social media – Page 3

Reconnecting with your audience

View more presentations from Dan Kennedy.

I’ll be leading a discussion on “Blogging, Social Media and Journalism” tomorrow from 10:45 a.m. to noon at the annual convention of the New England Newspaper & Press Association at the Park Plaza. I’ve put together some slides (above), but I’m conceiving this session as an unconference, and I want to turn it over to the editors and reporters who’ll be attending as quickly as possible.

The blabbing continues. From 3:45 to 5 p.m., Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub and I will lead a workshop on “Writing for the Web.”

Finally, on Saturday from 1:45 to 3:15 p.m., I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on social media that’s part of the ACLU of Massachusetts “Secrecy, Surveillance and Sunlight” conference at UMass Boston. I’ll be joined by Northeastern University Law School professor Hope Lewis, ACLUM online communications coordinator Danielle Riendeau and ACLUM communications director Christopher Ott.

Now, to get back to those slides (and sorry for the funny line breaks; there’s something about SlideShare that I’m obviously missing). There are a number of examples I’ll be talking about that are worth taking a deeper look at. So I thought I’d post some links here.

The Salem News’ Twitter post about the fire at Danvers Town Hall
The News’ online story, slideshow and Google map about the fire posted later that day
Doug Haslam’s blog post about the snowy sidewalk in Newton
Greg Reibman’s retweet of Haslam’s original Twitter post
The Newton Tab’s blog post reporting that the snow had been removed
The New Haven Independent’s comments policy
The NHI’s story on Jonathan Hopkins, also known as “Norton Street”
SeeClickFix
New Haven Independent site, with SeeClickFix feed in right-hand column
SeeClickFix comments about “the ugliest storefront on Chapel St.”
NHI story on Chapel Street storefront

A citizen-media aggregator for Haiti

On Wednesday I mentioned Global Voices Online, a Harvard-affiliated service that was rounding up citizen media from Haiti and the Caribbean.

Global Voices has since set up a Haitian Earthquake 2010 section that aggregates citizen-produced content and includes key links to mainstream news organizations — including the Boston Haitian Reporter. It’s got its own RSS feed, so you can plug it into Google Reader.

Here’s a first-hand account of the quake that I found on Global Voices:

Towards 4:45 PM, with our driver, we enter the parking lot of Karibean, Pétion-ville’s big mart. As usual, the way in is slowed by the usual Delmas traffic. While driving up the entry, our Patrol began to dance. I was imagining three or four boys standing on the bumper wanting to swing the car. In front of us, the parking lot ground rocked like the waves at Wahoo Bay. The Karibean building started to dance and in 3 seconds’ time completely tumbled down. A white cloud swept across the parking lot and you could see zombies whitened by dust appearing, in complete panic.

The earthquake is a tragedy whose full dimensions won’t be known for quite some time

Citizen media and the earthquake in Haiti

Note: This item originally included a photograph of a woman being rescued that was cited as an example of citizen media. On March 16, I was informed that the photo was, in fact, the copyrighted work of Daniel Morel, a professional photojournalist. Please see this for more information.

Update: Wednesday, 7:21 p.m. We are posting more links in the comments.

Ever since a tsunami devastated South Asia in December 2004, social media and citizen journalism have been recognized as key components of covering natural disasters and other breaking news stories. Professional news organizations can’t be everywhere; on the other hand, millions of people are carrying cell phones with cameras. New-media expert Steve Outing called the tsunami “a tipping point” for citizen journalism.

In such a decentralized news environment, the challenge for journalism has been to make sense of what is happening in something approaching real time. Most recently, social media have played an important role in bringing news of the Iranian protest movement to the outside world.

So when a major earthquake hit western Haiti yesterday, it was no surprise that news organizations, large and small, tapped into Haiti’s online community in order to provide them with the on-the-ground eyes and ears they did not have. Given Haiti’s unfortunate status as one of the poorest countries in the world, you might not think there would be much in the way of electronic communication. In fact, there is a lively and heartbreaking stream of reports coming out of the island.

I’ll begin closest to home. Last night the Boston Haitian Reporter started a live blog to gather accounts from readers and to link out to relevant information. The blog includes a live Twitter stream of news from Haiti. As the Boston Globe observes, there are 43,000 people of Haitian descent living in Greater Boston.

The New York Times, which over the past few years has morphed into one of the most Internet-savvy news organizations, has, not surprisingly, posted stories, a slideshow and a Reuters video. But the real action is taking place on The Lede, its blog for breaking news, which includes everything from staff reports to cell-phone photos posted to TwitPic. The Times has put together a Twitter list of people and organizations posting news updates about Haiti. And it is actively soliciting reports from its readers:

The New York Times would like to connect people inside and outside Haiti who are searching for information about the situation on the ground. Readers outside Haiti who have friends and relatives in the country, along with readers in Haiti who are still able to access the Internet, can use the comments section below as a forum to share updates. Some readers may be searching for the same family members.

Have you been able to reach loved ones in the area affected by the earthquake? What have you learned from people there?

National Public Radio’s efforts bear some similarities to those of the Times. NPR is concentrating its breaking-news and linking efforts on its blog The Two-Way, and it has also assembled a Twitter list.

CNN, whose iReport project is a major outlet for citizen journalists, has put together a page on the Haitian earthquake. As is often the case with citizen media, it’s not always easy to tell what you’re looking at. Some of the images are quite graphic, and are slapped with a label reading “Discretion advised.”

One of my favorite examples of professional journalists and citizen bloggers working together is Global Voices Online, a project founded at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society several years ago. Global Voices’ editors round up bloggers from every part of the world. For the most part, they labor in obscurity. But not at moments like this.

As of this morning you’ll find a compilation of tweets and photos and a digest of what bloggers in Haiti and throughout the Caribbean are saying. Here is Afrobella, described as a “Trinidadian diaspora blogger”:

Right now my heart aches for Haiti. The already-suffering island nation was just hit with a 7.0 earthquake. A hospital has collapsed. Government buildings have been severely damaged. There was a major tsunami watch, earlier. Reports of major devastation are just starting to pour in…my thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Haiti, and anyone with friends or family in Haiti.

You can also click through directly to Afrobella’s blog.

Twitter itself is a good source of raw information. At the moment, Yéle, a charity founded by Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean, is the number-two trending topic, and “Help Haiti” is number three. If you want to dip into the Twitter torrent, try searching on #haiti.

Should “anal retentive” be hyphenated?

Two weeks ago today, the Twitter feed Fake AP Stylebook was launched upon an unsuspecting planet.

Journalists who had long labored under the tyranny of the Associated Press Stylebook know that they’re supposed to use 1950s-style postal abbreviations for states, spell out the numbers one through nine and abbreviate street when it’s an address (17 Smith St.) but not a place (Smith Street).

Until now, though, we couldn’t be quite sure why the word Bible is always capitalized. It is, the Fakesters solemnly explain, a matter of pragmatism: “You don’t want to get letters from those people.”

Over the weekend I reached out to the Fakesters. Callie Kimball at Wired.com makes it sound like unearthing their identities was a journalistic coup worthy of Woodward and Bernstein, but I just asked them, and they told me. The founders, Mark Hale, 31, and Ken Lowery, 28, may soon have a book deal. If they are not the first to parlay Twitter into fame and fortune, they may well be the quickest.

The Fake AP Stylebook is also the subject of my column in the Guardian this week. It should go up later today tomorrow; I’ll link to it once it’s live.

The following e-mail transcript has been lightly edited, including (gasp) for AP style. Turns out I know it better than they do.

Media Nation: Who are you?

Mark: I’m co-creator Mark Hale, an Indiana native living in Louisville, Ky., with my fiancée and our menagerie of pets. I’ve left college twice, the first time from a Japanese studies program. The second time I left from a journalism program that included an internship as editor of the school paper, which is what led me to the simple joy of the real AP Stylebook. My interest in journalism coincided nicely with the weblog boom of the early 2000s, and I began commenting on comic-book-related sites and eventually started my own. Ken and I met through comments on our weblogs and have been acquaintances since. We’ve been in near-constant contact the last two years or so.

Ken: I’m Ken Lowery, a copy editor for the United Methodist Reporter, based in Dallas. I’m also a freelance movie critic and have wanted to be a journalist since I was a kid.

The rest of our team (whom we call our Bureau Chiefs) are made up of journalists, bloggers, cartoonists, graphic designers, a couple English professors, a professional librarian, a lawyer and others. We’re a diverse group, but we all like to write and we’re all big huge nerds.

MN: How did you come up with the idea of doing the Fake AP Stylebook?

Mark: Ken and I were chatting two weeks ago, and he showed me the feed for the real AP Stylebook on Twitter. With the proliferation of “fake” accounts, labeled and otherwise, I remarked to him, “I can’t tell if I’m sad or relieved that this isn’t a joke feed.” Ken got hit by a lightning bolt, he wrote a post about how television shows are denoted and I wrote one about Dr Pepper, each on our own feeds. Then he decided we should start it on its own feed, and off we went.

MN: Have you heard from people at the Associated Press? What have they told you?

Ken: We’ve spotted a few AP writers in our “response” feed, and they’re fans. We were also approached early in the feed’s life by a curious AP reporter who wanted to do a story, but that ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

Naturally, if and when the book becomes a reality, we’ll be changing up the title.

MN: You’ve been at this less than two weeks, and by Sunday you already had nearly 34,000 followers on Twitter. Are you surprised at the way this has taken off, or was world domination part of your plan from the beginning?

Mark: Tuesday, Nov. 4, will be the first day of our third week.

“Surprised” is pretty mild. We had no plans other than making each other laugh at first, and then dragging our friends into it so they could make us laugh, too. Given the talent of the people involved, I’m not surprised people like it; I’m just surprised there are so many. The number of followers is nearing the population of my small Indiana hometown.

MN: Not to get political on you, but is wingnut one word or two? Or should it be hyphenated?

Mark: Typically, no hyphen. Capitalize when referring to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure Wingnut.

MN: What’s next?

Mark: We and the Bureau Chiefs are currently pulling together a sample chapter as part of a book proposal. We’ve been approached by three agents, and have finally signed on with one.

We hope to work in a good deal of the Twitter material, but so far we seem to be cranking out original material at a good clip. Other than that, we’re going to continue trying to make people laugh for free on the Internet. That’s where the real money is these days, after all.