The study (PDF) by researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech aimed to uncover what makes for a good message on Twitter.

The team found that the most valued tweets were informative, funny and encouraged conversation.  Perhaps surprising, they also found that self-promotional messages also elicited a positive response.

By comparison, the worst crime someone could commit on Twitter was being boring. This was by far the most cited reason for not valuing a tweet.

Among the other bad practices identified by the researchers were repeating old news, being cryptic or using too many hashtags.

In her piece for The Atlantic, Megan Garber had a go at putting together “the Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable”:

BREAKING: Last week I had a #sandwich that was SO HORRIBLE, it made me want to #scream. Seriously, why can’t they make better #sandwiches?

— Megan Garber (@megangarber) January 31, 2012

Instead, the study suggests the best tweets are informative, entertaining and encourage a response. Quite a lot to pack into 140 characters.

The question is timely, given the raft of new entrepreneurial programs at journalism schools.

There has always been an entrepreneurial streak in journalism, typified in the freelance journalist who makes a living by pitching and selling their work to a range of clients.

Journalists, by necessity, have to be entrepreneurial in finding and chasing stories.

The shift today is in the product and process of entrepreneurial journalism.

I recall when I was in the Middle East for the BBC in the early 1990s as a “sponsored stringer.” The BBC guaranteed a steady monthly income, but I was able to freelance for other outlets so long as they were not in direct competition with the BBC and I put the corporation first.

During my four years in the region, I ended up freelancing for a range of broadcast and print outlets. Remember, this was before the web.

One of the secretst to successful freelancing is having something of value to offer. I was fortunate to be based in Tunis, which housed the PLO as it recognised Israel and started peace talks.

At the same time, there was a military coup, presidential assassination and an Islamic insurgency in neighbouring Algeria. There was plenty of news of interest to UK newspapers and magazines.

But there was another reason for my success as a freelance: scarcity. In this specific instance, I was one of the few journalists who was a native English speaker with a broadcast journalism background. This opened up US and Canadian broadcasters such as NPR and the CBC.

When I was in the Middle East, I sold my product, the story, to a media institution, which then distributed it to the audience. The process involved going through an editor.

The product and process were controlled by the media institution. One time, a British Sunday newspaper commissioned a 1,200 word profile of an aspiring female Algerian politician. My editor loved the piece. But come Sunday, for reasons of space, the final product was a large photo with a lengthy caption.

The physical constraints of the product, print, and the editorial process in London, impacted on how the story was published. And at the time, the paper didn’t have a web presence.

What makes entrepreneurial journalism different today is the ability to reach the audience directly, retaining control of the product and of the process.

An entrepreneurial journalist does not need to go through an intermediary like a big media institution to provide a product or service.

While the barriers to entry may have fallen away, there remains the need to reach audiences and secure their attention. And there still needs to be something of value in the offering.

After 133 years, the company has filed for bankruptcy. Essentially, Kodak was caught out by a combination of factors.

The technologies that enable us to represent with world in still images changed radically with the development of digital cameras. The rise of digital was bad news for a company that made so much of its money from selling film.

But technology alone doesn’t explain Kodak’s demise.  Along with digital technologies came changing patterns of behaviour.  A device intended to help us communicate while on the go, the mobile phone, took over as our everyday camera.

There is a sense of irony at play. Here is a brand that became synonymous with the Kodak moment - “a rare, one-time moment captured with a photo, or should have been captured by a photo,” as the company defines it.

Now, those moments are captured by a device that most people carry with them all the time, the mobile phone. These connected devices also make it easy for us to immediately share those “Kodak moments” with friends and family,

Kodak failed to see the danger from digital imagery, the mobile phone, increased connectivity and the shifts in people’s habits.

But it is easy to see why the company didn’t act.  The first cameras on mobile phones were of such poor quality that there seems little reason for Kodak to see them as much of a threat. The phones were clunky, slow and not hooked up the net.

Such an attitude ignores the lessons of disruptive innovation.  Clayton M. Christensen argues that companies fail to see the value of disruptive innovation as:

They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

Based on this premise, Kodak would not have seen digital cameras and mobile phones as competition or potential threat to its core business. Its core market was film and film cameras for customers who wanted good quality photos.

However, the history of technology shows how often the initial versions of a product or service are often of low quality but over time shift from being low-end and overtake established products and services.

Executives are reluctant to invest in technologies which disrupt their existing markets and customers, and usually bring in much less revenue, at least initially.

The rise and fall of Kodak is an example of how companies struggle between sustaining innovations that prop up existing markets and customers and disruptive innovations which challenge long-standing ways of doing business and require a radical rethink in corporate strategy.

Pexton noted how “hardly a week goes by without the Web site or newspaper launching some feature, or a venture to attract more revenue, or a blog, or a social media innovation.”

He later added, “I’m wondering, and readers are too, whether there’s just a bit too much innovation, too fast.”

In response, the Post’s Managing Editor commented, “I actually wish it were true that we have too much innovation at the Post.”

The crux of the issue here is not whether the Post should innovate, or about the pace of innovation. It is about the approach to innovation.

Given the fast evolving media space, news outlets have to experiment and explore different tools and services to reach, connect and engage with audiences.

The technologies people use to get the news are changing, how they use these technologies is changing and the institutional structures to support the news are changing.

Pexton notes that some readers find the pace of innovation “exhausting”. The problem for the Post, and for newspapers in general, is that the product is changing.

As a mass media product, the newspaper was designed to bring together a bundle of news, information, commentary and entertainment with broad appeal to a wide audience.

Online, that product is unbundled – both content and audiences are fragmented.  This requires a different approach to innovation as editors and developers have to consider the wants and needs of diverse audiences, who have different needs at different times on different devices.

Some features will be aimed at a broad audience, but some innovations will be aimed at specific fragments of the audience. For example, the @mentionmachine cited by Pexton is likely to have greater appeal for political junkies than a general Post reader.  And that is just fine.

The challenge for news organisations is taking a strategic approach to innovation. There is a risk of becoming enamoured with the latest shiny bit of technology or adopting a platform such as blogging without thinking through the why and how.

For example, when a British newspaper introduced blogs in the mid-2010s, it asked for a show of hands to decide who in the newsroom wanted a blog. A few months later, the newspaper realised that just letting any journalist blog wasn’t a good idea.

A good starting point for developing a new feature or introducing a new tool is Forrester’s POST framework, which provides a framework to consider the audience, the objectives and strategy to decide on the appropriate use of technology.

Innovation should be driven by the journalism and serve the journalism.  We should not argue about too much or too little innovation, but instead discuss what makes for good or bad innovation.

But the top five are older posts from 2007, 2008 and 2009 that continue to resonate with readers.

Principles of journalism as a word cloud

What a word cloud says about this blog

How to find out anything about anyone online

The new roles for journalists in a multimedia world

Create a breaking news site in minutes with WordPress

Studies find journalists use Twitter for broadcast

How journalists are using Twitter

Social networking sites challenge journalism ethics

Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account?

Social media transforming how people get the news

Thanks to all who take the time to read the blog and I wish you all the best for 2012.

For my contribution, I suggested that the excitement and hype over social media may start dying down in the coming year, and this is something to be welcomed.

My argument draws from Roy Amara’s First Law of Technology:

With every change in technology that affects consumer behaviour, We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

In my post, I suggest:

Technologies reach their full potential when we forgot about the novelty. Instead they become boring and blend into the background. How often do we think about the technology behind the telephone, or the television set in our living room?

With any luck, this is what will happen with social media. Social media tools and services will be so ingrained within our everyday experiences that we forget that they are such recent developments.

Essentially, the technology will become invisible as we shape it to meet our political, social, and cultural needs.

Read the full post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Journalists are being asked when would be the best present from programmers and developers, and vice versa for developers.

It is a key question as it focuses on the intersection of emerging communication technologies and journalistic norms and practices.

The way journalists do what they do has always been affected by technology, from the telegram to the television.  This is a a two way process, as journalists shape the technology to gather, process and disseminate the news.

There is a process of negotiation as established ways of working come up against of emergent communication technologies, and journalists explore different ways of telling stories.

There is no denying that technology is increasingly playing a bigger role in what journalists do and how they do it.  This presents its challenges for journalism educators as students need to develop competencies in digital story-telling.

My approach is to try to make the technology as invisible as possible so that students can focus on the journalism.

This doesn’t mean that journalists shouldn’t have an understanding of the technology. More importantly, they should understand how its features can enhance their story-telling.

For example, the fixed-line telephone is an invisible technology.  Most people don’t think about how it works and the technical infrastructure necessary to connect people over distance. We just use it to communicate, do interviews, gossip.

In the digital sphere, the software program, Soundslides, is a good example of an invisible technology. It is remarkably easy to learn to make an audio slideshow using the software.

The mechanics of creating an audio slideshow are the easy part. The hard part is creating a compelling work of journalism that combines still images and sound, with a narrative that informs, enlightens and entertains.

The ideal technology manages to combine complexity with simplicity. It combines a powerful set of technical features with a user-friendly interface.

My Christmas wish is for programmers and developers to create tools and services that are invisible and enable journalists to focus on doing what they are best at, telling stories.

The event was held on November 7, 2011, at UBC Robson in Vancouver, sponsored by UBC Continuing Studies and the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

UBC j-student Alexis Beckett wrote up the session for J-Source.ca.

The study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news outlets in the US by the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism is in line with earlier academic studies.

The Pew study, in collaboration with the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, found that Twitter was mainly used to distribute news and boost traffic to a news outlet’s website.

Just over 90 per cent of the tweets analysed during a week provided a link to a news story on the organisation’s own website.

Twitter was used far less as a reporting tool or as a way to filter information. Just two per cent of tweets asked for information or for eye-witness accounts. A minute one per cent of tweets were retweets from outside a news outlet.

There was a slight variation when it came to the Twitter feeds of individual journalists, rather than institutional accounts.

A study of the accounts of 13 individual journalists found that three per cent of tweets asked for information and six per cent were retweets of material not sourced from their news outlet.

Pew concludes:

“These findings reveal limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.

This behavior resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service – of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else – carries more weight.”

Admittedly, Pew only studied a small sample. But other research has also highlighted how news outlets have tended to use social media to try to reach a broader audience, rather than engaging in an exchange with the audience.

A study by Marcus Messner, Maureen Linke, and Asriel Eford (PDF) found that the official Twitter accounts of the top newspaper and TV outlets in the US functioned largely as an automated RSS feed of the latest news stories.

Another study found that many newsrooms automatically generated a tweet  (PDF) with a link when a story was published on the website.

The use of Twitter and other social networking tools to go beyond broadcast is still the exception in newsrooms. Yet there is potential for so much more.

In a chapter on Twitter for the new second edition of The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, I explore how newsrooms are adopting and adapting to social media, concluding:

Twitter is affecting how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. New journalistic genres are emerging as news outlets incorporate social media services into daily routines. A process of negotiation is taking place, as traditional ways of working bump up against social, cultural and technological practices that disrupt established journalistic norms.

The Pew study analysed one week of tweets on the main Twitter feed of 13 different news organisations, amounting to more than 3,600 tweets.

Also up for the award are Erica Ehm, who set up the online magazine YummyMummyClub.ca, and YouTube personality Nadine Sykora.

The winners will be announced on December 6th at the finale of nextMEDIA Toront,.

The social media maven award recognizes “medialites that demonstrate innovation in creating and connecting online communities.”

It goes on to explain that  “the top Canadian social media mavens will have demonstrated leadership in the field, skillfully using social tools to bring in likes, check-ins, tweets, and more to deliver an unparalleled level of community engagement.”

The Digi Awards, formerly known as the Canadian New Media Awards, are described as“Canada’s premier showcase of the remarkable digital media companies, projects, products and pioneers that are placing Canada at the forefront of the international mediascape”.

The Canadian New Media Awards were founded in 1998 as Canada’s first nationwide platform recognizing the achievements of the fast-developing digital media landscape. They were rebranded last year as the Digi Awards.

The Digi Awards are organized by Achilles Media.

(Cross-post from alfredhermida.com)