Social journalism: Community building through social networks

Social journalism: Community building through social networks Paciﬁc Northwest Newspaper Association Summit Seattle, Sept. 17, 2009 JD Lasica President, Socialmedia.biz jd@socialmedia.biz

Relax! Flickr photo “relaxation, the maldivian way” by notsogoodphotography http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/pnna (all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval) http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

Making sense of all the new terms http://socialbrite.org/glossary “Social media: Any online technology or practice that lets us share (content, opinions, insights, experiences, media) and have a conversation about the ideas we care about. ”

Explosive uptake in social media About 200 million blogs 5 of top 10 websites are social media sites 57% have joined a social network 39% subscribe to an RSS feed YouTube = 10% of all Internet trafﬁc Every time someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for social reasons 120,000 new blogs launched every day 1.5 million blog posts per day (17 per second) Sources: Universal McCann: Wave.3: Power to the People, 2008; various

Social networking and journalism Cartoon courtesy of John Cole, The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Penn.

New metrics for participatory age Old metrics: eyeballs, page views, stickiness New metrics: engagement, participation, passion, interaction, comments, uploads

10 ideas for building community 1. Be ﬁrst with breaking news 2. Leverage Twitter 3. Enable conversations 4. Get widget-happy! 5. Community video 6. Geocoding & citizen photography 7. Create local map mashups 8. Hook up with Facebook 9. Tap into sharing economy 10. Study, borrow, steal

1. Be ﬁrst with breaking news SMS alerts Latinos, African Americans > greater use of mobile devices Twitter to break veriﬁed news Best usage is to drive users to story on your site Live-blogging of public events Several free useful tools Moblogging to upload photos from mobile device Buzznet, Foneblog, Fotopages, mBlog, mlogs, phlog.net, Snap, Textamerica, Webshots. Cross-posting?

SMS alerts for niche news www.impre.com/alertas • ImpreMedia: 20 alerts/day, 1 million impressions/month • Popular topics: general news, breaking news, New York, politics, entertainment, sports, Mexican futbol league

Live-blogging to drive conversation Useful free tools: • CoverItLive.com • Scribblelive.com • Google Docs Examples: Obama’s health care speech, Sonia Sotomayor hearings, Rod Blagojevich impeachment, NFL playoffs. Use your site as a community forum!

2. Leverage Twitter San Diego wildﬁres: KPBS + USD Red River ﬂooding in North Dakota Flight 1549 “Miracle on the Hudson” BusinessWeek: 40 journalists on Twitter. MuckRack.com: feed of Twitter posts by journalists

Make Twitter work for you Train your staff on how to use Twitter Not a broadcasting medium to distribute headlines Start by listening & observing, but then: Be human, be conversational, not detatched Unlearn the conventions of journalism @ElDiarioNY: after 5 mo., 5% new trafﬁc from Twitter #1 trafﬁc driver: retweets “Twitter is just amazing. It's the perfect tool for journalists.” — Arturo Duran, CEO, ImpreMedia Digital (El Diario, La Opinion, et al.)

Don’t ghettoize social media @jamesjanega General assignment reporter, Chicago Tribune @kimpainter Health columnist, USA Today @dsarno Business reporter, LA Times

Tweeting done right: 70-30 Rule Omar Gallaga Austin American Statesman

Twitter accounts page Austin American Statesman http://www.statesman.com/news/ content/standing/twitter.html

3. Enable conversations Avert registration fatigue & BugMeNot syndrome

Identify & engage inﬂuencers Scope out Twitterers with large # followers. How do their interests intersect with your site’s? Learn about how people in your community use social media Connect with social media inﬂuencers through search.twitter.com, PlaceBlogger.com, etc. Ask people around you (neighbors, students, young people in your newsroom) how they use social media

Use hash tags to join conversations Find relevant hashtags through hashtags.org or Twitter Search Join (but don’t spam) conversation threads Start your own hashtag Some hashtags to latch on to: #health #sports #latino #education #democracy #politics #Obama #news #media #journalism #journchat At left, widget found at: http://journchat.info

4. Get widget-happy! Highlight community events Indy.com staffers pick the best local events to highlight on the site’s front page.

Tap into community conversations Real-time conversations Tap into the conversations that are already taking place in your community: Widgets let you post tailored discussions — both by topic and by geographic location. Create widgets for your business, opinion, politics, sports sections.

Promote community service Left: AllforGood.org helps you ﬁnd and share ways to do good in your community. Right: UnitedWeServe: Bottom-up volunteer opportunities at http://serve.gov

5. Community video Video + chat = engagement Think of your site not just as a way to showcase your own journalism but as a platform to connect users with interesting events taking place in the community. Streaming video tools include Kyte.com, Qik.com, Ustream.tv, Livestream.com and This is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, student journalism channel. Youcaster.com. http://www.kyte.tv/ch/109996-jmsnews

Live video streaming ImpreMedia teamed up with the PBS NewsHour to livestream the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. Went from 20,000 streams during 2008 campaign season to 45,000 streams this past spring. PBS provided the signal & video player, ImpreMedia provided the Spanish translations.

6. Geotagging & citizen photography Visitors to Flickr could see photos of the 2007 disaster taken from Minneapolis multiple vantage points. Many new digital cameras and mobile bridge collapse devices, like the iPhone, come with geotagging enabled by default.

Geotagging an art walk An afternoon with smart phones Dan Gillmor took a class of journalism students at Arizona State University out for a stroll and created a cool Flickr map with more than 120 photos captured with G1 smart phones. “It was absurdly easy,” he says. News organizations should enlist community members with geo- location capable devices to cover designated community events.

Community photo albums NewWest.Net NewWest.Net created a group pool on Flickr for readers to add photos to. People have added more than 16,000 photos. http://www.ﬂickr.com/ groups/newwest

7. Create local map mashups http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/ Everyblock Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Dallas Detroit Houston Los Angeles Miami New York Philadelphia San Francisco San Jose Seattle Washington, DC

Over the line? An anonymous publisher compiled a mashup of public campaign donations records, including the donors’ street address, and published it.

8. Hook up with Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/mndaily/ http://www.mndaily.com/

Reward points http://apps.facebook.com/mndaily/ Readers win points if they post a news story, share it, invite friends, send a letter to the editor, etc. Top scorers win prizes like Twins tickets, T- shirts, a bag of goodies. 15,000+ additional monthly visits, greater # comments, revenue potential

Charlotte Observer http://apps.facebook.com/observerfacebook/

9. Tap into the sharing economy Creative Commons • Rich source of free commercial material. • Flickr: 15 million Attribution licenses • Flickr: 10 million Attribution ShakeAlike licenses creativecommons.org ﬂickr.com/creativecommons socialbrite.org/sharing-center

Don’t do all the heavy lifting Flickr photo by Jason Means Partner with smart people. Use your community. Use free: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, CC Use open source: WordPress (and its plug-ins), Drupal, et al. Steal good ideas. Build on what’s come before.

10. Study, borrow, steal Statesman.com Moms Charlotte charlotteobserver.com/moms TechCrunch.com Mashable NewWest.Net Politico.com ProPublica.org HufﬁngtonPost.com BlogHer.com Themediaconsortium.org The Local: http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com Baristanet.com http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/sites

InlandSocal.com Riverside Press-Enterprise Hyperlocal Partnerships with local businesses Emphasis on dining, movies, music User-submitted photos, video, content

Momarama http://blogs.pe.com/moms/

Indy.com

Periodismociudadano.com  Recent comments  Tags  Embedded video  Twitter lifestream  Pointers to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blip.tv presence  Global Voices en Español

2-year horizon Flickr photo by jonrawlinson Embrace change as an opportunity Launch pilot projects, get a toehold Talk with your users about what you’re planning Get top brass to use social media New metrics: engagement, participation, comments

Innovate! "Rocket Man" on Flickr by Dave-F  “We have to change our entire corporate-industry behavior. We’ve got to stop overplanning and over-analyzing and turn our battleship into a speedboat.” —J. Todd Foster, managing editor, Bristol (VA) Herald Courier  Dare to fail. If you’re not failing at something, you’re doing something wrong. (“Fail often, fail fast.”)

Resources Socialbrite.org Knight Citizen News Network: kcnn.org Social Media Club: socialmediaclub.org BeatBlogging.org & NewAssignment.net Spot.us: crowd-funded reporting CiiJ: ciij.org/resources

Thank you! jd@socialmedia.biz twitter: @jdlasica http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/pnna Image: Universal McCann: Wave.3 report, March 2008

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Social journalism: Community building through social networks

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Social journalism: Community building through social networks — Presentation Transcript