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Recommended reading: Investigative social media, new ideas and tools

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

Link roundup: Facebook deals, Times paywalls, ONA and news experiments

Geolocation meets deals

Last news first. Facebook announced today that it will be doing more with its location feature, including offering deals tied to location. This could spell trouble for other geolocation providers like Foursquare and Gowalla, group buying sites like Groupon and, sadly, news sites looking for revenue streams. Facebook is offering these deals for free right now – and who’ll buy the proverbial cow through the likes of us when they can get the milk for free from Facebook?

A consumer/business side take on Facebook Places from D.C. blogger Lisa Byrne at DCEventJunkie outlines the potential on the local level. Facebook seem to have a lot of options for businesses of many sizes and kinds (including charities) to take advantage of the deal service.

Paywalls busted

Also today, GigaOm declares It’s Official: News Corp.’s Paywalls Are a Bust. NewsCorp’s Times (in London) lost 90% of its online traffic after putting up a paywall earlier this year. Somehow, they paint this as success, as they see a smaller online audience that is paying for their service as better than a large one getting it for free. Advertisers, it seems, disagree.

Election Experiments

I blogged here about what TBD was doing for elections (will update today with how that all turned out).The Nieman Lab and Lost Remote documented what news organizations around the country were doing to cover the 2010 election using news media and social media tools. Some great ideas in these posts from the likes of the Huffington Post, NPR and Washington Post.

More Adventures in Storify

Speaking of newsroom experiments, we at TBD are still in love with the tool. Burt Herman, who created the tool, was in the office Monday to tell us a few tips and tricks as well as take suggestions for improvements. Burt is awesome. We’ve been trying it in lots of different instances and news situations. Here’s a few of them:

Online News Association Conference

This was my first ONA conference and I was lucky to have it be in D.C. I volunteered, so I didn’t see many panels, but I was on the Friday keynote panel about TBD’s launch. Since I don’t have great notes, here’s some posts that summed up a lot of the conference’s highlights.

On Jobs (also ONA)

I sat for an interview Friday at ONA with Kent State student Nicole Stempak about journalism jobs for college grads. She asked me to explain how I’ve been fortunate enough to create my own positions in social media and online news since I left college. A few people asked me to share it, so I’m posting it here.

Data mining information from Twitter

It’s downright amazing what you can find out from Twitter’s formidable search engine. Here’s just some of what you can do with Twitter’s publicly available feeds:

• See what’s happening on your beat: Basic, but no less awesome. Follow the Twitter feeds of any agencies, officials and other contacts on your beat.

Find people on the scene or read reactions to events: Twitter has an excellent built-in search engine that allows you to search by keywords, location, date and more. It’s a gold mine to the journo who takes the time to search correctly.

More: Even if you aren’t searching for a particular topic, a Twitter search is a great way to do a fishing expedition for events (try searching for crash, fire, hurt, etc.). Also be sure to try common misspellings in the keyword search.

Search for someone at a particular place: Use the Twitter search with Foursquare or Gowalla to find an eyewitness in a particular location at the time news occurred. Search for the name of the location or keyword with added operators for 4sq or gowal.la. Like this.

See what topics are trending nationally and locally: Your home page on Twitter will show you what’s trending right now either network wide or by your location. Also check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). For instance, check out this local trendsmap data to see what topics keep coming to the top of Twitter in the DC area right now.

See tweets on a map: Check out Bing’s Twitter and Foursquare maps to see searchable tweets and check-ins on a map. For a new map, go to bing.com/maps/explore and select the map app you want.

Watch real-time reaction: Twitterfall is a great site for watching developing reactions and trends. Watch one of the trending topics or search for keywords to see them “fall” in as they’re tweeted.

Get a photo from the scene: There are lots of sites that allow you to search Twitter photos, but plugging twitpic OR yfrog OR flickr OR tweetphoto (plus a location or keyword) into Twitter Search will also turn up a lot of pictures. See one you’d like to use? Be sure to ask.

The sites here are just the tip of the iceberg – there are thousands more apps out there using this network to display useful trends and info.

Related Info:

Need to Know Twitter Tips for Journalists (6/4/10)

Excellent recommended post on the subject from Web Up The Newsroom.

Recommended reading for June 22-25

These are my recommended links for June 22nd through June 25th:

Recommended reading for June 10th-12th

These are my recommended links for June 10th through June 12th:

  • 5 Twitter Tools to Help You Manage Unfollowers | WebProNews – I can’t recommend Qwitter to anyone – it simply doesn’t work. Try these other services to keep an eye on who is unfollowing you – and possibly why.
  • Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp – Is this the end of the world as we know it? Maybe. I’m not ruling out that a good Twitter stream is worth paying for – I just haven’t seen it yet.
  • A new Colonel Tribune? – Daniel Honigman, the voice and creator of Colonel Tribune, is no longer with the Tribune. While I give him big congrats for getting out of the business on his talents in social media, I don’t think Colonel Tribune can really be the same with a new voice. We see this on a smaller scale when we change voices behind @cincienquirer – anyone can see the difference.
  • The ‘branding’ of the journalist – Editors Weblog – I’m always bugging the reporters at my paper to market themselves as brands – particularly in the current job climate.
  • Facebook | Recession Survivors – You’ll need to log into Facebook to see it, but this project is an excellent example of how news outlets can use the crowdsourcing tools built into Facebook to involve the community in a story. Click on the videos tab to see the fan videos that Facebook users have contributed to this project.
  • To Tweet? To Twitter? The Final Word On Proper Twitter Lingo – The AP Stylebook has officially added Twitter and it’s words for usage (“to tweet” “to Twitter”). Who says we’re behind?
  • Lead, Follow or Block: When to Use Twitter’s Block Function – A reporter today asked me about Twitter’s block function – when it should be used and what exactly it does. I found this post to be helpful in explaining the issue (the comments also add some insight).
  • Twitter Dividends | Knight Digital Media Center Weblog – This was an interesting discussion amongst alums of the Knight Digital Media Center’s fellowship workshops about what sort of gains news organizations can or should expect from Twitter. Yours truly is part of this discussion – and I suggest the answer doesn’t lie in analytics.

Recommended reading for June 8th

These are my recommended links for June 8th:

Recommended reading for May 28th-June 2nd

These are my recommended links for May 28th through June 2nd:

  • 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.

Recommended reading for May 26-27

These are my recommended links for May 26th through May 27th:

A catch-up on recommended reading

These are my recommended links for the past couple of weeks (sorry, I’ve been busy!):

Recommended reading for May 6th

These are my recommended links for May 6th:

Recommended reading for April 24th through May 5th

These are my recommended links for April 24th through May 5th:

Recommended reading for April 24th

These are my recommended links for April 24th:

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