content providers’ sites, but rather linked back to Digg. When you’d click the link on a story on the Digg site, it wouldn’t go to the story directly, but would open the page inside of an iframe at Digg’s site. Oh, crap.

At that time, TechCrunch noted that this would not affect most content providers’ web analytics and advertising displays, though it could impact the original source’s ranking in Comscore, Google and more. This had this news website editor weeping for the death of linkbait – and wondering when we’d begin to discourage our users from Digging our stories.

But maybe I was all worried for nothing. Last week, Digg set out to dispel the rumors of their alleged thievery, assuring we naysayers in the publishing world that their new gadget wouldn’t hurt us in SEO rankings, traffic and analytics. As Digg’s John Quinn put it, “Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.”

Don’t get too relieved just yet. Mashable notes that when perusing Digg, users now have to click twice to see the real link (or three times if they read Digg in an RSS reader). This may lead to even more proliferation of Digg links over original links if readers opt to go the easy route and just use those shortened Digg links in their blogs and social media tools. Also, despite their claims, Digg URLs are showing up in Google and goofing up our SEO.

This has led some content providers to block the Diggbar. Engadget, for once, decided to block it last Friday, stating, “We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.”

Mashable weighed in over the weekend with the pros and cons of the Diggbar. The biggest pro, of course, is increased site traffic from eager Diggers…but it may not outweigh the cost of the impact on SEO. I suggest you take a read before you get fired up and ready to call your programmers.

In short, the jury is out. I expect to see more hubbub as the Diggbar becomes more and more popular. And Digg isn’t alone, Facebook is already redirecting traffic back to itself from your shared links. StumbleUpon is soon to follow. There may be a battle brewing between social media sites and news websites over these new tactics – so stay tuned.

Sourcing: Non-profits on Twitter

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On March 19, 2009

In Social Media, Twitter

If your beat regularly includes covering major non-profits, I’d hope for your sake that you’re on Twitter.

Not a day goes by that I don’t see someone I follow trying to raise awareness for a cause or referring to an event sponsored by a non-profit. Many groups have taken to Twitter in the last year (or earlier) and they use it to push out their news, events and stories to those who care for their cause. If you’re on that beat – I’d guess you could use this info.

Face it – it’s a lot less annoying than spammy emails and likely easier to obtain than the faxes coming in to the desk that belonged to your newsroom’s secretary before she got laid off.

Mashable, in their always-helpful mode, has compiled a quick list of 26 non-profits on Twitter now. That number is only likely to grow.

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