Key takeaways from Sree Sreenivisan’s BlogWorld East discussion.
When you’re tweeting, or looking at your own twitter feed, make sure you’re seeing a lot of blue, meaning links, replies, hashtags etc. Your tweet will travel further.
A few tools: ViddyJam.com, Storify, Twiangulate.com, Twunfollow, Letter.ly, hy.ly, dnainfo.com
“I promise that my social media presence will be helpful, useful, informative, relevant, practical, actionable, timely, generous, brief, entertaining, fun, occasionally funny.”
Social media can help media pros find new ideas, trends and sources, connect with readers and viewers in new ways, bring eyeballs, traffic and attention to their work, help the create, craft and enhance their brand.
When you’re looking at twitter profile or thinking about your own, don’t think about the followers, think about the tweets and the following numbers.
Suggestion to make your own Facebook page as a journalist. People spend 70% of their time on their newsfeed and on their wall. You need to come out of the noise.
Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.
Image via CrunchBase
I’ve been using Storify for about two months now, and I really like it (really like it), but it comes with a grain (or two) of salt. I had a guest lecture at the SI Newhouse School of Communication at SU a few weeks ago, during which I walked a group of undergrads through a purposefully quick exercise of putting together a news piece on the government shutdown using Storify (the pieces of our story are at the end of this post, ignore commentary). It took all of five minutes.
Great, right? It was easy….
But part of what I tried to drive home with the students was the issue of verification, speed of reporting, and the difference between collecting and curating. Because there IS a large difference.
Collecting something implies that you’re gathering, bringing together, piling up, centralizing data and information (in the case of journalism). An important part of the process for sure.
But it’s not the full part of the process, and the process simply can’t end there. To be effective in storytelling, reporting, journalism etc, you need to apply rigor to your collecting process. You need to curate your content before disseminating it.
CURATING
curate
2 (kjʊəˈreɪt)
( tr ) to be in charge of (an art exhibition or museum)
I love this definition, it’s perfect. In the original sense, curation implies an ownership and a responsibility over whatever it is that you’re, well, curating. Taking this further, it means presenting your data/information in a way that is responsible, logical and compelling in order to effectively and correctly illustrate a situation.
Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.
“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Herman said. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”
Keywords here:
reliable sources
digest
provide context
most important pieces
Storify does not do the above. It’s still the job of the reporter to do these things. In a world where the click of a mouse can make things public in less than a second, and with information flying around on more digital platforms than we can all count, this is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle.
Storify, as a tool, is awesome, but it’s only a tool. It makes our jobs as curators – not simply collectors – easier. But it needs to be coupled with the same rigor and responsibility that comes with effectively reporting events, blogging news, etc.
I’m lecturing on Thursday to the SI Newhouse School’s COM 107 course, which addresses some of the fundamental shifts in media that have occurred over the past century or so, with a special focus on how digital technologies have affected the various disciplines (PR, journalism, advertising etc).
I’ve decided to talk about storytelling, and how it’s being played out mostly in the journalism space, an will be using Storify as an example of one such development. For fun, I put together a quick Storify on, well, Storify. See below.
TechCrunch had a good post today on how there needs to be more room for opinion in news reporting (“We Need More Opinions in News, Not Less,” TechCrunch, 8 July 2010). A few thoughts.
Other Publications are Already Doing It
It might be good to take a cue from publications like the Economist. I quite appreciate when they put opinion into their reporting. They usually identify their stance within the first two paragraphs – “It’s the opinion of this magazine that…..” – and then they continue reporting.
Get the Juices Flowing for a Better World View
When I get hit with opinion, I welcome it. It offers the reader an immediate starting point and helps them identify where the reporter is coming from. All the complaints about the difficulty for the lay reader of filtering news content, and such and such a publication or newscast being biased. This is actually a perfect way to give the reader their own filter before they start reading. “Ok, I’m reading something from an author who has this lens on. Therefore, what I hear may be affected by that.”
In my opinion, this opens the door for much more robust thought processes and discussions on the events and issues happening around us.
Note: This may not be entirely fair or realistic, as I’m trained to do the above, and many people haven’t had that opportunity and may not know to apply this filtering process. All the more reason to be blatant about where the opinion is, and then offering them opportunity to think further about it in their mind.
Be a Good Professor
I’ve been through my fair share of education – one undergraduate and two graduate programs – and I think the best professors I’ve had have been those that can clearly and comfortably state “what side” they’re on, get the facts out, and encourage us to think further – in whatever direction – about what we’re learning. They’ve pushed their students past the point of consumption, memorization etc, and really gotten them analyzing, having meaningful conversation and getting to the meat of things, while still being able to convey “just the facts.” I don’t think they could have accomplished all of that if they kept all opinion out, both theirs and ours. They allowed room for opinion in a forum that was meant to inform people about what’s happening around them, and the experience and takeaways were much more valuable because they did that.
Keep Op-Ed and Editorials Where They Are
Should journalism turn into opinion writing? No, it shouldn’t. Opinion pieces – which usually contain a smaller number of hand-picked facts amidst the opinion – should stay opinion pieces. If you muddle opinion too much, you start losing the facts.
But there should be room for opinion. It forces thinking and opens viewpoints. So bring it.
I posted analysis on the Iranian election Twitter phenomenon and its effects on the future of information dissemination on the DigiActive blog.
Earlier this week, amidst travel and trying really hard to work, I followed the events of what was happening in Iran post-election. I followed it all on Twitter.
There are many comments I could make on the events, but I wanted to highlight something that will be important for how information and participation happens in the months and years to come.
The fact is, we are all becoming a larger part of the information dissemination mechanisms that were once reserved for formal media channels. DigiActive has reported many instances of citizen journalism, on-the-ground reporting and information gathering, but now we’re talking about the addition of a process of broader dissemination.
/kəˈlɛkt/ 
TechCrunch had a good post today on how there needs to be more room for opinion in news reporting (“
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