By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Why, to cater to their audience’s every whim, of course. So kudos to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), which responded to my whining on Twitter about the lack of a downloadable MP3 of last night’s Massachusetts Senate debate by posting one this afternoon.
I was able to download it onto my iPod and listen while driving home. The experience was enlightening — and, no, I definitely don’t mean the debate.
I can’t think of a better lesson for journalism students.
Earlier today I was attending an orientation for freshmen and transfer students when word came in on my BlackBerry, via the Salem News’ Twitter feed, that the Danvers Town Hall was on fire. (Media Nation’s world headquarters is located in Danvers.)
By 4:30 p.m., the News had posted a reasonably complete story with a Google map and an 11-photo slideshow.
Ten years ago, needless to say, the News would have been silent until the next day.
I’ll be spending a good part of this week at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which is being held this year in Boston.
Tomorrow I’ll be on a pre-conference panel called “Social Networking, Social Media: Facilitating the Pro-Am Approach to Journalism and Building Social Communities,” part of a program titled “Reinventing Journalism and Yourself: One Tweet, One Friend at a Time.” I wish I could invite everyone, but I’m told there’s no more seating left.
I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be doing. I’m more likely to post Twitter updates; you can follow me here. This afternoon I succeeded at posting a photo to TwitPic with my new BlackBerry, so I’ll try to do a bit of that as well.
The student-run Huntington News is taking the social-media route to covering the collapse of a cornice on a Northeastern University-owned residence hall on Huntington Avenue.
Editor Maggie Cassidy used her Twitter account to get out the word that the News had posted a story online. And the photos were posted to the paper’s Flickr account.
Breaking news, from a paper that only comes out every other week during the summer. Good job, although the Flickr link from Twitter doesn’t work [note: now fixed]; pick it up from the story (or from here) instead.
Whoever was posting to Twitter as Boston Globe editor Marty Baron has renamed himself Fake Marty Baron. Good. His (her?) tweets have been mildly amusing. The fakery was not.
So what did I find in my inbox this morning? A message from someone named Marty Baron, letting me know that he was following me on Twitter. Well, I started following him and sent him a private note to make sure it was really him.
As it turns out, it’s not Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, but someone pretending to be him. “It’s not me,” Baron told me by e-mail. Such gamesmanship is far from unusual on Twitter, though it looks like the normally savvy Adam Gaffin was taken in.
Why can’t everyone be as honest as Fake Rahm Emanuel?
On Thursday I had a chance to take part in a panel on “Getting Started with Social Media: Lessons from the Front Lines,” sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.
It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot from the other panelists — Perry Allison of EONS.com, Pam Johnston of Gather.com and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. The moderator was Debi Kleiman of Communispace in Watertown, whose Fenway Park-theme meeting room was where we held our presentation.
I’ve posted the slideshow that accompanied my talk. Slideshare appeared to choke on embedded links, so I’ve listed them below in case you’d like to check any of them out.
What am I giving thanks for today? Fake Rahm Emanuel.