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Manually retweeting used to be the only option for passing on someone’s message on Twitter – you used to literally have to cut and paste on the Twitter site, although Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, among others, offered RT options. Since that’s no longer the case, I think this piece makes a fair point re original sources and credit… ” Use someone else’s picture to drive traffic to your brand, and people get mad. Slap an RT in front of someone else’s words, and that’s apparently just how the world works.”
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USA Today Goes Viral – NYTimes.com
I absolutely love this idea… “For Social Media Tuesdays, the staff must act as if there is no other way to get their articles except through sites likes Facebook and Reddit. That means USA Today’s journalists diligently place each of their famously punchy, graphic-rich stories onto various social media platforms. The purpose is to get them thinking like their readers, who increasingly get news through their Twitter feeds instead of the paper’s front page or home page.
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Rebooting Newsroom Strategy as Mobile, Wearables Rise | Mediashift | PBS
““I certainly think the trend in wearables is on an unstoppable trajectory,” Hutcheon said. “It will happen this year with smart watches. I’m not sure how smart watches will help journalism per se, but I do see things like Google Glass and drones as having a big part to play,” he said. “You can live-stream a news conference through a Google Glass; you could take pictures of people from that point of view. It’s a bit gimmicky still, but I think eventually it will be huge and mainstream.”
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Five ways local media can help itself | BBC College of Journalism
“As we adjust to a world where our regional and local media has fewer titles, fewer journalists, smaller profit margins and a reduced frequency of publishing, we need new models for local journalism to emerge.
The BBC absolutely needs to be at the heart of this. But the commercial and community sectors shouldn’t just look to the BBC (and the licence fee) to help them solve their problems. They need to engage more creatively with structural challenges affecting the sector.”
Category: Uncategorized
Interesting reads (weekly)
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The different styles and levels of excitement of commentators’ goal announcements makes for a fun interactive. Not too difficult to replicate I would imagine; some fun to be had here around regional differences in nouns, for example.
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A feast of takeouts from #DEN visual content meetup | The Media Online
Steve Matthewson’s thoughts, post-DEN, on visual content and how media should be using it. Good read.
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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Verifying Social Media Content: The Best Links, Case Studies and Discussion | Groundswell
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Sarah Marshall — How to export a Twitter list to an Excel spreadsheet
TwExList allows you to export a Twitter list into an Excel spreadsheet, and what is particularly useful is that it gives you a summary of data.
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Video Streaming apps and sites | shambles.net
A very useful round-up of the different options for live image coverage
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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“Neuroscientists published research showing the changes in neural patterns of volunteers after reading a narrative story based on real events. The researchers assigned subjects to read Robert Harris’ 2003 novel Pompeii, a piece of historical fiction based on real events. It is a genre cousin to narrative non-fiction and narrative journalism that employs the storytelling techniques of fiction to tell true stories. The results showed heightened connectivity in a specific part of the brain. The left temporal cortex lit up, and not just for the period immediately following the reading assignments. The neural changes persisted for several days. This is why we sometimes say that a story was so powerful we just can’t seem to shake it.”
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How to get the best out of photo apps on your smartphone – video | Technology | theguardian.com
Really useful mix of iOS and Android (ok, mainly iOS) apps, both paid for and free, to get the most out of smartphone photography.
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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Reader Flow and theArticle Gateway
I believe we spend far to much time faffing about making home pages look ‘right’ when much of our traffic comes to stories direct rather than from our shop window, so to speak. Therefore, of course I agree with this post (which also links to another worthwhile read on the subject at The Verge…TL:DR? Takeaway point is this – “the article page is the new homepage.”
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A Eulogy for Twitter – Atlantic Mobile
“Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn’t agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake
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Instagram’s Sweet Spot: Better for Brands than Facebook and Twitter? | Simply Measured
“brands on Instagram are getting exponentially more engagement as a percentage of followers/fans than content on Twitter or Facebook.”
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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∞ — Wearables versus there-ables. What if we’ve got…
“What if we’ve got it all wrong?What if we’re not actually supposed to wear all sorts of technology on our bodies and on our clothes? What if we didn’t have to / weren’t meant to carry our technology with us as we moved around town?What if the technology was actually already in the room when we got there? Maybe that’s the kind of Internet-of-things that will be more sustainable and will win long-term.”
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Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube – Open Culture
Video, YouTube, Commons
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“We are still waiting, though, for a third model of news publishing to emerge. A news organisation that holds institutional strengths, beliefs and resources at its core but allows the rise of the independently oriented journalist some freedom to succeed or fail is still at the drawing board stage.
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How to Make Cinemagraphs | Photojojo
A little bit Daily Prophet… how to make a photo move. It’s a bit time-consuming and involves photoshop but it’s really got me thinking about how to use it in storytelling.
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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(Re)defining multimedia journalism — Changing Journalism — Medium
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This is the key for me. Immersive means I am lost in what I am reading/watching/hearing/experiencing.
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Immersive experiences rule. Take me somewhere I have never been. Show me something I have never seen.
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New digital tools every journalist should try – Knight Foundation
I haven’t used any of these but I’ll give them a go “in digital years a lifetime for a product seems like about 21 months. “Moore’s Law” predicted chip-processing power would double about every 18 months. It more or less has for decades, and each wave of chips remakes the digital world. In digital time, that means a tool born in 2012 was born a lifetime ago. There’s nothing wrong with the classic tools; they just aren’t the latest ones. “
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“Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to.”
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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Aron Pilhofer on data journalism, culture and going digital | Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Interestingness ” Right now, many newsrooms are stupid about the way they publish. They’re tied to a legacy model, which means that some of the most impactful journalism will be published online on Saturday afternoon, to go into print on Sunday. You could not pick a time when your audience is less engaged. It will sit on the homepage, and then sit overnight, and then on Sunday a home page editor will decide it’s been there too long or decide to freshen the page, and move it lower. I feel strongly, and now there is a growing consensus, that we should make decisions like that based upon data. Who will the audience be for a particular piece of content? Who are they? What do they read? That will lead to a very different approach to being a publishing enterprise.”
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Stories for Your Screen: annie96 is typing…
Man, I *really* love this method of delivering a suspense story. I’m looking at how other media are using Snapchat and WhatsApp for audience engagement and it’s interesting but not Quite There (in my view), but as a medium for fiction, the design of this is very clever.
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The Big Roundtable’s Social Media Experiment – 10,000 Words
Interesting, and the conclusion is that the people within networks – however small – are more useful than the framework of that network. I can see the logic in the theory; however, I’m not sure I subscribe 100% to it. “Longform startup The Big Roundtable (BRT) recently commissioned three college students to put its assumptions about social sharing to the test. The challenge? Taking one story, one month and whatever techniques they could think of (legal, of course), the three undergraduates were tasked with the challenge of racking up the most unique page views.”
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Twitter Enhances Lists: 4 Ways To Take Advantage – Forbes
No new Twitter hacks here, but 4 solid tips to get the best out of lists – I find the the ‘subscribe & steal’ one very useful
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Chartbeat CEO on native ads, viewability, and a metric standard
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Why Writers Need Metrics, Too | LinkedIn
The pros of using analytics as a journalist – I really agree with the points raised here.
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The Most Important Topics Of 2014, According To You – Upworthy Insider
Surprisingly hard news is leading the way on Upworthy’s poll – not sure if this is the equivalent of people saying they read the Guardian when the actually get all their news from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame but still interesting
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Yes, Facebook reach is decreasing, no that’s not the end of news organisations’ effectiveness on the site. Interesting content gets shared; it’s the blah stuff that we shouldn’t bother posting that won’t get reach. Maybe it’s social media natural selection… “It’s worth noting the lack in organic reach shouldn’t mean marketers should cease creating non ad-funded Facebook content altogether. Some 25 million people in the UK visited Facebook every day in December 2013, the most recently available country-specific figures. Brands need to be where their audiences are and Facebook takes up a big chunk of their audiences’ lives. As a case in point: earlier this week, EE suffered a network outage that meant many of its customers had no access to its services for a number of hours. EE’s posts about the outage were shared and commented on thousands and hundreds of times respectively, despite the fact it didn’t pay to promote them, because customers expected up-to-date information to be readily available on its Facebook page. And it’s worth mentioning that actual marketing content from brands does show up in the News Feed, but just like word of mouth in any other form, it is only the exceptional marketing that creates a buzz.”
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The disrupted TV viewing model; interesting post and some excellent insights in the comments too.
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Skegnes Standard to become officeless paper – Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage
“Editor Stephen Stray said: “We really want to be at the heart of the community and our reporting team will now be out and about much more – getting to events and reporting on your stories.” “We are delighted to be holding regular ‘reporter surgeries’ at the Embassy and would like to thank them for allowing us space in there to meet readers.” However East Lindsey District councillor Steve O’Dare said the office’s closure would be “bad news for Skegness.” He said: “It’s understandable but I think it’s going to be detrimental to Skegness. A lot of people like to pop into the office.””
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Another JP title to become officeless paper
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0 4 0The Skegness Standard has become the latest Johnston Press title to embrace
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This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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There are a lot of resources in this directory, from basic to complex tools, many of which are rated and assessed by users. Very handyHecta is an app for OS X which magnifies photographs without pixelation or blur.Photographers, designers, journalists — and you — can zoom in on the smallest detail with clarity and precision.The long explanation is this: “LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms.”The short one is this: It’s pretty good for finding out what words people are searching for in a specified geographic area, i.e. a useful journalism tool.Latest in the handy podcast series from J.co.uk
This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)
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“Most publishers give their staff massive desktop monitors to work on, using desktop software tools, and a CMS that works on a desktop. And then the majority of users view the output on a mobile. “
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“These days, BuzzFeed is rapidly expanding with $46 million in funding. Vox Media has raked in some $80 million in venture capital. Business Insider’s $12 million boost last week makes its haul about $30 million. And feel-good social curation site Upworthy has raised about $12 million since launching two years ago. 1 “Suddenly, the market for content just opened up,” said Sarah Lacy, founder of PandoDaily, which has secured about $4 million in venture capital since 2012. “It’s dramatically changed. I think a lot of it for me was Vice getting valued at $1 billion. No one had seen anything like that in the content space. And they’re trying to speak to a very specific audience that’s hard to reach in a deeply authentic way. It’s certainly not something you’re phoning in. It’s not a pre-written press release. It’s not a listicle.””
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Text streaming sounds very cool, doesn’t it? Spritz looks more than the latest shiny, it looks like it really is going to be the next very big thing.
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Live blogging is a skill. It involves getting the tone as well as content bang on – and sometimes, as with this reader’s gripe – the line between fact and comment gets blurred. The trick is to know what kind of live blog you’re doing – and be consistent.From the Guardian Readers’ Editor blog: “The latest example was on the website today. Matthew Weaver’s “news blog” … included the statement: ‘David Cameron continues to try to give the impression of being on top of the crisis…’ Now, is that fact or opinion? If you are claiming it is fact, then I am not aware of any objective standard against which one can judge whether the PM is ‘on top of the crisis’ (whatever that means) or not … As a more general point, what is the status of these news blogs? My preference would be for them to stick to the facts.” In an exchange of email correspondence the complainant also said: “I would much prefer a news blog to do what it says on the tin – to give me the news unadulterated by the ‘views’ of the reporter. I don’t mind in the least if that results in a list of updates – isn’t that what news is? Opinion isn’t fact.””
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There are some annoying ‘sign up for more followers HERE’ ads to ignore before you get to the content, but good insights when you do.
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“If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again. MORE Here’s An Updated Tally Of All The People Who Have Ever Died From A Marijuana Overdose Huffington Post These Disturbing Fast Food Truths Will Make You Reconsider Your Lunch Huffington Post Justin Bieber & Selena Gomez Kiss Over Breakfast, Another Baby on the Way for Christian Bale & More People Fed by Joakim Noah’s intensity, resilient Bulls take down Heat Sports Illustrated ‘True Detective’ finale: Talk about it Entertainment Weekly “
Headlines and Deadlines 