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.

Video after the jump…

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.

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.

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.

At the time I thought it was because of the Pope’s visit to Australia, but now it’s down again. It would be interesting to know why they’re down, or what’s causing the down time.

Again, the message on the screengrab is the same:

We’re sorry…

We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.

I was trying to find something about a contact who was on Australian Story earlier this year, when I was faced with this ABC Online: Outage page. I tried navigating to a few other pages, but the entire abc.net.au domain was off the radar.

The following screengrab was taken Monday, July 14, 1.50am, and says:

We’re sorry…

We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.

I did wonder if the blue was a nice homage to Microsoft’s universally recognised blue screen of death. The only reason I can think of for the site being down at that time is perhaps an influx of Catholics looking for news about the Pope’s arrival in Australia. Our 1-2am would usually be prime internet traffic time for both the west and east coast of the US (8-9am and 11am-12), as well as Europe (5-6pm).

Personally, I like the idea of geo-tagging content so that readers can get a map view of their news across the city, state or country, and then be able to pick out what news to follow in feeds based on particular regions.

I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo!Pipes in trying to do that with news content that hasn’t specifically been prepared to be ‘locative’. It’s certainly time-intensive experimentation while I teach myself, and is yet to yield the results I’d like.

The list linked to by Paul Lamb is by LoJo connnect, who are also conducting a survey of news outlets and their offerings/experiments in locative media.

Via:
Paul Lamb at MediaShift Idea Lab

Now you don’t have to. With the promotion of university lecture podcasts, you can get all your learning done in your own time, and for free. Staring out the bus or train window as the city passes you by on the way to work? Why not listen to some old Harvard grads from the class of 1955 talk about the changes in journalism in the last 50 years? 50 Years in Media: Changes in Journalism

Want something a bit more contemporary? Try Utah State’s Blogs, Wikis, New Media for Learning or Flash courses.

If you’re a visual learner and have a video iPod or other portable video player, try MIT’s Media, Education, and the Marketplace video lectures.

More podcasted courses available in the OEDB podcast directory, and also in iTunesU, university podcasts available directly from iTunes.

via New Media Bytes

Also from New Media Bytes: Ultimate guide to Twitter tools and resources for journalists

The example suggesting there was little money in online video mentioned Perez Hilton from TMZ, who claims to have only made $5,000 from 25 million video views on YouTube. Safran says Perez could realistically be making $500,000 a month.

Of course Perez isn’t making money off video. He’s hosting it on YouTube. That’s a free service. He doesn’t have control over pre-roll tied with banner ads or any of the tracking that’s required to make advertisers want your product. He’s paying nothing for video hosting, so naturally he’s getting next to nothing in return.

Even at a modest $20 CPM (and this should be $30 – $40), he could be bringing in $500,000 a month in preroll ads. He’s missing out on $6 million in inventory.

Safran is adamant that just because you can’t make much money off YouTube doesn’t mean there is no money to be had in online video.

via Lost Remote TV Blog

So what is it about owning your brand that brings in the advertisers? Safran points out that Perez may not be making as much money as he could because of ownership rights to those videos. When online newspapers do video, the ‘wire’ videos from Reuters and Sky News (in Australia) are generic news items. Often they’re not local, or locally owned.

If you don’t get a lot of views, perhaps its because people are aware they could get that news and video at any other site, since you’ll often see the same ‘wire’ video across competing sites, as you would agency stories across print.

So what will a viewing public repeatedly come back looking for? Trusted local content delivery. By trusted, I mean people are aware that the video they want to see can be found with your media organisation so they will eventually, unprompted, return repeatedly to see what’s new.

In the case of TMZ, this is guaranteed celebrity video, pictures and humiliation that will be regularly updated, and that either can’t be seen anywhere else, or is just easier to find on TMZ because you know it will be there. You can ‘trust’ there will be something there to see.

In the case of local news sites, the only video of interest to your loyal readers or viewers that you can guarantee to always have is – local video. And if you do it well, they keep coming back, just to see if you’ve got the video they trust you’ll have. As local content, you absolutely won’t get the 25 million video views that celebrity clips will get on YouTube, but if you’re getting a large chunk of the local population, that translates into excellent advertising dollars locally.

So I remain a believer in the potential of locally produced online news video, and the market for it. Corey Bergman makes a good point in the post in question, consumers are going to begin demanding more accessible content.

Just vaguely thinking about doing online and mobile content delivery won’t cut it. Our news sites need to be aggressive in developing their own multi-platform content-delivery solutions so that, again, by making themselves the reliable point of content consumption they capture the new market, rather than try to catch up with it.

She describes Generation C as the 12-24 age range, who think email is for their parents – it’s outdated. They almost exclusively communicate via social networking.

So what are online news sites doing to push every possible integration with social networking sites to increase coverage in this demographic – other than selling out news coverage for entertainment?

The New York Times has started text message news alerts via keywords

I’m not sure how the text message news alerts are different than the text/im/web updates that are already available through their various New York Times Twitter updates. I imagine having the in-house control of text message distribution of news opens more possibilities for monetisation of that media further down the track, rather than waiting for Twitter to start advertising.

The New York Times also has a Facebook page (approaching 10,000 ‘fans’) and Rob Larson, vice president of product development and management at NYTimes.com said, “We intend to use every available platform to disseminate The Times’s quality news and information.”
via The Editors Weblog

The New York Times is by no means the only media organisation experimenting with digital access and social networking for news. They’re just recognised as one of the leading ones.

In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I’m a journalist at The Courier Mail newspaper, where I worked as an online multimedia producer until December last year before moving into editorial.

I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.

Our current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.

During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.

Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds – one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.

Fairfax masthead sites

• Sydney Morning Herald – none, although there is a user account for an SMH columnist
  https://twitter.com/samanthabrett – last and only update May 2007
• The Age – http://twitter.com/theage – last update May 2007
• Brisbane Times – none

ABC News

• http://twitter.com/abcnewsbrisbane – regularly updated through day
• http://twitter.com/abcnews – regularly updated through day
• http://twitter.com/abcrn – ABC Radio National – deleted since December
• http://twitter.com/abctv – an example of a squatter. Two updates, one of which is “can’t believe this one wasn’t taken”.

News Limited masthead sites

• The Australian – https://twitter.com/theaustralian – never updated
• The Daily Telegraph – https://twitter.com/dailytelegraph – never updated
• The Herald Sun – http://twitter.com/heraldsun – never updated
• AdelaideNow – https://twitter.com/adelaidenow – never updated
• PerthNow – https://twitter.com/perthnow – never updated
• The Mercury – https://twitter.com/themercury – never updated
• NT News – none
• The Courier Mail – 20 Twitter accounts (as at January 31, 2008) updated whenever new content available on site

I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ‘squatting’ on the Twitter user names.

A search for “news” in Twitter, yields a lot of results. Here are just a few (listed as their Twitter user name) that may be of interest – financialtimes, npr news, cbcnews, wired, ITN_NEWS, BBC, SkyNewsBusiness, indianews, SkyNews, and CNETNews.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.

The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.

At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.

The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it.
04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter?
04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen
06:39 PM August 02, 2007

Liberal (both spoofs)
http://twitter.com/johnhoward
http://twitter.com/johnhowardfacts
Labor: none
Democrats: none
Nationals: none

In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website.
https://twitter.com/greensblog

I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.