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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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »Weblogs
Sock Puppetry::Bloggers Must Be Vigilant Against Astroturf Comments
If you run an online forum or a blog that allows readers to comment, you sometimes feel like you're having a conversation in the fog. Often people will contribute anonymously or make up names or places where they live, or even lie about their gender, age or occupation. So what can you do about it? You might require a...
more »Citizen Journalism
Citizen Media Conundrum::If You See News, Where Do You Report It?
One of the ideas behind citizen journalism is that anybody who witnesses something newsworthy can photograph it, videotape it or write about it for the rest of the world. But one of the conundrums of citizen journalism is where do you do that? You could start a blog or put the information on your existing blog. You could try...
more »Your Take Roundup
Your Take Roundup::Sense of Community Motivates You to Work for Free
So much of the web is powered by volunteer work it's mind-boggling. The non-commercial ethos of the early days of the web, when people posted their thoughts to usenet groups and bulletin-board services, stuck around for years even as the web became more commercialized. America Online's chat room moderators, eBay's user-generated ratings, and Flickr's vast array of user-submitted photos...
more »Online Forums
Riding Talk Revisited::Politicians Speak Out About CBC Forums
In early February, I looked at an interesting project by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) called Riding Talk, where they provided a moderated forum for each and every riding (electoral district) in Canada before the late January elections. I had hoped to include the thoughts of a few politicians who participated in the forums but I didn't hear from...
more »Online Forums
World Wide Flame War::Topix.net Forums Give Window on Cartoon Flap
Pre-Internet days, a newspaper in Denmark that printed cartoons could be assured that they wouldn't be seen in other parts of the world. Those days are over. With protests and riots still burning bright in the Middle East over cartoons depicting Mohammed, we cannot ignore our global neighbors even if they live on the other side of the world....
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::CBC Offers Moderated Forum for Every Precinct
The hodge-podge of political discussion boards online can give you a headache. Usually it's a matter of who can scream the loudest and attack the fiercest. And if the subject is economics, someone will spout off on abortion. Plus, how can you find the right forum for the issues that concern you or your locale? The Canadian Broadcasting Corp....
more »Your Take Roundup
How Much Should You Moderate Comments? It Depends
After the Washington Post's website decided to shut down comments on its Post.Blog, I asked our own budding MediaShift community how you thought blog comments should be moderated here and elsewhere. Should online forums and blogs put up technological roadblocks to spammers and people spewing vitriol? Should they employ humans to check every comment before publishing them? Your responses...
more »NewspaperShift
Washingtonpost.com Walks the Line
The people who run the website for the Washington Post newspaper, washingtonpost.com, really want to empower their readers and give them more online. They offer live online chats with reporters and editors, online forums for readers to discuss Post articles, and a slew of blogs including the Post.Blog, in which "The Editors Discuss Site Policies, Design and Goals." Ah,...
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