Elevenses: twitter for journalists

Excitingly, we ran our first weekly editorial development session today.

The idea is to run an event every Thursday at 11am for 3/4 hour. The topic will be different every week but it's all about helping people develop new journalistic skills.

As there are four of us involved in Elevenses we each only have to curate one a month.

Adam curated today's which was all about Twitter. Four of our most enthusiastic Twitter users talked about how they use it to find stories break stories, build relationships and build their brand.

This is a hot topic but even so we were amazed when over 50 people turned up.

To be fair, some of this may have been thanks to the publicity generated on the letters page of our corporate intranet regarding whether or not the word "curate" may be used as a verb. Perfectly cromulent in my view.

Misc thoughts: Silverlight, Flash and Twitter

I've been on a Flash for Beginners course for the last two days. My hope was that learning the basics that way and spending some time with Mindy McAdams book Flash Journalism would result in some skills and ideas for interactive multi-media storytelling I could spread around our business. We shall see. I think the main lesson so far is that Flash is very complicated and it would take huge commitment on the part of a journalist to master it.

Anyway, early days. I was quite pleased with the animated bug I made on the course but I don't think it will be winning a Pulitzer Prize.



Meanwhile Journalism.co.uk alerted me to something I had missed in the whole Obama overload thing - it's a CNN.com multimedia Silverlight thing which stitches lots of photographs together and lets you freely navigate through them (if you have the will). But the one that caught my eye was the UGC set which is basically composed of photographs from people around the world which show them watching the Obama inauguration on television. I found myself moving from scepticism to compulsion quite quickly. Nice use of UGC.

Finally, Twitter. It's gone mad of course. It's great that so many of our editorial people have suddly taken the plunge and hopefully the n00bs1 will start talking to people in their markets rather than just to each other any day now. Meantime, I'm finding Twitter rather overwhelming. It feels like ambient noise rather than ambient intimacy. I may switch it off.

Footnotes

1. For definition of n00b consult 140pedia which is dedicated to providing definitions no longer than 140 characters for the Twitterati.

Twitter: proving the value to journalists

My US colleague Dan Blank has done some interesting work on The ROI of Journalists and Magazines Using Twitter.

Dan looked at the 277 tweets from the School Library Journal during January. He concludes:

So, at the most basic level, how much exposure did this bring to School Library
Journal. It’s a difficult metric to pinpoint for a variety of reasons but a conservative estimate is: A few thousand page views.

Dan analyses the kinds of tweets and identifies three further areas that Twitter has delivered beyond merely traffic:

• Engaging the Top 10% of Your Audience
• Improving Editorial
• Marketing across more networks

Highly recommended it and I'll be adding it to my "Must Read" list for journalists:

• 10 things every journalist should know in 2009:
  http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/01/13/ten-things-every-journalist-should-know-in-2009/
• How journalists can master Twitter:
  http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/04/30/how-journalists-can-master-twitter/
• Twitter to journalists: here’s how it’s done:
  http://eatsleeppublish.com/twitter-to-journalists-heres-how-its-done/
• Five barriers to journalists using twitter:
  http://sarahhartley.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/five-barriers-to-journalists-using-twitter/
• Twitter for journalists:
  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_for_journalists.php
• Twitter can still work for journalists without tech-savvy readers:
  http://beatblogging.org/2008/10/21/twitter-can-still-work-for-journalists-without-tech-savvy-readers/

Mumbai, twitter and the news

Seems like just about everyone has clocked Twitter as the breaking news-source of the moment.

Techcrunch has some interesting stuff and there's a thoughtful piece by Matthew Ingram about the question of whether or not news organisations should report tweets as fact.

It's something that struck me when looking at The Guardian's (abandoned) live blog which contained the entry:

8:26am:
One of the Australian victims has been named on the microblogging site Twitter.

That's quite a significant statement, especially if you happened to be a relative of the (alleged) victim.

Matthew Ingram argues:

Obviously, no one wants a loved one to be worried by false reports. But at the same time, chaotic situations result in poor information flow — even to the “professional” journalists who are working at the scene. First-hand and second-hand reports on Twitter are no worse. Should anyone take them as gospel, or the final version of the events? No. Obviously, at some point someone has to check the facts, confirm reports, analyze the outcome, and so on. News reporting and journalism are much more of a process than they are a discrete thing. But as I have tried to argue before, Twitter reports are a valuable “first draft of history,” and that is a pretty good definition of the news.

That's true, but I think that what those of us working in new media forget is that millions of people have either no idea or only a vague idea of what twitter is.

If you know what twitter is then you can calculate your response to take account of the cavils and risks; if you don't, and you trust the BBC (for example) as your source of news it's a different story.

Coming round to twitter

One of the mindsets of the mass media is that we do not understand "small" very well.

Our magazines are geared around substantial (if targeted) circulations and we send the same messages to all of them; our websites are optimised to attract as much traffic as possible.

And, if the truth be told, some of our attempts to introduce "community" have been hindered by our tendency to look for big numbers by using traditionally successful tools such as mass marketing emails.

We currently have the luxury of having three Community Editors who do not yet have communities to run, by which I mean they do not have community sections on their websites.

Together we have been developing what we're grandly calling a "social media outreach programme" which really means becoming part of the communities already out there and linking up with the (relatively few) people in their markets who are already hooked in to the whole social media thing.

It has been a very instructive exercise and the response so far has been positive. Twitter accounts have been set up by Computer Weekly and Contract Journal, both of whom have managed to achieve a tone and a restraint which are alien to our traditional publishing. CJ was even spontaneously applauded by one follower for not making the same mistake as its rival and twittering every article it publishes.

They have relatively few followers compared to the big boys but they are the right people. We've got a few other plans up our sleeves in a similar vein and I'm actually rather optimistic about our ability to think small.

What value Twitter?

What a peculiar business. My head hurts.

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron is auctioning his Twitter account here on ebay.

The value theoretically lies in the number of people following him on Twitter. That number has gone up since he put it up for sale. At the time of writing, he has 1,595 followers and the bidding is at $1,235.

I'm not bidding for it. Microblogging does my head in. It just makes me want to scream "Make it stop! Make it stop!" Ironically, Rocketboom expresses it well for me:



Mind you, sometimes it has its uses.

Digital journalism tools: Twitter

Dan Blank has put together a handy summary of how journalists can get real value out of Twitter. Dan has brought together information from various sources so it's worth checking out his post in full .

One of his sources is Darren Rowse who has outlined these nine ways in which twitter helps him up his game as a blogger (but they are equally valid for journalists too)

• Research Tool
  
• Reinforce (and expand) Your Personal Brand
• Promote Content
• Extend Audience - Find NEW Readers
• Networking
• Previews
• Speedlinking
• Story Gathering
• Find Out What People REALLY Think.
  

read dan's post for more detail.