Go to CJR to read their brief introduction to what is more of a newsroom discussion being conducted in the comments. There are some good points made.

This is my initial reaction…
Online news has been in various places (including the recent MEAA Future of Journalism report) described as more “event-driven”, with a lack of analysis that has formerly balanced out the print edition. I disagree that all news has been balanced in that way.

“a reporter showed up from an outlet thatshall remain nameless asking about an incident that happened 20 minutes earlier and four blocks away. …Local MSM: either figure itout or die trying.”

The nightly broadcast TV news has always been event-driven, as has the hourly bulletin radio news. Deeper analysis has been left to long-form programs with a focus on investigation. With that in mind I say that yes, like other forms of news, Twitter is event-driven. It conveys the immediacy of what is happening in the form of live text updates but it is just that, one form, one medium of choice to convey information. It is a form that is useful in lieu of other forms that may be preferable, like live vision (via TV or web streaming), or at length descriptions of events that have unfolded so far, and explanations of the circumstances surrounding an event.

In the comments at CJR, many people are worried about the face value with which Twitter updates might influence a reporter’s understanding of an event, while others rightly say it should be treated much the same as a member of the public calling something in - it needs to be able to be verified. Just like local contacts, however, a journalist can also be building up trusted social networking contacts, whose news tips or inside word a journalist might be willing to accept at face value.

Journalists have never underestimated the value of sources, and social networking sources should be treated the same. Digital media may have created a different world to one most journalists are familiar with, but some things remain the same - journalists have contacts they regularly communicate with, with whom they build relationships. There may be casual contacts who only occasionally pass on an interesting bit of news, and then others with more clout who are an immense help to getting an inside story. With a vast array of experts and contacts available online, particularly through social networks, Twitter is just one of those essential tools.

But I digress.

Journalists should use Twitter:

• to find contacts
• to maintain and communicate with contacts and their audience
• to monitor keywords relevant to their round (their beat, for my American friends)
• to monitor updates around a specific geographic location.

A journalist might want to monitor Twitter updates by location to be aware of anything significant mentioned in their local area (like an emergency), or because a significant event will be taking place in a specific location, like the Republican National Convention.

I mention that because one of the best things I read recently about the possible use of Twitter as an “event-driven” source was its use at the RNC, and how mainstream media was left far behind.

In a Poynter post a few months ago, Twitter: Surprise Star of RNC Coverage, two quotes stood out.

Albert Maruggi observed: “[Twitter is] the police scanner of 21st century newsroom. This from a guy that used to rewrite AP copy for 11pm newscast.”

Currently assigned to the enviable police desk reporting round, I enjoyed this analogy. Like a scanner, Twitter is a non-stop flow of information; if your ear isn’t attuned, or you’re not listening to the right frequency, you could easily miss a big story in all the static.

The second quote in the Poynter piece on Twitter was from “One local resident, Minneapolis Michael,” who said on Tumblr, in a post titled, How Twitter changed my RNC experience:

“…Every local media outlet needs to do what the Pioneer Press is doing. By using their Twitter account as a place to post links to stories and place them in context, it gives me a credible local source AND they are looked upon favorably by the Twitterverse.
[…snip…]
I will leave you with one anecdotal piece of evidence: As I was at a street corner downtown Saint Paul checking my feed to see where the next hotspot was, a reporter showed up from an outlet thatshall remain nameless asking about an incident that happened 20 minutes earlier and four blocks away. …Local MSM: either figure itout or die trying.”

In future posts I plan to expand on some of the ways I use social networking - particularly Twitter - as a journalist, and some of the tools that help in that use.

What I worry about is when an over-enthusiastic marketer, or just someone out to wreak havoc, executes a coordinated “Twitter attack” designed to play the mainstream media for a fool. How long till we see the first fake emergency or breaking news scam go worldwide in a matter of minutes through Twitter?

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She’s been in the newspaper industry so long, I think Helen would bleed ink, and will quietly mourn the state of the newspaper industry.

I realized really how dedicated I was to newspapers, which are dying.

via huffington post via crikey

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I pore over content and my feed reader, trying to perfect comment, and content, so that it is comprehensive, definitive, and unable to be questioned. I feel the need to cover the issue from all angles, as if I must attempt to encompass the breadth and wealth of thought out there. And yet I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of more, better, reasoned, experienced content creators out there, and so hesitate to speak.

The speed of change is so quick that, even if I could reach that point of perfection, it would be out of date within days, hours, or even minutes. So, inspired by this post by Bryan Murley from Innovation in College Media, I commit to not being overwhelmed.
In that post, Bryan harks back to something he wrote in 2006.

We can’t allow ourselves to get so overwhelmed with the pace of change that we become immobilized by the sheer volume of change that is taking place.

And with that, I welcome you back to the earley edition.

It is not that comment will be spurious or ill-formed, but I will shoot my thoughts and ideas on digital innovation from the hip with confidence, within reason and, hopefully, with an accuracy that will make my contribution to the crowd worthwhile.

Read on, friends.

Bryan’s Innovation in College Media post featured in October’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Will Sullivan at Journerdism.

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UPDATE: I have removed the uTag script that automatically changed my URLs. And for brevity, the technical issues with uTag that I address in this post are:

1. If the ad banner is left open after visiting a site, the user continues surfing to other websites, and later closes the ad banner, the browser will automatically refresh to the page first visited by following the uTag link.
2. In the same vein, once the ad banner is closed, using the Back button will simply reload the banner frame, rather than going back to the linking site.
3. A uTag Death Loop exists, whereby a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked on top of each other. Read below for how this happens.

Put simply, uTag is a monetisation strategy for linking. Several sites already provide link shortening services which have become popular chiefly amongst Twitter users, who need a short link because their posts have a 140 character limit. Examples are bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com, to name just a few. The difference with uT.ag is that it aims to pay people for providing those outbound links.

The utag link will provide an ad banner on the target page and, at the end of a payment period, a share of revenue is deposited into a pre-nominated paypal account. The ad banner sits below the normal page content and can be closed if a user considers it too intrusive, but will the banner become more of an annoyance for people than the revenue is worth? Also, if users hate the banner so much they stop trusting or using your links, then you have a serious problem.

So it’s great in theory - a revolution of the link economy. Whereas people linking out to quality content were in the past building a reputation as a trusted resource, the idea is that now you can still do that, but at the same time actually be paid! But there are still some bugs to be worked out that may turn people off, and away from your content.

The uTag blog has listed a few external reviews of their service, while
Pantsland’s Brad Kellet has aggregated a few responses from his Twitter crowd after he asked for their thoughts on the banner ads.

I’ve implemented the code on my site and, as you’ll see, it rewires every outbound link to a uTag link (UPDATE: no longer). I see three main issues with the service. As Hugo Sharp, one of the uTag developers, responded to these bug questions on Twitter (@hugosharp), I present the exchange here.

The uTag death loop I referred to is a possible scenario in which a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked up on each other.

Read the following Tweets in reverse order to see how this outcome, a double ad banner, happened.

So a brief experiment confirmed the existence of a uTag Death Loop, or as @hugosharp described it, a potential black hole.

As my last (top) update mentioned, the experiment was unsuccessful in that I couldn’t loop back to my site from Twitter, because Twitter outbound links open in a new tab or window. However if I linked to a uTag enabled site, which in turn linked back to my uTag enabled site, a loop of following those two links could theoretically result in a never ending stack of uTag ad banners.

If a high traffic site was using uTag links they might expect to lose a proportion of visitors who get sick of the intrusiveness, and apparent unpredictability, of the ads. As I mentioned at the beginning, some visitors may stop trusting your links, or using them at all, because of the banner they know they’ll get.

While you shouldn’t disregard the unhappiness of a proportion of visitors, some people may offset that with the possibility of revenue that the uTag link provides.

Mine is not a high traffic site, so with little to no return on the uTag banner ad revenue the uTag links may have to go.

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You can also read through the live Future of Journalism tweets from various people on the day.

What I’m providing here is just a quick video of a question I asked of news.com.au editor David Higgins about the use of social networking tools for newsgathering.

About the conference itself, there wasn’t really a great deal suggested in the way of what the future might actually hold for ‘journalism’. Although for newspapers, a comment by David Higgins is worth noting. He said that more morning commuters were moving to mobile phones for their news instead of newspapers, and suggested the future of the weekday paper in physical form could be in doubt.

“Monday to Friday, I don’t think the outlook’s very good,” he said.

In the process of asking a question from the floor earlier David said that, since they started promoting news.com.au as an iPhone optimised site, traffic was up by more than 50,000 hits per month.

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On Monday I hit 700 Twitter updates since signing up to Twitter just over 12 months ago. Since Monday I have posted another 125+ updates, reaching nearly 300 updates in the first 11 days of September. Excessive?

From my Twitter graph it’s obvious I reached the Twitter tipping point towards the end of August, when I first actually engaged with Twitter - entering the conversation, and the community. Since then it has taken off. At first I followed the people I thought most influential in new media, but my Twitter use increased as I discovered more people in the ICT field in general, particularly in Australia and Brisbane. Twitter uptake in the Brisbane region has grown quite a bit recently - 1400+ who have entered Brisbane as their location - although actual Twitter use is, for the most part, infrequent. By grown, I have only my memory to compare that number against the last time I searched ‘Brisbane’ in Twitter.

So while blog posts and updates have been slow here on the webpage, I have not disappeared off the face of the earth, perhaps just into the murk of the Twitterverse. It’s not a bad place to be though - very good for keeping up, in real time, with the happenings of your industry (if you follow the updates of people and topics you are interested in).

I don’t use Twitter to communicate with family and friends, because most of them have never heard of it and, even of those that have, none of them use it.

As a journalist, Twitter has helped me not just in finding a few stories from people I follow, but has also started to help me find stories on certain topics using searches. I’ll go into that a little more in a later post.

In the meantime, I do have a few other blog posts in the works, and I hope they’ll spruce up this drab page in the very near future.

If you’re from Brisbane and use Twitter, @btub will let you know when there are Brisbane Twitter user meetups. As of this writing I haven’t been to the one that happened since I became active on Twitter, but there is one happening this weekend.

On Twitter I am @earleyedition, and you can see some of my recent Twitter posts in the right sidebar.

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To watch the video, go to acidlabs, where you can also see a video of Jay Rosen defining citizen journalism. I would embed, but for some reason embedded video has been breaking my page recently.

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SABEW
45th Annual Conference
April 27-29, Sheraton Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD

USING SOCIAL NETWORKING IN BUSINESS REPORTING

Jay Rosen, New York University and author of PressThink blog

It’s not about the technology … The whole art of doing any kind of social network reporting is in organizing people

This is one of the most important things about the internet. This is one of the things that’s changing the world most profoundly today - is the falling costs for people with the same interests, or people of like mind, to find each other, share information, pool their knowledge, collaborate, and publish.
I’m going to say it again. The falling cost for like minded people to find each other, share information, collaborate and publish back to the rest of the world, is a major factor changing government, politics, media, social life - at the same time.

USING SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS TO IMPROVE THE REPORTING OF A BEAT REPORTER

We’re trying to figure out how we can use Gillmore’s insights, and the tools that we have now - like blogging, social networking tools - to actually improve the reporting that a beat reporter does on their

the potential is there to mobilize thousands of people on a single story

beat, and we’re several months into that project, and I can tell you some of what we’ve learned from it.

LESSON ONE: SLOW & DIFFICULT WORK, NO BREAKTHROUGHS TO REPORT
Our first lesson is that this is slow and difficult work, and that we don’t have any breakthroughs so far. That it’s a lot easier to understand the concept ‘My readers know more than I do’, than it is to work out a regimen in which that knowledge can actually flow in and start influencing the articles, and scoops, and series and so forth. So it’s slow and difficult work. We don’t have breakthroughs to report yet.

LESSON TWO: THERE IS NO FORMULA
Secondly there is, and I know this is frustrating, no formula for doing it yet. Because we can’t easily point to somebody who uses social network reporting to complete their beat every day.

LESSON THREE: ECONOMIC REALITY LIMITS TIME TO DEVOTE TO SOMETHING NEW
Third, one of the things we’ve learned is, in the current economic climate in most newsrooms, especially in newspapers, reporters are under a great deal of pressure. They not only have to produce on deadline, they have to produce more than they used to. And, despite their enthusiasm for this project when they signed up for it in November, the economic realities of the newsroom are such that many of them have almost no time to devote to something new.
And this is very much getting in the way because the immediate pay-offs in terms of scoops, meeting your production quotas or breaking big stories so that you can explain to your bosses why you’re putting time into your network are not really there, so this has become very frustrating for some of our people and it’s very much a sign of the times and a sign of the economic climate out there.

LESSON FOUR: IT’S NOT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY
My fourth lesson is by far the most important lesson that I’ve learned in this work.
It’s not about the technology. It’s not about what tools you use. It’s not about which blogging software you adopt. It’s not at all about whether you should use Facebook or Twitter or some of the other technologies that are out there. The whole art of doing any kind of social network reporting is in organizing people, and how people are engaged to help journalists, rather than the tools and technologies we have for reaching those people. And it’s hard to overestimate how important this is and how easy it is to forget it.

LESSON FIVE: THE TEN PER CENT RULE
The fifth important lesson is sometimes called, among those who study user-generated content, the ten per cent rule. The ten per cent rule is that if 100 people sign up for your network, if 100 people sign up for your citizen journalism project, about 10 of them will actually contribute anything in terms of content. Whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s comments in a thread, whether it’s tips sent in by email, about ten per cent will actively contribute. And one of those ten will become an extremely committed contributor, what is sometimes called super-contributors in online organizing.

THE CHALLENGE: GIVING YOUR AUDIENCE SOMETHING TO DO
And so the real challenge is not getting people to sign up or participate, it’s figuring out how to give them stuff they can do that actually makes its way into your report, so they can see the results of what they do. And if you can do that, people will participate.

THE POTENTIAL: MOBILIZING THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ON A SINGLE STORY
And so if you want to know why am I here talking to you about this, it’s because the potential is there to mobilize thousands of people on a single story.

WWW.TALKINGPOINTSMEMO.COM - a model internet news site
The model of an internet news organization is this one, because it is completely involved in filtering, processing, editing this huge inflow from readers, packaging it as news stories and blog posts, sending it back out which in turn stimulates more inflow from the readers.

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Not much logic behind the recommended kayak route - Seattle to Sydney. Wouldn’t something like San Diego to Brisbane (since I’m going to Brisbane) make more sense? But we’re kayaking some 12,700km (7,923m), there is no sense.

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Senior Video Journalist

Due to the growth of the business we are currently looking for a talented and passionate Senior Video Journalist to produce journalistic video and multimedia content…

Digital Media Designer-Mobile (Part time)

Due to the growth of the business we are currently looking for a talented and passionate Designer who will be responsible for the design of mobile sites and mobile advertising campaigns as well as online and print creative.

It’s good to see a growing awareness of the importance of user friendly mobile content.

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