Former home of Headlines and Deadlines

Goodbye Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:14:00 +0000

Headlines and Deadlines is on the move. I've had a long and committed relationship with Blogger but we're calling it a day and my cardboard boxes have been unpacked at Casa Wordpress.

I exported my content, uploaded it to Wordpress.com, updated my domain so it points there instead, and this is the last thing I'll be posting here. So if you want to keep following my links and posts, you need to go here from now on. If you're subscribed to this blog in a Reader, I have tried to port the rss (God knows, I have tried). However, I am not sure it's worked - and since Feedburner has trembled on the cusp of closure since Google bought it, allegedly, it may be a moot point anyway.
Come and say hello - I've tidied up specially, just in case someone visits...

Social media has wrecked my blog*

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 30 May 2014 12:59:00 +0000

I am a lazy blogger but it's not my fault. Twitter and Diigo are to blame for my indolence, and Blogger has a part to play in it too.

You see, it's so easy to just tweet a link, perhaps with a (very) short opinion, or save it to Diigo and get that site to sweep my curated links and comments onto this blog once a week, that I have gotten out of the habit of writing longer thoughts here.
Classic example:

This is in the Social Journalism group on Facebook - it's not a secret group although you need to request to join, so I don't thing screengrabbing the image is bad form.
I read Ian's post and thought he made a very relevant point re verification, cynicism and the requirement to check something out because it seems too incredible to be true, but I couldn't link to it because FACEBOOK.
That meant I couldn't tweet or share it either,
So I was about to give up when I suddenly thought "I could put it on my blog" - and it was a true OMG moment; I really had forgotten that my blog was there for such things.

In addition to the other social channels taking over, I actually don't like Blogger much as a platform, but I continually fail to find the time or energy to relocate to another one. See? Again, a lazy blogger. Both these things really need to change.

So how to get out of the habit of tweeting and bookmarking, instead of blogging? Does it even matter, in the scheme of things?
I started the blog six years ago to test social tools and ways of storytelling, and it gradually morphed into a 'thoughts about changing journalism' (I meant that in both senses btw) and now it's a linkroll of things I find interesting to read, because I tend to forget about it for other things.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this - Nieman Labs says the blog is dead and cites 2014 as the year of its expiration. The Atlantic goes further, and says that the Stream of online organised information is now The Thing - fresh and now are what matters.
That must mean the River of News is at an end, not so much dried up as diverted into a backwater. (Dave Winer's reference to RSS, which I see crops up in the Altantic's comments, incidentally).

But, although I'm a lazy blogger I enjoy being a blogger, and while I enjoy and celebrate the nowness of the Stream, the River is also important to me.

I think there is room for both; in the same way we're grappling with how to present longform journalism to readers in a way that is compelling and engaging (which, in English, means they stick with the story rather than going off to look at a list of 19 Things You Did When You Were a Teen That Will Make Your Teen Cringe!).
At the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo, we've worked with Shorthand this month to create two immersive stories around football - here and here - which taught me a lot about the ways we should structure longform. More importantly, both articles were sharp reminders of the idea that if it doesn't work on mobile, don't bother doing it - swathes of work was cut from the MCFC story because they simply didn't make for a good mobile experience.

So, two things. I need to be less lazy about my blogging and I need to work on my relationship with Blogger, or find a new partner. New month, new attitude... new home?

* The title of this post is of course provocative and wrong - after all, blogging is social media as far as I'm concerned - but it was the best way to describe this post in a pithy headline.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 18 May 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Verifying Social Media Content: The Best Links, Case Studies and Discussion | Groundswell

tags: how-to verification
BBC 'NewsLabs team' to drive innovation | Media news

tags: innovation BBC
Jill Abramson’s Ouster: Why Aren't Standards This High For Male Leaders? - Sarah Green - Harvard Business Review

tags: HBR NYT
Sarah Marshall — How to export a Twitter list to an Excel spreadsheet

TwExList allows you to export a Twitter list into an Excel spreadsheet, and what is particularly useful is that it gives you a summary of data.

tags: twitter how-to
Video Streaming apps and sites | shambles.net

A very useful round-up of the different options for live image coverage

tags: streaming video

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 11 May 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Your Brain on Story: Why Narratives Win Our Hearts and Minds - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

"Neuroscientists published research showing the changes in neural patterns of volunteers after reading a narrative story based on real events. The researchers assigned subjects to read Robert Harris’ 2003 novel Pompeii, a piece of historical fiction based on real events. It is a genre cousin to narrative non-fiction and narrative journalism that employs the storytelling techniques of fiction to tell true stories. The results showed heightened connectivity in a specific part of the brain. The left temporal cortex lit up, and not just for the period immediately following the reading assignments. The neural changes persisted for several days. This is why we sometimes say that a story was so powerful we just can’t seem to shake it."

tags: storytelling narrative
How to get the best out of photo apps on your smartphone – video | Technology | theguardian.com

Really useful mix of iOS and Android (ok, mainly iOS) apps, both paid for and free, to get the most out of smartphone photography.

tags: photo apps smartphone video

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 04 May 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Reader Flow and theArticle Gateway

I believe we spend far to much time faffing about making home pages look 'right' when much of our traffic comes to stories direct rather than from our shop window, so to speak. Therefore, of course I agree with this post (which also links to another worthwhile read on the subject at The Verge...TL:DR? Takeaway point is this - "the article page is the new homepage."

tags: audience
A Eulogy for Twitter - Atlantic Mobile

"Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake

tags: twitter
Instagram’s Sweet Spot: Better for Brands than Facebook and Twitter? | Simply Measured

"brands on Instagram are getting exponentially more engagement as a percentage of followers/fans than content on Twitter or Facebook."

tags: instagram engagement audience

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 12:33:00 +0000

∞ — Wearables versus there-ables. What if we’ve got...

"What if we’ve got it all wrong?What if we’re not actually supposed to wear all sorts of technology on our bodies and on our clothes? What if we didn’t have to / weren’t meant to carry our technology with us as we moved around town?What if the technology was actually already in the room when we got there? Maybe that’s the kind of Internet-of-things that will be more sustainable and will win long-term."

tags: technology wearables
Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube - Open Culture

Video, YouTube, Commons
Digital journalism: we're still waiting for the third model of news publishing | Emily Bell | Economy | The Guardian

"We are still waiting, though, for a third model of news publishing to emerge. A news organisation that holds institutional strengths, beliefs and resources at its core but allows the rise of the independently oriented journalist some freedom to succeed or fail is still at the drawing board stage.

tags: future of news
How to Make Cinemagraphs | Photojojo

A little bit Daily Prophet... how to make a photo move. It's a bit time-consuming and involves photoshop but it's really got me thinking about how to use it in storytelling.

tags: cinemagraph photoshop tutorial how-to gif

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:32:00 +0000

(Re)defining multimedia journalism — Changing Journalism — Medium
- - This is the key for me. Immersive means I am lost in what I am reading/watching/hearing/experiencing.
- Immersive experiences rule. Take me somewhere I have never been. Show me something I have never seen.
New digital tools every journalist should try - Knight Foundation

I haven't used any of these but I'll give them a go "in digital years a lifetime for a product seems like about 21 months. “Moore’s Law” predicted chip-processing power would double about every 18 months. It more or less has for decades, and each wave of chips remakes the digital world. In digital time, that means a tool born in 2012 was born a lifetime ago. There’s nothing wrong with the classic tools; they just aren’t the latest ones. "

tags: tools
The newsonomics of Digital First Media’s Thunderdome implosion (and coming sale) » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to."

tags: thunderdome DFM newsonomics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Talking about Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism at the Society of Editors regional conference

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:05:00 +0000

I was asked to speak at the Society of Editors regional conference 2014 a while ago, and so on Monday I found myself talking to a room of people about coding, social media, and data journalism, among other things.

It was a little distracting when the Duke of York loomed in the doorway towards the end of my talk - he was speaking about journalism and apprenticeships - but on the whole I got through without being boo-ed or having pastries thrown at me.

There were enough discussion points from the day to make several blog posts (particularly around this panel discussion), and I intend to come back to those when I have more time, but in the meantime I thought I'd pop the draft of what I talked about (sans slides, which were purely illustrative) on the blog.

Titled Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism, the talk was an expanded version of what I covered in my 5 minute slot at News:Rewired last February. So if this is TL:DR you should have a look at this instead.

Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism

When I was 18, the editor of the Tenby Observer suffered an unaccountable rush of blood to the head, and agreed I could to spend a year in his newsroom, working as a junior reporter.

He even paid me £30 a week and in return I supplied him with a headaches, calamities, the occasional story and, often, a weekly ‘correction’ roundup, amending whatever I’d written the previous week.

To celebrate my admission into the world of journalism, a friend presented me with a copy of the 1949 classic Journalism For Women, which imparts the following advice to an editor: “Maids respect a mistress who can do any of the tasks she expects of them”.

I’m going to use the term ‘journalist’ but most of what I say applies to everyone in a newsroom, including editors.

So, as I’ve been asked to talk about the emerging skills and opportunities in newsrooms, I think we should move forward with that phrase ringing in our ears.

Skill #1: Creative Journalism

Companies must invest time and money in training journalists for their digital roles, but I’d expect journalists to want to explore and master things themselves too.

There are few social storytelling tools out there that can’t be learned within a few minutes - from Awesome Screenshot to Zee maps - they aren’t complicated, and they make digital storytelling, sharing information and collaboration much easier and more effective.

In March, Trinity Mirror Regionals ran a two-day play and learn event for journalists at UCLan where a group of reporters, photographers, senior newsrooms executives, specialist reporters and newsdesk types got together to try new things.

Among the innovations that emerged were timelines, gifs, video soundbites for Explainer Journalism, interactive maps and, through the collaborative efforts of a deputy news editor and a mobile journalist from different titles, the Moyes Random Excuse Generator.

They used a site called Codepen and a spreadsheet to create a native design app for the MEN that summed up the spectacular popularity fail of the Man Utd manager.

Fun; shareable; drove traffic to other parts of the site including the home page.

Skill #2: Social Journalism

Journalists should not only use social media but but absolutely familiar and comfortable with the nuances and tones of different sites and tools.

What works on Facebook doesn’t mean engagement on Twitter. When and why Instagram instead of Flickr? Live tweet, or live stream? It’s an essential skill for a reporter to have, and for their managers to understand too.

Shareable content is the holy grail; if you don’t know your audience - what tone to strike with them, and where, when or how they use social media so you can share your own and your title’s content with them well - you are missing an essential skill of modern journalism.

I’d expect any journalist applying for a newsroom job these days should have active Twitter and LinkedIn profiles listed on their CVs, plus links to their multimedia work and, preferably, their updated and engaging blog. These are the social journalism skills they need to do the job effectively and are as important as a decent cuttings portfolio - and for some roles, of considerably more interest.

We need bright, engaging, questioning communicators in our newsrooms, who can create networks of geographic and niche communities; it’s no longer enough to competently turn a ring-in from the newsdesk into a splash.

Skill #3 Networked Journalism

This doesn’t mean you have a phone on you - it means your smartphone is an extension of your writing hand.

It needs to be packed with apps - such as Audioboo, Vine, Dropbox, Maps, Twitter, Snapseed - and your go-to tool for covering a story, whether it’s the scene of an accident, or a council press bench.

Journalists now can capture news more effectively on a phone that we ever could with a notebook and some overwrought adjectives; phones let us create multimedia, edit it and share it without going near a desk - we can crowdsource, create, package and market our work, and do it in real time, allowing more transparency and accessibility to what we do than ever.

At a time when regional journalists are still suffering a backlash as a result of some murky national practises, mobile and social journalism can help us a chance to re-establish an eroded trust, through open reporting, accessibility and transparency of information and purpose.

A mobile journalist is not someone with a mass of kit, it’s someone who sees a story and transmits it, in real time, via whatever device and medium best suits the purpose.

This is one of the most dramatic innovations in our trade of recent years, and the most exciting - the ability to self-publish reports, whether 140 characters or a live streamed video, means removing a filter and a time-lag between newsroom and audience.

Skill #4 Data journalism

I guess the old idea of ‘we’re journalists - we don’t do Maths’ was kicked into the long grass some time ago, and in Trinity Mirror the Data Unit, where journalists and coders work together to interrogate raw data and produce information, content packages and interactives of relevance and importance to all titles, is an absolute gift.

Certainly, when I was a daily title editor they kept my newsdesk supplied with a constant source of potential splashes and the daily Data Bulletin was a welcome email.

But data journalism isn’t the preserve of the expert - taking raw information, interrogating it and creating compelling, valuable content is now a pretty basic requirement. Using free tools like Datawrapr and Tableau lets us not only present a story in an interactive way but get to the heart of what the story really is.

Making data shareable adds another layer of engagement and an opportunity for further stories and content. Remember when the MPs expenses logs were made available? What newsroom didn’t gleefully fall on them?

Data journalism is more than spreadsheets though; today’s journalistic toolbox needs to contain basic coding skills too.

Coding isn’t a dark art and html isn’t someone else’s job - if you make a Twitter widget or to show conversation around an article, for example, or an embeddable map to show the location of a story, being able to hack the rudimentary backend code by adapting it for your site and purpose is important - and empowering. Expecting someone else to sort out your multimedia or html equivalent of the newsdesk rewriting your intro - ie. not something any journalist wants to happen.

Skill #5 Measurable journalism

Know what works. Analytics have completely changed what we know; tools such as Chartbeat and Omniture tell us what our audience is reading, sharing, responding to - and sites such as Hitwise show us where they really are going to find their news.

Twitter analytics, Facebook Insights, the plethora of Twitter tools, retweets and favourites, indicate our social reach and engagement.

Analytics used to be the preserve of the marketing department - the digital journalist skillset should combine knowledge and application of analytics to get their stories in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Digital audience footprints are easy to follow and they let us build up a detailed picture of our audience, from when they are online, and with what device, to what they share or what they save to read when they have more time.

Knowing what your audience wants doesn’t mean we become Upworthy, or the preserve of listicles - it means we reach more people and make ourselves more relevant to their lives.

It means we make better products - what we create in digital can inform our print content and make it richer in tone, voice and authenticity.

It also means we make money; as more people come to our site, stay on it and share our content we understand more about them and our commercial colleagues can target them more effectively.

Liverpool Echo editor Ali Machray says his audience is now as large as it was during the glory print days of 1985. I think that’s something to be very proud of.

Innovation and creativity thrive in a digital newsroom where the priorities are audience, then content and, finally, platform, not vice versa.

The new digital innovation team being built by Trinity Mirror is about using the skills and the mindset I’ve mentioned here, bringing a passion for journalism together with the expertise and interests of our audience and communities.

When I was a reporter I would file my copy and wait to see it in print. Sometimes I’d wait days, if it was a holdable splash.

Now reporters own a story; words, video, audio - whatever elements make it sing - publish it, market it and assess how it performed. You get instant feedback (not always a pleasant experience) from your readers and you see a story change and gain new legs as more diverse voices are added to the discussion.

It’s making us more relevant. While audience attention span may seem to be dwindling and the value of social sharing is questioned every time Facebook tweaks its algorithm, we know - thanks to some research on the subject - that the links that are most likely to be saved, shared and distributed, are actual news.

Not lolcats, not lists, but facts. This is the best time to be a journalist.

Thanks for your time.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Aron Pilhofer on data journalism, culture and going digital | Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Interestingness " Right now, many newsrooms are stupid about the way they publish. They’re tied to a legacy model, which means that some of the most impactful journalism will be published online on Saturday afternoon, to go into print on Sunday. You could not pick a time when your audience is less engaged. It will sit on the homepage, and then sit overnight, and then on Sunday a home page editor will decide it’s been there too long or decide to freshen the page, and move it lower. I feel strongly, and now there is a growing consensus, that we should make decisions like that based upon data. Who will the audience be for a particular piece of content? Who are they? What do they read? That will lead to a very different approach to being a publishing enterprise."

tags: journalism tow data
Stories for Your Screen: annie96 is typing...

Man, I *really* love this method of delivering a suspense story. I'm looking at how other media are using Snapchat and WhatsApp for audience engagement and it's interesting but not Quite There (in my view), but as a medium for fiction, the design of this is very clever.

tags: whatsapp audience network storytelling
The Big Roundtable’s Social Media Experiment - 10,000 Words

Interesting, and the conclusion is that the people within networks - however small - are more useful than the framework of that network. I can see the logic in the theory; however, I'm not sure I subscribe 100% to it. "Longform startup The Big Roundtable (BRT) recently commissioned three college students to put its assumptions about social sharing to the test. The challenge? Taking one story, one month and whatever techniques they could think of (legal, of course), the three undergraduates were tasked with the challenge of racking up the most unique page views."

tags: social media network audience
Twitter Enhances Lists: 4 Ways To Take Advantage - Forbes

No new Twitter hacks here, but 4 solid tips to get the best out of lists - I find the the 'subscribe & steal' one very useful

tags: twitter lists
Chartbeat CEO on native ads, viewability, and a metric standard

tags: metrics analytics chartbeat
Why Writers Need Metrics, Too | LinkedIn

The pros of using analytics as a journalist - I really agree with the points raised here.

tags: metrics analytics
The Most Important Topics Of 2014, According To You - Upworthy Insider

Surprisingly hard news is leading the way on Upworthy's poll - not sure if this is the equivalent of people saying they read the Guardian when the actually get all their news from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame but still interesting

tags: upworthy news
Your Facebook page's organic reach has been desecrated - so stop chasing Likes | Opinion | Marketing Week

Yes, Facebook reach is decreasing, no that's not the end of news organisations' effectiveness on the site. Interesting content gets shared; it's the blah stuff that we shouldn't bother posting that won't get reach. Maybe it's social media natural selection... "It’s worth noting the lack in organic reach shouldn’t mean marketers should cease creating non ad-funded Facebook content altogether. Some 25 million people in the UK visited Facebook every day in December 2013, the most recently available country-specific figures. Brands need to be where their audiences are and Facebook takes up a big chunk of their audiences’ lives. As a case in point: earlier this week, EE suffered a network outage that meant many of its customers had no access to its services for a number of hours. EE’s posts about the outage were shared and commented on thousands and hundreds of times respectively, despite the fact it didn’t pay to promote them, because customers expected up-to-date information to be readily available on its Facebook page. And it’s worth mentioning that actual marketing content from brands does show up in the News Feed, but just like word of mouth in any other form, it is only the exceptional marketing that creates a buzz."

tags: facebook organic reach likes marketing
Notes on TV — Benedict Evans

The disrupted TV viewing model; interesting post and some excellent insights in the comments too.

tags: disruption television
Skegnes Standard to become officeless paper - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

"Editor Stephen Stray said: “We really want to be at the heart of the community and our reporting team will now be out and about much more – getting to events and reporting on your stories.” “We are delighted to be holding regular ‘reporter surgeries’ at the Embassy and would like to thank them for allowing us space in there to meet readers.” However East Lindsey District councillor Steve O’Dare said the office’s closure would be “bad news for Skegness.” He said: “It’s understandable but I think it’s going to be detrimental to Skegness. A lot of people like to pop into the office.”"

tags: journalism future+of+news mobile+journalism
- Another JP title to become officeless paper
  
  by Paul Linford  Published 31 Mar 2014. 
  
  0
  
  0 4 0
  
  
  The Skegness Standard has become the latest Johnston Press title to embrace

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Socdir | Your social media directory of tools.

There are a lot of resources in this directory, from basic to complex tools, many of which are rated and assessed by users. Very handy

tags: tools social media directory

Heckta for OS X - photo magnifier

Hecta is an app for OS X which magnifies photographs without pixelation or blur.

Photographers, designers, journalists — and you — can zoom in on the smallest detail with clarity and precision.

Latent Semantic Indexing

The long explanation is this: "LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.

Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms."

The short one is this: It's pretty good for finding out what words people are searching for in a specified geographic area, i.e. a useful journalism tool.

How organisations are engaging with the Snapchat community | journalism.co.uk

Latest in the handy podcast series from J.co.uk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:32:00 +0000

How we built Ampp3d in eight weeks

"Most publishers give their staff massive desktop monitors to work on, using desktop software tools, and a CMS that works on a desktop. And then the majority of users view the output on a mobile. "

tags: technology future+of+news ampp3d
Why venture capitalists are suddenly investing in news - Quartz

"These days, BuzzFeed is rapidly expanding with $46 million in funding. Vox Media has raked in some $80 million in venture capital. Business Insider’s $12 million boost last week makes its haul about $30 million. And feel-good social curation site Upworthy has raised about $12 million since launching two years ago. 1 “Suddenly, the market for content just opened up,” said Sarah Lacy, founder of PandoDaily, which has secured about $4 million in venture capital since 2012. “It’s dramatically changed. I think a lot of it for me was Vice getting valued at $1 billion. No one had seen anything like that in the content space. And they’re trying to speak to a very specific audience that’s hard to reach in a deeply authentic way. It’s certainly not something you’re phoning in. It’s not a pre-written press release. It’s not a listicle.”"

tags: technology news quartz future+of+news investment
Spritz

Text streaming sounds very cool, doesn't it? Spritz looks more than the latest shiny, it looks like it really is going to be the next very big thing.

tags: technology Spritz future+of+news
Open door: The readers' editor on… the line between comment and fact in live blogs | Comment is free | The Guardian

Live blogging is a skill. It involves getting the tone as well as content bang on - and sometimes, as with this reader's gripe - the line between fact and comment gets blurred. The trick is to know what kind of live blog you're doing - and be consistent.

From the Guardian Readers' Editor blog: "The latest example was on the website today. Matthew Weaver's "news blog" … included the statement: 'David Cameron continues to try to give the impression of being on top of the crisis...' Now, is that fact or opinion? If you are claiming it is fact, then I am not aware of any objective standard against which one can judge whether the PM is 'on top of the crisis' (whatever that means) or not … As a more general point, what is the status of these news blogs? My preference would be for them to stick to the facts." In an exchange of email correspondence the complainant also said: "I would much prefer a news blog to do what it says on the tin – to give me the news unadulterated by the 'views' of the reporter. I don't mind in the least if that results in a list of updates – isn't that what news is? Opinion isn't fact.""

tags: audience content liveblog liveblogging
What Type of Content Gets Shared the Most on Twitter?

There are some annoying 'sign up for more followers HERE' ads to ignore before you get to the content, but good insights when you do.

tags: content audience social sharing
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile: What You Get Wrong about the Internet - TIME

"If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again. MORE Here's An Updated Tally Of All The People Who Have Ever Died From A Marijuana Overdose Huffington Post These Disturbing Fast Food Truths Will Make You Reconsider Your Lunch Huffington Post Justin Bieber & Selena Gomez Kiss Over Breakfast, Another Baby on the Way for Christian Bale & More People Fed by Joakim Noah's intensity, resilient Bulls take down Heat Sports Illustrated 'True Detective' finale: Talk about it Entertainment Weekly "

tags: chartbeat engagement analytic audience

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:33:00 +0000

Neil Gaiman's Journal: Storms and how they start

"Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn't do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it's incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. "

tags: Hugo twitterstorm twitter Neil+Gaiman
How BitTorrent Rewrote The Rules Of The Internet | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Fascinating, short read about how BitTorrent's use of Micro Transport Protocol has dramatically grown its user base, and made the net a less congested place. "Under uTP, any BitTorrent transfers you have going on in the background will politely wait for your streaming to be finished before they jump in. Then, in the uncrowded hours of the late night, uTP lets your torrenting get going, soaking up all that suddenly spare bandwidth. Now that uTP is used for 80% of BitTorrent transfers, traffic no longer peaks in that 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot. This is also why the monthly userbase has grown from 60 million in 2008 to 170 million today--all while the share of peak traffic continues to go down. "

tags: bittorrent internet innovation
The world's largest photo service just made its pictures free to use | The Verge

"Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery. "

tags: copyright photography photos Getty
Wrexham.com overturns ban to film council meetings - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

"A hyperlocal news website has been successful in overturning a ban on the filming of council meetings. Wrexham.com has published what it believes to be the first ever video of a Wrexham Council meeting following several rejected requests in recent years."

tags: council transparency democracy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 12:33:00 +0000

14 takeaways from the news:rewired digital journalism conference

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

tags: news:rewired
Crossing the language boundaries across your newsroom: journo to dev and back

An open Google Doc that considers how traditional reporters and developer reports (for Noah Veltman considers them very similar in their goals) can work together and communicate more effectively. I see huge opportunities for better cross-working with these two groups; sometimes it feels like developers occupy that previous Bad Guy space owned by IT. Better communication and empathy is the start. "the secret is not to treat developers like a service desk — what ProPublica’s Al Shaw calls “the deli counter,” where you just hand in your order. The developers are reporters, too, and you should treat them as such. Communication in particular is hard. Email is bad; tickets are slightly better but still aren’t synchronous. Using chat or direct communication is better. Having time to test things can be very contentious. There are other concerns for developers: Are you going to reuse this later? Is this an ongoing project? Will the data be updated? How is that going to work? How is this going to be maintained? What’s the game plan? What is the minimum viable product, and what can be delayed until later?"

tags: developers coding hacking editorial
How To Say “This Is Crap” In Different Cultures - Erin Meyer - Harvard Business Review

How different nationalities give management feedback. Very good, and also faintly horrifying... "Managers in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in drastically different ways. The Chinese manager learns never to criticize a colleague openly or in front of others, while the Dutch manager learns always to be honest and to give the message straight. Americans are trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly."

tags: management leadership
The Battle of Little Bitcoin: Native American Tribe Launches Its Own Cryptocurrency - Forbes

Really interesting read - how MazaCoin is now the national currency of the Lakota Nation. "After signing a joint venture agreement with the Oglala Sioux Tribe Office of Economic Development early in 2014, Harris immediately began mining his new currency to produce 25 million MazaCoins ahead of its launch to serve as a “national reserve” for the Lakota Nation, which can then be used in times of crisis (like the collapse of Mt. Gox) to help stabilize the currency. A number of these coins were handed out to interested businesses and individuals within the community, to encourage them to get involved in trading and speculating ."

tags: bitcoin cryptocurrency disruption
Slides, Links & Tutorials from NICAR14 // Ricochet by Chrys Wu

A brilliant set of how-to tutorials around data, curated from NICAR14 by Chrys Wu. Shows more than ever how even a basic grasp of coding can make you a far more skilled and effective journalist.

tags: nicar14 coding data how-to tutorials slides
Some Bot to Watch Over Me - NYTimes.com

"For a month now, I have been spying on my apartment. I have spied in the afternoon, and I have spied late at night. Since I can see most clearly into the living room, my voyeurism has been focused there. Often I see only an empty room that could use a little art on the walls. Sometimes I catch the cat sleeping on the rug. One night last week, I watched my girlfriend watch TV. "

tags: technology future scary cool shit

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Social media monitoring and analytics (infographic)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 11:53:00 +0000

Not 100% sure who I owe a hat tip to for tweeting a link to this infographic about social media monitoring (I suspect David Thackeray though).
It is exceptionally useful, anyway, and I thought I would store it on my blog as it's a reference source I will probably come back to in the future.

The World of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

Powered by Demand Metric - See more at: http://www.demandmetric.com/content/world-social-media-monitoring-and-analytics-infographic#sthash.MfJdn18b.dpuf

Tweetdeck: A short user guide to getting the most out of it

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:59:00 +0000

(Photo credit: estherbester)

I ran my first Webex training session this week; it was a 45 minute run-through of How To Be a Tweetdeck Ninja, which contained my tips for getting the most out of Facebook.
Ahem.
I've used Tweetdeck for years and I like the Chrome extension very much - I personally find Tweetdeck the desktop tool for Twitter I wouldn't be without (one other being Buffer).
So when asked to give some colleagues an introduction to Tweetdeck, and others a bit of a power-user insight, it was a chance to sift through what is useful or not to me, and share it.
Because Trinity Mirror uses Google Apps, I've slanted the presentation to the Google Chrome Store Tweetdeck extension - obviously that isn't a prerequisite to using Tweetdeck.
Having not used Webex before (other than a nice, safe 'this is how it works' session between me and the trainer) it was a little nerve-wracking but, used properly it is a great tool for engaged learning. (My main learning outcome was that background noise can hugely impact on the sound quality.)
Anyway, before the session started I did ask the Twitter hivemind for its thoughts on what was good and bad about Tweetdeck, and and then pulled a selection together into a custom timeline* of the responses:

Social media tips/tricks

There was also a powerpoint sent around as an aide memoir, which I've uploaded to Scribd:

How To Be A Tweetdeck Ninja

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 12:33:00 +0000

Olympian Bode Miller: ‘Be Gentle With Christin Cooper’ for NBC interview | Poynter.

Never a good look when an Olympic hero cries as a result of your question. However, I don't think she was insensitive (although the camera work was too much) "Olympic skier Bode Miller told his Twitter followers that NBC’s Christin Cooper was doing her job when she asked him questions about his brother who died last year. Miller cried and viewers jumped online to complain. ("

tags: interviewing+techniques
BBC journalists' interviewing techniques - YouTube

This is a fantastic interview with Peter Allen, 5Live's wonderful Drive journalist, talking about how to interview. It includes a particularly affecting interview with the mother of murdered Lucy Blackman, and you can hear him trying to maintain a professional interviewing manner, even as her hear audibly breaks on air.

tags: journalists interviewing+techniques bbc

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Shifting my social media life around

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:25:00 +0000

I bit the bullet today and made myself a Facebook page.
I'd actually created it a few months ago, but I didn't publish it because it seemed a bit, well, extravagant - I have a Facebook profile, I'm on all the usual social networks, plus I have various about.me type pages. What was the point of a Facebook page as well?
But my social media world is starting to become a bit too much of a mashup for me to do anything particularly effectively.
If you're interested in seeing the page, it's here under the imaginatively titled vanity url alisongow.journalist.

The need to put a bit more organisation into my social media life is something that's been bothering me for a while.
Take Twitter: I have used it for more than 6 years now and it's a different beast to what it started out as (of course it is!) but the way I was using it hadn't evolved quite as much.
So, for example, I've got 5,000-odd followers, some of whom are actually Really Real People (there are also some Really Odd People, and I'd prefer them not to follow me, but that's for another post).

Some are journalists, some are from what I tend to call In My Liverpool Home, or from Wales, and follow me either because they know me or because we move in the same circles and geographic spaces, as well as the same digital spaces.
But the intersection of those worlds isn't of that much interest, I guess.
I've had to change the way I think about Twitter; I genuinely used it as a micro-blog initially, then it became a crowdsourcing tool, then a replacement RSS feed, then a way to promote my news title's journalism. And, of course, it's always been a noise I couldn't live without.
But, that means I now think of what followers are looking for from me more than before and so the micro-blog part of things has gradually decreased, as as the amount I tweet.

Often, I can't tweet about work things, interesting as they might be, because it isn't the right platform, or the right time.
I can't get involved in long tweet-debates any more because I don't tend to be on Twitter as often - I might be in meetings, or driving.
Also, I notice some people use Twitter in an incredibly focused way - just to talk about journalism, for example. That would drive me nuts - I enjoy posting pix from my days out-n-about, for example, and I'd struggle to be quite so single-focused and earnest.
However, things evolve all the time.

Then it struck me that while I'm refining the way I use Twitter all the time, I've done little to change how I use Facebook.
That is a place where a lot of my non-journo life spills out, from the problems of renovating an old property to the perpetual war waged against sheep breaking into the garden, to - yep, sorry - my cats. Look, I never said it was an interesting spill-out of my life.
But I felt that was limiting my potential to use Facebook; having said that, I don't really think my old school friends give a rat's ass about my Thoughts on Journalism.

So I thought I'd experiment with a page, and it was born today. I suspect it will be very handy too, for mini-blogging, and I've also set up an ifttt recipe to auto-post my Diigo bookmarks to the page.
My friend Dilyan is very good at cutting to the heart of things with his questions, and he did it again today; I'm not sure I have an answer...

I'll see how it goes.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Outlook for 2014: InPublishing

"Is there light at the end of the tunnel for the regional press? Will their efforts to realign their businesses start to bear fruit? Peter Sands looks at the priorities for the year ahead and solicits the views of senior regional executives."

tags: future+of+news journalism business newspapers editors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Investigating whether it's worth investing time in LinkedIn (aka Help, please...)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 16:55:00 +0000

I've been involved in interviewing for some journalists jobs recently, and I noticed that while some CVs will state the applicant's Twitter, and occasionally their blog, hardly any referenced a LinkedIn profile.
More interestingly, during social media role interviews, LinkedIn was mentioned by just a handful of people as a potentially useful tool.
Twitter and Facebook, of course, were top of the pile, with Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and Google+ cropping up (Google+ interests me - I don't find it compelling, but it is engaging. When I remember to post there...)

So, LinkedIn. Do any newsrooms do it well? What are the opportunities for users? I thought I might test the water with a poll, and so I dusted off my Ask500people.com login to find that the site was moribund. Which is a real shame - I liked it for when I needed plenty of responses, but they didn't necessarily have to be local to my new patch.
Anyway, I tried easypolls.com instead, just because it came up first on a search for 'free, embed, poll' as I didn't need anything as fancy as SurveyMonkey.

So, if you have two moments to spare, tell me why you use LinkedIn, and help me work out whether it's a network or the digital equivalent of a business card - something most of us have to promote ourselves, but don't tend to use that much. If you really want to tell me more than clicking a button allows, you can always post a comment. I'm going to pop this link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, and see which sends most traffic to the blog and where most (if any) comments, likes, shares or comments happen, and then update this post with my findings.
Thanks for helping with the research!

survey service

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 12:32:00 +0000

5 tools to boost your Instagram campaigns

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Useful for any social media journalists looking to incorporate more uses for Instagram in their field. I also like the Backspaces app.

tags: tools instagram
Smartwatches and the digital future of news | Journalism.co.uk

The words "wearable tech" will soon become wearisome to my ears I think, but for now I'm learning as much as I can about it, and this piece from J.co.uk is a useful addition to the sum of knowledge.

tags: wearable+technology wearable+tech smartwatches
A Running List of What We Know the NSA Can Do. So Far. - WNYC

I really like this as an approach to a story - the 'what we know' approach invites readers to consider 'what we don't know' and to add to the sum of information contained here. I don't know if you call this journalism or open curation of data, or whether the two are more or less the same thing. But it's very interesting, and something I plan to try and introduce more of in my new role .

tags: NSA surveillance data journalism
Macro Social Sites Are Just A Part Of The Digital Puzzle

Additionally, unless you want to sell out and go for high-bounce traffic from low-value, disinterested users macro social sites probably won’t send you the highest volume (let alone quality) traffic anyway. Build connections and community with smart, niche and passionate audiences. You’ll win every time

tags: listicles audience

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Bafta nominations 2014 - liveblog | Film | theguardian.com

fair play to the Guardian for attempting to liveblog a BAFTA list, which appeared to be speed-rapped. And fair play for holding up hands and saying 'we were a bit pants'. Sometimes you try things and they work, sometimes they don't. "It's impossible to liveblog two people reading a list. Apologies. We will have a full list of nominations on the site shortly, along with a gallery of the key nominees and Peter Bradshaw's reaction."

tags: bafta oops

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 12:32:00 +0000

If you love something, set it free: a lesson for old media | Outsider/Insider

"I have no doubt that the higher-ups at every major media organization would say, if asked what their mission is, that they want to deliver the news, inform the public, uncover important stories and of course (for many) make a profit while doing so. If that were really true though, there wouldn’t be an apparent need to tightly control all aspects of that mission. If you love something, in other words, you have to set it free. I hope it’s a lesson old media can learn before they become totally obsolete."

tags: media future+of+news
Ezra Klein and the problem with top-down control | Media Nation

This commentary was published earlier at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What should a 21st-century news organization look like?

tags: media future+of+news
If a tweet worked once, send it again — and other lessons from The New York Times’ social media desk » Nieman Journalism Lab

"We examined some of 2013’s most successful tweets, measured in terms of clickthroughs and retweets, to see what connects with these readers and where our investment of editorial effort really paid off (the data comes from SocialFlow, whose system the Times uses to manage some of its major Twitter accounts). We also looked at some of our strategies and tactics to encourage a variety of types of reader engagement with our journalism using Twitter."

tags: nytimes social media Twitter

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 12:32:00 +0000

How BuzzFeed mastered social sharing to become a media giant for a new era (Wired UK)

The Buzzfeed story is a good read, although the tone is a sometimes little starry eyed. Perhaps the journalist was hoping to defect. Anyway, I found this an interesting read, particularly the move into hard news reporting.

tags: buzzfeed viral sharing
- f there is a science to BuzzFeed's content strategy, it is built on obsessive measurement
Facebook News Feed Redesign Changes Struggle to Court Users - Mike Isaac - Social - AllThingsD

"Most people think of Facebook in a similar way: It’s a place to share photos of your kids. It’s a way to keep up with friends and family members. It’s a place to share a funny, viral story or LOLcat picture you’ve stumbled upon on the Web. This is not how Facebook thinks of Facebook. In Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, Facebook should be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” He wants a design-and-content mix that plays up a wide array of “high-quality” stories and photos. The gap between these two Facebooks — the one its managers want to see, and the one its users like using today — is starting to become visible. "

tags: facebook news social
New data show where Facebook has (and hasn’t) made the shift to mobile – Quartz

tags: facebook mobile quartz
Twitter / ScottFilmCritic: If you only see one frog who ...

I love this. No matter how smart you think you're being, Twitter will be smarter.
3 Social Trends For 2014

Slideshare presentation by James Whatley, a dude who absolutely knows what he's talking about. And - of course - one of the Big Things for 2014 is disposable social.

tags: social trends
Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messenger apps | Technology | The Observer

""I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days," said Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London. In the last few years she has used Facebook less and less because she doesn't want "the whole world to know" what she's doing. When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because "it's more personal". For similar reasons, some 78% of teenagers and young people use mobile messengers to plan a meet-up with friends, according to research advisory firm mobileYouth."

tags: whatsapp social media messenger facebook
Young people don't do journalism. Oh yes they do but not your model

This made me think about a number of assumptions I have, but mostly I've bookmarked it because of Q's multiple responses in the comments. He says: "The young have become creative online. Some feel in the traditional system, a lot of stories created by that traditional media was negative and stereotypical. With, no or very little good news. So, with the aid of the internet they have created an alternative, and can now be in control of their own stories and imaging, and get that to their own audiences. They can also now decide the balance or weighting of a story with a good or bad light, and the checks or control on them is via the social platforms they are serving. If the audience doesn?t like the content, it takes seconds for the content creators to be notified and contested. Of course within all of this there are online haters sitting behind keyboards that hate anything posted online. However, now the content creators are also the audience or very close to them this once again leads them to feel that they don?t need the support of traditional media, which has misshaped and wrongly defined them in the past. Also, one has to question the fact, why very few young people even read the traditional media and their journalistic stories? ... If... they see media created by social platforms they respect by content creators they trust, and their friends reinforce that on social media, they will engage in conversation and might even SHARE the good news to others." (He also tells a story about a conversation with a Guardian journalist about gangs that a) made me cringe and b) made me look at the whole way UK media report on gangs in a different way.

tags: multimedia journalism future+of+news
The cup and the knife: the reality of caring for someone with dementia

" In the end my dad died of dementia, but also because dying was the easiest way to treat him." An honest and upsetting account of watching a loved one disintegrate through illness. One of the best pieces of writing I've read for a long time.

tags: dementia longform+journalism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 12:32:00 +0000

Justine Sacco’s aftermath: The cost of Twitter outrage - Salon.com

tags: twitterstorm
Croydon Citizen launches print edition after hitting £2,000 crowdfunding target

"James Naylor founded The Croydon Citizen as a part-time project, targeting people who are actively involved in the community and who want to further intellectual debate on local issues." “We talk about the really big issues, like you would find in the Economist or the New Statesman, but related to Croydon. I go by the ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ motto with it.” He doesn’t get paid, and works on the project outside of his full-time job in technology advertising. “I do it because I love it. No one gets into journalism because of a big fat pay pack.”"

tags: crowdfunding citizenjournalism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Former home of Headlines and Deadlines

Goodbye Blogger

Social media has wrecked my blog*

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Talking about Innovation and Digital Skills in Journalism at the Society of Editors regional conference

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Another JP title to become officeless paper

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Social media monitoring and analytics (infographic)

The World of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

Tweetdeck: A short user guide to getting the most out of it

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Shifting my social media life around

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Investigating whether it's worth investing time in LinkedIn (aka Help, please...)

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)