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Social Networking
The Quixotic Quest to Avoid Olympic Spoilers on Social Media
Olympic fever hit me young. One of my earliest memories is of a coloring book featuring the raccoon mascot from the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics that my mom gave me when I was three. I colored in the pictures of the raccoons skating and bobsledding while I watched the Olympics on our old boxy television. From then on, wherever I... more »
Who We Are
MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.
5Across
5Across Classic: Olympic Athletes on Social Media
We decided to pull up this 2010 episode of 5Across about athletes using social media because of its relevance to the current 2012 Olympics, especially as the roundtable includes two U.S. Olympians: Natalie Coughlin and Donny Robinson. Not much has changed in the last couple years, except that even more athletes are on social media -- and more are connecting...
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Global View
Best Online Resources for Following the 2012 London Summer #Olympics
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London have largely been anticipated as the first social media Olympics. Athletes, fans, and the media shared their voices online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, but this time in London, even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to adopt a full-fledged social media strategy. Starting with the Athletes' Hub - fully...
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World View
Special Series: Olympics in the Digital Age
It used to be that there were two ways to experience the Summer Olympics: watch the games on your TV (and on NBC's schedule) or travel to the games themselves. Oh my, how things have changed. This summer, you can follow your favorite Olympian on Facebook. Live stream the finals on your laptop. Look at near real-time photo galleries online....
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Social Media
London 2012: The Thrills (and Agony) of the Social Olympics
It's an Olympic achievement. Not just the London Games, but the social media infrastructure behind them. People definitely engaged online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. But new apps, better mobile devices, and an Olympic policy encouraging athletes to use social media mean that fans will have more access and interaction with Olympians than ever before. An International...
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Philosophy
My (Thwarted) Plan as the New York Times' Public Editor
About six weeks ago, I got a phone call out of the blue from a New York Times editor who told me that I had been recommended to be a candidate for the open Public Editor job at the Times. My first reaction (outside of shock) was to be honored that they would consider me, but I also felt pretty...
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Social Media
In the Face of Censorship, #SudanRevolts Goes Social
Serious North Africa news junkies are likely aware of growing demands for regime change in Sudan. Protests have spread outward from Khartoum, the capital, over the past few weeks. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested, detained, and beaten. If you're unaware, perhaps it's because you've been busy following elections in Egypt and Libya. Or maybe it's war in Syria that's...
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World View
Social Media Flexes Muscle in Mexican Election Protests
Mexican students who organized massive protests against the country's biggest broadcaster may not have seen their favored candidate win, but they did spotlight how online media can seize the political agenda in a country with little media competition. Using the hashtag #YoSoy132, these students created YouTube videos and social media tools to rally against what they saw as the potential return...
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Social Media
As Studios Go Online to Promote Movies, the Mass Media Ecosystem Shifts
Our mass media ecosystem relies on a constant flow of money to sustain itself in its present form. This money comes from many directions, including but not limited to TV advertising revenue, basic and premium cable subscriber fees, and movie box-office receipts. This revenue is gathered by various gatekeepers, who take a cut and then send monies back to production...
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Social Media
How the Death of a Janitor Captured a City's Media Narrative for 6 Years
SPOKANE, Wash. -- For years, Otto Zehm lived an unassuming life on this city's margins -- working as a janitor during the day, eating dinner in convenience stores at night, playing guitar with his friends. In the spring of 2006, that quiet life ended after Zehm was taken into police custody for a crime he didn't commit. Today, Zehm,...
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Social Media
How to Defend Yourself Against Facial Recognition Technology
Facial recognition technology is now just about everywhere we are. It's in our phones, social networks, and media management, and this itself carries vast implications. (See this post about how the technology works, where it is, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to it.) But it's also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of "public" spaces, as...
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MovieShift
An Actor's Life in the Digital Age: Trying to Make New Media Pay
I went to my first movie at 4 years old: "Mary Poppins" at the Sycamore State Theater in Sycamore, Ill. It was one of those large theaters with lots of character about it. Beautiful blue lighting glowed along the ledges and pointed to the lavish velvet curtains that surrounded the screen. Dick Van Dyke, who played Bert in the movie,...
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Media Usage
5 Tips to Prevent Digital Burnout and Maintain Good Mental Health
The Internet's reach is so pervasive, it feels as though it has always been around. The reality is that the web is still in its infancy, and we don't really understand the risks it poses to our mental health. In fact, various experts, such as Larry D. Rosen, a psychologist and author of "iDisorder," believe that personal gadgets are...
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Media Usage
Why We Need a Technology Sabbath
I only have to look at my 3-year-old to see the impact of my use of technology. He walks around the house saying, "Where's my iPhone? I have a call in a minute." And he has two toy phones he carries around in his pockets in case an "important call" comes in. I know all too well whom he is...
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Free Speech
Citizens Get Conflicting Messages About Their Right to Record
This month, federal agencies and local officials sent two powerful but conflicting messages to the American public about our right to record. On May 14, the Justice Department submitted a letter to the Baltimore Police Department providing in-depth guidance on citizens' right to record. The letter was submitted as part of a court case that dates back to 2010. The plaintiff,...
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MagazineShift
Magpile Brings Social Sharing to Print Magazine Enthusiasts
Reading a print magazine doesn't have to be a lonely experience anymore. Magpile, a new social site for magazine lovers, offers enthusiastic readers a place to share their favorite magazines and discuss them online. Founder and print magazine fan Dan Rowden, a web developer, noticed that although a number of websites let readers rate and discuss books, magazine fans were...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #49: Facebook IPO Mania; Internet Week; 16th Webby Awards
Welcome to the 49th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil as co-hosts. Today is the day for the Facebook IPO, so we've got it covered like a wet blanket. Special guests Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer and Troy Young of SAY Media talk over the ins and outs of Facebook as it soars into the...
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Your Take
Poll: What Do You Think About the Facebook IPO?
Now we have a date (May 18) and a price range ($28 to $35 per share) for what could be the biggest initial public offering in the history of tech stocks: Facebook. The company has grown by leaps and bounds since it was born in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm at Harvard in 2004, and now could make Zuckerberg richer than Microsoft...
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Business
Can Web-Only Original Programming Finally Stick?
The days of skateboarding dogs holding sway on the web may be numbered. Technology companies and advertisers are professing their belief in the value of professionally produced original content. Portals and platforms like YouTube, AOL, MSN and Yahoo -- once known for aggregating and optimizing video produced by others -- are spending millions of dollars to develop and acquire programming...
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Media Usage
Infographic: Moms Hold Big Influence Online
This post and infographic originally appeared on the Nielsen blog Nielsen Wire here. It is reused here with permission. Moms are often at the center of their family's offline life, so it's little surprise that they're also at the center of many of the biggest trends online as well. Whether to look up the latest product reviews or to connect...
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PoliticalShift
Will Online Video Coverage of U.S. Election Eat into Text-Based Stories?
As I've read up online about the 2012 campaign news in recent months, I've noticed I'm doing a lot less, well, reading. I've checked around a bit and confirmed that websites that traditionally focus on text-based journalism -- like Politico.com and NYTimes.com -- are indeed ramping up their video offerings to add a new dimension to their campaign coverage. The...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #47: Positively Dan Rather; Future of Facebook; Rise of Snip.it
Welcome to the 47th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. On this show, Rafat had the honor (and early-morning wakeup call) to interview news icon Dan Rather at 7 a.m. while Rather was traveling by train to Washington, D.C. Rather has a new memoir out, "Rather Outspoken," and talked to...
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Your Take
Poll: Where Are Your Favorite Places to Share Photos?
You recently went on vacation to an exotic and new locale and you want to show people your great photos from the trip. So where do you post them online? Are you a fan of Flickr or Facebook? What about Instagram? Or perhaps you're part of the thriving photography community on Google+. And let's not forget the old school folks...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #46: Photography Special: Creative Commons, Cameraphones, Instagram, Google+
Welcome to the 46th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. Rafat is celebrating his birthday, we're not sure how old he is, but we know that he loves photography. So this week we are celebrating his birthday by doing a special show focused on photography in the digital age....
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Social Media
As the 'Friction-Less' Web Grows, Friction Against It Does Too
Control over our public image is incredibly important to us -- from the clothes we decide to wear each morning, to the music we blast loud enough for street-goers to hear, to the very words we speak aloud to our friends, bosses and strangers. Often, they're carefully chosen within our rooms, our headphones, and our minds. We need these private...
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PhotoShift
Photojournalists Scramble to Video. Is it Worth It?
Few can say they didn't see it coming. but many felt the final nail in the coffin was firmly in place when at the end of 2011 CNN fired 50 photojournalists. The international news network explained its decision in a letter: We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate...
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Education
Facebook Groups for Schools Raises Concerns
The explosive growth of online social media sites specifically targeted at schools has compelled Facebook to edge its way back into the fertile ground of college campuses. Last week, the company announced a new feature available only to students and faculty with an active .edu email address, Groups for Schools. It's billed to be exclusive -- even alumni and prospective...
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Social Media
Socializing the Space Shuttle's Farewell
More than a decade ago, I was driving down a Tampa, Fla., street when I saw one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen -- and may ever see. A space shuttle, piggybacked on a jumbo jet, came out of nowhere and seemed to fill the entire sky. It was massive -- seeing it on TV was one thing,...
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Culture
Governments Increasingly Targeting Twitter Users for Expressing Their Opinion
This piece is co-authored by Trevor Timm. In its six years of existence, Twitter has staked out a position as the most free speech-friendly social network. Its utility in the uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa is unmatched, its usage by activists and journalists alike to spread news and galvanize the public unprecedented. As Twitter CEO Dick...
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Legacy Media
5 Creative Strategies for Magazines to Use Pinterest
Despite what you may have observed, you can pin more on Pinterest than recipes, home décor, fashion, and enough DIY projects for a lifetime. Much has already been written about magazines' use of Pinterest. Because the majority of the site's users are women, much of the coverage has focused on how Pinterest has presented opportunities for women's magazines to share...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #45: Rafat Returns!; Cord-Cutting Rising?; Google Surveys Instead of Pay Walls
Welcome to the 45th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. That's right, Rafat Ali is back in the saddle after a nearly three month trek to India, Burma and Iceland. And he's back just in time to talk cord-cutting once again, this time after new research showed that cable...
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Social Networking
Online Privacy: Kids Know More Than You Think
Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don't care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don't fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them. But tweens are much more...
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Your Take
Poll: How Is Social Media Changing Activism?
How do people end up in the streets protesting something? What motivates them to take action, even when that action could lead to their arrest? Last year, Facebook and Twitter played major roles in helping organize street protests during the Arab Spring, to the point where dictators were focused on either blocking the services or using them to spy on...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #44: Social Media's Role in Activism, Trayvon Martin; Pinterest's Legal Drama
Welcome to the 44th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week, we convene a special roundtable to discuss how social media is changing activism, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, in a...
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Social Networking
How Social Media Is Changing Protest Reporting in the U.K.
In March 1984, tens of thousands of British miners went on strike over expected coal mine closures. During the next year, unions faced off with police and Margaret Thatcher's conservative government in what became Britain's most turbulent industrial protest of recent decades.
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Social Networking
Infographic: The Role of Mobile Devices, Social Media in News Consumption
Editor's note: This week, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. The following is an infographic the organization put together to spell out some of the report's biggest findings and it is used here as a guest post. Click on the image below for a larger version of the...
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Philosophy
Pizza With a Side of Attitude: The Rise of Snark Online
On Mondays, when my students ask me what I did over the weekend, I often reply, "read, wrote, and then read and wrote some more." Most of the time, I'm being more serious than they know. A few weekends ago was an exception, at least initially. I visited my family in Pennsylvania, made pizza with my mom, and repaired the...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #42: SXSW Special: Homeless Hotspots; Ambient Apps, CNN/Mashable?
Welcome to the 42nd episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week is a special episode dedicated to all things South by Southwest (SXSW), the media confab covering technology, music and film down in Austin, Texas.
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Social Networking
At SXSW Music, Streaming and Engagement Apps Rule
The common ground between technology developers and music companies becomes clearer and clearer every year at SXSW. For many years, the festival has seen a distinct interdependence between the two industries. However, as the Interactive conference transitions into the Music conference, the two industries are beginning to show significantly different trajectories. While the Interactive conference focuses more and more on...
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Social Networking
What started out as a casual live music conference has grown into something huge. The South by Southwest conference now encompasses music, film and interactive, and spans 10 days in March. Last year, SXSW estimated that the conference brought in 65,200 people to its exhibit space, and pumped a whopping $168 million into the local economy in Austin, Texas.
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Social Networking
Pew Report Finds Americans Unfriending Over Political Beliefs
As a teenager who was vocally opinionated about political issues, I often heard the cautionary refrain "Politics is not the topic of polite conversation." That counsel must have been lost on me, since I find myself as an adult publicly airing my opinions as both the political correspondent for this blog and as a Democratic analyst periodically appearing on FoxNews.com.
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Social Media
How the Anti-Social Media Crowd Misses the Mark
Facebook's impending stock offering has rekindled laments about the ills of social media. They largely miss the mark. The toppling of dictators, strengthened familial connections, rebirth of friendships, fanning of imagination, and creation of new methods of sharing -- to these I can add some very personal examples of how social media have helped me.
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #40: Pay Walls at L.A. Times, Gannett; TechCrunch Turmoil
Welcome to the 40th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the George Kelly as co-hosts. Kelly is online coordinator at the Contra Costa Times newspaper and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week the big topic is pay walls, as both the Los Angeles Times and Gannett newspaper chains are planning to charge...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #39: Cord-Cutting Special: Comcast Streampix; Google Fiber
Welcome to the 39th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Brightcove's Eric Elia, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week we convene a special roundtable to talk about one of our favorite subjects: cutting the cord to cable TV! We had hoped that a Comcast executive...
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MovieShift
How New Platforms, Streaming Media Change the Equation for Indie Filmmakers
Traditionally, there were three main types of distribution for the work of independent filmmakers: theatrical, broadcast and straight to DVD. Most filmmakers hoped for a combination of all three. But everything has changed. The digital online world has opened up new avenues of distribution including video on demand, live streaming, and mobile and tablet applications. Indie filmmakers are harnessing...
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TVShift
Dear Cable and Satellite Companies, Hollywood Studios, and the People Who Make TV: The thing is, we love TV shows. We love the comedy, the drama, the sports, the events, and even sometimes what you call "romantic comedy." We remember fondly those days growing up as kids when the family sat around in the den watching our favorite shows after...
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TVShift
I'm Mad as Hell, But I Haven't (Yet) Cut the Cord
"You can cut the cable, dad," my teenage daughter has told me more than once when I've grumbled about the poor service, unexplained fees and large percentage increases I've had to pay over our introductory "triple-play" rates to our cable company. We did suspend our cable service for weeks a couple of summers ago when we were away much...
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MagazineShift
Why Esquire Created a Trailer for the Zanesville Animal Escape Story
Lights, camera ... magazine article? Esquire recently released a 46-second video trailer for a story in its March print edition, available on newsstands yesterday: "Animals," by Chris Jones, a feature about the escape and eventual killing of zoo animals in Zanesville, Ohio. Magazines have been creating videos to accompany articles for a while now. However, Esquire put an innovative twist...
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TVShift
Special Series: Cutting the Cord to Cable TV
With rising cable and satellite bills, thrifty Americans pinched by the recession have considered cutting the cord to cable. The savings can be enormous, even if the tech know-how can be daunting when creating your new cable-free TV-watching environment. So MediaShift has decided to devote a week of editorial to cord-cutting, with our in-depth guide, first-person accounts, and even a...
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Guides
Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV (Updated 2012 Edition)
This week MediaShift will be doing a special in-depth report on cutting the cord to cable TV -- who's doing it, why and how. For background, we're updating our special guide to cutting the cord we first published in January 2010. That post has been viewed more than 58,000 times, proving that there's an intense interest by the public in...
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Your Take
Poll: What Do You Think About Pinterest?
Lately, the social network that's been all the rage has been Pinterest, which is a visual look at the things you like. That means recipes, infographics, photos, design and more. MediaShift's Courtney Lowery Cowgill wrote that Pinterest was the first thing she'd been excited about online in a long, long time. So have you tried out Pinterest? Are you addicted...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #38: Online Report from Tunisia; Pinterest Craze; Apple Monitors Factories
Welcome to the 38th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. First, we get a special on-the-ground report from special guest Mohamed El Dahshan in Tunisia, talking about a ruling expected from the country's Supreme Court about filtering the Internet....
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Legal Drama
Journalists Should Learn Best Practices for Fair Use in Digital Age
As we listened to the 80 journalists we interviewed over the last year for a study, Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public's Right to Know: How Journalists Think about Fair Use, we got a clear message: hard-working journalists are often confronted with copyright questions that threaten to keep them from doing their jobs well. Take these hypotheticals: Caitlin works for...
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Social Networking
College Memes Madness: Students Posting Non-Stop on Facebook
College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University's student newspaper, explains, the meme is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of...
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Social Networking
Pinterest: Why What It's Not Says So Much
It's almost impossible to explain Pinterest to someone who has never been on it. And now that it's hit the big time, there's a lot of explaining to do -- especially, it seems, to men who can't seem to avoid hearing about Pinterest from the women in their lives. Pinterest -- which Mashable's Pete Cashmore called "2012's Hottest Website" in...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #37: Merger Mania: CIR-Bay Citizen; GigaOm-PaidContent; Twitter Censorship
Welcome to the 37th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with important mergers abounding! First up is the Center for Investigative Reporting announcing that it will try to merge with...
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PoliticalShift
Are You Part of the 2% (of People Who Get Campaign News From Twitter)?
Many of you are, like me, among the proverbial "99%" when it comes to economics and income. But if you regularly learn about the 2012 campaign from those you follow on Twitter, as I do, you're in an elite class of a different sort. A new report out from the The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press...
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Your Take
Poll: What Will Facebook Be Worth in 5 Years?
They say that history repeats itself, but that's so easy to forget. It was only as recently as 2006 that analysts were saying that MySpace was likely worth $15 billion (and I was spoofing that conclusion). And you can go back to older social networks like Friendster or Tribe.net or America Online's chat rooms... you get the point. So now...
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Philosophy
Romenesko Gets His Mojo Back After Leaving Poynter
Jim Romenesko is having a good time. Lately, the "journalism evangelist," "KING of the blogosphere," and "go-to source for news about the news" has been waking up earlier, posting more often, and featuring content he had not felt free to publish for more than a decade. In the wake of his abrupt departure from The Poynter Institute late last year,...
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Podcasting
Turning Panic Into Money: Marc Maron's Podcast Gold
Just over two years ago, comedian Marc Maron was out of a job, couldn't get standup gigs and was going through a debilitating divorce that had put him in debt. With "nothing to lose," as he put it, he launched the WTF podcast, by sneaking into the New York offices of Air America radio, from which he'd just been fired....
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #35: Apple's Boffo Earnings; Get More Clicks Per Tweet; NYC vs. Silicon Valley
Welcome to the 35th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. Once again, Apple dominates the headlines, this time for quarterly earnings that blew away Wall Street -- and everyone else. The company made $13.1 billion in profits in the quarter,...
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MarketingShift
It's True: We Really Are All Publishers Now, Including Brands
Though it's a relatively new idea, the phrase, "We're all publishers now" already has become somewhat of a cliché. Seriously. Let me Google that for you. I'll wait while you go look ... Back? See what I mean? More than a full page of results with that exact phrasing. While it seems very democratizing, and it is, what many don't...
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MagazineShift
Ladies' Home Journal Ventures Into Bold Crowdsourcing Experiment
In 1900, Ladies' Home Journal published an article containing predictions for the year 2000. Though some of the author's predictions were accurate -- Americans are indeed taller, and photographs are now sent around the world -- one key point was missing. The author didn't imagine that in the new millennium, the very magazine that published his predictions would no longer...
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Business
Breakthrough Websites for Young Women, by Young Women
A new generation of young women has begun to make their mark online, combining entrepreneurial energy with the hardwired digital fluency that typifies the so-called digital natives. Here are two stories of such women, both 26 years old, who jettisoned their office jobs to create online media outlets designed for young women like them. For these women and others like...
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Public MediaShift
How Social Media, Collaboration Fueled Reports on Australia's Refugees
An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup. The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a "citizens' agenda." The result...
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Citizen Journalism
Why Training Citizen Journalists Is So Important After the Arab Spring
Tomorrow (Jan. 14, 2012) marks the one-year anniversary of Tunisia's liberation from 23 years of oppression under dictator Ben Ali. It was a liberation sparked by one man's shocking public protest against injustice through self-immolation and fueled by the power of citizen journalism and social media. During the last months of 2010, Tunisians captured footage of protests and government oppression...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #33: CES Jumped the Shark?; SOPA Battles; Google+ in Search
Welcome to the 33rd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we have a special show focused on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas all week. Apple isn't there and Microsoft did its last keynote presentation there. Is the show losing momentum? Are...
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Ethics
3 Laws for Journalists in a Data-Saturated World
At the Cyberspace Conference in London in November, Igor Shchegolev, the Russian minister of communications and mass media, referred to sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #32: Yahoo's Mr. Wrong?; Steve Rubel's Clip Book; Fake @Wendi_Deng
Welcome to the 32nd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. We're back from our holiday break and ready to tackle more media news. The big news of the new year is a new CEO (again) at Yahoo, this time PayPal president Scott Thompson will try his...
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Collaboration
The 5 Tenets of Open Journalism
I'm not a middle-of-the-roader and wasn't aiming for a compromise position with my discussion paper, "The Case for Open Journalism Now: A new framework for informing communities," published early this month by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab. Instead, I sought to identify and propel a culture shift that might build a healthier relationship among those who produce...
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Legal Drama
Wiretapping, SOPA, Occupy: 2011 Was a Tumultuous Year in Media Law
This piece is co-authored by Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars. This year turned out to be one that could fit well in a Billy Joel song: peppered protesters, jailed journalists, Internet crusaders ... the list goes on. To recap a year that has been chock-full of shifts in media, we put together a list of the top 10 (plus...
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NewspaperShift
For Better and for Worse: The Changing World of Science Journalism
Jeremy Roberts sat still on the shore of the Bitterroot River, photographing a female kingfisher. The chunky, crested icon of anglers would seize a fish, fly away, then return to the same branch to fish again. Time and again she came and went. In addition to the other photos he took, Roberts snapped a picture with his cell phone and posted it to Facebook.
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #30: Netflix, Time Warner Make Peace?; E-Books Price-Fixing; Holiday Gadgets
Welcome to the 30th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we have an eclectic mix of topics. First up is the UBS Media and Technology Conference in New York, where the talk of the conference was the rise of over-the-top video services and talks by...
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PoliticalShift
How Bloggers, Occupy Wall Street Have Inspired Each Other
From the very beginning, supporters of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have touted its decentralized nature as one of its greatest strengths. The opponents of a political movement commonly attempt to discredit them by pointing to outside powerful interests secretly pulling strings, thereby jeopardizing its grassroots legitimacy. We saw this with the Tea Party, whose opponents very early on argued that...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Professors Can Navigate Social Media
Teaching journalism today requires an aptitude for learning new technology and experimenting with social media and mobile tools. It's a rewarding challenge, a constant race to stay ahead of the curve. But while some might expect a challenge in staying ahead of students regarding social media, it can sometimes be the opposite.
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Social Media
A Newsroom Primer: Starting Fresh With Google+ Brand Pages
If newsrooms avoided creating an account on Google+ when the product asked brands to stay away, the time has come to build your brand inside the social-networking tool. Last week, Google opened up brand pages for all to use. But before you set it up, there's an important thing you need to know: You can set up a brand page...
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MediaShift
A Strange, Sad Day in Journalism: Romenesko's Resignation
Aggregation is an underappreciated art. Sure, with a quick tutorial, almost anyone can perform some version of it. But I have stumbled across only a few individuals and media outlets who have done it really well for any length of time on the web. Jim Romenesko has heavily influenced the practice of online aggregation. By many accounts, he was one...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #26: Streaming Video Special: Apple TV Set?; YouTube Channels
Welcome to the 26th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. This week is a special look at streaming video services, including the possibility of an Apple TV set and the impending launch of YouTube channels. Guests include tech journalist Dan Frommer of SplatF and Brent Weinstein, head of digital services at United Talent Agency.
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BookShift
How Social Networks Might Change the Way We Read Books
Reading hasn't always been seen as a solitary act. Our first experiences with books demonstrate that: before we know how to read, we often have people -- a parent, a teacher -- reading out loud to us. But once we know how to read, there's a sense that we're supposed to read silently and oftentimes, alone. Even so, we're...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #24: Non-Profit News Sites; iPhone 4S Boom; Android's Ice Cream Sandwich
Welcome to the 24th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. The hot topic is non-profit news sites and whether they can sustain themselves. A recent study was released from the Knight Foundation about the business health of some of these sites, and noted that they still need to experiment to find the right business model to survive.
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Social Networking
Dutch Artist Explores Privacy, Social Media With 'Showroom Girls'
This past summer, Amsterdam's Foam museum exhibited a controversial project by Dutch visual artist Willem Popelier -- a project that has raised a debate about the intersection of the Internet, in particular social media, and privacy.Popelier's Showroom Girls centers on the story of two 14-year-old girls the artist tracked through social media.The two girls visited a shop where customers can...
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EducationShift
A Case for Using Social Networking for Learning
We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #23: Occupied Wall Street Journal; Netflix Backs Down
Welcome to the 23rd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. The main topic on this show is the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, how the media has covered it, and the remarkable "Occupied Wall Street Journal" newspaper. Special guest Arun Gupta is the co-founder of the newspaper and explains the importance of a print publication in political circles.
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EducationShift
Using Facebook, Hoot.me as a Study Tool
Protecting student safety has been the rationale behind the recent spate of "laws restricting teachers' and students' communication via social networking. The laws call into into question once again the educational value of these sorts of online social tools: Why do teachers need to talk to students on Facebook? Shouldn't students be studying? Isn't Facebook just a waste of time?
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Social Networking
2011 Knight-Batten Winners Include Storify, Andy Carvin
Since 2003, the winners of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism have encouraged new forms of information sharing, increased user engagement, and created innovative ways to share information. This year's cream of the crop, announced earlier this month in Washington, D.C., were no exception. While Storify, a publishing platform for social media, took home the top spot and a...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #21: Social Wars: Facebook's Timeline, Media Grab; Google+ Dead or Alive?
Welcome to the 21st episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. This week is a special edition the war between the social networks, and what that means for the media world.
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Social Networking
A Journalist's Primer to Google+
After a few months of chatter, Google+ has opened up to everyone. As a journalist, Google+ is something you need to explore. Its simplicity of broadcasting your message is worth understanding and using to connect with news consumers. I jumped into the new social space within 24 hours of its release. I'm an early adopter, and I love to share...
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Business
5 Questions Publishers Should Ask Before Committing to a Social Platform
J Crowley, Foursquare's head of business development and media partnerships, greeted a study group then showed off pages that some of the best-known media companies had created on the location-based social sharing service.
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BookShift
A Brave New Book World: How Authors Become Entrepreneurs
A few years ago, I interviewed author Ron Carlson about his novel "The Signal." I asked him about his experience with his longtime editor, Carol Houck-Smith, who had recently died. He remembered back to 1977 when he had just signed a deal to publish a novel with Houck-Smith at Norton: It's such a treasure to me to have had this...
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Social Networking
Google+: Social Media Upstart 'Worse Than a Ghost Town'
I wanted to log on to Google+. I swear I did. But the thought of it made me tired. I recently wrote a piece for MediaShift on the perils of tweeting interview requests. Like I've done for past pieces and many of the posts on my blog College Media Matters, I carried out all the expected social media promotion. I...
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World View
How Social Media Is Keeping the Egyptian Revolution Alive
This piece was co-written by Hanna Sistek. CAIRO -- The revolution in Egypt is unfinished business. While new online tools are used to strengthen civil society, activists are still struggling with the digital divide when it comes to mobilizing masses against the army and the remains of the old administration. On a Saturday evening in Cairo, a digital campaign against...
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Philosophy
September 11th Ten Years On: 'Are You OK?'
There is nothing like an anniversary to force you to notice change. In New York City this weekend, a lot of us are contemplating what's happened over the past decade: to ourselves, to our city, and to the world. One of the most startling realizations is the shift in the role of the media since the attack. We remember watching...
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Social Networking
An avatar, for lack of a better explanation, is our incarnation on the Internet -- the virtual Halloween costume we wear every day. Whether it's an animated alter ego in a game or online community, or a two-dimensional Facebook profile picture or Twitter "Twavatar," your avatar is how the online world sees you. It's also how you see yourself. Researchers...
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Your Take
Poll: What's Your Favorite Video Streaming Service?
This has been a busy week in the world of video streaming services. The new higher rate for Netflix streaming and DVDs just went into effect, just as Starz broke off negotiations with Netflix (meaning, perhaps, less selection of movies on the service). Hulu also made noise by launching a streaming service in Japan that costs more but has no...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #18: CNN Buys Zite; DoJ Blocks AT&T; Starz Drops Netflix
The Mediatwits podcast is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. Welcome to the 18th episode...
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Free Speech
Online Comments Run Afoul of Thailand's Laws Shielding Royalty from Criticism
BANGKOK -- As a high profile case against a prominent media campaigner returns to court in Bangkok, it has emerged that the long arm of Thailand's lèse-majesté law has reached into California. On Thursday Chiranuch Premchaiporn of the Thai current affairs website Prachatai returned to court in the Thai capital to face vague-sounding allegations that she facilitated third-party remarks about...
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World View
Andy Carvin's Twitter Feed Swerves from Libya to Earthquake
NPR's Andy Carvin has been the star of the Twittersphere during the Arab Spring, even sending out an eye-popping 1,200 tweets in one weekend. But today was a day like no other for Carvin, as the Libyan rebels took over Colonel Moammar Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, while an earthquake struck the East Coast in the U.S., shaking Carvin's house as...
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TVShift
HBO Go App Shakes Up the Streaming TV Scene
In a second-quarter earnings letter to investors distributed last month, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the biggest threats to his business weren't the likes of Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus, but applications such as HBO Go. "HBO subscribers can watch HBO on-demand through their MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) provider web interface (DishOnline.com, say), or through the HBO Go dedicated...
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EducationShift
Twitter Interview Requests: #Innovative or #Epicfail?
Over the past year, I have noticed an emerging student press trend sweeping the Twitterverse: the tweet greet. An increasing number of student journalists appear to be using Twitter as the prime spot to seek sources for their story or class assignments and to make first contact with these sources. The result: a dramatic rise in brief, public, and sometimes...
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Social Networking
What the England Riots Tell Us About Social Media
When England instituted the Riot Act of 1714, it did so to prevent "tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters." That statute came off the books in 1973, but now British Prime Minister David Cameron is targeting the "riotous assemblies" of the online and social media worlds in the wake of deadly and...
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Social Networking
Overexposed? Baby Photos in the Age of Facebook
From the moment that pink solid line appeared on the pregnancy test, every little decision felt monumental. Home birth or hospital? Cloth or disposable? Co-sleeper or crib? Sling or stroller? With each choice, I did more research than perhaps a person should do and there was almost always more information than I needed. By the time my last trimester...
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Media Usage
Twitter Chat: How to Avoid Ads for Kids, Share Meaningful Media Moments
As part of our ongoing series on Kids & Media, we had a recent live chat on Twitter with a group of parents to talk about how our kids use media. Special guests included MediaShift managing editor Courtney Lowery Cowgill, Common Sense Media's Caroline Knorr and PBS Parents' Tracey Wynne. I was the moderator, and we had a good...
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Media Usage
How to Control (Or At Least Influence) Children's Media Access
This week, MediaShift will be running a special series on navigating the relationships between kids and media. Stay tuned all week as we explore topics like this one. Once you have a child old enough to use a remote, the angst begins over how to control access to media. And absent the will to live a technology-free existence, media...
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Ethics
Rethinking Journalism Ethics, Objectivity in the Age of Social Media
In response to the rapidly changing media environment, many schools and academic programs are offering novel approaches to journalism education. This seismic change creates tensions within programs, especially when it comes to how to teach ethics for this increasingly mixed media. In an earlier column, I put forward some principles for teaching ethics amid this media revolution. But these principles...
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Social Networking
Google+ Terms of Service, Illustrated
Editor's note: When Google+ launched, there was much ado about the Terms of Service, especially in how they related to photos. So, artist Ryan Estrada set out to simplify things with the following infographics, which immediately went viral. He explains below what inspired them. I'm an artist who makes my living sharing my work online, and when I joined Google+...
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EducationShift
Wikipedia Taps College 'Ambassadors' to Broaden Editor Base
From what I can tell, most of my fellow educators spend more time criticizing Wikipedia than engaging with it. The conversation tends to go round in a fairly tiresome circle: The first educator points to an article on the subject of his/her expertise and points to a glaring error to demonstrate that the whole enterprise is worthless. The interlocutor responds...
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Free Speech
Social Media Plays Major Role in Motivating Malaysian Protesters
More than a week after Malaysian police fired teargas and water cannons at thousands of demonstrators seeking reform of the country's electoral system, a Facebook petition calling on Prime Minister Najib Razak to quit has drawn over 200,000 backers, highlighting the role of social and new media in Malaysia's restrictive free speech environment. One contributor to the page wrote: "The...
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World View
Social Media and Satire Fuel Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt
Political satire is, historically, a great propeller of social movements. As Srdja Popovic, a leader of Optor, the Serbian resistance movement, said: Everything we did [had] a dosage of humor. Because I'm joking. You're becoming angry. You're always showing only one face. And I'm always again with another joke, with another action, with another positive message to the wider audience....
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Social Networking
How Social Media 'Friends' Translate Into Real-Life Friendships
When social media first gained attention, I heard many people scoff that these online connections couldn't possibly be real friends. Some even used "Facebook friend" as a synonym for shallowness, fearing people might trade face-to-face interaction for a virtual life online. But many years, re-tweets, meet-ups, event invitations and birthday wishes later, the majority of the people I know now...
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Social Networking
How to Correct Social Media Errors
In my job as the social media editor for MediaShift, I'm used to fitting big ideas into tight spaces. But recently, in the fray of 140-character editing, I struggled to condense a curious statistic. Finishing up, I double-checked grammar, the link, and clicked "submit" as usual. It was retweeted more than 100 times (see the tweet at left). And it...
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EducationShift
College Students Miss the Journalistic Potential of Social Media
This piece was co-written by Alexa Capeloto. A couple of days after news broke of Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan, a group of students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where we teach journalism, sat in a classroom and talked about how they were first alerted to the story. Most said Facebook. Some said friends or family, primarily...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #12: Facebook Gets Skype Video; Phone-Hack Scandal in U.K.
Welcome to the twelfth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at the recent launch of Facebook video chat with Skype built in. While Facebook called its announcement "awesome" it was underwhelming for tech and media insiders who have...
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TVShift
KOMU-TV Puts Google+ Hangout Video Chat on the Air
As a reporter and anchor for KOMU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Mo., and the broadcast lab for the Missouri School of Journalism, I already chat with viewers via Facebook and Twitter on our "Livestream" behind-the-scenes webcam mounted on the news set. Now, KOMU has added yet another delightful distraction to the other side of the set. It's turned me into...
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Your Take
Every few months, a new social network is born, and the cycle begins again. It starts with the emails: "Joe Blow wants you to join his network!" "Jane Blow wants you to join her network!" Then you check it out. Huh. It looks like all the other social networks, except that no one's there yet. Then you have to build...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #11: Can Google+ Overtake Facebook, Avoid MySpace's Fate?
Welcome to the eleventh episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at the recent launch of Google+, a more fully formed social network that is taking on Facebook. Google+ is in an invite-only mode but both Mark and Rafat...
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EducationShift
Virtual Worlds Are Scary for Parents, Liberating for Kids
There are more than 1 billion users of virtual worlds, online communities where people have avatars and participate in various simulated environments. Even more impressive than that number: Roughly half of those virtual world users are under age 15. With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (violating the social network's Terms of Service), you'd...
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Culture
5 Guidelines for Community Managers to Have Cross-Cultural Fluency
While the behavior of connecting is nothing new, doing it in a virtual environment gives rise to new and sophisticated challenges -- especially when you're connecting across cultures. Knowing how to navigate these challenges is essential to community management. When I first discovered the Internet in 1996, I instantly fell in love. I was a bicultural, New York native who was...
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Social Networking
The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative
The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, best known for the bleak and cynically fatalistic love poem, "Dover Beach," once described journalism as "literature in a hurry." As the news cycle has been spurred on by Twitter and social media, and quickened to the point of being nearly instantaneous, I can't help but wonder what Arnold would think of...
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Social Media
Social Media Creates New Avenues for Connecting Journalists and Sources
The true value of a reporter can be measured by the number of contacts in his or her address book, I'm told, and one of the most important priorities for a journalist is to establish a wide network of sources, which can later be used to produce solid and trustworthy reporting. Now, increased Internet and social media usage in newsrooms...
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MovieShift
4 Filmmakers Use Social Media to Crowdsource Their Stories
The second line of filmmaker Tim Burton's new short story is this: It is, of course, a tweet -- and one that encapsulates a new participatory era where contributions and voices from the public are reflected in all forms of art and storytelling, film included. One of the early adopters of emerging media was filmmaker Kevin Smith, who now has...
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Legal Drama
New Jersey Supremes Take Narrow View Defining Journalists Online
If you're a self-described journalist who posts on Internet message boards, then you're not protected by the reporter's shield law. So says, at least, the Supreme Court of New Jersey. Earlier this week, it handed down Too Much Media LLC v. Hale [PDF file], a case featuring porn, cybersecurity and death threats. (What more could you want?) To unpack the...
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Social Networking
How the Egyptian Revolution Inspired Protests in Spain
Shortly after I moved to Madrid after visiting Cairo, an Egyptian friend tweeted solidarity with the hashtag #SpanishRevolution. A revolution? In Spain? Was this his attempt to make my new home seem more exciting? The link he posted led to video of a packed Puerta del Sol -- a square in the center of Madrid. And so, someone 2,000 miles...
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Social Networking
Weiner Scandal Lesson: Sexting More Trackable Than Real-Life Flirting
My first internship was covering state politics. College parties were nothing compared to the drinking, carousing and eye-opening public behavior I saw during the legislative session. It was the 1970s -- a mere decade after the "Mad Men" '60s. Each week brought a new jaw-dropper, such as when a legislator told me he'd be happy to discuss a bill he...
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Social Media
BBC Social Media Summit Fixates on Creating 'Open Media'
Journalists need to shift their mindset to talking with -- instead of at -- the "people formerly known as the audience." That was a take-home message from the recent BBC Social Media Summit in London. It's a notion others (including me) have written about in academic research regarding media representation of minorities. But it was The Guardian's Meg Pickard who...
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Social Media
How PBS NewsHour Used Social Media in Response to Hack Attack
PBS NewsHour staffers who were awake late last Sunday before Memorial Day, including myself, were just as startled as the rest of the Internet to discover a legitimate-looking blog post on our site claiming that late rapper Tupac Shakur was alive. We were under a hacking attack. Suddenly, it was time for damage control. I hope you never find yourself...
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Legal Drama
Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media?
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced June 1 that the company was partnering with Photobucket to make it easy to share photos at Twitter.com. With a "Twitter native photo-sharing experience," he said, "users will own their own rights to their photos." The implication? That this might not be the case with third-party services. Therein lies the real battle over photo-sharing sites:...
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Social Media
How to Use Social Tools to Curate, Research and Expand Sources for a Story
Our website, Tijd.be has existed for 15 years now, and my colleagues recently asked me to write an opinion piece about what the next decade and a half will bring -- a daunting task. I had some ideas, of course, but I wanted to eat my own dog food and actually tap into my social media networks to write the...
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RadioShift
5 Must-Have Apps for iPhone Radio Reporting
Having the right tool for any job is important, especially when your finished product is due right now. Since February 2010 I've been doing all my field production and reporting on my iPhone for all-news WTOP-FM and wtop.com in Washington, D.C. You can read my in-depth report on how I use the iPhone for reporting in this previous report for...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #9: Twitter Buys Tweetdeck; Facebook's Role in Breaking News
Welcome to the ninth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the recent purchase of Tweetdeck by Twitter, and the questions it raises about companies starting businesses on the platform of other companies. If you run an app for...
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Your Take
What Does the LinkedIn IPO Signify?
Last week when business social networking site LinkedIn went public, the stock shot up from $45 per share to more than $90, and even today is trading at $96-plus per share. The company's valuation is more than $9 billion, even though the company had earnings of just $15.4 million last year. That kind of eye-popping debut on the public markets...
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Social Networking
Newsroom, Community Use Facebook as Key Hub After Joplin Tornado
When Joplin, Mo., was hit with a massive tornado, I knew my community would react. Even though we're nearly 250 miles away, many people in Columbia and mid-Missouri are either Joplin natives or have family there. My newsroom's normally local-focused Facebook page quickly became a clearinghouse for updates about how mid-Missouri could help the tornado-ravaged community. Fans are using the...
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EducationShift
Children and Facebook: The Promise and Pitfalls for Social Media
With more than 500 million Facebook users across the world, it's hard to refute that the social networking site has profoundly changed the way we communicate and share information. But what's the Facebook effect on kids? When it comes to navigating the social networking world -- whether it's Facebook or fan fiction sites -- the terrain becomes even murkier. Parents...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #8: LinkedIn's Bubbly IPO; Grueskin on the New York World
Welcome to the eighth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the big IPO of business networking site LinkedIn, with the stock price doubling to more than $90 per share in its first day of trading, valuing the company...
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Europe
In Lithuania, an Overdue Crackdown on Online Hate Speech
Online hate speech is becoming more and more widespread in Lithuania and until recently, comments like, "The world needs Hitler again to do the cleansing job," which was posted on a website called Delfi, or "Expel dirty Roma people out of Lithuania" would have gone unheeded by criminal justice. "Although the Lithuanian Criminal Codex includes sufficient law provisions to prosecute...
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Social Media
BBC Social Media Summit: Crowdsourcing a Research Agenda
The BBC College of Journalism is staging a Social Media Summit (hashtag #BBCSMS) in London this week, which will bring together industry leaders, practitioners and academics from around the world, with a view to collaboratively mapping the future of social journalism. Social media is having a transformative impact on professional journalism. And the speed of the real-time revolution raises significant...
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World View
3 Non-Profits Train Foreign Journalists to Boost Global Coverage
About seven years ago, Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was working as a foreign correspondent in Nepal. During a visit to a village in the Eastern part of the country, Hegranes offered a pen and notebook to the matriarch of the village, and asked her to write down her own story. "What she came up with was a really...
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PoliticalShift
Burmese Media Launch Campaign to Free Jailed Reporters
Hla Hla Win, Sithu Zeya, Maung Maung Zeya, Ngwe Soe Lin and Win Maw are all undercover reporters in Burma, and all are serving jail sentences ranging from eight to 27 years after being caught in one of the world's most draconian media dragnets. To coincide with World Press Freedom Day last week on May 3, Democratic Voice of Burma...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #6: Bin Laden News on Twitter; Demand Media Goes Long-Form
Welcome to the sixth episode of "The Mediatwits," the new revamped longer form weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the way the news of Osama Bin Laden's death played out over Twitter and other new media, making minor celebrities of @ReallyVirtual and @KeithUrbahn. Our...
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EducationShift
Columbia J-School Students Try to Keep Professor Off Social Media
News of Osama bin Laden's death brought a huge surge of activity to Twitter and other social media platforms Sunday night and Monday. So it's a strange quirk of timing that this is the week that Sree Sreenivasan -- digital media professor, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and longtime social media enthusiast -- has agreed...
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Social Networking
A Twitter Timeline on the Killing of Osama Bin Laden
[View the story "Timeline of Tweets Around Death of Osama Bin Laden" on Storify] Did you see any other key tweets around the news of Bin Laden's killing? Share them in the comments below and I'll add them to the timeline above. Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report...
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Social Networking
Canadians Prefer to Get News from Friends (not Editors) on Social Media
Journalists today are expected to be active on social media, sharing observations, anecdotes and links with their audience. Facebook itself is reaching out to newsrooms, recently launching the Journalists on Facebook page as a resource for the media. But a study from Canada suggests more people prefer to get their news via their friends and acquaintances on social media, than...
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PoliticalShift
European Council Changes Course on 'Tweetwall' After Berlusconi Insults
The social network platform Twitter broke the one billion tweets barrier as it celebrated its fifth anniversary in March of this year. Since October of 2010, the European Council and its President Herman Van Rompuy have contributed to this record result. Twitter gives politicians a chance to better connect with their voters. Political institutions have also recognized the value of...
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Legal Drama
Tasini Lawsuit Against Huffington Post Has No Merit
Jonathan Tasini's at it again. Last week, the writer and labor activist declared war on Arianna Huffington, first promising to make her "a pariah in the progressive community" and then threatening to make her life "a living hell." He went on, in a splendid variation of Howard Beale's "I'm mad as hell" speech, to say that unpaid Huffington Post bloggers...
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Social Networking
Susan Orlean Explains How Twitter Affects Her Long-Form Writing
As I spoke to Susan Orlean about the role the social web plays with her long feature articles and books, I couldn't help but compare her to another famous writer for the New Yorker: E.B. White. Like Orlean, White had decided to leave the frantic mania of New York City life for a much quieter one in the country, moving...
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Social Networking
Facebook Sometimes Slow to Remove Offensive Content, Fake Profiles
When it comes to Facebook, what goes up may not come down, at least not without a fight. In many cases, the social networking giant has been slow to act when it comes to offensive content and fake profiles. Robin Sinkhorn, mother of actress Lauren Potter, who plays Becky in the popular TV series "Glee," learned this last year. Potter...
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Social Networking
Social Media's Role as a Crucial Lifeline During Japan Disaster
This is the story of seven people connected by the Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March and their need to obtain immediate and accurate information. Mass confusion combined with their desire to reach loved ones compelled them to turn to social media as a lifeline. Through networked, digital technologies, they created new ways to supplement lifelines...
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EducationShift
Many Journalism Schools Put Minimal Effort into Facebook Pages
As students at the Missouri School of Journalism, we've learned about the importance of social media to the news industry. But beyond the scope of journalism, we use social media every day just to communicate with each other. From perusing Spring Break pictures to keeping up with friends' birthdays, Facebook and Twitter are constant companions for many college students. So...
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Your Take
Who can forget the good old days of America Online, the company of the mid-'90s that spent a ton of money mailing out CD-ROMs for people to try it. Over the years, it has morphed from a dial-up service to a content company to a mega-merger with Time Warner to a spin-off back into a dial-up service with content. In...
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Social Networking
7 Social Lessons Learned from the MediaShift Mixer
MediaShift has been in existence since 2006, and has a vibrant, engaged community that has grown over those five years. But where is that community of readers and contributors in the real world? How can they connect, get to know each other and network face-to-face? That's been the conundrum for me as the founder and executive editor of the...
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Free Speech
Bloggers, Media Students Push for Free Speech in Cambodia
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA -- A blog criticizing Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has been at the center of a recent controversy in Cambodia, shedding light on a deteriorating environment for freedom of expression in the Southeast Asian country. World Food Programme (WFP) employee Seng Kunnaka received a six month sentence for handing out copies of...
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RadioShift
How One Radio Reporter Ditched His Equipment for an iPhone 4
It's been more than a year since I packed away my laptop computer, digital recorders, microphones, cables and cameras, and began covering Washington, D.C. with only my iPhone. When I first came to the top-rated all-news WTOP in 1997, the bag phone I carried weighed as much as a bowling ball. Reel-to-reel tape recorders (ask your parents) were the newsroom...
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PoliticalShift
How Social Media is Being Used in the Scottish Elections
Since Barack Obama successfully tapped into social media during his run to the White House in 2008, every political group has tried to use the digital world to bring in revenue and votes. This year's Scottish Parliament elections, which take place on May 5, will be the first in that country since Facebook and Twitter came to dominate the social...
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Embeds
Video: Robert Scoble on How to Build a Career in Media
I don't know about you, but when I want to find out about the newest tech stuff, I read blogs and their related Twitter feeds. As a newspaper journalist, it puzzles me that somehow those blogs, with their limited resources and short history, manage to beat the mainstream media. Take, for example, uber-blogger Robert Scoble. When Flipboard's servers went down...
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Europe
Romanian Magazine Uses Facebook for 'Crowd-Publishing' Success
It all started over a beer. One evening in April 2009, Cristian Lupşa and four other young journalists were chatting in a pub in Bucharest, Romania about the low quality of the country's print media. They should start their own magazine, someone joked. They could call it Decât o Revistă, which in slightly broken Romanian means "just a magazine." It...
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MusicShift
SXSW 2011: Music Apps Get Social; Streaming Battle Continues
SXSW is easily the most chaotic experience in the music industry. For the 14,000 people that attend the music conference it provides opportunities to immerse themselves in the ecosystem that powers much of the global business. It is one of the best times to tee up deals and relationships that could power significant developments for the rest of the...
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Business
A Twitter Chat About Writer Pay Rates in the Digital Age
With the rise of content farms such as Demand Media and Examiner, and the recent AOL/Huffington Post merger, there has been a lot of talk about how much writers are being paid online. On the farms, the only way for writers or copy editors to get high pay is to work very fast -- likely with poor results. And Huffington Post and many other group blogs rely on an army of contributors who aren't paid at all.
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Social Media
Oversharing, Overstimulated and Setting Boundaries at SXSW
AUSTIN, TX -- By Day 3 of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, I find that the future's so bright, it kind of gives me a migraine. Inside the Austin Convention Center, where most of the conference was staged, pillars are baroquely barnacled with multiple generations of posters, flyers, and business cards -- many of which sport cryptic QR...
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EducationShift
Why Missouri's J-School Should Rethink Its Approach to Twitter
Do you check the official Twitter feed for the Missouri School of Journalism on a regular basis? Probably not, based on its dismal number of followers. As of today, the official Twitter account of Mizzou's J-School had just 630 followers. That is a far cry from most other top journalism schools and a negative reflection on our own. How does...
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World View
How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster
The reports and pictures of the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last week reminded me of reporting on the earthquake that leveled Japan's port city of Kobe in 1995. On a personal level, I am praying for the people in a country I have come to see as a second home. As a media observer, what struck me...
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Public MediaShift
IMA + SXSW = Major Discussion on Future of Public Media
Public media makers found a whole new crew to hang with at this year's Integrated Media Association (IMA) Conference on March 10 and 11. Fueling excitement was a new collaboration: The IMA preceded and then flowed into the interactive track of the SXSW festival on the 12th. Attendees at a Knight Foundation-supported array of SXSWi panels on news innovation and...
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Social Networking
How Tuenti Held Off Facebook in Spain with Better Privacy
JEREZ DE LOS CABALLEROS, SPAIN -- When I first got to Spain, my Spanish students immediately asked me if I was on Tuenti. Like most Americans, I had never heard of it. Once I learned that it was another social network, I figured I didn't need it. First of all, I had a Facebook page, and secondly, I was wary...
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Legal Drama
Will Righthaven Copyright Lawsuits Change Excerpting Online?
Editors' note: An update has been added at the end of this article. Is it an infringement of copyright to post an excerpt from an online news article -- including a link to its source -- on a website, a blog, or an online forum? This practice is ubiquitous in online journalism, but its legal status has been in question...
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Social Networking
Facebook Pushes Comments Upgrade, But Will Publishers Bite?
Bit by bit, feature by feature, Facebook is making inroads into sites that live outside of Facebook.com. Major publishers now sprinkle their sites with Facebook plug-ins, from fan page widgets to friend recommendations to the ubiquitous "Like" thumbs-up. And hey, why not? It's a win-win, with publishers getting more engagement and increased traffic from Facebook News Feeds, and Facebook getting...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Shankbone's Wikipedia Photo Portraits Spread Like Wildfire
David Shankbone is arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world. He has taken over 1,000 portraits of prominent people across a variety of fields for articles on Wikipedia.org and its foreign language equivalents. Because the pictures are copyleft -- or free for reproduction, alteration, and distribution -- they are used by numerous non-profits, schools, authors, television programs...
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World View
How Technology, Social Media Is Making Life Hard for Dictators
This is the third of our on-the-ground reports from Cairo, Egypt, from Jaron Gilinsky. In this video report, Jaron considers the effects of social media on the Egyptian revolution. I wondered how Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak eventually knew about the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets calling for his resignation. Surely, he had many agents on the streets...
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MovieShift
How to Experience the Oscars on Mobile, Social Media
The Academy Awards are less than 127 hours away. While most people haven't seen all 10 Best Picture nominees, the Oscar-nominated reels may still be experienced through the revelry of mobile, digital and social initiatives. For moviegoers who still want the big screen experience of dreams and swans before Sunday, AMC Theatres offers the final chance with its Best Picture...
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EducationShift
How to Integrate Social Tools into the Journalism Classroom
Integrating social media into university classrooms can be a daunting task for many journalism educators. Professors are typically required to use clunky online systems for grading and communicating with students. It's an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. These awkward systems don't inspire creativity, enrich collaboration, or instill a passion for experimentation -- all of which are required to survive and succeed in a rapidly changing media industry.
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Online Video
Closed Captions Should Be Standard with Online Video, TV
When "The French Chef" appeared on PBS in 1972 with captions, it marked the first TV show ever to be fully accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. For the next decade, people with disabilities enjoyed more and more captioned TV, culminating in a 1990 law that required all TV shows to be captioned. Fast forward to today. When...
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Public Relations
How to Fix the Tech PR Industry's Diversity Deficit
PBS.org has recently been home to some frank and thoughtful discussions about an overlooked issue: the lack of racial diversity in the media. For those who may have missed it, the dialogue was sparked by Retha Hill in an Idea Lab post about the lack of minorities at new media conferences. Mark Glaser expanded the conversation from the comments section...
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World View
One Journalist's Survival Guide to the Egyptian Revolution
During the uprising that eventually ended the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, I became convinced that the most important journalistic work being done today is in those countries where journalists are not wanted. Mubarak and his agents were determined to silence the protesters and their message. But, thanks to the valiant efforts of journalists and the resilience of the...
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Online Video
How an Atlanta Ice Skater Made a Viral Video Go Worldwide
Every city has at least one iconic street. New York has Broadway. Los Angeles has Sunset Boulevard. Chicago has Lake Shore Drive. Atlanta? It has Peachtree Street. And one frozen night in early January, within blocks of the house where Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone with the Wind," Peachtree became more than a street -- an urban rebel christened it as...
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EducationShift
5 Principles for Teaching Journalism Ethics in the Digital Age
Our global media ecology is a chaotic landscape evolving at a furious pace. Professional journalists share the journalistic sphere with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists and social media users around the world. The digital revolution poses a practical challenge to journalists: How can they use the new media tools responsibly?
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World View
Egyptian 'Sandmonkey' Blogger Unmasks Himself in Cairo
CAIRO, EGYPT -- I have been following the Egyptian pro-democracy blog, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, for years now. I have long wondered about the identity of its author, who describes himself as "a micro-celebrity, blogger, activist, new media douchebag, pain in the ass!" on his blog. I contacted him several times on previous trips to Egypt, requesting an interview, and...
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AdvertisingShift
On Facebook and Online, Privacy Is Only an Illusion
As our public selves merge perceptibly with our private selves on social networks, our notions of what constitutes privacy -- arguably even the very definition of privacy -- is undergoing a radical revision. Mark Zuckerberg audaciously quipped in 2010 that privacy was no longer a social norm. For many of the 600 million-plus users of Facebook, the idea of...
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Social Media
Timeline: Facebook's Stormy Relationship with Privacy
No company has done more to push the boundaries of online privacy than Facebook. The world's leading social network has changed the way friendships are maintained, news is shared, and protests are organized -- among much else. While many of these innovations have been enthusiastically embraced by Facebook's 600 million-plus users, others have provoked serious backlash. Below are some...
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MusicShift
Silverman: CD Sales to Co-Exist with Cloud, Digital Downloads
There's a growing feeling in the American music business that the future will be in the cloud. No one will need physical CDs anymore, but will listen to music on streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which will eventually merge into a grand digital jukebox. But industry veteran Tom Silverman, who founded dance music label Tommy Boy Records in...
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World View
Social Media Alone Do Not Instigate Revolutions
This post was also written by Sean Noonan for STRATFOR. Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt yesterday after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt -- Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr...
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World View
Social Media, Facebook Help People Stand Up in Tunisia, Egypt
Even though they're far away from the center of the action in Cairo, Chinese web users felt the impact of the current demonstrations and political change afoot in Egypt. Chinese users searching for "Egypt" on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, came up empty, and 467 sites were reported inaccessible after a call for a "march of a million" was...
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Free Speech
The Yes Men's Bichlbaum Discusses Ethics of WikiLeaks
In my first post on MediaShift, I laid out how the digital media revolution was compelling organizations to become more transparent in their communication with the public. While vigorous in my promotion of radical transparency, I acknowledged "practical limits," such as the revelation of competitive secrets or legally sensitive information. In the two years since that post, I continued to...
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Your Take
What Role Did Social Media Play in Tunisia, Egypt Protests?
As the protests are playing out in the streets of Cairo and the rest of Egypt today, I have been glued to the live-stream of Al Jazeera English as well as the Twitter hashtag #Jan25, a top trending topic based on the big protests a few days ago. The Egyptian protests come on the heels of a similar revolution in...
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World View
Citizen Media Brings Opposing Political Views to the Maghreb
The Maghreb is generally a term used to refer to five countries in North Africa: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. This article explores the current state of the media in the region, and marks the effect that a burgeoning citizen media sphere is having on democracy. It is based on a contribution by the author, Algerian journalist Laid Zaghlami...
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Weblogs
Mike Elk: Dismissal Signals Change in Direction for HuffPost
Last Thursday, I was "fired" as a labor blogger from the Huffington Post by executive business editor Peter Goodman for helping a group of union construction workers disrupt a conference of bankers. (I put fired in quotations marks because I, like the majority of people who blog for the site, was not paid for my contributions by Huffington Post.) The...
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Social Media
In Search of Meaningful 'Social Media Optimization' (SMO)
I must admit that the acronym SMO sends shivers down my spine. It reminds me of search engine optimization (SEO), which in itself is a good and logical thing. Unfortunately, it has led to countless "SEO experts" who have infested Twitter.
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Social Networking
Social Media Grows at NY Times, But Home Page Remains King
Lately Facebook has been trumpeting its prowess in driving traffic to news sites. In a blog post a couple weeks ago, Facebook media guy Justin Osofsky crowed that Facebook was now the number one referral site to SportingNews.com and that the Washington Post saw Facebook referral traffic grow 280 percent year-over-year. That's certainly impressive, but the New York Times website continues to get the majority of traffic from its own home page.
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Environment
How Green is Facebook, Microsoft Push into Cloud Computing?
Information and communication technology (ICT) companies already account for up to three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- a figure projected to increase as more data centers are built to store the shift of information to the web. During interviews with MediaShift, executives at Microsoft and Facebook said cloud computing could have positive environmental impacts. But analysts and activists have expressed serious doubts about the implications of the coming data-center building boom.
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World View
How Mapping, SMS Platforms Saved Lives in Haiti Earthquake
This article was co-authored by Mayur Patel Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti last January, killing more than 230,000 people and leaving several million inhabitants of the small island nation homeless. Though natural disasters are common, the humanitarian response this time was different: New media and communications technologies were used in unprecedented ways to aid...
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Social Networking
Are People of Color Missing in New Media? A #MediaDiversity Chat
How many times have you been to a technology or media conference and noticed the dominance of white male speakers at the podium or the room? That's what Arizona State University professor and media veteran Retha Hill saw when she attended the recent NewsFoo conference in Phoenix and the ONA conference in Washington, DC. She wrote about the diversity problem...
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AdvertisingShift
2011 Flash Points: Open vs. Closed, Google vs. Apple
We don't know exactly what media and technology stories will occur in 2011. Will Facebook finally go public? Will Gawker Media achieve mainstream respectability? Will Jon Stewart start his own cable network? But we can be sure that a lot of stories will occur around a few areas of tension. Here, then, are flash points I predict will define media trends in the coming year and beyond.
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Media Usage
Top 10 Media Stories of 2010: WikiLeaks, Facebook, iPad Mania
This year has been all about privacy, or lack therof, online. Time magazine named Mark Zuckerberg as their Person of the Year, while the popular vote went to Julian Assange, the founder and chief instigator of WikiLeaks. Much has been made about both men trying to make our lives more transparent, Facebook with its 500-million-strong social network, and WikiLeaks...
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MovieShift
'The Social Network,' Streaming Boom Dominate Film in 2010
From Pandora to Palo Alto, digital and social media grabbed movie headlines in 2010. The year started with a box office record-breaker that captured our 3D imaginations ("Avatar") and is ending with David Fincher's fascinating look at Facebook ("The Social Network") collecting awards for film of the year (American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Critics, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics, et al).
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Social Networking
Vietnam Pushes Facebook Clone to Control Online Speech
HANOI, VIETNAM - Inside one of Hanoi's more than 3,000 online gaming houses, gamers clad in coats and scarves pass the hours shooting at each other on their screens, oblivious to the wintry gray and 10 celsius evening outside. This is southeast Asia, but the French colonial architecture and the proliferation of tourist-market socialist kitsch -- all covered by a wet blanket autumn gloom -- give the place a slightly European feel.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Yahoo Prefers Delicious Sale to 'Sunset'
In this week's 4MR podcast, I look at the controversy surrounding Yahoo possibly closing down social bookmarking site Delicious, which it bought five years ago. An internal slide was leaked showing Delicious was on the "sunset" list (to be closed), but after an outcry on Twitter and other social networks, Yahoo said it would look for an outside home for Delicious, meaning it could open the way for a sale. I talked with ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick about the future of Delicious, and even photo-sharing site Flickr in the wake of chaos at Yahoo.
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Social Media
CNN's Joshua Levs Uses Social Media Savvy in Hard, Soft News
When Joshua Levs left NPR's Atlanta Bureau to become a correspondent for CNN, he found that something was missing. Specifically, it was time. The rapid pace of TV left him with a fraction of the time he once had to present the many layers of a story. In the end, Levs saw that social media could fill the gap and provide an additional avenue for him to share information and connect.
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Europe
Brussels Leaks Tries to Build on WikiLeaks Idea in EU
A new site, Brussels Leaks, modeled after WikiLeaks, launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and the Twittersphere. This follows the announcement of OpenLeaks, a spin-off from WikiLeaks from former workers there. But Brussels Leaks doesn't plan to run the documents that are leaked to it, but rather rely on the media to...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Minorities, Young People Lead in Twitter Use
In this week's 4MR podcast, I look at the recent survey results from Pew Internet on Americans' use of Twitter. The research group found that 8% of American use Twitter, with 2% using it daily. That use is even more pronounced among Americans aged 18 to 29, and among blacks and Hispanics. I spoke to Pew Internet senior research specialist Aaron Smith about the survey results and how Twitter use compares to social networking use.
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Free Speech
Online Freedom of Expression Under Siege in Thailand
BANGKOK, THAILAND -- "Today I have to go all the way to Khon Kaen to report to the police," said Chiranuch Premchaipoen, the editor of Thailand's well-known online news site Prachatai during a recent conversation in Bangkok. The town is 450 km from Bangkok, and Chiranuch has to travel there once a month just to check in with police. This...
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Social Media
How Calgary's Mayor Used Social Media to Get Elected
Naheed Nenshi became mayor of Calgary at the end of October not by outspending his rivals or hailing from the incumbent political class in Canada. Nenshi didn't plaster his campaign message across the television, and he didn't even buy a single newspaper advertisement. Instead, Nenshi led a grassroots effort that mobilized soccer moms and utilized online activism on a Facebook page, on Twitter and on YouTube.
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Social Media
How NewsHour Used Crowdsourcing to Refute TSA Meltdown
Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here. During Thanksgiving week, the debate over stricter TSA security measures was turning into the big story. A handful of airport security anecdotes were making the rounds via...
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Embeds
How Storify Helps Integrate Social Streams Into Articles
Curation seems to be the big buzz word in journalism and online content these days. It's also an area that's generating a lot of product innovations. New services such as Keepstream, Storify, Storyful and Qrait are jumping into the space, aiming to offer new tools to help people curate web and social media content. Curation is a way for journalists...
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EducationShift
10 Reasons Our Student Newspaper Blog Stinks
Amid many scoops and successes this semester, The Minaret, the weekly campus paper I advise at the University of Tampa, has endured a major bust. Roughly three months in, our efforts to launch a buzzworthy and newsworthy blog have failed -- spectacularly.
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PoliticalShift
Fundly + Facebook = Millions in Micro-Donations for Campaigns
Political campaigns and non-profits must constantly "feed the beast" with their fundraising efforts. While traditionally that chore has meant going after people with the most money, the Internet has helped spawn networked fundraising and even "social fundraising" efforts where micro-donations add up to a lot more. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, 53% of the $750 million Barack Obama raised...
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Public MediaShift
8 Key Lessons the CBC Learned Working with Citizen Journos
The 2010 G20 summit in Toronto marked the first time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation collaborated with citizen journalists on a large and integrated scale. In the lead up to the event, we noticed our online community was passionate about the topic. As a public broadcaster, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to tap into that conversation and encourage...
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Public MediaShift
NPR, PBS Try to Tame Controversy, Embrace Tech at PubCamp
The second annual National Public Media Camp, which wrapped up Sunday night at American University in Washington, D.C., provided an opportunity for representatives from all three organizations to share their experiences and -- more importantly -- the lessons learned. Not surprisingly, the session entitled "How to handle an online revolt" was one of the many highlights of a packed weekend of diverse discussions.
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Public MediaShift
A Viral Video Takedown of Public Radio (in 5 Acts)
Why is NPR such an easy target for comedy bits and video parodies? It doesn't take a regular listener of Science Friday to figure it out. They're a bunch of mega-nerds. With every subtle use of alliteration, every time Robert Siegel says "draconian," and each transitional upright bass interlude, they slap a big fat "kick me" sign in the...
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Public MediaShift
How Public Access TV Evolved into Community Media Centers
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. Around the country, community media centers are launching exciting new collaborations with local organizations, neighborhood activists, schools, and media outlets to...
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Public MediaShift
5 Emerging Trends That Give Hope for Public Media 2.0
Public media is facing the same pressures as commercial media when it comes to digital: How can they transition to a new age of social media, collaboration and audience interaction? From today until Thanksgiving, MediaShift will have a special in-depth report on Public Media 2.0, with analysis, case studies, a 5Across video roundtable and coverage of this weekend's national PubCamp in Washington, DC.
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Citizen Journalism
Crowdsourced Fact-Checking? What We Learned from Truthsquad
In June, Senator U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch made the statement that "87 million Americans will be forced out of their coverage" by President Obama's health care plan. It was quite a claim. But was it true? That's a common, and important, question -- and it can often be hard to quickly nail down the real facts in the information-overloaded world...
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NewspaperShift
How I Won the Washington Post Pundit Contest with Social Media
I'll forgive you if you don't yet know it, but I'm America's Next Great Pundit -- or at least that's what Washington Post readers decided last week. After reading everything from blogs to live Q&A chats to video roundtables to traditional Op-Eds, voters on the Post's website winnowed 1,400 contestants down to one: me. I'm not letting it get to...
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AdvertisingShift
Augmented Reality Invades Newsrooms, Kids' Shows, Ads
You point your wireless device -- cell phone, iPad, whatever -- at a graphic on a box of unassembled furniture and then the instructions, complete with 3-D diagrams, instantly appear on-screen. Point at a piece of paper and it's suddenly a game board shared by friends across the room or across the world. This is augmented reality, or AR. While...
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AdvertisingShift
Can Social Sharing Survive the Rise of Rewards-Based Campaigns?
Left alone in a room, a group of people were given a complicated seven-piece puzzle, known as a Soma cube, and told to assemble the pieces into specific designs. One group was offered a monetary reward for each correctly assembled puzzle; another group was offered nothing. They worked at the puzzles until being told they could stop. And then the...
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World View
Canadian Murder Trial a Crucible for Real-Time Coverage
Late last month in a Canadian courtroom, Russell Williams, a former high-ranking colonel in the Canadian military, pleaded guilty to the murders of two young women as well as 86 counts of break and enter, sexual assault and other crimes. His sentencing hearing was widely covered by major Canadian media. Here, Canadian online journalism professor Robert Washburn explains how journalists...
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PoliticalShift
Live 2010 Election Day Chat on Social Media + Politics
I will be joined by an all-star lineup of new media experts, comedians, and social media gurus to look at how online coverage of Election Day is going -- with pointers to the most innovative mashups, maps, video blogs and more. The plan is to chat today from 10 am to 1 pm Pacific Time, and then again from...
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5Across
5Across: Politics in the Age of Social Media
5Across is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. As more people use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, politicians and campaigns need to put more time, energy and money into reaching people there. According...
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PoliticalShift
How the Tea Party Utilized Digital Media to Gain Power
The biggest story of the U.S. midterm election has been the growing influence of the Tea Party movement. Since their first rallies in early 2009, these vocal, visible conservatives have succeeded in shifting the center of American political discourse to the right. This election cycle, Tea Partiers have gone a step further, successfully backing primary challengers against moderate Republicans...
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PoliticalShift
Quirky Conservative Canadian MP Gets Real on Twitter
Tony Clement, the federal minister of industry in the current Conservative Canadian government, was home having dinner with his family one Saturday night in July when a woman began banging on their door. She frantically asked for help, saying her friend was drowning in the nearby river. Clement, his wife and father-in-law ran down to the water. He and...
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PoliticalShift
Will Geo-Location Services Play a Role in Elections?
The experiments that took place with Facebook and Twitter during the 2008 presidential campaign are now viewed as standard operating procedure just two years later. Will the same be said about location-based services come 2012? Foursquare and Gowalla are the current crowned kings of geo-location and have been getting regular mentions in the tech blogosphere and beyond. Geo-social is very...
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PoliticalShift
Special Series: PoliticalShift 2010
About this Series After the success we've had with previous in-depth reports -- the Beyond Content Farms series and Beyond J-School, we decided to do another series on MediaShift. This time the series will look at "PoliticalShift 2010," the way that social media, technology and blogs are changing the equation for politicians in the context of the 2010 U.S. midterm...
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PoliticalShift
GOP Beating Democrats with Social Media for Midterm Elections
There is a major shift going on in politics this election cycle, with more candidates and campaigns using social media and technology to boost their chances. From today until the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 2, MediaShift presents an in-depth special report, PoliticalShift 2010, with data visualizations, analysis, a 5Across video roundtable and live CoverItLive chat on Election Night with...
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NewspaperShift
Newspapers Must Consider More Free, Citizen Media Content
Newspapers can be saved and they can get back to delivering a consistent return on capital to investors, but this can't be achieved using old methods. At CRG Partners, our experience working with newspaper companies in the U.S. and U.K. has shown us that publishers and their executive management seem to believe that traditional cost-cutting methods of layoffs, smaller and...
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Social Networking
Public, Closed or Secret? How to Use the New Facebook Groups
I was wrapping up a normal evening of checking through my newsroom's content before bed when I noticed I had been invited to a Facebook group. This was about seven hours after Mark Zuckerberg and his team introduced a number of changes to groups. The change that most piqued my interest was the new groups process. So when I noticed...
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MagazineShift
Revamped Forbes Pushes Advertorials, Social Media, Conflict
Earlier this year Kevin Gentzel, the chief revenue officer of Forbes, took a look at what the chief marketing officers in the Forbes CMO Network were doing with their companies. He realized they were becoming content creators -- and that this had big implications for his magazine and other traditional media. Gentzel said this underscored the massive shift that was...
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Environment
How Climate Activists Are Warming to Social Media
American environmentalists recently suffered a pair of devastating defeats in their decades-long effort to halt global warming. Progress stalled on domestic legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions prior to a key UN summit in Copenhagen. Lack of leadership from America, the world's second largest climate polluter, made it impossible to produce and binding international agreement at the conference. Then, a...
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Social Media
'Liquid Newsroom' Project Developed with Radical Openness
People often think it's best to hide their good ideas and develop them in secret. The goal is to beat the competition by emerging only once your concept is fully developed and ready to go. This can be the case with a new business, or a piece of journalism. At the moment, though, people seem intrigued by the opposite approach....
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EducationShift
Professors Speak Out About Changes Coming to J-Schools
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. This article was co-authored by Abby Moon. A previous article on MediaShift mined the OurBlook series of interviews with leading journalists and academics to...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: New Twitter Makes Room for Ads
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the newly redesigned Twitter.com, now with a double-pane view, embedded photos and video, and infinite scroll. Some folks say this means Twitter is more of a media company, getting people to pay more attention to its website, where it could serve up more ads. I talked with tech pundit and blogger Robert Scoble, who said he likes the redesign and thinks third party Twitter app makers will need to innovate to survive.
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Social Media
Social Media Helps Drive Traffic, Engagement at NewsHour
When the PBS NewsHour relaunched both on-air and online in December, a new homepage was unveiled, a news blog was born and a new correspondent joined the team. But another big change unfolded behind the scenes as well: The addition of a social media desk assistant (myself) dedicated to fostering an online community and better distributing PBS NewsHour content digitally....
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EducationShift
How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School
In April 2007, Zephyr Basine arrived at school for her noontime biology seminar -- and immediately zoned out. Instead of learning science, the sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carried out a "fashion-scoping session." While the professor spoke about organisms and evolution, Basine focused on her fellow students' outfits and accessories, scouting for something new, chic or trendy.
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EducationShift
Revamping J-Schools in Australia to Bring in 'Citizens Agenda'
As Australian democracy hangs in the balance, and with the outcome of the August 21 national election unlikely to be resolved for weeks, I'm considering the implications for journalism education -- and how we can invent new models for political reporting.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Places Wants to Be Turned Off
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recently launched Facebook Places location feature. While the social network touts it as a great way to tell your friends where you are in the physical world, others worry about the privacy implications. In fact, the most popular stories on the subject are telling people how to turn it off. I talked with Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen about his take on how Facebook could have made it easier to turn Places off.
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EducationShift
Social Media, Entrepreneurship Dominate AEJMC 2010
The problem with five jam-packed days of panels and events is that you can't do it all. Presentations and business meetings for the 93rd annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), which was held in Denver earlier this month, ran concurrently from 7 a.m. until, for some, after midnight. I hustled from my booth in the exhibit hall to sit in on sessions across the different groups, but especially to eavesdrop on discussions among attendees.
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Online Video
10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience
I love my iPad. One of the reasons I love it is that it's a great device for watching video. Some mainstream media integrate video very nicely into their iPad applications. However, it seems that all this slickness comes at a price: The conversation with the people formerly known as the audience is often non-existent. It seems that the potentially-messy-but-genuine...
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Social Media
Experts Weigh Pros and Cons of Social Media
OurBlook.com has been conducting an ongoing interview series on the current and future role of journalism and social media. In previous posts for PBS MediaShift, I shared some of the insights we've gathered about the future of journalism, and the skills that will be required of future journalists. In this installment, experts weigh on the impact social media has had...
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PoliticalShift
3 Hot Topics at Supernova: Public Policy, Social Media, Privacy
Supernova, an annual technology conference, recently convened for the first time on the East Coast, a change that was evident in the composition of the conference attendees and the direction of the overall conversation. Below are the top three major takeaways from the conference. Policy matters Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, earned a place as crowd favorite during...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Facebook Launches Media Page But Resists Revenue Sharing
Facebook is the alpha dog of social networks, and it's also becoming a top dog when it comes to referring traffic to news sites. That became clear in February when Hitwise found that Facebook was referring more traffic to news and media sites than Google News. But for a long time, Facebook only had intermittent communication with media companies about...
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EducationShift
Journalism Education 2.0: Training in an Age of Radical Change
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. "We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second...
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Public MediaShift
Pop and Politics Blog Becomes Converged Radio Project
These days it's not so unusual for a public radio program to boast a companion blog. But few shows begin online and move to broadcast.Pop and Politics is the exception. Farai Chideya -- a high-profile public affairs reporter, novelist, and the former host of NPR's late and lamented African-American current events program "News & Notes" -- began the Pop and...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Kachingle Hopes 'Social Payments' Can Help Fund Content
If advertising alone isn't going to support all the online journalism and content sites, and pay walls will just turn readers away, perhaps there's another solution, a third way: Social payments. More than just simple donations, social payment systems such as Kachingle and Flattr simplify giving money to sites you visit. Both services set up a monthly payment system, with...
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Public Relations
What Working for Wikipedia Taught Me About Collaboration
A little over three years ago, I started working as the communications manager for Wikipedia. I had just moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., and was ecstatic to hear that this quirky website, which had begun to pop up in many of my web searches, was based there. Having grown up in New York, my culture radar detected that this was...
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Public Relations
5 Digital PR Lessons from BP's Oil Spill Response
Just like late night talk show hosts who salivate over a fresh political sex scandal, professional communicators can't stop analyzing and talking about BP's public relations work during the current Gulf Coast oil spill disaster. More to the point, they can't shut up about BP's inability to relate to the public, and its poor use of digital and social tools...
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EducationShift
Rethinking the Role of the Journalist in the Participatory Age
Students who dream of a career in journalism are entering the profession at a time when the question of who is a journalist, and even what is journalism, is open to interpretation. The function of journalism is still to provide independent, reliable and accurate information considered vital to a vibrant democracy. But defining who is a journalist is much harder.
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EducationShift
The Influencer Project Showcases 60 Speakers in 60 Minutes
The world is flooded with multi-day web marketing conferences and other educational opportunities aimed at teaching people how to use social media. But this week the shortest social media conference ever lined up 60 thought leaders to speak for 60 seconds each.
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Legal Drama
What the Viacom vs. YouTube Verdict Means for Copyright Law
Some have called it a license to steal. To others, the recent Viacom v. YouTube court decision was no less than a trumpet heralding the protection of free speech on the Internet. And yet to a third contingency, Manhattan federal judge Louis Stanton's decision was really an exercise in high-minded legal theory. Regardless of your outlook on the case, it...
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Media Usage
Spot.Us Lessons: Journalists Work in, and For, the Public
In a previous post I introduced the most significant findings from my recent case study of Spot.Us, a crowdfunding platform for journalism. In this post I discuss what my findings mean for journalism, and for the role and the work of a journalist. Renegotiating the Role of a Journalist A crowdfunded journalistic process brings a new element to a journalist's...
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EducationShift
Free Online Journalism Classes Begin To Gain Ground
The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.
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MagazineShift
Magazine Writers Are Slow to Take Up Multimedia
An ideal pitch for a magazine story today would seem to require great possibilities for text and for multimedia. Freelance magazine writers, one would think, would be honing their multimedia skills so they could pitch well-rounded stories to editors who could feature them in print, on the web and on an iPad or mobile device. Surprisingly, though, freelance magazine writers...
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Free Speech
Crisis in Kyrgyzstan Shows Need for 'Responsible Content'
Back in 1996, my Columbia University colleague Jack Snyder and his co-author, Karen Ballentine, published a ground-breaking article called Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas. The essay used Serbian broadcasting and Rwandan radio to illustrate how hyper-nationalist media could be used to incite political violence. Today's online media have the potential to be used in a similar fashion -- and...
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NewspaperShift
6 Takeaways from 'TechDirt Saves Journalism' Event at Google
What will the journalism landscape look like five to 10 years from now? The megatrend of unbundled, specialty-focused niche sources of online information likely spells doom for many of today's lumbering media giants. But opportunities abound for new players, as well as for daring news brands willing to expand their notions of what it means to stay competitive in the...
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Thought Leader Q&A
How Josh & Chuck Made 'Stuff You Should Know' a Hit Podcast
Perhaps you were hunting around iTunes one day and came across a list of the top audio podcasts. There in the top five among the usual suspects from NPR was something called Stuff You Should Know. And once you started listening, you were hooked on the congenial chit-chat between hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, senior writers at HowStuffWorks.com (owned...
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MovieShift
How 6 Big Summer Films Are Using Facebook For Marketing
Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, believes in "better living through technology." Most marketers would argue that better marketing is enabled by technology as well. One of the primary game-changers today is Facebook and studios are learning how to engage audiences online to spur a better box office. Movie marketers understand the impact that reaching their desired audiences on...
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Thought Leader Q&A
NBC's Ryan Osborn Wants to Use Social Media for Storytelling
Ryan Osborn's story at NBC is the prototypical tale of the young aspiring journalist going from a page on "The Today Show" in 2002 to becoming the first director of social media at NBC News. But what he'd like to do in that job is not exactly typical: Osborn wants NBC to concentrate on using Twitter and Facebook to extend...
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World View
Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship
At least 80 people were killed during the latest clashes in Thailand. But the confusion and danger that are present in various parts of Bangkok do not explain why several Thai and foreign journalists have been shot since April. Two are dead. The tense political situation also doesn't justify the leadership's blocking of more than 4,000 anti-monarchy websites. As we...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Privacy Update; Bay Citizen Launch
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I look at how Facebook tried to simplify its privacy settings in the face of widespread criticism and defections. Now the 50 settings have been streamlined down to 15, but still some critics decry the opt-out nature of sharing vs. opt-in. Plus, the new Bay Citizen non-profit news...
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Social Networking
Social Media Training: From Conferences to the Classroom
She sat in a chair signing an autograph, as the camera's flashes made the stones on her Ms. America crown sparkle. A man knelt about five feet in front of American royalty and drew a sketch of her on the iPad. Caressa Cameron, Miss America 2010, was addressing the audience at the 140 Character conference in New York City last...
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PoliticalShift
Aussie #Spill Breaks Down Wall Between Journalists, Audience
The spectacular demise of the Australian conservative party's leadership in November 2009 was a turning point for political journalism in the country. This is the third and final installment in a special MediaShift series (read part one here and part two here) about the transformative impact of the biggest Australian political story of 2009, which became known simply by its...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: A Primer on Facebook Privacy Issues
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I focus on the recent privacy brouhaha at social networking giant Facebook. Why are prominent techies deleting their accounts and complaining? Mainly because Facebook keeps adding features that are "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" and its privacy policies are a complex mess. I talked with lawyer Michael McSunas to...
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MagazineShift
'48 Hour' Births Crowdsourced, Print-on-Demand Mag in Public
The first issue of 48 Hour Magazine, though printed on old-fashioned paper, is one of the most technologically interesting magazine projects today. The staff of 48 Hour Magazine sent off its finished "Issue Zero" to MagCloud, a print-on-demand service, at noon on May 9 after a harried two-day submission, editing and design process. Following weeks of building buzz about the...
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PoliticalShift
U.K. Conservatives Pushed Online Promotion -- But TV Reigns
The new media evangelists who preached of a revolution in British electoral politics will have to wait until at least the next election to see their prophecies come to fruition. In this country steeped in electoral tradition, the impact of new and social media on the 2010 race was minimal. The British still consume high tea and scones, watch football...
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NewspaperShift
Canwest Buyers, OpenFile Bet on Value of Local News in Canada
Two Canadians took a gamble that local news still matters this week. The two represent the hopes of both old and new media. One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada's largest newspaper chain, the Canwest newspapers, led by experienced news executive Paul Godfrey. The other was the launch of a hyper-local, participatory news start-up called OpenFile.ca,...
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5Across
5Across: Athletes on Social Media
Back in the day, the only coverage of a sporting event came from the accredited media. But now, you can find out more from fans in the seats taking pictures and posting to blogs -- or from the athletes themselves who are getting hooked on Twitter and Facebook status updates. In fact, Major League Baseball has warned players it is...
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Legal Drama
CDA Protects Newspapers from Liability for Libelous Comments
A desperate, weeks-long search in 2007 for missing Purdue University student Wade Steffey yielded a number of stories in the local Lafayette, Indiana, newspaper, the Journal & Courier. The newspaper also covered a mugging incident that was reported by another student, Timothy Collins, on the same night of Steffey's disappearance. Local police, apparently suspicious of the coincidence between the two...
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Public Relations
Social Media Release Must Evolve to Replace Press Release
It's been nearly four years since the birth of the social media release, and the terminology and abilities of this tool are evolving alongside social media itself. This fast-paced evolution means many communicators are finding it tough to choose which tool best fits their needs. Sometimes, this wealth of options can lead PR pros to stick with the classic news...
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Weblogs
Newsrooms Should Use Blogs to Battle Bloat, Complexity
Media professor and writer Clay Shirky recently wrote about The Collapse of Complex Business Models on his blog. That post was in turn inspired by Joseph Tainter's 1988 book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Shirky wrote: When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the...
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PoliticalShift
How #Spill Effect Brought Color, Collaboration to Media Tweets
Twitter distinguished itself as an important new platform for breaking political news in Australia during the Great #Spill of 2009. This is the second installment in a MediaShift series on the "#spill effect." (You can read the first part here.) It draws on a case study of the event and includes online interviews with eight tweeting journalists who are prominent...
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PoliticalShift
How Technology Changed American Politics in the Internet Age
The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign drew the attention of the world. In the aftermath, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were widely credited with helping secure the historic victory of President Barack Obama. But the Obama campaign wouldn't have been able to make its technological strides without the innovations first deployed by the Howard Dean campaign years...
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MagazineShift
Magazines Require Innovation, Experiments in Digital and Print
Some magazine fans may feel like their favorite publications are dissolving into fragments of their former selves: fractured content distributed throughout the web, social media, digital editions and the surviving print versions. But something unique to magazines does still hold at the center, and a new report on the future of magazines suggests that the future for both print and...
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PhotoShift
Photo Essay: Location Apps Battle, Geeks Gather at SXSW
Every March, the city of Austin, Texas, welcomes the world for its annual South by Southwest Festival, otherwise known as SXSW. The festival consists of three parts: SXSW Interactive, a four-day geekfest for the Internet community; SXSW Film, ten days of international cinema programs; and SXSW Music, a four day non-stop celebration of live music. The Interactive section, known as...
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Social Networking
Geo-Location, Sentiment Analysis, AT&T Blankets SXSWi
As SXSW Interactive comes to a close and SXSW Music kicks off, it's worth taking a look at the ideas, trends, discussions, and issues that dominated the four-day technology summit. Here are the five areas that stood out the most to me. 1. Conference Buzz Every year there is a product or two that monopolizes most of the buzz --...
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Public Relations
PR Pros Use Twitter to Reinvigorate Brands, Engage in Conversation
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts operates luxury properties in countries all over the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Asia the Middle East and Africa. Aside from traditional promotions, one of the ways it connects with current, past and future guests is via its main Twitter account. Several accounts are also maintained by individual properties. "We push out news and...
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MagazineShift
How Magazines Use Social Media to Boost Pass-Along, Build Voice
Magazines have always prided themselves on their longevity as a medium and their pass-along circulation -- the additional readers each copy gains when it's passed from hand to hand. Today, social media are providing opportunities for readers to share content and experience their favorite magazines as part of their social activity online. As a result, this is the dawn of...
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RadioShift
NPR, SiriusXM Internships Steeped in Multimedia, Social Media
When you think about internships at media companies, you probably picture people fetching coffee, running errands, or worse. But some internships have taken a different tack, setting up specialized blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for their interns to help them understand new technology and spread the word about their programs. At NPR, the 40-plus interns put together a...
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Public MediaShift
Witness Creates Sophisticated Evaluation Tools for Video Impact
Last month, Jessica Clark and I explored how various Public Media 2.0 projects are measuring their level of success in informing and engaging publics. We found that many public media organizations are struggling to measure impact -- and some are relying only on traditional indicators of reach, as opposed to other elements of impact such as relevance, inclusion, engagement or...
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Public MediaShift
Public Media Twitter Chat Aims to Foster Collaboration
Public media workers and aficionados have a new routine: Every Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, they log on to Twitter for Public Media Chat, which is using the #pubmedia hashtag. The chat, which started about a month ago, is the result of a discussion between a group of public media professionals at PublicMediaCamp in Washington, DC. "Public Media Chat...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Viacom Yanks Shows from Hulu; FT's Pay Model
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the recent move by Viacom to pull "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" from Hulu, and run them on their own sites. Plus, the Financial Times said it would start charging for day passes and weekly passes to augment its metered pay system online.
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MovieShift
Can Social Media Chatter Predict Oscar Winners?
The biggest night in movies is two days away, and everyone has an opinion as to who will win an Oscar. While there isn't a proven formula that can tell us which film is going to win, a closer look at social media such as blogs and Twitter can provide some interesting perspective as to which nominees are dominating conversations...
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Citizen Journalism
Are Photos by Aid Workers an Invasion of Privacy in Haiti?
I recently spent a week in Port au Prince, Haiti, helping in a tent hospital set up at the airport. When I arrived back in San Francisco, I wrote about my experience in Haiti on my blog and posted pictures I had taken. I also posted photos on my Facebook profile, including images of smiling children who had just been...
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PoliticalShift
The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends Australian Political Journalism
Australia is gearing up for a national election in 2010 and a core group of influential political journalists in the elite Canberra Press Gallery are tweeting their way along the campaign trail -- and bringing an engaged public along for the ride. Press Gallery journalists are among the most active Australian reporters on Twitter, which entrenched itself Down Under as...
more »Social Networking
<- Go to Photo 15 On a final note, I couldn't resist the chance to show off my rope skills with Internet star Shira Lazar at the Girl + Guy Party. To read more about SXSWi 2010, check out Jason Feinberg's report on MediaShift. For more of Kris Krug's photos from SXSW this year, check out his Flickr photostream tagged...
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Citizen Journalism
IOC Loosens Citizen Photog Restrictions, Launches Flickr Group
At the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, social media was in its infancy. But in Vancouver, it sometimes seems to overshadow the accredited media. As expected, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are the first Games to truly be impacted by social media. As a result, one question leading up to the Games was whether the...
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Legal Drama
Courts Still Wary About Webcasts, Live-Blogs, Tweets at Trials
One of the most watched television events in U.S. history was the announcement of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in October 1995. By the time that trial was televised, the public had become accustomed to watching footage of both civil and criminal proceedings in state courts, and such proceedings continue to be broadcast today. But shortly...
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Citizen Journalism
True North Media House, W2 Provide Citizen Media Hub at Olympics
At the Winter Olympics, members of the press affiliated with official, IOC-designated media outlets have access to the Main Media Center and are given a special accreditation badge. The MMC provides workspace -- as well as massages and McDonald's -- for "the approximately 2,800 accredited members of the written and photographic press," according to organizers. That's been the case at...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Olympics Tape-Delay Backlash; PleaseRobMe's Geo-Scare
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the backlash against NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics, with people on the West Coast angry at the network for tape-delaying the best events until prime time. Plus, a new service called PleaseRobMe.com points out the vulnerability of people who use check-in geo-location services such as Foursquare along with Twitter. And I ask Just One Question to NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes.
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World View
Media Development Needs Unified Research for Digital Age
Not so long ago, some Western governments and private donors decided that investing in the media was a good way to support the development of democracy in other countries. Over the years, media development has become a vast enterprise, responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment every year. The paradigm was straightforward enough: provide training, equipment, and management...
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Citizen Journalism
Citizen, Alternative Media Converge at Olympic Games in Vancouver
It has become second nature for people to capture experiences, events and news using their phones, cameras and computers. We live in a world were journalism is an action -- and citizens have stepped up to answer that call to action. As a result, the story of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games is by no means limited to the version...
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World View
NGOs Must Harness Social Media Beyond Disaster Relief
When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Doctors Without Borders had 1,300 followers on Twitter. Now, it boasts over 13,000. The Red Cross follower count shot up by just over 40,000 people in the weeks following the quake. If technology wasn't already transforming the public role of the non-governmental organization, it has now brought many to a point of...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Google's Mixed Buzz; Olympic Social Media
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the new Google Buzz, offering ways for people to use their Gmail contact list to send out status updates, videos, photos and more. Google has had to react to an array of concerns over privacy and the way Buzz automatically generates followers (and followees). Plus, the Olympics start on a somber note, but are being covered like never before over social media. And I ask Just One Question to NYU J-school grad and former MediaShift contributor Alana Taylor.
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Social Media
Inside the Social Media Strategy of the Winter Olympic Games
In 2006, Graeme Menzies and a few colleagues travelled to Turino, Italy to watch the 20th Winter Olympics. The group constituted part of what would become the communications team for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, which kick off with opening ceremonies on Friday. Menzies is the director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, also...
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Digging Deeper
Can Milbloggers Give Unbiased View on '30 Days Through Afghanistan'?
The U.S. military has had an uneasy relationship with soldiers using blogs, video and photos to offer an unvarnished, uncensored view of war. The military brass has responded in the past by restricting blogging by enlisted soldiers, and having commanders review blog posts before posting. But that may be softening with the launch of a new project by the...
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World View
Bloggers Face Death Sentence in Iran; Some Escape to France
Iranian authorities are once agan cracking down on the Internet. Internet connection speeds were degraded in several cities in advance of the Islamic Revolution's 31st anniversary on February 2. This same tactic was previously used by the regime in advance of events likely to be used by the opposition to stage demonstrations. Several websites were also targeted by hackers, including...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook as News Reader; Engadget Comments
This episode of 4MR is brought to you by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more. Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the rise of Facebook as a place to find news. Hitwise...
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MarketingShift
For years, the digerati have been declaring the end of email as a useful tool. Back in 2003, experts said RSS feeds would spell the death of the inbox. In 2007, Wired and CNET said younger generations were using IM, Facebook and MySpace instead of email. More recently, PC Magazine's John Dvorak proclaimed "9 Reasons E-mail is Dead," and The...
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<- Go to Photo 11 A final, fun note: I had a chance to interview U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir, and the entire interview can be found here. This shot of us together was taken by John Biehler. Kris Krüg is a designer, writer, photographer, and webmonkey based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Constantly challenging himself by shooting diverse subjects...
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World View
GlobalPost Expands Partnerships, Struggles with Pay Service
A year ago, GlobalPost launched online with an ambitious mission to "redefine international news for the digital age...with a decidedly American voice." The idea was to hire freelance stringers around the world to report back to the U.S., and thereby fill the gap left by the closure of traditional media's foreign bureaus. While the site has forged important partnerships with...
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Public MediaShift
Why Youth Media Projects Should Link Up with Public Media
"The issues that we tackle in our films are very powerful," said youth filmmaker Lenah Perez in a newsletter from the New York-based youth media organization, Global Action Project. "I should say the way we tackle the issues is powerful, the issues are important -- to look at the world as the big picture and to fight for this world."...
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Embedded Report
How to Use Meta-Stories to Engage the Newsroom, Community
How do we create a community? This question is frequently asked by editors as well as by marketing managers and other business people. More and more, I don't think you can create communities. Communities already exist. You can try and offer them a news service or a platform that the community finds useful and engaging, but forget trying to control...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Text Donations to Haiti; Google.cn Uncensored
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the way social media and text-to-donate has helped to transform charitable giving in Haiti after the earthquake. Plus, Google announced it would stop censoring its search site in China after having Gmail accounts of dissidents and free speech proponents hacked there. And I ask Just...
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Digging Deeper
Best Online Resources for Following Haiti News, Taking Action
In the face of devastating news happening far away, there is comfort in making a connection. And those connections often are made online among strangers who are sharing video, photos, stories or tweets about the devastation around them. Such is the case in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city that was devastated by an earthquake last Tuesday, with tens of thousands feared...
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PoliticalShift
Local Bloggers Step Up to Watchdog Local Government
Traditionally, newspaper reporters were dispatched to cover the mundane proceedings of a local government in action: the city council meeting. But as the mainstream media grapples with its survival in the Internet era, the seats in the audience once occupied by full-time reporters are sometimes being filled by local bloggers and other citizen media outfits. They're using blogs and social...
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Media Usage
8 Lessons Journalists Can Learn From Scientists
The ScienceOnline10 conference starts this Thursday, and about 275 scientists, educators and science writers from around the world will gather near Raleigh, N.C. to discuss many of the same online tools and issues that journalists are examining. Sessions will focus on topics like "citizen scientists," crowdsourcing, and the best iPhone apps for gathering and sharing information. The conference is sold...
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Social Media
How WSJ Uses Social Media from Behind a Pay Wall
We're not even a month into 2010 and The Economist has already declared it to be "The year of the pay wall." "There are plenty of examples of paid content thriving even when free alternatives are available," according to the magazine. "Punters are happy to pay for multichannel television even though commercial broadcast television is free. Such alternatives thrive because...
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Citizen Journalism
Activist-Journalists Bring Citizen, Pro Media Together at COP15
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK -- This past Saturday, on a crisp afternoon in Copenhagen, Jacob Wheeler and Rick Fuentes, two journalists with the non-profit media start-up the UpTake, walked alongside a mostly peacefully stream of demonstrators.* Roughly half of the total police force in Denmark followed in step. Conspicuous among the crowd were the hundreds of ad hoc reporters with serious-looking digital...
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MusicShift
The Year in Digital Music and Predictions for 2010
As 2009 comes to a close, and the music industry shifts focus to 2010, it's worth looking back at some of the noteworthy events of the past 12 months. This is also the right time to look ahead and predict what will happen next year. For some in the business, this year brought trouble after trouble; for others, 2009 was...
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Legal Drama
Lessons Learned from Tweeting a Biker Gang Trial
We fell into Twitter somewhat accidentally in our newsroom at the London Free Press in Ontario, Canada. The Bandidos biker gang trial was going to be a big one for the Free Press. We'd extensively covered the crime when it first happened: eight bikers from Toronto found dead on a rural road near London, and six men charged with...
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PoliticalShift
Can Posterous and Tumblr Boost Government Transparency?
If a present-day version of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was looking for a way to easily release important confidential information, he might find himself drawn to Posterous or its micro-blogging/lifestreaming competitor, Tumblr. These services have the potential to offer a new level of simplicity for releasing government information, and help open up the closed doors of Congress. Beyond becoming tools for...
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Legal Drama
Is It Legal for an Editor to Unmask an Anonymous Commenter?
On November 13, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website, StLToday, asked readers to comment on a story titled, "What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" Soon, a commenter posted a reply that included a "vulgar, two-syllable word for a part of a woman's anatomy," according to an online account by Kurt Greenbaum, the paper's director of social media. Editors at the...
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Weblogs
NYTPicker Covers New York Times Like a Wet Blanket
On Sunday, the New York Times published an Editors' Note detailing a conflict of interest: The "Place" feature about Miami in the T magazine travel issue on Nov. 22 included a reference to the 8 oz. Burger Bar. The writer has had a long personal relationship with a co-owner of the restaurant; had editors known of that connection, the restaurant...
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AdvertisingShift
5 Tools to Help Automate Local Advertising
Promises of whiter teeth, IQ quizzes, and digital dancing people clutter online ads these days. At the same time, experts at future-of-journalism conferences are declaring that news will never again be solely supported by advertising. Neither one tells the full story of the present and future of online advertising for hyper-local and other news websites. Experiments with new advertising technology...
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Weblogs
Can H1N1 Flu Bloggers Help Battle Pandemic Misinformation?
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, remembers the last flu pandemic, which occurred in 1968. "It's a great contrast [with today], because back then you had to wait weeks for information, and the only way you got it was through newspapers and scientific journals, and now of course we have instant dissemination of everything," Racaniello...
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World View
Iran Cracks Down on Internet Expression, Bloggers, Journalists
Last week, the Iranian blogger Sasan Aghaei, who runs the site Azad Tribun, was arrested by intelligence ministry officials after they carried out a search of his Tehran home. It is not known where he was taken. Aghaei is also a reporter for the daily newspaper Farhikhteghan, and he's the third employee of the paper to be arrested since the...
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PoliticalShift
Best of Twitter: FTC Workshop Discusses Future of Journalism
For two days this week, some of journalism's most high profile executives and experts descended upon Washington, DC, for "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" a workshop hosted by the FTC. One exchange of note came between Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington, who spoke separately but did a good job of representing two divergent points of view. Murdoch kicked...
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5Across
5Across: Social Media Marketing 101
There's a new series of demands being made in company meetings everywhere: "What is our social media strategy? What are we doing on Facebook and Twitter? I want followers and fans, and I want them now!" But before companies large and small -- as well as non-profits and charities -- jump into social media, they need to take a deep...
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Social Media
Profiles in Courage: Social Media Editors at Big Media Outlets
During a recent trip to see an editor I work with at The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper in Canada, I passed by the newspaper's cafeteria. My editor looked in and pointed at a man who was sitting with his back to us. "There's Mathew Ingram, doing his office hours," he told me. Ingram is the Globe and Mail's...
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PoliticalShift
Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook
Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor. During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Murdoch-Google Spat; Ft. Hood Shooting on Twitter
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at recent comments by News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch about taking his content out of Google searches, and how many people reacted to it. Plus, many news organizations made Twitter Lists to cover the Ft. Hood shooting, but the Austin American-Statesman had an excellent Twitter feed...
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Social Networking
Media140 Brings Old and New Media Together, With Explosive Results
Over 300 people gathered under the Media140 banner in a concert hall at Australia's national public broadcaster ABC in Sydney last week to consider the future of journalism in the social media age. Media140 is a newly formed global collaboration of journalists, academics and social media practitioners that is staging conferences around the world. The goal is to examine the...
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AdvertisingShift
Can Salon's Revamp Help it Stop Bleeding Money?
Salon.com was a pioneering website launched in 1995 by former editors of the San Francisco Examiner, mixing opinion and investigative reporting with a sharply progressive slant. Although the company went public at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, it had lost more than $80 million by 2003, and lost $4.6 million in the fiscal year ending March 31,...
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Legal Drama
Does Gawker's Publication of McSteamy Sex Tape Constitute Fair Use?
Editor's Note: new information was appended to this article on Dec. 15. It probably seemed like a fun idea at the time. Last year, Eric Dane, known as "McSteamy" from the show "Grey's Anatomy," his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche decided to make a home movie. Yes, that type of home movie. The threesome recorded...
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World View
President Obama Must Press China on Web Censorship
In China, Google is forced to censor its search engine, Facebook and Twitter are blocked, U.S. news agencies are barred from selling their services freely, and foreign investment in the media industry is closely watched. Yet when President Obama visits the country in a few days, it's unknown if he will publicly pressure the Chinese government on issues of censorship...
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World View
Hossein Derakhshan's Arrest: One Year Later
It's been over a year now since the arrest of Hossein Derakhshan, popularly known as Hoder. Ever since he wrote the first Persian-language blogging guide in November 2001, he has helped pioneer the Iranian blogging community while living in his adopted home of Toronto. (Derakhshan is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada.) However, beginning in 2006, Derakhshan's views started...
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NewspaperShift
FT's Long Room Uses Velvet Rope Approach to Online Community
What determines a successful community? The number of unique visitors or page views? The number of comments? Those metrics can be important, but there are also qualitative aspects to consider. Are the discussions on your site respectful and insightful? Are members deriving value from the community? Or are you hosting flame wars that lack intelligence and decorum? In order to...
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Digging Deeper
@FakeAPStylebook Editors Explain Their Overnight Success on Twitter
For anyone who has suffered through reading the entire AP Stylebook for a journalism class, there's a cathartic release when reading the dry wit of the @FakeAPStylebook feed on Twitter. It combines parody of the journalism usage bible with funny repartee and the absurd. That mix has brought amazing success to the people behind the feed: more than 40,000 followers...
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Hyper-Local
TheDigitel.com Brings Human Context to Local News Aggregation
Many news websites are working to refocus on local news, and often this means turning to automated aggregation. One hyper-local startup in Charleston, S.C., is blending links, community and visuals to try and redefine aggregation by giving it a human context. TheDigitel.com was launched by Ken Hawkins in June 2008, and recently received its first round of venture capital funding...
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PoliticalShift
Politicians Use Social Media to Bypass the Press Corps
Politicians are figuring out what social media technologies like blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have to offer: direct access to voters. More than ever before, they can bypass the professional press and deliver an uncensored, unfiltered -- and unchecked -- message. "[Social media] allows me to gives my thoughts on the events of the day and the complete text of...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Scoble on Twitter Lists; Time, Newsweek Hurting
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Twitter Lists and how they allow people to group the people they follow on Twitter. Some say they might replace RSS feed readers. Robert Scoble answers Just One Question about how Twitter Lists have changed his life. Plus, magazines are hurting once again, with Time...
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Legal Drama
It's Now or Never For Citizen Journalists and Federal Shield Law
When Sen. Charles Schumer amended the Senate's bill to exclude unpaid reporters, bloggers, and citizen journalists from a proposed federal shield law, many in the Internet and journalism community were outraged. In the wake of the change, MediaShift published an article that argued Why Bloggers and Citizen Journalists Deserve a Shield Law. [Ed. note: please see update at the bottom...
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MagazineShift
Did the Web Kill Gourmet Magazine?
The murder happened in the kitchen with a laptop. That possible explanation for the death of Gourmet magazine sounds like a solution from the game Clue. The 68-year-old food magazine met its end this month when publisher Condé Nast cut it and two other magazines. Some blamed Gourmet's demise on the Internet and its theft of the print audience. It's...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Twitter's Real-Time Search Deals; Bloomberg Rising
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the deals Microsoft made recently with Twitter and Facebook to incorporate tweets and status updates into its Bing search engine. Google quickly announced a deal with Twitter too, but why should we care? Also, Bloomberg bought out BusinessWeek magazine, but the jewel might well be...
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Philosophy
The Right Way For Media Companies to Create Social Media Policies
Swimming in the roiling sea of online journalism, increasing numbers of newsrooms have decided to take up the challenge of articulating editorial policies for social media. Over the past year, news organizations from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to the BBC have issued protocols for staff on Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs and websites. Recently, the...
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Public MediaShift
PubCamp Examines New Models, Philosophy for Public Media
"Public Broadcasting has a future and its all about YOU," tweeted Jonathan Coffman at the close of this weekend's bustling Public Media Camp. Coffman, the product manager for PBS Engage, was a key organizer of the event, along with Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at NPR's Social Media Desk, and Joe and Peter Corbett, two brothers who run iStrategy...
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AdvertisingShift
8 Tips to Make Sponsored Tweets Work
If Twitter the company is not interested in putting advertising in its product right now, other companies have proven they can do it on their own. There has been an explosion of startup companies that place "sponsored tweets" into Twitter feeds and split the ad revenue with Twitterers. The first one to sell ads into Twitter feeds, Magpie, says...
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Weblogs
Why Bloggers and Citizen Journalists Deserve A Shield Law
Today in the United States, there is no legislation that allows bloggers to protect their sources. Yet bloggers have become a great way for the public -- and journalists in particular -- to keep informed about important topics. A survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research released on September 22 found that 66 percent of journalists...
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Online Forums
7 Keys to Hosting Successful Chats With High-Profile People
In recent weeks we at De Tijd, a Belgian newspaper, have been experimenting with chat sessions where members of the Belgian government are brought in to discuss politics with our community. I'm very enthusiastic about this because I feel that our newspaper has enabled its community to have a direct, high-quality conversation with policy makers. I reported in a previous...
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World View
How Webcasting Helps Exclusive Conferences Be More Inclusive
For four days last month, Bill Clinton convened an elite group of heads of state, business leaders and celebrity activists for the annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Each year CGI picks a theme, and the focus of this year's gathering was the empowerment of women and girls in developing countries. The impact of the gathering was considerable,...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: FTC's Blogger Rules; Charging for iPhone Apps
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the new FTC rules for blogger disclosure, when they are reviewing a product or service. They are now required to disclose if they are being paid by the company or if they get a freebie. And what's up with all the new paid news apps...
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Public MediaShift
Eight Public Media 2.0 Projects That Are Doing it Right
It's official: "Public Media 2.0" has graduated from theory into practice. "We believe that a successful broadband policy and implementation requires Public Media 2.0," said Ernest Wilson, the new chair of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at Friday's unveiling of the Knight Commission's new report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. Echoing the report's...
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World View
Online Reporters in Malaysia Struggle Against Jail, Fines and Filters
Malaysia ranked No. 132 out of 173 countries on last year's edition of Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index, which means it's already a hostile place for reporters. Thanks to recent initiatives aimed at controlling the flow of online information, the country appears ready to tighten its grip on the Internet, too. But bloggers and web journalists continue to...
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PoliticalShift
Local Politicians Use Social Media to Connect with Voters
When television cameras panned across the room full of senators and representatives during the recent presidential address to a joint session of Congress, the audience at home caught a glimpse of several political leaders tweeting away on their BlackBerry phones. At the national level, social media has been embraced by many politicians. Even the White House has a Twitter account...
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Social Media
Using 'Socratic Conversation' to Unlock a Community's Insight
How can you unlock the creativity and insights of your community? Well, you can give community members a blank canvas and hope they are inspired to paint it with ideas and contributions. You can also provide them with access to experts such as journalists or external sources for chats, discussions and other interactions. Both methods have their merits, but they...
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Citizen Journalism
Mainstream Media Miss the Point of Participatory Journalism
The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years. But a growing body of research suggests that the advent of participatory journalism, or user-generated content (UGC), has done little to change the way...
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World View
Environmental Reporting Becomes Hazardous Work in Egypt, China
Since May 2009, Tamer Mabrouk has held one of the saddest records regarding human rights abuses in Egypt. He is the first blogger to receive a fine after a company sued him for having criticized its activities in Lake Manzala, which is connected to the Suez Canal. Mabrouk was fined $8,700, lost his job, and was forced to move out...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Examiner Buys NowPublic; CIMM Wants Better Metrics
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the recent buyout of NowPublic by Examiner.com for a reported $25 million. The citizen media site will combine with Examiner.com's low-pay "Examiners," who write about niche topics for the newspaper chain. Also, major TV networks, ad agencies and advertisers teamed up to form the Coalition...
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Citizen Journalism
Can Allvoices Succeed as Citizen Journalism Platform?
With Examiner.com recently buying out citizen media site NowPublic for a reported $25 million, the attention turned to similar independent sites such as Allvoices. Would it now become buyout fodder for a mainstream media company, or would it suffer the fate of so many citizen journalism sites that came before it, shutting down before finding a successful business model? To...
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Weblogs
Can Health Care Blogs Fill the Gap Left by Mainstream News Coverage?
Paul Testa recently checked his voicemail and listened to a message from a hospice worker who lives in a conservative district of Ohio. He'd never met or spoken to this person before, but the worker reached out because Testa seemed like the right person to receive some important, inside information about the health care system. Testa doesn't work for a...
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NewspaperShift
The Five Habits of Highly Successful Community Managers
Talking about communities, and newspaper communities in particular, often leaves people with a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's true that being a community manager enables you to meet wonderful people, but the reality of daily community management can be difficult and unsettling. Every community manager has to deal with community politics (the online equivalent of office politics), disillusionment and a...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Editorial Layer at Wikipedia; NYT-ProPublica Story
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the recent move by Wikipedia to add an editorial layer to some entries, the so-called "Flagged Revisions" that will only allow changes that are approved by certain editors. Plus, the New York Times Magazine will be running a story co-produced with ProPublica that cost $400,000...
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NewspaperShift
Newspaper Editors Want Clear Credit When Bloggers Link to Them
If only every blogger could link to stories the way Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does. The libertarian blogger, with his hundreds of thousands of readers, offers up dozens of daily snippets that typically consist of a single sentence and a link. Sometimes it's a headline or even a single word -- "Heh." As a result, those being linked by Reynolds...
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Legal Drama
Was Twitter Document Theft, and Publication by TechCrunch, Legal?
In June of this year, the personal email account of a Twitter employee was accessed, apparently as a result of an insecure password. By Twitter's own account, the unauthorized access to that account was the first in a series of actions that ultimately gained the hacker (who calls himself "Hacker Croll") access to Twitter corporate documents that were maintained...
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Culture
Gnomedex 9.0: Tech Conference Looks Deeper at Social Media
SEATTLE -- I am here attending the geekfest of geekfests called Gnomedex. Its name is a play on the old tech conference Comdex, which ironically doesn't exist anymore. Coming here is a throwback to my time as a pure tech journalist going to conferences such as Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show. But what's interesting is that even in...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Takes on Twitter; iPhone Backlash
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at all the recent moves Facebook has made to take on Twitter, including revamping its search, coming out with slimmed-down "Facebook Lite" and buying out FriendFeed. Plus, various high-profile tech pundits have come out against the iPhone after Apple rejected Google Voice from its App Store....
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PoliticalShift
How U.S. Departments of Defense and State Differ in Social Media Approach
The Defense Department's new head of public affairs says there is no more powerful communication tool in reaching supporters and critics alike then with a personally delivered message. What's the suggestion? Social media technologies like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter must be thoroughly engaged by civilian and military personnel at DoD in a new era of personal communication. That's what Price...
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Weblogs
Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote
In the recent dust-up between the Washington Post and Gawker, Post reporter Ian Shapira was upset when his story was excerpted on the media gossip blog Gawker. While blogs and even mainstream news articles have been quoting, excerpting and summarizing other stories and blog posts for years, there's never been accepted etiquette on how to do so. According to Shapira,...
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NewspaperShift
Five Ways to Use Mind-Mapping Tools in the Newsroom
About a week ago, I was in a meeting with some colleagues, preparing our coverage of an upcoming news event. We were jotting down ideas in long lists; it was quite literally linear thinking. But linear thinking isn't always the most helpful way of looking at a problem, because it restricts the way that you associate ideas together and limits...
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Social Media
URL Shorteners Help Track Links, Take Heat for Framing
If there's any doubt that an online titan can be easily overthrown, look no further than the URL shortener Tinyurl.com. For years, it was the most popular of its kind and the dominant (and default) URL shortener for Twitter. Then a few months ago I began to notice that it had all but disappeared from my own Twitter feed. With...
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TVShift
Blogs, Twitter Become Force at TV Critics Press Tour
In January 2006 when I launched MediaShift, I sat on a panel at the TV Critics Association (TCA) press tour in Pasadena, Calif., and saw an audience of aging TV critics working at newspapers, largely keeping notes on pen and paper, writing up stories that would run weeks and months later in print. When I returned to the press tour...
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PhotoShift
Can Citizen Photo Agency Demotix Succeed Where Scoopt Failed?
Recently, the "citizen photo agency" Demotix has had reason to celebrate. The site gained fame by selling front-page photos to the New York Times taken by Iranians who captured shots of protests after the disputed presidential election in Iran. Then came another seminal moment when the site got the only shot of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in handcuffs...
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PoliticalShift
The Highs (and Lows) of Public Officials on Twitter
Are high profile public officials using Twitter as a noble tool to bypass the proverbial "mainstream media filter" and communicate directly with constituencies? Or do they just see it as yet one more wall in the online echo chamber, something merely to influence and/or amplify mainstream media stories? The answer probably lies somewhere in between as I found from examining...
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Virtual Worlds
Virtual Worlds Show Promise for Newspaper Communities
In my previous post, I talked about the browser-based virtual environment Metaplace, which I think may provide a way to boost interaction with our community on newspaper website Mediafin. To test how well virtual worlds could be used to build a community, I undertook some experiments in organizing "conferences" in worlds like Metaplace and Second Life. And the results turned...
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Public Relations
How PR People Can Tactfully Locate, Pitch Influential Bloggers
Many PR agencies are hesitant to issue any guarantees on whether a particular piece of content or advertisement will "go viral," leading millions of users to toss it around through their various social media platforms. One way that they try to achieve this is by approaching the people often most responsible for the viral spread of content online -- big-name...
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MarketingShift
Personal Branding Becomes a Necessity in Digital Age
In 2007, Atlantic Media's director of digital strategy Scott Karp was named one of the 40 most influential people in publishing by Folio magazine. But Folio wasn't honoring Karp for his work at Atlantic, which publishes the Atlantic Monthly magazine, but was instead fawning over the work Karp did at his personal blog, Publishing 2.0, which covered how technology is...
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Weblogs
Some Bloggers Welcome FTC Scrutiny for Paid Reviews
When it was reported in 2006 that the FTC would begin forcing word-of-mouth companies -- which paid people to hype products to their peers -- to disclose their marketing campaigns, Brian Clark predicted at the time that these rules would apply to bloggers as well. Now it looks like his prediction is coming true -- and bloggers are taking the...
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NewspaperShift
5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites
I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Edelman's Steve Rubel Switches from Blog to Lifestream
I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera. We talked about his balancing act as a blogger/journalist/PR person, how PR is shifting with the advent of social media, and what lessons Edelman and Edelman's client Wal-Mart have learned from previous missteps online.
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Weblogs
Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks
Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald's website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply "Your Blogs." If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would...
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World View
Brave Citizen Journalists Provide New Images of Iranian Life
Like many people, I have been watching this so-called "Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, [Insert New Media Application] Revolution" unfold in Iran from the comfort of my own home. Watching the dizzying and horrifying images that have emerged on the Internet has triggered a whirlwind of emotions and thoughts. I was shocked and outraged by the death of Neda. I felt a...
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Weblogs
Zombie Bloggers Create Communal Horror Stories
On June 13, bloggers around the world imagined they were under attack by the living dead, writing short horror narratives for the annual Blog Like It's the End of the World Day (which was especially appropriate for me since it fell on my birthday). But there are some bloggers who blog as if everyday were the end of the world:...
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World View
How Will Iranian Protests Change Twitter?
There's been much ado about Twitter's role in the political protests in Iran, and for good reason. With the Iranian government expelling foreign journalists, outlets like CNN scrambled to uncover sources where they could. They found these sources among the din of unverifiable messages surfacing on Twitter. It's been fun reading mainstream media accounts of how Twitter is, in a...
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Guides
Your Guide to Iran Election News Online
From time to time, I'll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. I've already covered Twitter, citizen journalism, alternative models for newspapers and other topics. This week I'll look at Iran election news online. Background...
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AdvertisingShift
Will Digg Users Bury New Digg Ads System?
Since its launch in late 2004, Digg has tried its hand with several outside advertising networks, going from an off-the-shelf Google AdSense arrangement to working with Federated Media before finally signing a deal for Microsoft to deliver its display advertisements. But in April of this year, Digg announced it would end its deal with the software giant in favor of...
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Social Media
Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter
Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets,...
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EducationShift
Why is American University Becoming Center for New Journalism?
I visited American University last month to try to answer a burning question for me: Why was the School of Communications there becoming such a hotbed for new forms of journalism? The Center for Social Media is there. The J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, moved to American from the University of Maryland. And Charles Lewis, the founder of...
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Legal Drama
Criminal Cases Push Newspapers to Identify Anonymous Commenters
Anonymous comments on newspapers blogs are drawing attention from prosecutors seeking information about criminal matters, once again raising the issue of whether newspaper blog comments are protected under state press shield laws. Last fall, I wrote about two civil cases involving claims of defamation, where two separate courts refused to order newspapers to disclose information that would lead to the...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Special Iran Election Edition
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's special edition, I look at the way that social media have played a vital role in the breaking news happening in Iran after their contested presidential election. Though the government has cracked down on the opposition, censored the media and blocked websites and even text messaging, the news has...
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NewspaperShift
5 Ways a Community Manager Can Help Your Media Outlet
Recently, the New York Times appointed its first ever community manager, someone to "concentrate full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers." Of course, the New York Times is a huge operation, and has an enormous community of print and online readers/users. Do we at...
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NewspaperShift
Being in the hospital on an I.V. for a number of days put me in touch with the suffering of newspapers. I was down but not out. I have polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and one of my cysts had ruptured, causing severe pain and the temporary loss of kidney functioning in my right kidney. Not fun. But while I was...
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Social Media
How Journalists Balance Work, Personal Lives on Twitter
Twitter is continuing to make headlines around the world as it amasses followers. But it's also making an impact on the newsmakers themselves. Journalists are invading the space at a rapid pace and learning to report live, crowdsource stories and engage with a whole new audience...in 140 characters or less. It may not be revolutionary -- many journalists view the...
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Social Networking
Journalists Should Customize Social Networks to Maximize Experience
Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience. But many journalists don't know how to get the full benefit...
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Legacy Media
WSJ's D Conference Fumbles Transition to Web 3.0
CARLSBAD, CALIF. -- The organizers of the tony, high-priced tech conference known as D All Things Digital, included a manifesto of sorts in the program guide titled "Welcome to Web 3.0." In that treatise, organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher define Web 3.0 as "the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple...
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Social Media
How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia
Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of...
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Weblogs
Media Criticism Flourishes Online, Putting Legacy Media Under Microscope
In November 2007, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote a piece for the magazine chastising House Democrats for wording in their version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not long after the column hit the web, Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece arguing that "for the sake of its own credibility, Time Magazine needs immediately to prohibit Joe Klein...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: WSJ's Social Media Guidelines; NYT's Pay Plans
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the Wall Street Journal's code of conduct for reporters and editors, with guidelines for using Twitter and social media sites. Plus, the New York Times is considering two different plans for charging for online content -- a metering system and subscription system -- according to a report...
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MobileShift
Live-Blogging EconSM Gathering About Social Networking on Mobiles
SAN FRANCISCO -- I am at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center right down the hill from where I live in Potrero Hill. Yes, it is "Bike to Work Day" today in San Francisco, but I couldn't bike down in nice clothes. So I split the difference and walked most of the way here. The topic is how social...
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5Across
Twitter Mania: Will Twitter Change the World?
Twitter has become a multi-headed phenomenon since MediaShift devoted a week to covering micro-blogging two years ago. Twitter is now established as a new form of communication, an early warning system for breaking news, and a startup company in San Francisco that has no discernable income. And with the power of Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kutcher, it has become...
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Wikis
Wikipedia Art: Vandalism or Performance Art?
Artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern developed the idea to create a self-referencing Wikipedia article late last year. The plan was to write a new article, titled Wikipedia Art that was wholly devoted to the fact that the page had been created -- an article that was completely meta and self-referential. The axiom that all press is good press is...
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NewspaperShift
Journalists Can Embrace Emotions and Remain Neutral
Very recently I did something weird. Normally, when moderating our online community at Mediafin, I first read the news articles before I read the comments left by community members. Feeling a bit bored, I reversed this. I started by reading the comments and tried to figure out what the articles were about. It was a weird (but rather subversive) sensation...
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MagazineShift
Vanity Fair, New Yorker Fan Blogs Give Free PR to Conde Nast
The Twitter user who writes under the handle Vanityfairer would not tell me her real name. She began following me in December after I mentioned the magazine Vanity Fair in a tweet, and for the next few months we exchanged replies and direct messages about the magazine's content and its writers. Though she made no claims to be associated...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Swine Flu Online; Disney Joins Hulu
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the positive -- and negative -- way the Internet, blogs and Twitter have spread information about the swine flu. There are great resources, maps and tracking sites, but it's easy to get in a panic as well. Also, Disney joined up in the video site Hulu, putting...
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EducationShift
Advice from the Pros to Journalism Graduates
It's an anxious time to be graduating from journalism school. The economy is in the tank and newsrooms are being decimated. But yet, it is also a great time to be a journalist, with more news and information available than ever before and more ways than ever to reach audiences. At the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at...
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Culture
How Charities Harness Social Media to Raise Awareness, Money
On April 14, actor Hugh Jackman pledged to give AUS $100,000 to the charity that could best convince him, via Twitter, that it was deserving of the award. On Friday, Jackman announced that, unable to decide, he had chosen two winners to split the prize: Operation of Hope, a medical foundation that donates surgical procedures to children in developing countries...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Pirate Bay Case; Oprah-geddon on Twitter
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the recent ruling in the Pirate Bay case, where four men at the file-sharing site were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison -- but are asking for a retrial due to a conflict of interest by the judge. I also mention @Oprah's entry to...
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Legal Drama
Coalinga Newspaper Not Liable for Running MySpace Rant
A post on a social networking site like MySpace could end up anywhere, and depending upon where it ends up, the result could be catastrophic. We've covered that territory before on MediaShift, discussing a case involving discipline of a teacher for conduct shown on a MySpace page. In Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, a California appeals court considered a case...
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PoliticalShift
Live-Blogging Netroots Nation's New Media Summit
SAN FRANCISCO -- I am in the swanky Bently Reserve building in downtown San Francisco for the Netroots Nation's New Media Summit, affliated with the liberal blog Daily Kos. On the agenda today are panels on the evolution of journalism and new media, the wisdom of crowds, social media for social good, and using video to expand your audience....
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: #AmazonFail; Journalism Online; Ashton Kutcher Speaks!
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the controversy surrounding #AmazonFail, a protest that formed on Twitter when the giant bookseller delisted thousands of gay-themed books from its bestseller lists. Amazon eventually said it was a mistake by an employee in France, but the PR damage was done. I also look at the unveiling...
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Public Relations
Amazon's Fail: Not Using Social Media to React to #AmazonFail Meme
In what some initially speculated to be a homophobic new expurgation policy, Amazon.com removed hundreds of gay and lesbian themed books from its sales rating system, effectively concealing these books from online shoppers. Some titles were completely delisted from Amazon's search engine. The controversy may never have provoked such widespread media attention -- or an official company response -- if...
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EducationShift
How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail
Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked...
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EducationShift
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: HuffPost Investigative Fund; AP on Mobile Apps
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the new Huffington Post Investigative Journalism Fund, which has $1.75 million to start a new non-partisan site that will do investigative work and then give it away to any news organization. I also look at the latest moves by Disney, distributing video on YouTube and possibly on...
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AdvertisingShift
Political Blogs' Double Whammy: Post-Election, Deep Recession
This week several major bloggers -- most politically right-of-center -- will see the shuttering of their blog ad network. Pajamas Media, which launched in 2004 and provided advertising for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin, announced earlier this year that it would close down its display advertising for blogs in order to put more focus on its online...
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MusicShift
Maximizing the SXSW Experience with Social Media
Every year, thousands of bands, music industry professionals, and hardcore fans flock to Austin, Texas for the mighty South By Southwest (SXSW) music festival. Over the course of nine days, three distinct but interwoven conferences take place -- Interactive, Music, and Film. For the uninitiated, SXSW can be an overwhelming, daunting experience. But for tech-savvy patrons, technology has made the...
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Legal Drama
'Fox & Friends' Hosts Not Liable for Repeating Associated Content Parody
As newspapers are closing or abandoning their print editions, online news sources are growing in importance -- as are sites that rely on user-submitted news stories. But with so much unfiltered news content available online, how do you separate the accurate from the inaccurate and truth from parody? You might think that traditional news sources would be better able...
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NewspaperShift
Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online
I once worked for a daily newspaper, where there were two things guaranteed to generate letters to the editor: articles about cats and the comics section. Readers didn't have much to say about our coverage of local elections or big trials, but we were sure to receive letters if someone disagreed with the slant of an editorial cartoon or didn't...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: All Things Twitter!
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week is a special edition devoted almost entirely to Twitter. I talk about the huge popularity of Twitter now -- with 9.8 million unique visitors to its website alone in February, according to comScore -- and how the startup is now bringing in revenues thanks to a deal with Federated Media...
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MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
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Digging Deeper
New Gatekeepers Twitter, Apple, YouTube Need Transparency in Editorial Picks
There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don't have bylines. These...
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Philosophy
Farewell to the Tyranny of Reporters
When I give lectures about the future of journalism, recently I have been making reference to the weakening, if not the entire overthrow, of what I term The Dictatorship of the Writer. What I mean is simply that in the pre-Internet past reporters and writers of various sorts would nose about a subject and after a certain amount of research...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: State of the Media; Jurors' Itchy Twitter Finger
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I talk about the new gloomy State of the Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), and the positive side for online media. I ask "Just One Question" to PEJ director Tom Rosensteil, and cover the latest news about jurors going online, Twittering and Facebooking...
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MagazineShift
Mother Jones Boosts Community in Site Revamp
As digital technology wreaks havoc on the business models of legacy media such as newspapers and magazines, they are now turning more often to the non-profit model. Can they raise donations, micropayments, or get grants? They might want to check out a magazine that's been a pioneer with the non-profit model, and first went online in 1993: Mother Jones. The...
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NewspaperShift
How Print Publications Can Help Hyper-Local Sites
The New York Times is going into the hyper-local news business, as reported by Zachary Seward at the NiemanJournalismLab. It is just one example of hyper-local -- also called community journalism, beat reporting, or representative journalism -- in action. Other instances include Kennesee State university Professor Leonard Witt's Representative Journalism in Georgia and community news site Patch.com. It's not clear...
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Thought Leader Q&A
BlogTalkRadio Lets Anyone (Including the Pentagon) Start Talk Shows
BlogTalkRadio CEO Alan Levy: "Three or four months into doing this, we started broadcasting live from Afghanistan, with an embed there named Scott Kesterson. Every Friday morning he would be live from Kabul or from Kandahar, and people could listen in and ask him questions. And the soldiers were listening to what was going on...Now, the Pentagon has a network on BlogTalkRadio. Now you know the medium has arrived when the Pentagon is embracing it."
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MusicShift
Five Tips for Musicians to Engage Their Fans Digitally
There was a time when celebrity musicians were positioned as unreachable idols. Those days are long gone; in today's wired marketplace, musicians have to forge a personal relationship with their audience to keep their fans' interest. And for many, that means creating opportunities for fans to have an inside look into all aspects of an artist's life.
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: Hearst E-Reader; Boxee vs. Hulu
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I talk about how the New York Times launches hyper-local sites right as Google's Tim Armstrong launches Patch.com hyper-local sites -- both in New Jersey. Plus, Hearst says it will develop a new e-reader device like a Kindle, but with a larger, flexible screen, likely coming from E-Ink,...
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5Across
Lively Roundtable Discussion on Making Compelling Online Video
When I launched MediaShift in early 2006, I wanted to go beyond writing about all the trends in online media -- blogging, podcasting, online video, etc. -- and actually do those things myself. Walk my talk. I recently launched the 4-Minute Roundup audio podcast, and today I'm launching a new monthly video roundtable called 5Across that will include 5...
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Embedded Report
Developing Social Media Workshops for Journalists
For the last few weeks, my colleague Raphael and I have been organizing a series of social media workshops for our fellow journalists at the Belgian business newspapers and websites De Tijd and L'Echo. I'd like to open this up to reader suggestions, so let me tell you what we intend to cover in this course -- and I hope...
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Weblogs
Diet Bloggers Deal in Brutal Honesty in Quest for Weight Loss
On February 11, Scott Schroeder fell. He'd eaten at a McDonald's for supper and gorged himself on a Big Mac, fries, regular Coke, and a dollar chicken sandwich. And though he managed to pull out of the trenches the next morning, he fell from grace later that day when he stopped at a Taco Bell and ate two soft tacos,...
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Legal Drama
How Animal Rights Activists Beat the Rodeos in Videotaping Events
As cell phone cameras and palm-sized videocams have become cheap and ubiquitous, there is little if anything that is immune from being documented and displayed on the web, as numerous celebrities and sports stars have learned to their regret. In the realm of hard news, the result is that citizen journalists are able to bypass big media news organizations and...
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PoliticalShift
How Obama Inspired Israeli Politicians' Online Campaigns
Just as television changed the way political campaigns were run in the 1960s, the Internet has changed the way political campaigns are run in the 2000s. Upwards of 70 million people watched the more aesthetically-pleasing JFK debating the more radio-suited Nixon on the tube in 1960. Nearly 50 years later, the YouTube debates of 2008 allowed people to ask their...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Productivity Guru Gina Trapani Balances Blogging, Coding, Community
This is one in an occasional series on MediaShift where I discuss issues in-depth with thought leaders in online media. The format has changed to give you a profile of the person, as well as more of our dialogue -- including audio clips. If you have suggestions for future Q&As or want to participate yourself, drop me a line via...
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Social Networking
How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility
By the time the news spread that the Dalai Lama had opened a Twitter account it no longer seemed such a novelty that a high profile individual would join the micro-blogging service, even if he was a divine being. The account gathered nearly 20,000 followers before Twitter pulled the plug two days later when representatives of the Tibetan leader informed...
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Digging Deeper
Reuters Closes Second Life Bureau, but (Virtual) Life Goes On
The sun shines brightly as I stroll along the curving pier above the water, looking out toward a beautiful island with trees swaying in the wind. There's a looming ampitheater festooned with signs for Thomson Reuters, and a series of concrete buildings that appear ready to hold important meetings. I stride in confidently through the doorway... You might think...
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EducationShift
5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them
When people talk about online innovation in college media, they tend to start big and stay there. And it's true that large circulation college newspapers (and big name journalism programs) have been doing some impressive things online, but the need to innovate extends to smaller journalism programs as well. And for them, the challenges can be daunting. So what are...
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World View
Monarchs Use 'Lese Majeste' Laws to Silence Online Critics
"When it comes to a monarchy, all reason goes away," according to a Thai reporter quoted in a Reporters Without Borders report on free expression in Thailand published this week. He was commenting on the multiple charges of lese majeste -- injury or insult to the king -- brought against journalists and writers in his country, where speaking negatively about...
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World View
How Social Media War Was Waged in Gaza-Israel Conflict
Both sides deployed dangerous new media weapons during this latest round of fighting in Gaza. Armed with Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, and Lavazza espresso, warriors fearlessly and tirelessly scoured the cyber battlefield searching for enemy (blog) outposts. Outfitted with high-tech ammunition like HD videocameras, firewire 800s, and white phosphorescent keyboards, they attacked one-sided videos, slanted essays, and enemy propaganda with...
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EducationShift
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors
One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash's story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster "Twilight" was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to the tears and tantrums at the event on Sunday evening when it...
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Weblogs
Can 'The Printed Blog' Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form?
If the entire media industry is a river that is slowly but persistently moving toward the Internet, then one could picture Joshua Karp as a canoeist paddling against the current, trying to take the online realm and solidify it into print. I first heard of his new business venture, The Printed Blog, from a colleague of mine who runs a...
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Public Relations
In Hudson River Landing, PR Pros Were Not First Responders
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important -- and increasingly complicated -- role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Rufus Griscom Mixes High, Low Brow on Babble Parenting Site
Rufus Griscom: "Online content, if it's not user-aggregated or user-generated, is seen as rather old and creaky. But I would argue that there are lots of shades of gray. All of the online content sites are becoming a hybrid of user-aggregated, user-generated and edited content, because feedback and citizen journalism and ratings and suggestions are becoming part of these sites."
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Social Media
Journalists Still a-Twitter About Social Media
Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections
The micro-blogging platform Twitter was the breakthrough social media tool for journalists in 2008. It became a pipeline for breaking news for both professional reporters and citizen journalists, with the massacre in Mumbai, the Hudson River plane crash and Obama's inauguration highlighting its effectiveness as a source of live, user-generated online content. Journalists increasingly used it to cross-promote their own...
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NewspaperShift
How Niche Bloggers Fill Gaps Left by Local Newspapers, Alt-Weeklies
On December 11, Ben Tribbett checked his phone messages and found two waiting for him from Virginia gubernatorial candidates Terry McAuliffe and Creigh Deeds. And when he opened his inbox that same day he had received an email sent by another candidate, Brian Moran. All three messages were to wish him a happy birthday. The fact that three high-level politicians...
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Digging Deeper
Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business
You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with...
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Legal Drama
U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law
In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law intended to control child access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. The law was immediately challenged on free speech and other grounds and its enforcement was delayed. After ten years of litigation, on January 22 the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to...
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PoliticalShift
Obama, Congress Enlist 'Direct to Constituent' Communications
Professional communicators are paying close attention to the rise of "direct to consumer" (DTC) communications. This is a phenomenon largely enabled by the rapid proliferation and adoption of online technologies, whereby organizations can communicate directly to the public without filters or mediation from the press. Corporate blogs or advocacy groups' online "action alerts" are just a couple examples. As a...
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Media Usage
How Forwarded Email Jokes, Hoaxes Evolved with Social Media
When I first ventured online in the late '90s, my in-box was constantly flooded with email forwards. Friends and co-workers alike tossed around lists of jokes, hoaxes and cautionary urban legends, pleas about a dying child in Idaho that needed your prayers or horror stories about human fingers discovered in fast food hamburgers. Today it seems that there are fewer...
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Embedded Report
The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick?
Video is one of those new practices we have to get used to as newspaper journalists now working in a Web 2.0 world. One of the key issues is the quality of the video. Do we always need slick, television-style video, which require more specialized skills, or will our community accept "rougher" video, made by amateurs using less sophisticated cameras?...
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Online Video
YouTube Helps Video Journalists Get a Start
When discussing the travails of major news outlets online, it's not uncommon for someone to mention the effect that companies like Google and Craigslist have had. But seemingly overlooked in this debate is Google's own YouTube, which has become a breeding ground for unknown and upcoming filmmakers and broadcast journalists. In what way could the online video giant use its...
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Education
Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools
Some journalism academics may be even more scared of new technology and more resistant to change than the worst print "dinosaurs" working in media today. But Web 2.0 has made getting online so simple that there are no more excuses for being disconnected. While some reporters see journalism education as a potential refuge from the rapid pace of change in...
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Embedded Report
More Time for Blogging! The Future Is Already Behind Us
At Mediafin, we started the year with some ambitious plans for our blogging activities. We want to create new blogs to involve more people, but we also want to become more active on our existing blogs. I'll tell you about what we're doing, the reasons behind it and how things seem to be working out at this early stage, as...
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Weblogs
Can Blog Awards Identify Quality Online Content?
I met the news that my blog, Bloggasm, had been nominated for a 2008 Weblog Award with a mixture of amusement and apathy. I had watched last year as my RSS feeds became clogged with the incestuous link trolling common with such contests. The Weblog Awards, like others of its kind, are based on a popular vote, guaranteeing that most...
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Citizen Journalism
Ushahidi Platform Used to Document Congo, Gaza Crises
Bloggers have always been timely in their response to local, regional and international crises and Kenyan bloggers were no different when violence broke out following the December 2007 elections. Within nine days Ushahidi, "a platform that crowdsources crisis information," was born. But that open source platform is now being "localized" to cover conflicts in other global hotspots, including in the...
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PoliticalShift
Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR
It's easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt...
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Weblogs
Can Technorati Beat Google at Blog Search?
"It doesn't matter what Internet business you're in," Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of blog search engine Technorati told me recently. "You're either going to have direct or indirect competition with Google and that's just the way it is...[Google is] not the 800 pound gorilla, it's the 80,000 pound gorilla." But unlike most competitors to Google, Technorati still seems to have...
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EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
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TVShift
Public-Access TV Fights for Relevance in the YouTube Age
Public-access television is a sometimes bizarre world where anyone with the time and inclination can appear on television. It's where you find the rants of Colombus, Ohio, goth Damon Zex and the strange instructional videos of Let's Paint TV, where Los Angeles host John Kilduff taught viewers how to paint and make blended drinks all while exercising on a treadmill....
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World View
Innovative Web Video Series Shows Real Life in Gaza, Israel
One sense of fear, two armies, and three rows of electrical fences separate Israel and the Gaza Strip. For the past 10 years, it has been difficult for residents of these two places to ever imagine meeting one another in person. Now, thanks to a new documentary project produced by French/German television station Arte TV and a handful of Israeli...
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World View
Vietnam Cracks Down on Dissident Blogger Dieu Cay
In Vietnam, speaking out against the government can come with a hefty price. Blogger Dieu Cay ("the Peasant Water Pipe") -- or Nguyen Van Haias in real life -- is learning this the hard way. The 56-year-old man is serving a 30-month jail sentence on a trumped-up charge of tax fraud, a poor excuse for the government to try to...
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NewspaperShift
Pulitzers Open to Online-Only Entrants -- But Who Qualifies?
When it was announced earlier this year that Joshua Marshall, founder of TalkingPointsMemo, had become the first blogger to win a George Polk Award for his coverage of the attorney firing scandal, many recognized the news as a milestone for online journalism. A somewhat condescending New York Times headline read, "Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize." Earlier this...
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Embedded Report
Wikis Still Slow to Catch on Internally, Externally
Our newsroom at Mediafin is transforming into an integrated multimedia operation. To prepare for this, we recently decided to create two wikis to stimulate talk and facilitate media training programs. At the same time we also created another wiki to encourage discussion amongst our readers. In this very early phase of the experiments, I learned that wikis are still an...
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Social Networking
Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg
It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don't clean them out often enough. "Jessica Kositz (jkositz) is now following your updates on Twitter" my latest alert tells me,...
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Digging Deeper
Video Report from the Czech Online Media World
A funny thing happened on my way to Eastern Europe last week. I sent out a Twitter message saying I was heading to Prague and Berlin and wondered if there were any bloggers or online media people I could meet. I got a reply from Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA), telling me that Radim Hasalik in Prague...
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NewspaperShift
A Newspaper's Role in Bringing the Community Together
Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community. This may sound self-evident, but it can be a tough sell in a newsroom working under high pressure. So how do you get reporters to buy into the proposition that they need to listen to their audience? They need to see for themselves the enthusiasm that the community...
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AdvertisingShift
Is Six Apart's 'TypePad Journalist Bailout Program' a Gimmick?
The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!" But one advertising and blogging company is...
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AdvertisingShift
Project Wonderful, Blogads, FM Go Beyond Click-Through Ads
For new bloggers looking to build up their reader base, it's not always enough just to write well; you need to advertise, to get the word out. And what better way to advertise than with ads? Unfortunately, most advertising online still leaves much to be desired, both for advertisers trying to get noticed and for host sites trying to earn...
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MagazineShift
Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World
Every year Locus Magazine, "The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field," publishes a year-in-review of the genre. This summation always includes a rundown of the circulation of the remaining speculative fiction magazines, sometimes referred to as the "pulps" because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they used to be printed. In their heyday there were dozens...
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World View
Burmese Blogger Sentenced to 20 Years For Reporting on Protests
In many countries, you have to commit a serious crime to be sentenced to 20 years in jail, but in Burma this can happen just for using the Internet. There are almost 69 cyber-dissidents in jail worldwide, yet Burma's Nay Phone Latt has become the first blogger to receive such a lengthy prison term. His crime? To have informed the...
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Digging Deeper
Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business?
Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and...
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World View
Nigeria Joins List of Countries Harassing Bloggers
On October 19, U.S.-based Nigerian blogger and journalist Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports was arrested by the Nigerian State Security Services (SSS) upon his arrival at Abuja airport. It was some days before the SSS announced that Elendu had been charged, first with money laundering and then sedition. Yet another report claimed he was charged with sponsoring a guerilla news...
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World View
Video Report from Jeff Pulver's Tel Aviv Breakfast Meetup
I thought I was going to a breakfast where people actually ate food. But food is hardly the top priority at a Jeff Pulver breakfast, where people are too busy pitching their latest ideas to investors, scoping out the competition, or scoping out the eligible singles on the market. Jeff is known for being one of leading innovators in voice-over-IP...
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Weblogs
Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way
During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after...
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Embeds
FriendFeed Widget Motivates Reporters to Use Social Media
Blogs should be conversations. At least, that is how we think about blogging at Mediafin, Belgium's leading publisher of business newspapers and websites. This last week, I have been busy reorganizing our major financial blog, Bear&Bull, adding FriendFeed widgets in hopes of encouraging more audience interaction. The results have been surprising -- although the audience has been slow to react,...
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Embeds
NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus
The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University's list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: "Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod...
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PoliticalShift
Citizens, Media Use Social Media to Monitor Election
In a YouTube video uploaded on October 24, a husband and wife couple from Oregon sit at their kitchen table and fill out their mail-in voting ballots for the 2008 election. The wife explains to the camera that Oregon has had mail-in voting for "about the last 10 years," and the two walk the viewer through the entire voting process,...
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Legal Drama
Judges Rule Anonymous Commenters Protected by State Shield Laws
Political campaigns often produce a blizzard of ancillary election-related litigation -- for an example, just look to the 2000 presidential campaign. When the press reports anonymous accusations during an election campaign, sometimes that litigation involves lawsuits by candidates or public officials seeking to learn the identity of those anonymous sources. In many states, newspapers and other media can protect such...
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Weblogs
Econ Bloggers Gain Clout in Financial Crisis
Late last month Dean Starkman, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, penned a scathing piece titled "Ouryay Eatbay Just Ewblay Upyay." The essay is addressed to members of the mainstream business press and proclaims dramatically in the opening paragraphs that their beat "just blew up." Starkman wags his finger at economic reporters, chastising the business beat as a group...
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EducationShift
Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions
Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking...
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Digging Deeper
How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It
When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to "follow" you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or "tweets," display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names...
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World View
China Blocks Blogs, Search Results on Tainted Milk Scandal
The evidence is accumulating. The censorship imposed on the Chinese media about the contaminated milk scandal has had disastrous consequences according to Reporters Without Borders. Last July, a journalist working for the investigative weekly Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) gathered reliable information regarding a wave of hospitalizations of new-born babies, with four killed and 53,000 sickened. These illnesses were linked to...
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Citizen Journalism
How Political Diarists Power RedState, Daily Kos
In October of last year, a man named Leon H Wolf published a post on the front page of influential conservative blogging community RedState titled, "Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is REALLY Not Fair)." One of a handful of bloggers who run the site, Wolf and his blogging colleagues decided to virtually ban all promotion for then-presidential candidate Ron Paul...
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Legal Drama
Teacher Fired for Inappropriate Behavior on MySpace Page
It's not just students who can get into difficulty for school-related blogging. In a recent case, a federal court rejected a challenge brought by a non-tenured teacher when the public school at which he taught decided not to renew his contract. The school had accused the teacher of overly familiar contacts with students via his MySpace page that were deemed...
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EducationShift
J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach
Professors are commonly stereotyped as people who know more about books than technology. But as classrooms are now filled with a generation who grew up with computers, iPods and the Internet, more and more professors are starting to experiment with new digital learning tools. At last week's Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, academics...
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World View
Africa News Empowers Citizens to Report Online
Over the past couple of months I have been following a new African news portal, Africa News, the latest in the 12-year history of African online news media. Africa News goes much further than previous attempts to create online news communities serving Africa; the site includes content submitted by locally based citizen journalists who use mobile phones and the Internet...
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Weblogs
Journalists Consider Risks, Conflicts of Running Personal Blogs
Implementing strategies developed by millions of office workers who have honed the practice of flipping from computer solitaire to spreadsheets at the first sign of a lurking supervisor, I hid my blog from my co-workers. I had been a blogger for nearly four years by the time I entered the newspaper industry in 2006, and when I later accepted a...
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Online Video
Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube?
Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there's finally...
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Weblogs
Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere's Origins
In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled "Happy Blogiversary," claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that...
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Digging Deeper
NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn't take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting -- even though the class she...
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PoliticalShift
How Greenwald's Brave New Films Spreads Its Political Message Online
Last month, Politico's Mike Allen asked presidential hopeful John McCain the seemingly innocent question of how many houses he owned. McCain's response -- "I'll have my staff get to you" -- became a major focus for both the media and Obama's campaign, who repeated it in just about every speech to illustrate that the Republican candidate was "out of...
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World View
Activists Face Obstacles Online in Winning Women's Rights in Iran
Women in Iran have learned to unleash the Internet's potential to promote freedom. In the country that has, according to the OpenNet Initiative, experienced the most explosive online growth in the Middle East, the Internet has become a battleground between a repressive regime and the increasingly active feminists demanding the end of legal discrimination against women. Women activists, who...
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World View
Arab Bloggers Meet to Discuss Free Speech, Reject 'Journalist' Label
BEIRUT -- A quick look at the Regions sidebar on DigiActive, a nine-month old blog that catalogs how activists use digital tools, reveals something unexpected. The site details case studies of online activists from around the world, but by far the largest number of stories involve bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa -- 39 -- compared with...
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Embedded Report
How Synchronous Communication Helped Engage Our Community
Most forums and websites are "asynchronous media" -- meaning that the people you see participating in an online conversation aren't all necessarily online at the same time. One person posts a comment in a forum on Monday, a second poster might reply on Tuesday, the original poster returns again on Thursday, and so on. People move at their own...
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Embedded Report
Blogger Conditions Worsen as Many Defend Palin Pick
Shame on us, the media, for thinking the Republican National Convention would pale in comparison to the Democrats' show in Denver last week. For bloggers on both sides of the aisle here in St. Paul, what the RNC has lacked in strawberry-lemonade smoothies, it has more than made up for with juicy stories. While Hurricane Gustav may have stopped...
more »Digging Deeper
Lessons from Katrina Help Media, Volunteer Efforts in Gustav Coverage
When Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, the evacuation of the area went much more smoothly than during Hurricane Katrina three years ago. This time, the local, state and national agencies were more prepared for a potential disaster. Similarly, online media outlets and volunteer efforts were also better prepared for this hurricane, having learned their lessons from the Katrina...
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PoliticalShift
Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias
Last week, Digg CEO Jay Adelson sat in a crowded room in Denver holding a stack of papers while facing a camera and trying to project his voice over the cacophony around him. Next to him sat a tired-looking U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who had taken a break from the Democratic National Convention to meet with Adelson....
more »Embeds
Blogs Help Humanize, Demystify Life in the Middle East
JERUSALEM -- Blogs exemplify the best and worst attributes of the Internet (and human nature). At their worst, blogs can be untruthful, bad sources of news and gossip. But without the profit motive, the need for immediacy, and the thirst for conflict, blogs can also help show a more complete picture of the Middle East. At their best, they can be a great source of anti-news and help demystify this murky region.
more »PoliticalShift
Bloggers Make Progress Covering Convention at DNC
DENVER -- Even for members of the traditional media here in Denver, access to floor seating at the convention has been scarce, and talk time with politicians and celebrities at the Democratic National Convention is a game of persistence and luck. Some days you see all the newsmakers, other days you're stuck on the outside with the gawkers, watching...
more »Digging Deeper
The Best 2008 Political Convention Coverage Online
In 2004, the major political conventions gave a few dozen bloggers press credentials, a historic moment for the new media outsiders. And this year, the political conventions have tried to be even more open to bloggers, video reporters, podcasters and new media. The Democratic convention credentialed 120 bloggers, and the GOP has credentialed 200 bloggers, according to Forbes. And the...
more »
NewspaperShift
Newspapers Can Do Online Video on a Modest Budget
I was as excited as anybody to be able to post video on our website. Our newspaper readers were turning more and more to their computer screen to read our news and it seemed logical that they would appreciate and enjoy seeing video enhancements for the print edition. My excitement soon turned to frustration as I started to run into hurdles.
more »
PoliticalShift
Will the Big Tent in Denver Help Bloggers Break Through?
As the 2008 Democratic Convention quickly approaches, thousands of journalists will begin swarming into Denver for what is sure to be an around-the-clock media event. Reporters will interview throngs of convention goers to examine every facet of the political landscape and the implications it has for the upcoming election.
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EducationShift
Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism
Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." All they needed was a pen and a notebook. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day's paper.
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Locative Media Project Aims to Collect Stories of Atlanta
The technology and journalism fields have long been dominated by men, especially in the upper management of big companies. But the J-Lab and McCormick Foundation want to shine the light on new ideas from women who work at mainstream media outlets but want to start something up on the side. That's why they started giving out grants in their...
more »Legal Drama
Should Copyright Law Change in the Digital Age?
This is the final part of my three-part email roundtable discussion looking at the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video created at the behest of the Center for Social Media at American University. In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it...
more »World View
African LGBTI Communities Come Out of the Closet Online
"The closet I have come out of -- it is similar to the wardrobe my relieved parents stepped out of when I unlocked the wardrobe after the police had left. If you're black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you, if you're gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs of this society closet you. If you...
more »
Digging Deeper
Commenters Mix Conversation, Self-Promoting Links to Defeat Filters
There was a time not too long ago when you could spot spam comments on a blog from a mile away. There were too many links, the comment was off-topic, and they were trying to promote a pyramid scheme website. But as human and automated filters started catching problematic posters, their techniques became more sneaky. Soon, there were comments...
more »Embedded Report
How Outside Firms Like TownNews.com Can Help Small Newspaper Sites
I decided early on that the best strategy for our newspaper to grow its web presence was to not to hire people, but to find other firms to partner with.
This took us from working with a guy with a server is his apartment to working with a phone company and finally a newspaper-specific host/content management system. We gave up control over many aspects of our website in order to remain flexible.
more »Online Video
Creating a Video to Help Educate People on Fair Use
Last week, I ran the first part of a special three-part series on fair use in online video. With the release of the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video, the question was how this Code might help video producers, remixers and mash-up artists use copyrighted works legally under "fair use" rules. In the first...
more »MediaShift
MediaShift Looking for Embeds, Correspondents, Managing Editor
I just wanted to update readers on changes that are happening here at PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab. In early June, I put out a call for new correspondents and "embeds" to write for MediaShift. I want to add more voices to this blog besides mine, open it up to more ideas and diverse opinions, and get better coverage...
more »Digging Deeper
Will Code of Best Practices Help Video Mash-Up Artists Stay Legal?
You just created the best video mash-up ever, taking a speech given by John McCain broadcast on Fox News, remixing it with the song "Ol' Man River," and quick-cutting in clips from gangsta rappers. You upload it to YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and watch the views pile up. But have you run afoul of copyright law? Do you...
more »Embedded Report
NBC's Penguin Story Goes from Web to 'Nightly News'
It was a seemingly prosaic moment at the end of the "Weekend NBC Nightly News" program Saturday, July 5: Lester Holt wrapped up the show with one of those ever-popular cute animal stories. The piece was about a baby penguin rejected by its mother and now being raised by a zoo worker in Boston. But there was a lot more to this story than met the eye, as Holt hinted at with his introduction: "It's a story we first reported on our website. It got a lot of traffic there, so much in fact that we thought maybe we'd air it right here. So here's NBC's Clare Duffy with our report."
more »Weblogs
EU Member's Plan for 'Blogger Registry' Is Wrong-Headed
When blogs were born over 10 years ago as a way to share the details of one's life with a limited number of people online as a sort of journal, no one could have imagined the importance that this type of D.I.Y. publishing would later take on. Today, bloggers who started out just writing for themselves have empires. Bloggers these days have larger spheres of influence, attracting the eyes of more people -- even presidential candidates. -- and they enjoy the freedom to write whatever they want (within reason) on their blogs.
more »Your Take Roundup
Keep Video Ads Brief, Contextual
Online video usage is exploding online, as people watch everything from YouTube to TV shows to sporting events -- but mainly, YouTube. But the question is how sites will be able to pay for all that usage. Most video viewers would prefer not to pay for them, nor watch any advertising either.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Quick Video Services Spark Conversations, Boredom
Online video has moved way beyond simple video-sharing on YouTube. A growing number of services are allowing users to make video on the fly and stream their material live or near live to the web or from mobile devices. Instant video content, often just conversations between the producer and his or her audience, or video comments back and forth, is much different from content that is recorded, edited and posted onto video-sharing sites like YouTube.
more »Digging Deeper
Online Video Ads Finally Find Their Niche
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads. So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them.
more »Open Source Reporting
Educational Centers for Journalism Experiments
Will print newspapers exist in 10 years? How will we fund investigative journalism in the future? How can journalists learn to do reporting, moderating communities, filtering content, building Google Maps and all the other technical and online duties they will need to know?
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
4 Reasons I Don't Use Personalized Start Pages (And 3 Reasons Others Do)
When you open up your Internet browser, what's the first thing you see? Many people opt for personalized start pages, portal-like websites that let you pick and choose the content you want, such as news, weather or updates from social networking sites like Facebook. You can add widgets to your start page, and even create widgets for others to use on their pages.
more »Legal Drama
AP Badly Mistaken on Drudge Retort
Last week, the Associated Press decided that the Drudge Retort was in violation of copyright laws because it excerpted parts of AP stories and linked to them. The AP legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drudge Retort's owner, the technology book author Rogers Cadenhead.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Spain's National Obsession with Mobiles, Texting
A few weeks ago I told you about the perpetuation of print newspapers here in Spain, and in that post I mentioned the fact that you don't see a whole lot of laptops being used on the streets of Barcelona or Madrid. One might think that this is an indication of a lack of love for gadgets. Quite the contrary: You may not see laptops, but what you do see are cell phones -- and tons of them.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Slingbox Lets Me Take Live TV Abroad
Last month, I moved to Spain, and I took my TV with me. Not the actual TV set, but my shows. As I write this, I'm watching a live episode of "Larry King Live," where politicians and pundits are discussing the implications of the Obama victory. It's 9:00 in the morning here in Spain, and even though I'm having breakfast, late-night Larry King and everyone else is truly live, thanks to Slingbox.
more »Digging Deeper
'Technology Sabbath' Offers One Day to Unplug
Lately, I've been experimenting with taking one day each week away from work completely. You might think this would be an easy task as there's a "weekend" each week that allegedly offers up two full days of rest. And yet, as I work at home, the shiny big screen of the iMac beckons at all hours, and I am often in front of its white glow the first thing every morning and the last thing at night.
more »Your Take Roundup
People Get Picky on Adding Friends on Social Media Sites
There comes a time in every person's online life when they have to make a decision: to add or not to add a "friend." I put friend in quotations because that's usually the problem. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it's polite, or ignore them because I want to protect my personal information?
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
3 Reasons FriendFeed Is Great -- and 3 Ways It Scares Me
Ask me what my mother is doing right now and I couldn't tell you. Or what my best friend has been up to lately...no idea. But with a quick look at my computer screen, I can see what a staggering number of people I barely know are doing right now, 10 minutes ago, or last night. What they are reading, what they are posting and what they are commenting on -- all in one place.
more »Digging Deeper
Newspaper Vet Malcolm Finds Blog Religion with 'Top of the Ticket'
If you have preconceived notions about political blogging, Andrew Malcolm is here to shatter them. Malcolm, 64, has decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times, and later as an editorial board member and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has ink in his blood, but when he was tapped by the L.A. Times to help write the new political blog, Top of the Ticket, Malcolm became a quick convert to the online religion.
more »NewspaperShift
Post-Mortem on the Multimedia Boot Camp
For five and a half days, a group of mostly newspaper journalists (with a few broadcasters and non-profit folks thrown in) took an intensive boot camp multimedia training at UC Berkeley through the Knight Digital Media Center. The idea was to learn as much as possible about shooting and editing video, capturing and editing audio, building Flash animations, doing...
more »NewspaperShift
Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- The week-long training at UC Berkeley in multimedia has now moved to a new phase. After getting basic background on audio, video and photographic equipment, we went out into the field on our group's assignment. My group, Team Gecko, went to visit Professor Robert Full to learn about the work he's done in biomechanics. Full's lab...
more »NewspaperShift
Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso
It's now Day 3 in the marathon week-long multimedia boot camp at UC Berkeley run by the Knight Digital Media Center. We have broken into groups to create various multimedia stories, and later today we'll go out to do our primary interviews and video shoots. My group will be meeting with Robert Full, a professor who studies robotics based on animal movements.
more »NewspaperShift
Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- After our long storyboarding sessions, it's now time to move into more hands-on training and seminars on doing video shooting, audio recording, digital photography and using Macintosh computers. So far, there's been a good mix of lectures, discussions and collaborative work on storyboards for our projects. The group is very inquisitive, and the instructors have done...
more »NewspaperShift
Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- It's Day 2 at the Knight Digital Media Center's week-long boot camp for journalists learning to do multimedia reports. On the agenda for the day is learning about doing "storyboarding," or laying out how a multimedia report will work. And there will also be some basic tutorials on using videocameras and techniques in video shooting. (Some...
more »NewspaperShift
Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- With MediaShift, I've always had a plan to add video and audio along with all the text reports I do here. As I want to "walk my talk" about media outlets using multimedia, I felt it made sense to do them myself. This week, I'll be auditing a week-long boot camp in multimedia training at the...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Are Print Newspapers Alive and Well in Spain?
From a picture window in an office from where I am writing in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona, I can see the same sights I could see from a similar window in my former neighborhood in San Francisco: pedestrians, taxis, cafes and bookstores. But there is something different about my view here: I can spot three different storefronts specializing in newspapers and magazines, all on one block and on one side of the street. A couple of yards away, there are more newsstands. A visit to the corner cafe reveals something else that's rather curious: the room full of coffee drinkers is full of people reading the news -- not on laptops or iPhones -- but on good old-fashioned pulp.
more »NewspaperShift
Fear and Loathing (and Bad Hooker Jokes) at the Old Media Corral
LAS VEGAS -- When Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines presented the recent Interactive Media conference, it seemed like the perfect time for traditional media execs and managers to examine the interactive landscape and consider innovative approaches to the web. The idea was a good one, and timely, but the execution was sorely lacking. Everything about the conference had...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News
Last May on MediaShift, we wrote a series of articles about a new microblogging tool called Twitter, which was just beginning to gain visibility among the digerati. At that time, many bloggers were still on the fence as to how useful the service really was. Many thought it was a waste of time. Others just didn't understand if it...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
NPR Considers Convergence for Next Generation of Radio Reporters
The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs -- Next Generation Radio (NextGen) and Intern Edition -- aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR...
more »Your Take
How do you decide on friend requests?
If you belong to social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Flickr, et al, you probably face this question each day: Should I add this person as a friend? Most services will send you an email alert that someone has requested that you become their friend. Now it's up to you to decide to accept or ignore it....
more »Citizen Journalism
This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That's a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that's gone wrong in our modern world. And there's a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive its painful transition in the digital age. But the conference...
more »Digging Deeper
9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort. Search engine optimization, or "SEO," means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site. Over...
more »NewspaperShift
Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who'll See the Future?
BERKELEY -- We are midway through the first day at the conference, "Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?" [You can read my earlier post from the conference here.] One thing that struck me here is that we have some serious bigwigs and executives at major media companies, like the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR,...
more »NewspaperShift
State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting
BERKELEY, CA -- I am blogging live from the conference, "Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting," at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. It is perhaps the most beautiful day outside here, with glorious blue skies, but investigative journalists are like vampires, hiding out in dark spaces when it's warm and sunny outside. So here we are in...
more »NewspaperShift
Examples of Online Investigative Journalism
This weekend I'll be attending "The Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Journalism?" hosted at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. There will be a lot of old school journalism types who have been plying the trade of investigative work for decades. Most of these folks work at big news...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Public Documents + Shoe Leather Reporting = The Smoking Gun's Staying Power
In a world of social network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it's the simple things that work best. That's the lesson of Web 1.0 startup The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic. If a prominent politician or celebrity has run afoul of the...
more »TVShift
CBS Considers 'Loyalty Index' Over Pay for Page Views
With so many ways to track a writer's popularity online, should that popularity be tied to a journalist's or blogger's pay? That is a question that's come up quite a few times over the years, and last week I took Gawker Media to task for paying writers based on page views. My basic point was that there should be...
more »AdvertisingShift
Why Paying People by Page Views is Wrong
Recently, Gawker Media, the blog empire run by Nick Denton, made two moves that were curious. One was spinning off three sites that weren't making the cut: Gridskipper (travel), Idolator (music), and Wonkette (politics). The other was slashing the pay-per-page-view rate for Gawker Media writers by 33%. In Denton's go-ahead-and-leak-it email memo, which showed up on Silicon Alley Insider,...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
'Blog Till You Drop' Phenomenon Overblown; Disconnecting Is Key
The New York Times recently published a story , "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop," that created a lot of buzz. The story told about bloggers who were literally working themselves to death. As if it were a quickly advancing trend, the Times' Matt Richtel declared, "a growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs,...
more »Digging Deeper
The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. "Press releases are nearly useless," he...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Web Serials Find Their Niche vs. TV
Everyone's a producer -- or so it seems with the availability of video-making tools for just about anyone these days. With the arrival of cheaper, more compact equipment and the rapid of advance of technology in this area, it's possible to shoot a pretty good quality video with a small digital camera or even a high-end cell phone. Plus,...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Front Porch Forum Makes Friends & Neighbors, But Can It Make Money?
We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there's a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get...
more »Social Networking
Africa's Social Media Conundrum
"Web 2.0 [is] a venture capitalist's paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralizing potential of peer-to-peer production."
more »Weblogs
How Bloggers Covered Kenya Violence, Deal with Racism, Sexism
Within 24 hours of the outbreak of the post election violence in Kenya, Kenyan blogs were posting hour by hour reports. On December 31st there was a complete shutdown of the mainstream media.
more »Wikis
How to Be a Model Wikipedia Contributor
Wikipedia -- like Google or CNN -- is a name we recognize immediately when mentioned in conversation. The collaborative online encyclopedia currently ranks 8th on the Alexa list of top web destinations. Ask anyone sitting in front of a computer to find information for you on any topic. While most might turn first to Google, many others will turn...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
The Blessing and Curse of the iPod Touch
Here at MediaShift, we have had some less than perfect experiences with mobile devices and the Internet. Earlier this year, Mark wrote "a manifesto about what would make for a smarter smartphone." And last summer "I grumbled about the bad time I was having with my new smartphone." The Treo 680 was under-delivering in the one area that had convinced me to purchase the phone in the first place: surfing the web.
more »Digging Deeper
Semi-Pro Journalism Teams Give Alternative View of U.S. Elections
Elizabeth Gotsdiner got Joe Biden's errant spittle in her mouth. Shantel Middleton got to ride on a Ron Paul blimp. Mayhill Fowler was following Obama canvassers and ended up helping them carry brochures for the candidate. Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways....
more »Digging Deeper
Politico 2.0: Ruffini Blogs, Twitters, Crowdsources Obama Donations
Patrick Ruffini is the epitome of the new breed of political consultant. He's a numbers wonk who swears by Microsoft Excel. He's a tech geek who's had his own political website since the mid-'90s, and he writes for various big-name group blogs such as TechPresident and TownHall.com -- as well as his own blog. And though he has worked...
more »Philosophy
I struggle nearly every week with an identity problem: Am I a blogger or a journalist? Most times, I can take the easy way out and think of myself as the nouveau blogger/journalist or journalist/blogger -- but which one comes first? nags my inner pigeon-holer. Last week's blog post (or was it a long-form piece of journalism?) on MediaShift...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Citizen Journalism Spreads in Spanish-Speaking World
Traditional media has always drawn a line between the reporter and the "reported to." But citizen journalism is a phenomenon that looks to bridge the gap between the news and the people, with average folks being able to use digital technology and the Internet to create and distribute their own news. But most stories about citizen journalism in the...
more »Digging Deeper
Distinction Between Bloggers, Journalists Blurring More Than Ever
The time-worn debate of Bloggers vs. Journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Facebook Becomes Catalyst for Causes, Colombian FARC Protest
This morning, I received a notification on my Facebook profile that said if I sent a virtual plant to some of my friends, I'd help them "save the Earth." If you're a Facebook user, you probably wonder how much the incessant pleas by certain applications on the site might actually "change the world." Modules built to help you attack...
more »Open Source Reporting
How Our Next President Should Use Participatory Media
Today is President's Day in the U.S., celebrating the February birthdays of past presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. But rather than looking back, I'd like to look forward to the next president of the United States -- whoever he or she will be -- and consider how they might use technology and new media to be more responsive...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Lately, it seems everybody's a video producer. From YouTube to BlogTV to Seesmic â- it's as if everyone's doing something with a videocamera. Last year, I wondered if the transition from blogger to video producer and host might not be the best route for everyone. It seemed that bloggers were eager to jump formats and just "do video," and the...
more »Digging Deeper
With the advent of the Internet and a growing number of security breaches, people worry that their personal information can be seen and exploited around the world in an instant. If you have incriminating photos online, a potential employer or love interest might find them and make snap judgments. If you shop online with a credit card, a merchant might steal your information and run up charges on your card. If you surf online around major media sites, publishers might use your "data trail" to target advertising to you.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Reasons I Won't Give Up Books
Last month at the highly anticipated MacWorld conference here in San Francisco, Apple honcho Steve Jobs said some words that left many agape. Those words weren't "Macbook Air" but "people don't read anymore." He was predicting a doomed future for Amazon's new Kindle e-reader. Shocked, I've been going over this for weeks now, trying to cut through the punditry...
more »Citizen Journalism
Social Media, Google-Twitter Mashup and More on Super Duper Tuesday
11:02 am Pacific Time I'll be live-blogging the Super Tuesday election day here in the U.S. and will be highlighting all the efforts online to cover the day's events and results. I'm especially interested in finding the best social media sites, mainstream news sites and blogs and video coverage -- and am asking for your input on any innovative efforts...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Why I Left Print Media for Digital
In new media circles, one of the hottest topics of recent years has been the print-to-digital shift. People pundit about it, shout "print is dead" and wallow in the sadness sparked by nostalgia for a day when this wasn't a question. We've also begun speculating on whether a device like the Kindle will really ever take our attention away...
more »Digging Deeper
In Digital Age, Journalism Students Need Business, Entrepreneurial Skills
The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. In the past, a journalism student would learn about being a newspaper reporter, then take a job at a small-town paper, eventually moving up to a medium and then larger paper. Now, the reporter might launch a blog, an audio podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.
more »Your Take Roundup
Facebook Has a Problem with Trust
In the not-too-distant past, I remember fondly getting an email notification from Facebook that one of my friends had sent me a message or "poked" me virtually. I happily clicked over to Facebook to see what someone had said or done, and responded in kind. Now, my reaction to getting the same kinds of notifications has changed, and I...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
How Google, Wikipedia Have Changed Our Lives -- For Better and Worse
A lecturer in the U.K. made headlines this month when she banned her students from using Wikipedia and Google for research assignments in her classes. The professor, Dr. Tara Brabazon, said that students "don't come to university to learn how to Google." I'm sure they don't, but I can imagine the fear that the ban struck in the hearts...
more »Digging Deeper
BusinessWeek.com Pushes into Aggregation, Video, Participation to Stand Out
Business news is often about numbers. And when you check the audience numbers on the various top financial news sites online, the portals such as Yahoo Finance and MSN Money come out on top, followed by a jumble of online magazines such as Forbes.com, wire services such as Reuters, and online-only pubs like TheStreet.com. As of last August, BusinessWeek.com...
more »Media Usage
The Efficiency (and Shame) of Long-Distance Reporting
My writer friend Marlene once had a dot-com job that seemed odd. She wrote for a travel site about various countries but never traveled to those countries. She simply aggregated information from other websites and did extensive online research before writing about them and putting together guides. But strange as it seemed at the time, I was destined to...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Social Media for Reporting
Because we live in an age when social media sites are our daily bread, it seems natural to turn to them as resources for writing a story. When I wrote a piece about the popularity of Facebook all over the world, I went straight to Facebook to get the user interviews I needed. And when I wrote about the...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online -- with Moderation
Major media sites have started to get the religion of audience participation, but there's been one big hitch: How do you harness the audience's knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation? Over the years, traditional media sites have tried forums, killed them, and tried them again, this time with more...
more »Weblogs
Blog Pundits Certain About Steve Jobs' Keynote
After the stunningly bad predictions by pollsters, pundits, commentators and anyone who graced a cable TV news studio before the New Hampshire Democratic primary, we decided to turn a fake news source, the fictional Online News Network (ONN), to tell us what Apple CEO Steve Jobs will tell everyone in his much anticipated speech tomorrow morning. The following is...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Places to Watch Movies Online Legally -- and Free
The spread of broadband Internet access has made online video a much better experience, allowing movie fans to catch a flick on the Net without having to rent a DVD. Depending on the kind of system and monitor you have, watching films on a computer can become almost as enjoyable as watching them on your television. For instance, with...
more »Digging Deeper
Anti-Piracy Dragnet Could Hurt 'Fair Use' of Copyrighted Video
All the lawsuits and rhetoric around people uploading copyrighted material on video-sharing sites such as YouTube make it seem like a black-and-white situation: either you're shooting your own original video or stealing it from someone else. But what's lost in that simple either-or interpretation is the more gray area in copyright law known as fair use, which protects people...
more »PoliticalShift
Iowa Caucuses Blanketed by Twitter, Blogs, Video
If you were anywhere in Iowa yesterday, you might as well assume that anyone around you could report on what you were saying, even in what you thought was a private moment at a restaurant. That's the hard lesson learned by veteran GOP political strategist Ed Rollins, who was repeatedly flummoxed in a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace,...
more »MediaShift
10 MediaShifting Moments of 2007
As the year 2007 sets in the distance, we can take some time to consider the year that was. I'm not a huge fan of year-end lists, but sometimes they help us get a grip on what transpired -- and ponder what's to come. What's perhaps most amazing about 2007 is that two distinct phenomena -- the iPhone and...
more »Digging Deeper
When Will Google's 'Big Project' YouTube Bring in Profits?
In its brief 22-month history, video-sharing site YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon. The Iraq War has been called the "YouTube War" because of the videos that are regularly uploaded by soldiers and insurgents. The upcoming U.S. presidential race has been called the "YouTube Election" with its own "YouTube Debates" thanks to the questions for candidates uploaded by the...
more »Philosophy
Journalists, Bloggers Have a Sorry History at Startups
As a journalist covering a particular business, there is a temptation to believe that we know enough about that business to actually become a full participant in that business. We have been writing about it, we see what works and what fails, so we should know enough to try our hand at it too. But more often than not,...
more »Social Networking
The Universal Language of Facebook
It's been just four short years since a college student named Mark Zuckerberg launched a new social network with a very specific target demographic: American Ivy League college students. Since then, the Facebook phenomenon has exceeded everyone's expectations. After opening up accessibility to anyone interested in signing up late last year, growth in the U.S. for the social network has...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Hyper-Local News
Hyper-local news is the information relevant to small communities or neighborhoods that has been overlooked by traditional news outlets. Thanks to cheap self-publishing and communication online, independent hyper-local news sites have sprung up to serve these communities, while traditional media has tried their own initiatives to cover what they've missed. In some cases, hyper-local sites let anyone submit stories, photos or videos of the community, with varying degrees of moderation and filtering. Pioneers such as "Northwest Voice" in Bakersfield, Calif., and "YourHub", which started in Denver, actually reverse publish select material from their websites in print publications. Both of them are run by mainstream newspaper publishers.
more »Your Take
How important is digital media in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign?
As the U.S. presidential primary season quickly approaches, the question remains just how important the Internet and new media have been in the election race. While political tracking sites such as TechPresident can show how many Facebook friends the candidates have, or how many video views they've had on YouTube, there isn't a direct correlation between online popularity and actual...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
6 Reasons I'm Not Hooked on Podcasts
A year ago, Mark wrote about the factors that were limiting the growth of podcast adoption. Some of the problems include the difficulty in finding quality content, a lack of understanding of the medium, and a general impatience in getting podcasts to work. I can relate. Try as I might, I haven't been able to make podcasts a part of...
more »Digging Deeper
Hype and Backlash for Second Life Miss the Bigger Picture
In May 2006, BusinessWeek ran a cover story on the virtual world Second Life (SL) by Robert Hof called My Virtual Life. The tagline breathlessly said, "A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice." It didn't take long for other mainstream media...
more »Philosophy
Revamping the Story Flow for Journalists
Every time I sit down to write an in-depth story for MediaShift, I start getting that same sinking feeling: I'm missing something. Did someone else already write this story? Did I talk to all the right people? Did those people tell me everything I should know? Are my assumptions and story angle sound? Did I get all sides of...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Last.FM, Jango, Pandora Trounce Music Discovery via Radio
Back before the Internet, listening to the radio was a one-sided experience. Beyond the occasional call-in request, music radio was about listening to whatever the DJs decided to play whenever they decided to play it. But a new breed of online music services are giving listeners access to music content on demand, and most are for free. Can these...
more »Digging Deeper
TechPresident, 10Questions Put Spotlight on 'Voter-Generated Content'
Just as the Internet and technology have shifted the playing field in media, allowing bloggers and podcasters to help set the news agenda, so has the realm of politics been disrupted by technology that gives voters more power to inject their own issues into the fray. And in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, that disruption has been strongest in...
more »AdvertisingShift
How much do online marketers and websites know about us? Do they save records on what we've bought, sites we've visited, people we've contacted? It's a subject that few of us bother with until we find out our private information has been stolen or inadvertently been made public. And privacy concerns have been front and center lately as MySpace...
more »Weblogs
Losing the Journalistic Security Blanket
Here's the quiz of the day for 21st Century Journalism 101: What makes news critics howl, able reporters swoon and strong editors weep? (Hint: The great unwashed and untutored of the blogosphere consider them pure manna.)
more »Citizen Journalism
Teaching Citizen Journalism Challenges Both Profession and Professor
I have a unique place in the citizen journalism world -- I teach one of the very few practical courses in this growing area of our profession.
more »NewspaperShift
Rethinking the Mercury News...with Community Participation
When I was clicking through the website of the San Jose Mercury News metro newspaper, I noticed the navigation bar had the usual tabs for News, Tech, Sports, Business, and finally, Help. But this time, rather than consider this Help tab as a way for readers to get help, I could hear the Mercury News calling out to readers...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Evolves for Wildfire Coverage, But Hyper-Local Still Lacking
When people think of community or hyper-local neighborhood news, they typically think of bake sales, petty crime and development catfights. But when a disaster strikes, the stakes for community news are raised, and lightning-quick news updates online can save lives and help residents cope. That was the reality in San Diego and Southern California during last week's series of...
more »Social Networking
Am I Really Worth $300 as a Facebook User?
"I do not plan on being on Facebook too much anymore -- seems like a waste of time & it seems my friends cannot even take a breath without me receiving notification of it. E-mail is better!" That was the note I got from one of my new friends on Facebook who had become obsessed with Facebook, found that...
more »Media Usage
California Wildfire Coverage by Local Media, Blogs, Twitter, Maps and More
The last few days have shown that online resources, social media, and collaboration on the Net can make a huge difference in a natural disaster. As the wildfires have spread in Southern California, the evacuees and local residents have utilized the Internet not only to connect and get updated information; they have used it to tell their stories, share...
more »Digging Deeper
MarketWatch Turns 10, But Can It Evolve for Another 10?
As the financial news site MarketWatch celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, the stalwart Web 1.0 company stands on the precipice of change. It has launched a community initiative that lets people comment on stories, rate stories, and compete for points by making market predictions. As part of Dow Jones, MarketWatch will become part of the News Corp. empire...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Even in U.S., Bloggers Get Little Protection
Earlier this year, there was a debate in journalism circles and in the general public about who could be considered a journalist, as San Francisco videoblogger and media maker Josh Wolf was jailed after refusing to turn over video footage to federal authorities. After spending 226 days in jail, Wolf was dubbed the "longest-jailed journalist in American history." But...
more »Digging Deeper
BBC Trains Iranian Journalists through ZigZag Online Magazine
Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a large educated and Internet-savvy class of people. But because it's a closed society, most journalism training does not address the importance of objectivity and balance in reporting, nor does it stress the importance of online journalism. The BBC World Service Trust has been quietly trying to change that, training 150 journalists in...
more »Citizen Journalism
MediaShift Launches Idea Lab Group Blog
A few weeks back, I heard gunshots outside my window. It was pretty scary, and reminded me of my urban environment here in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. But where could I turn to get the story on what happened? Was someone killed? Do police know what happened? In the past, I might have heard something about it on the...
more »Your Take
Should bloggers and newspapers make peace?
Everywhere you turn, newspaper websites are getting the blog religion. They're either adding new blogs from reporters or community members, or setting up an alliance to share advertising, or just buying up big-name bloggers, as the New York Times has done with Freakonomics and by hiring TVNewser's Brian Stelter. Alana Semuels counts all the ways newspapers and bloggers are working...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Our Internet Obsession with Missing People Goes Too Far
Reading online news is a great way to stay constantly updated on what's going on in the world without having to rely on television. And in times of great tragedy the Internet has shown itself to be incomparable in its ability to make information move quickly for the good of public awareness and safety. But for all its positive...
more »Digging Deeper
Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional spaces where you can interact with other people, collect items and build structures, and communicate via a virtual representative of yourself called an avatar. These worlds have been influenced by various science fiction writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, along with the movie, "The Matrix."
more »Weblogs
Can Internet, Blogs Sustain the Saffron Revolution?
When the ruling military junta in Burma cracked down on protesters, killing unarmed Buddhist monks, the world was watching. While mainstream journalists have to work undercover in Burma for fear of the junta's wrath, Burmese citizens and tourists were able to shoot photos and videos of the protests and transmit them to the outside world. The contrast between this...
more »Digging Deeper
6 Maxims for Music Promotion in the Digital Age
Not too long ago, there was an established route for promoting musical talent. The music would go into heavy rotation on the radio and MTV, the artist would play in a record store, and promotion might include an advertisement in a music magazine. But the old formula has been updated with the advent of digital distribution, social networking sites...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
YouTube, Flickr Become Forces for Cultural Change
The term "social web" brings to mind images of people around the world interacting with each other without borders or barriers. With the arrival of more and more sites that help us connect, express ourselves and share media, it seems like we're advancing toward a more open Internet, in which everyone has the right to view or post whatever...
more »Digging Deeper
Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Look for Resurgence
When I mentioned the name "Henry Blodget" to a friend from the old dot-com daze, she wrinkled her nose with disgust. "How can anyone trust what he has to say, when he was the one who caused the bubble in the first place!" she said. Blodget was a financial analyst who mightily predicted Amazon's stock would hit $400 --...
more »Open Source Reporting
EarmarkWatch.org Enables D.I.Y. Investigative Work
As professional journalists, we often believe that we have all the answers, or that we can find the knowledgeable source that has all the answers. When it comes to covering the workings of the U.S. Congress, journalists often rely on Congressional staffers or aides with inside information to find out what's going on. Or they follow the money through...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Bloggers Make Jump to TV Shows -- But Should They?
It wasn't that long ago that I was marveling over the fact that mainstream media was paying attention to blogs, particularly for culling public opinion on hot button political issues. I remember being shocked when CNN started featuring a segment quoting bloggers on "The Situation Room" -- shocked and wondering how it all happened. When did blogs suddenly become...
more »Digging Deeper
News21 Improves Multimedia, Still Lacks Audience Involvement
The News21 initiative had grand designs to provide fellowships to 44 bright journalism and political science graduate students, and have them create innovative, cutting edge -- and sellable -- work. In the first year, the Northwestern University fellows broke ground with a Flash-based story on Digital Data Trails and the UC Berkeley fellows had their work featured on a...
more »Your Take Roundup
Internet Offers Unlimited Time for Presidential Debates
One of the complaints most people have about televised politics and debates is the prevalence of the sound bite. There's never enough time for candidates to discuss issues in-depth or argue their point for more than a minute. Instead, we are stuck with the tyranny of zingers and one-liners, perfectly fit for highlights on SportsCenter, uh, I mean the...
more »Your Take
What blogs would you nominate as the best in the world?
It's that time of year again. No, not just the new fall TV season. It's also blog nomination season, when big international groups (and smaller national groups) ask people to submit nominees for the best blogs. In November, I'll again be a judge for the Best of the Blogs (The BOBs) awards, run by the German's international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle....
more »Digging Deeper
Can Citizen Journalism Make a Difference in Jordan?
Ramsey Tesdell would like to bring the concept of citizen and community journalism to Jordan, an Arab country that has a long history of state-controlled media. Tesdell, 23, along with three other early 20somethings, launched the site 7iber in May as a place for "people-powered journalism," hoping that average folks would tell the stories overlooked by mainstream media in...
more »Citizen Journalism
'People Searches' Let Everyone Investigate You
After being an online journalist for 12 years, I figure one of my specialties is doing investigations online about people I'm interviewing for stories I write. I want to know their background, where they've worked, where they live and whatever can give me relevant context for my interactions with them. But lately, I've noticed that my "people searching" skills...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Online Video Sites Scratch Your Niche
In my post about online television a few weeks ago, I wrote about why I don't enjoy watching television on the Internet. One of the reasons is that a big video-sharing site such as YouTube has thousands of different kinds of content jumbled together in one place, making it hard to find the content I want. Why should I...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Social Networking Online
Social networking websites help people connect with others who share their interests, build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos. The idea of social networks has been studied by sociologists for decades as they analyze the ties between people in families, organizations and even in towns or countries. According to "Wikipedia", "Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals."
more »Online Video
The Tangled State of Archived News Footage Online
A couple of weeks ago a video of Vice President Dick Cheney from 1994 came up on YouTube, with Cheney saying that invading Baghdad would invite a quagmire. I investigated this on my own and discovered that, while I could find it today via the C-SPAN archives, it wasn't clear that someone in 2003 during the run-up to the...
more »Your Take Roundup
Google News Comments a 'Fabulous Step Forward'
For an experimental feature that barely registers a blip in reality, the idea of letting sources of stories comment on Google News has stirred up a hornet's nest in journalism circles and the blogosphere. Two software engineers at Google News said they would be adding limited comments to news stories that are linked from the news aggregator, giving quoted...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Free Newspapers Lead Way Online in Europe
As big newspapers struggle with shifting business models, a new breed of free newspapers have have found their niche in many parts of the world. According to the Newspaper Innovation blog, 36 million free papers are distributed daily in 49 countries. As newspaper subscriptions lag, advertisers turn to these papers that have a captive audience of commuters desperate for...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Is the Future of Television Online? Not Yet
Late last month the BBC announced that it would be offering up a large part of its television content free of charge on its website. And back in May, ABC announced it would stream some of its primetime shows in HD online for free. As networks begin to put more of their content online -- either on their websites...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Flickr Changes Lives, Launches Photog Careers
With the plethora of social networking sites, it's easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites -- chatting up strangers, lurking on people's profiles, spying on friends -- is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr is a...
more »Your Take Roundup
Front Porch Forum Fans Adore Hyper-Local Email Reports
Yesterday, when I heard a shooting take place in broad daylight down the street from me in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, I wondered what happened, who got shot and thought about how lucky I was not to be out and about with my son at that moment. Later, I got an update from an email list serving Potrero...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Food Lovers Become Experts at Chowhound, Yelp
Before the web was in widespread use, food lovers would wait patiently for the New York Times restaurant reviews to come out for the hottest new spot in SoHo, or for hometown papers to write up the little Korean joint that just opened down the street. We relied heavily on that system of stars, dollar signs and bells indicating...
more »Your Take
What's your favorite way of getting hyper-local or neighborhood news?
Lately there have been a lot of happenings in the world of hyper-local citizen journalism projects. The venture-funded Backfence series of sites crashed and burned, Pegasus News was sold to Fisher Communications, and the Washington Post launched its first hyper-local effort, LoudonExtra. The idea behind many of these sites is to capture the smaller stories that newspapers, TV and radio...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
'Open Universities' Try to Bring College to Masses
A college education in the United States can be one of the most costly in the world. For many young people, college isn't an option because of the economic strain it represents for their families. And many older people who would like to attend classes must forego studies to make ends meet. But thanks to the power of voluntary...
more »MarketingShift
Marketers Grapple with Giving Teens More Control Online
SAN FRANCISCO -- A curious thing happened at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco today during the Ypulse Mashup 2007 conference about those wired teens. Yes, a lot of older folks dressed business-casual tried to look hip and decipher what the kids were doing online in social networks, on mobile phones and in virtual worlds. But on numerous...
more »Citizen Journalism
Co-Founder Potts Shares Lessons Learned from Backfence Bust
There has been a lot of speculation about what went wrong at Backfence. To date, the company's investors and I have tried to stay out of the second-guessing in the blogosphere and the trade press, largely because there are private business matters involved that we've chosen not to discuss.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Why My Smartphone Is Dumb About the Net
I've got a problem: I hate using the Internet -- on my phone, that is. I am one of those people whose ears perked up at the idea of being able to take my online activities, such as reading news, watching videos and social networking with me wherever I go, on my phone. And after investing in a flashy...
more »Open Source Reporting
How Would You Build a Newsroom From Scratch?
A lot of the brightest minds in journalism have been thinking for some time about how the newsroom of the future might operate as we move from legacy print and broadcast operations into a more converged, Internet-centric world. I've taken a couple stabs myself at how a "New Newsroom" might operate, both in a guest post on PressThink in...
more »Digging Deeper
Topix Capitalizes on Forums, Reaches Rural Areas
When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to abandon them altogether online. And people on forums are usually...
more »Social Networking
Social Media Runs on 'Friend' Power
I've been thinking a lot lately about friends, and the shifting definition of friends within online social networks such as "MySpace", "Facebook" and "LinkedIn." There was a time in the not-so-distant pre-web past when I considered a friend to be someone who had my back, someone I could go to for advice or help, someone I considered a trusted ally.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Face-to-Face Networking Trumps Panels at Conference
SAN FRANCISCO -- In my account of Supernova 2007 yesterday, I didn't mention one of the things that really irked me about the conference: the silence. When panelists were on the huge stage at the main ballroom in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, the large audience sat silent typing away at their laptops. While some sessions ended with a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Business Crowd Considers Web Users in Third Person
SAN FRANCISCO -- Anyone tired of Web 2.0 topics and discussion, and the current venture-capital-fueled hype, would have been advised to stay far away from the Supernova conference here. The conference site bills it as "the only event that assembles the most compelling people and companies from the converging worlds of computing, telecom, and digital media to put decentralization...
more »Digging Deeper
TechDirt Builds Community of Bloggers to Offer Corporate Analysis
In the world of technology research, firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research and JupiterResearch seem to hold all the cards, knowing markets in-depth and charging firms thousands of dollars for a peek inside. Many small and medium companies, especially startups, are often on the outside looking in, not able to afford the high cost of research firms but still...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas
What do Brazilian and Indian Internet users have in common? A favorite social networking site called Orkut, a Google web property which, when it was launched in 2004 was meant to put its parent company on the social networking map in the U.S. Orkut may not have taken off stateside, but it has exploded in these two countries, and...
more »Digging Deeper
Collaborative Radio Shows Invite Listeners into Creative Process
Long before the term citizen journalism became trendy, ordinary citizens shared the stage for decades with professional journalists in talk radio. They collaborated, they cajoled, they ranted and they often added wit and wisdom to live radio call-in shows. But with the advent of the Internet, public radio shows are finding that websites -- and blogs in particular --...
more »Your Take Roundup
Virtual Worlds for Kids Entwined with Real World
While the media has been abuzz about Second Life and adult virtual worlds, a bevy of virtual worlds for kids have been even more popular than their adult counterparts. Tween world Club Penguin has more than 4 million visitors per month, according to a New York Times article on the virtual world craze for kids. But I wondered when...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Online Map Craze Helps People Visualize Data
It's not often that you find an Internet trend based on something ancient. But that's what's happening with maps. Google Maps has gone from innovative to indispensable and highly replicated in a little over two years. Thanks to Google's open map API (appliction programming interface), just about anybody can create a map for just about anything -- from tracking...
more »Social Networking
Dangers Overblown for Teens Using Social Media
I remember the first time I watched Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator, a TV series where they snared sexual predators using online venues. It was a train wreck -- the kind you can't keep your eyes off of. These predators were so creepy and so dumb. Some of them were lured into the trap more than once by...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Community-Edited News Sites Abound in Other Languages
Back in 2004, when developer Kevin Rose launched the community-edited news site Digg, he could not have imagined it would launch a global phenomenon. A simple application that allowed users to contribute web links and vote on stories to push them to the front page somehow appealed to so many of us that by the next year, it had...
more »Digging Deeper
Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation
For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. A post about the U.S. attorney general firing scandal might be tagged: "U.S. politics," "Alberto Gonzales," "attorney general firings." But the missing element for bloggers has been a...
more »Your Take
What's the right age for kids to start visiting virtual worlds?
Forget about Second Life. The big buyout talk in virtual worlds lately has been around sites such as Club Penguin, a squeaky-clean world catering to kids aged 8 to 14, and Webkinz, a kids site with games and virtual pets. A recent BusinessWeek article noted that Big Media companies such as Sony and News Corp. were interested in paying upwards...
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