A Web editor's tale

A key ideal and admission for all news organisations: all your content, everything that has your name on it should adhere to the same high standards of production and maintenance – and that includes social media.

Everything is equal across the digital landscape, nothing should be given less consideration.

Any content you publish, whether it’s re-purposing from print, or collected from digital sources, should still have a quality stamp from your organisation:

“Until now, we spoke about ElPais.com when we were referring to online content. But in this new age, we’re dropping the “.com” and the whole El Pais newsroom is working, regardless of the platform where content is published – in print, on the web, on mobile or tablets – to the same standards of quality and rigour,” declared the paper, as it unveiled the new design, “El Pais is El Pais, no matter where you read it.”

From SFN Blog – Website redesign reflects new newsroom philosophy at El Pais by Hannah Vinter

Following the riots across England this week, Peterborough, like many towns and cities I’ll bet was awash via social media with rumour, suggestion and misinformation about potential disturbances in the city. Here’s how we handled that through our Twitter coverage:

Andy Dickinson makes lots of good points (here is my discussion with Andy on his article) on Twitter’s evolution for news organisations, suggesting via a tweet:

August 8, 2011 10:21 pm

Reporting that nothing is happening in your area/city? ask yourself is that really news.

@digidickinson

But I feel there’s a balance to be had here and saying no news is not a valid reason for Tweeting is not always fair. If as an official local news source on Twitter you’re seeing multiple tweets asking/predicting/suggesting there’s rioting or other event not actually taking place, at some point there is a duty to respond (it would be ideal to include all those Tweeters but with a 140 character limit, that’s not always realistic).

At the @PeterboroughET we took the policy of limiting our updates and retweeting local police (who were pretty on the ball with their updates) where possible to add weight to our information. Verification has always been key with Twitter, along with sifting and filtering sources and tip-offs, all part of regular news process, they are just magnified on social networks.

It would have been easy to respond to all those concerned locals individually (plenty of them genuine) and getting directly involved with those seemingly deliberately misinforming regarding potential or imagined riots in our area, that would best be served by a linked rolling story enabling longer coverage, but we took the view initially that publishing anything on our website would be fueling a non-existent fire.

This partly relates to the issue of resource, whether we spent much time on such a non-story, a vital issue especially for stretched local news teams, but mobile/web apps enable social media monitoring and interaction without being necessarily on duty or in the office, enabling news teams to react more quickly to events such as this.

It’s all part of the learning curve of Twitter for news orgs, which becomes more difficult as your following audience grows, but the benefits of being able to quickly inform, collaborate and communicate still outweigh its negatives.

A few thoughts sparked by an article ‘Guardian part 2: What are engaged users REALLY worth?’ by the Wannabe Hacks:

Speaking from the point of view of a local daily newspaper website… All visitors have value, but they visit for different reasons. and they have become a disparate bunch, Twitter followers, Facebook likers, registered commenting site visitors etc. Different strategies are needed for each group.

Big reasons for staying/returning to the site: quality and relevance of content to visitor’s interests – as it always has been. Good quality journalism has long term value, celebrity stories have high short-term value.

Many people visit but never comment or interact on news websites, should we force these people to register? If they are a large but loyal number then I think the potential loss of audience is too great. If your publications voice is only being heard by a small minority how can consensus or influence be maintained?

Clamoring for the largest audience must be tempered with not overlooking delivering what your target audience want, be that subject or geographically based. If you’re not doing that then you’ll have little chance of moneting the audience.

The data on registered users though has huge long-term value, knowing what they look at, where they came from, their journey through your site, enables tailoring related content and commercial offers to them and justifying changes to your site structure.

There’s nothing wrong with commercial elements alongside quality content, but if it has relevance to the user, then there’s clearly more revenue potential and everybody wins!

In short, a very difficult area, a fine-line to be trodden through making enough money to pay for quality of content and product whilst keeping a strong, loyal audience and not driving them away with over-bearing commercial strategies.

In terms of skills, SEO and understanding how content works in a digital environment is vital to all editorial staff. Being able to judge how and when to add keywords and phrases into headlines/intros, compacting a story into a Tweet and other web-based copywriting and sub-editing is a hugely valuable skill-set.

The live blog is an opportunity to curate multimedia content and information from professional and non-professional sources ‘on the ground’, using editorial judgement in what to publish.

It’s a great collaborative tool for news organisations to cover major or breaking events, conferences or big issues using mobile tools and central monitoring to coordinate interactive content publishing, the audience then have the power to feed into the live stream and feel part of the process.

A live blogging strategy

As an example strategy, setup a CoverItLive blog and promote across all your platforms in advance where possible, setup initial questions if possible. Get all your journalist involved using Twitter, all their feeds can be added to the live blog, collectively creating the live blog stream without any other action required in its most basic form.

A manager can monitor the live blog, adding user comments and any related tweets as well as multimedia content and polls into the stream.

Specific Twitter hashtag feeds can be used if appropriate to integrate information from members of the public who may be at the scene and let the audience follow via Twitter if they prefer.

When to use a live blog

It has its place when suitable situations arise or events break as an important digital media publishing strategy that shows what can be achieved coupling journalistic skill and citizen knowledge with readily available digital publishing tools.

Editing and curating is a vital part of the operation, but this is clearly a different area of journalism from reflective, objective long-form pieces that would follow-up online and in print, but all have their value to the audience.

It’s just a new opportunity in a multimedia, multiplatform publishing world.

Further reading:

• Tips on tweeting live by Mary Hamilton – advice on choosing hashtags, sources and curation
• Twitter for journalists: beyond gathering and distributing content
• Styles of live blog: Guardian, New York Times, BBC, FT – Andy Bull, multimedia-journalism.co.uk

Crowd Blur by jonicdao - flickr.com/photos/jonicdao

Crowdsourcing is a means of involving/collaborating with the audience in the newsgathering and storybuilding process. It can be useful in gaining a consensus of opinion or locating a knowledgeable source on a subject. It’s not suitable in every situation, but a strategy should be in place should an opportunity arise:

Once the bare bones of a print story are  in place, when you have the basic facts: what, where, when; and if it’s not an exclusive, get a story live and start gaining some consensus from your audience.

Create a short intro focusing on a talking point, something that will affect local people, attempt to engage public opinion through an active voice.

If story or feature is in its early stages and relates to a local issue, national issue with likely local effects or recent event that members of local community are even possibly likely to have an opinion on, push a short description of the story and ask for feedback. Remember even a small niche community group may have strong opinions.

In headline use “Add specific content keywords…” to alert potential interested readers, then timestamp the intro “10.20am: Story in brief…” to highlight the current nature and tell readers as story develops.

Keep body of the story short and to the point, just facts, then encourage witnesses/locals/those with knowledge to interact and engage.

Add a ‘call to action’ question, “What do you think about this proposal/change?” or “Have you been affected by this” then list ways to contact the news team. e.g.:

How has the event affected you? What can be done…?
Comment below, email news@yourpaper.co.uk, interact at yourpaper.co.uk/yoursay or discuss via Twitter @yourTweets

Further reading:

• 10 things that have been crowdsourced in 2011
• Lessons in crowdsourcing: Claire Wardle on using Ushahidi for the Tube strike | Online Journalism Blog
• Crowdsourcing a Better World – NYTimes.com
• 10 Tips « Crowdsourcing: A Fieldguide from WNYC
• Spot.us

Sign up to: http://twitterfeed.com/ it’s quick and easy.

Create a new feed and add an RSS feed and then tell it when and where to push articles.

When creating a feed, click ‘Advanced settings’ where you can tell it:

• how often to update,
• whether to take headline and/or first paragraph,
• add an optional keyword/#hashtag before or at the end, e.g. your town name,
• shorten the article link using bit.ly or other service (you’ll need an account, but that’s easy to set up)

Inspired by the news:rewired conference, 14 January 2010

Communication to the Stars by Striking Photography by Bo on flickr.com

Making it part of a constructive and nutritious newsroom strategy

Updated, 22 March 2012: Twitter has become accepted by journalists as an opportunity for two-way communication, newsgathering and crowdsourcing, and as a key distribution tool in a fast-moving digital environment. But remember, Twitter is just a tool, like your phone, pen and paper or editorial content management system. It is not a guaranteed saviour of journalism, the answer to newsroom prayers or going to write a story for you – but it can definitely help, especially in an increasingly ‘digital first‘ news publishing environment.

As with any source Twitter information needs verifying, here are some tips from mediahelpingmedia.org, here Alex Murray gives an insight into BBC News’ verification processes, and here Mary Hamilton‘s nine ways to use Twitter responsibly following the UK riots of August 2011. It’s also worth remembering that even in 2012, with a proliferation of smartphones with seamless social media apps and after several high profile events having brought Twitter into the mainstream, whilst the numbers are growing steadily, not everyone is using it, and to varying degrees depending on location, probably only a small proportion of a local audience is tweeting. The key is having a realistic expectation and clear strategy that will dictate levels of success, as Paul Bradshaw puts it:

the tools should come after the strategies, and the strategy should come after the objective

So set some clear objectives on what you want Twitter to achieve for you, find out the most efficient and effective way of using it and then dive in, making sure to take a step back once in a while to see if your strategy is working and what and how others and peers are using social media tools. Plus the next time you go for a media-related job interview, it may well crop up as a question. So here are some tips and quotes I collated for my own local newspaper newsroom team:

• Sign up to Twitter: as an individual journalist, and be aware that what you say and do represents and reflects you and your news organisation.
• Remember: this is a professional, public-facing account backed by your news organisation’s brand.
• My advice on separate accounts for work/non-work tweeting has mellowed: get your own personal account if… what you do out of work is very specific/niche/completely different from your day job, and worth its own Twitterverse. Just make it clear it’s your own views and not those of any employer! Otherwise the odd personal comment or showing some personality does no harm. Read more advice in my curated discussion on storify: “Journalists on Twitter: 1 profile or 2?“
• Username suggestion: @yournameNewsOrg – needs to be short but memorable, doesn’t have to be strict, but make sure shortening any words doesn’t spell anything odd or inappropriate! – Read my related post on ‘Journalists on Twitter: 1 profile or 2?‘
• Add professional bio details, who you are, your news title, location, your local patch, what areas of content you cover.
• Inject some of your own personality into your Tweets, it will help people to ‘warm’ to you as a real person as opposed to just a reporter.
• If you make a mistake in a tweet, start a new one with “Correction:…”
• If you’re replying to someone, having their @profilename at the start means only followers of both of you would see it, if it’s something of mass-interest, use a full stop at the beginning to publish it to everyone, “.@localPeeps blah blah…”

Here is a good starting point listing Twitter basics: 10 Must-Learn Lessons For Twitter Newbies - www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/

What’s in it for you

Push: gain a following of interested, local people, share your stories and  ideas for stories. Pull:get feedback/comments/images and video, request help/opinion/information on upcoming stories and ongoing/upcoming events. It may take a while to get a substantial followering: stay enthusiastic, this will give you time to get used to the process, and find your own style.

Feb 2010: New director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks commented: “Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand. If you don’t like it… then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.” Source: Mashable.com

How to manage/tools

Make the process of updating Twitter quick, (here’s what I do): install Firefox or Chrome browser – quicker and more advanced than Internet Explorer, sign up to a bit.ly account (you can use a Twitter account), this will shorten long URL, and enable you to track how many people are clicking on your links.

Then when you want to send an update about your story, click on a link directly from Firefox to open your bitly account, ready for adding your message, it will automatically make and insert a short bit.ly URL of your story. Or use the AddThis Firefox extension or AddThis Google Chrome extension to create your Twitter ready short URL. There may well be sharing buttons on the page asthese are common on news websites.
Tools such as TwitterLocal, Trendsmap and Nearby Tweets help you find tweeps in your community. Try desktop, mobile or web-based apps: Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Twitterfall (web) – ‘specialising in real-time tweet searches. New tweets fall into the page’.

See also by me:  Useful free Android apps for journalists - and: must have iphone apps for journalists by Anthony De Rosa, Ten fantastic apps, tips and tools for recording audio on journalism.co.uk

Tips on using Twitter and suggested tools: some quotes and notes –

• busy journalists facing too many demands in shrunken newsrooms can’t afford to let anything steal away too much of their day
• first a caveat: You need to invest some time learning to use Twitter and connecting with followers, primarily people in your community and colleagues who share your professional interests
• Some days Twitter will provide great value and be worth spending some time
• Tweet a few times each day. Your tweets don’t have to take much time, but they help you engage with colleagues and your community
• Check your “mentions.”
• Search your real name.
• Using this search and the mentions… engage any time someone is talking to me or about me, without constantly watching the whole stream
• Use Twitter as a news source
• Use a mobile Twitter app
• I would suggest snaptu.com, quick and straightforward to use if you’ve not an iPhone or Android enabled phone – richardkendall
• You can browse some tweets or fire off a quick tweet while walking to of from your car, while waiting for a meeting to start or riding an elevator or lift! – richardkendall
• paper.li  - organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into a newspaper-style format
• Twitter lists. Twitter lets you sort the people you follow
• Advanced Twitter search tips and example operators

Sarah Booker adds key points including:

• Monitor the activities and discussions in your community.
• Connect with colleagues and share ideas with them.
• “Crowdsource” stories by asking for story ideas or information.
• Quickly find people who witnessed or experienced an event.
• Drive traffic to your content.
• Improve your writing as you learn to make points directly in just 140 characters.

Further reading/viewing:

• Articles, insights and discussion on social media and journalism from BBC’s Social Media Summit – #bbcsms, May 2011
• Managing A Great Social Media News Team – Poynter.org
• Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable
• The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines – Copyblogger
• Live-tweeting Best Practices | Twitter Developers
• 10 ways journalists can use Twitter before, during and after reporting a story | Poynter
• Ignore the naysayers: Twitter is what you make it, Shane Richmond (@shanerichmond), telegraph.co.uk
• 6 Tips to Run a Successful Group Twitter Chat –  Social Media Today
• How has social media changed the way newsrooms work?, Kevin Bakhurst, BBC News
• Newsroom integration: the past taking over the future?, Kevin Anderson, journalism.co.uk
• Trusting Tweets, a guide for journalists - mediahelpingmedia.org
• Twitter advanced research techniques 1: searching twitter, Colin Meek (@colinmeek) and Judith Townend (@JTownend)
• Twitter Journalism: search and verification
• Tweeting 101: A Twitter Cheat Sheet – webworkerdaily.com
• Tips on tweeting live by Mary Hamilton @newsmary
• Twitter for journalists: beyond gathering and distributing content
• How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut), a great guide by Paul Bradshaw, from April 2008
• Technology is not a strategy, it’s a tool – part 2, Paul Bradshaw
• Making the most of Twitter, guardian.co.uk tips
• 2009 As Seen Through Twitter Hashtags, Mashable.com
• The rise of Twitter as a serious platform for discourse, ReadWriteWeb
• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
• How to: know when to use photos from social media, journalism.co.uk
• 10 Tips « Crowdsourcing: A Fieldguide from WNYC
• It’s time for journalists to promote a better ‘Twitter style’ – by Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles
• @Sreenet’s Twitter Guide for Newbies & Skeptics
• @Sree’s Social Media Guide – a work in progress - a good, wide and ongoing collection of social media tips and best practices, May 2011
• Who Should Journalists Follow On Twitter? – 10000words

This post was originally published on 16th February 2010. I’ve been constantly tinkering and updating ever since as the web and social media never sleeps and is in a state of constant change.

Image used can be found here: Communication to the Stars by Striking Photography by Bo on flickr.com

Here’s my take on  John Thompson‘s Ten things every journalist should know in 2010 posted over at journalism.co.uk this week (see also Vadim Lavrusik‘s 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist at Mashable.com).

I’m coming from a regional news media perspective here: Twitter is something that journalists need to take up in order to interact with their beat/community, push their work and crowd source. There are many tools for managing Twitter, I prefer Seesmic for ease of use, and Monitter for keeping an eye on localised topics; for mobile phones try the Snaptu mobile app, which I’ve found to be quick and simple to use; see also: Tweetdeck.

Further reading: Lavrusik’s 8 Tools to Help Filter Your Twitter Stream & Find News at Poynter.org and  Mashable’s guide to Twitter for journalists.

But if journalists are going to tweet personally or have a Facebook profile (you may want to think about a personal and work-based account?), you need to consider your online ‘brand‘. It’s not about your employer if you have social media personas, it’s important to remember how you, your comments, posts and reputation will be seen – whilst reaping the benefits and bringing some of your personality into play.

Content curation is increasingly relevant as the web takes flat print stories and offers much more scope for expanding ‘living stories‘ (e.g. ‘climate change’, more on the Guardian Technology site) with links to sources, timelines, maps, the ability to update and correct errors, images stored on Flickr, lists of links on Delicious, integrated live comments from Twitter, live blogs from Cover It Live or Scribble Live. Read more on Mashable’s 8 future traits of journalists.

The web opens up the opportunity of collaborating with other journalists or publications, get local people or experts involved. The myth of the citizen journalist taking over has hopefully now been debunked. There are plenty of good bloggers out there, but few are professional writers with editors to advise them, but they still have a part to play in voicing concerns, raising issues and adding local opinion.

the blogosphere will remain an endless supply of true expertise, analysis and opinions that will challenge and stimulate old media… Frederic Filloux, Monday Note

Also, think about commercial opportunities or aspects of what you are putting together, as the industry continues to struggle to adapt to a multi-media, multi-platform world, finding ways of making money from digital content are key, and journalists would do themselves no harm by throwing any revenue ideas around.

Important points from Thompson’s list are that the core skills of journalism remain vital – being able to tell a story in whatever medium, along with the call to take control of modern technology. Start with small tools and skills, but there is so much to gain with a few skills and some understanding.

Content is king on the web, but it’s all about engagement, keep your reader interested make them feel part of the process or be open to feedback. Part of getting it right is choosing the rights social and multimedia tools to tell the story, maybe elements of layout and style or interactivity.

In short the future is not all bleak, there is great opportunity all around for journalism.

As Tom Standage puts it:  “The death of newspapers is not the same as the death of news.”

My expanded comment on The Guardian Local’s Sarah Hartley‘s video post: What impact has social media had? I asked:

Social media tools such as micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter  have opened up great opportunities for everyone from big media organisations to the man on the street, the most vital point being that it gives anyone a voice, cheaply and quickly to have their say and share their experiences.

On the downside it doesn’t guarantee truth or honesty and it does create more noise and spam that needs to be filtered, but the web has tools for that too, such as Google Reader or following defined Twitter lists.

But on the whole, it is a force for good, tapping into what the web and digital media does best, connecting people and bypassing barriers to communicating that existed before the digital age.