Social media has become “indispensable” for journalists, says the latest State of the Media report. The annual report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism highlights the importance of social media to news organisations. At the time of publication, 184 news organisations had designated social media editors. “In 2012, social media continued to expand its role in the news ecosystem, establishing itself as an indispensable tool for distributing
The BBC College of Journalism is a treasure trove of advice, lessons and tips for any budding or experienced journalist. Outside of the UK, it is only available on a subscription basis. The College of Journalism tends to post videos from events on its Youtube channel. But I recently discovered that some of the lessons available through a dedicated website on the main BBC website. Among the videos are various
The UK journalism site, journalism.co.uk, has put together a list of 50 blogs on journalism. The list covers “blogging reporters who share their tips and experiences of mobile journalism, blogging journalism educators, and blogging photojournalist.” It is required reading for anyone interested in gaining insight and perpectives on the changing of journalism. I’m honoured that this blog, Reportr.net, is included on a list. Among the other blogs by journalism educators are Mindy
When data analysis and visualisation goes wrong: The problem with heatmaps, captured perfectly by xkcd. (Via Danny Sanchez)
As a journalism professor, I spend quite a bit of time talking to students about building up their professional presence online. It is important for students to have an online portfolio that showcases their work and will pop up when a prospective employer searches for them online. WordPress, the choice for many students, has just made it that much easier to create an elegant portfolio site. It has launched WordPress.com/portfolios with 30 dedicated portfolio
This graphic on the top trends on Twitter in 2012 has been in the bookmarks for a few days. Among the key points: Twitter grew to 500 million users – 140 million are active users 150 million Tweets were posted during the London Olympic games Barack Obama’s “4 more years” photo is now the most retweeted in history A quarter of all top trends were hash tags. The others were
This blog has been somewhat neglected over the past few months. My writing energies have gone into working on my new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters. Tell Everyone shows us how to thrive at a time when our vastly expanded ability to share has given individuals much greater power to influence what is published, changed the way people organize, challenged institutional
The fog of war is a phrase commonly used to capture the uncertainty and confusion that surrounds military conflicts. Facts, rumour and speculation swirl in the fog as journalists try to figure out what is going on. But on November 14, the Israeli Defense Forces blew away the fog of war when it live tweeted its assault on the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, in Gaza. Through its official Twitter account,
My keynote at the Neo-journalism conference in Brussel was called “The Ambient News Network: Twitter and the reconfiguration of journalism.” It looked at how Twitter has developed as a network for real-time news and information, influencing how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. Twitter facilitates the instant, online dissemination and reception of short fragments of information from sources outside
At the Neo-Journalism conference in Brussels, Anders Olof Larsson of Uppsala University presented his research into the journalists’ use of Twitter in a talk show context in Sweden. In a brief presentation, he explained how he examined the use of Twitter by a new current events talk show called Hubinette, shown on public service TV in Sweden. He collected 2,314 tweets with the hashtag #Hubinette. His analysis showed that messages spiking