slides from class

1. MAC114
Facebook vs Twi3er: news and social media

2. Recommended reading: Chapter 14

3. ‘Twi7er is already far more
effec=ve a tool for repor=ng,
discovery, dissemina=on and
collabora=on than anything the
BBC will ever produce’
- Emily Bell, 2013

4. ‘every major channel of
informa=on will be Twi7erfied’
- Johnson, 2009

8. I think organisa=ons are lot more
sophis=cated in how they use Twi7er
and are confident enough to let
individual journalists do what they want
to do in their own voice …
- Jemima Kiss, guardian.co.uk cited in
Harcup, 2015: p220

9. We have a very established community
team which pushes and promotes all out
content across Twi7er, Facebook and
other Networks. I think there’s an
understanding that different content
suites different plaWorms: Twi7er for
breaking news, Facebook for more
discursive things and Pinterest and
Instagram for visual things.
- Jemima Kiss, guardian.co.uk cited in
Harcup, 2015: p220

10. Personality
Immediacy
Personal vs professional

11. “In the 20th Century making the news
was almost en=rely the province of
journalists… The economics of publishing
and broadcas=ng created large, arrogant
ins=tu=ons – call it Big Media…
- Gillmor, 2004: xiii

12. “Big media … treated the news as a
lecture. We told you what the news
was…. Tomorrow’s news repor=ng and
produc=on will be more of a
conversa=on, or a seminar…
- Gillmor, 2004: xiii

14. “something that takes into account the
collabora:ve nature of journalism now:
professionals and amateurs working
together to get the real story, linking to
each other across brands and old
boundaries to share facts, ques=ons,
answers, ideas, perspec=ves. It recognizes
the complex rela=onships that will make
news. And it focuses on the process more
than the product”
- Jeff Jarvis, 2006
Networked journalism

15. The idea that tradi=onal journalism opens
itself up to the public. It shares the produc:on
process from start to finish. It uses new
technologies to include the ci=zen in every
aspect of news-gathering, produc=on and
publica=on. It means using a lot of jargon like
crowd-sourcing, social networking, wikis and
Twi7ering. Many of these techniques build on
exis=ng journalism methods and are already
out there. But it will also require a
par:cipatory revolu:on in the way we make
the news.
- Charlie Becke7, 2008

18. Certainly in the tech news space
there’s a real fa:gue about blog
content – nobody has =me to read it
and certainly we don’t have =me to
write it. Blogging seems to have
shided away from something an
individual would do to being a very
polarised plaWorm, either for high-
end, authorita:ve and expert
writers who use Medium, for
example, to low-end trashy celebrity
viral sites like BuzzFeed and
Upworthy
- Sarah Hartley, cited in Harcup, 2015

19. I’m not sure how much appe=te
there is for the public to blog at
length anymore – it’s less that
Facebook etc have taken over and
more that there just isn’t enough
=me for normal people to do all this
stuff, let alone have a real life.
- Sarah Hartley, cited in Harcup, 2015

21. We’re all about star=ng conversa=ons and
kickstar=ng debates. We do respond to
comments, that’s the policy. When you
respond they realise there’s actually a
human involved. Our journalists push
stories out every way they can, they’re
mini-marketeers of their own content. It’s
not enough just to write that story. The
journey of that story is a lot longer and
they should be looking at it during the day,
is it performing well, do we need to give it
another push, can we get a different angle
on it? It’s about taking responsibility for
that too
- Carla Buzasi, cited in Harcup, 2015

24. “In most online communi=es, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of
users contribute a li7le, and 1% of users account for almost all the ac=on”
- Jakob Nielsen, 2006
The 90-9-1 rule

25. If you have a huge following online,
you have to be aware of your own
personal safety. I always advise
journalists with big followings never to
tweet where they are in their personal
life, for example. You need to be
aware of what you’re publishing and
your loca=on, which tradi=onally
wouldn’t have been an issue unless
you were covering very, very vola=le
subjects. But people can have an
obsession with individuals that publish
daily and regularly. That shouldn’t
scare journalists off but it should be
something that they’re aware of.
- Neal Mann, cited in Harcup, 2015

26. Social media usage is just increasing
exponen=ally so it makes no sense as a
journalist not to be where the
audience is and where the poten=al
sources are. That’s where they are,
that’s where you should be. If you
look at the data and the shid towards
social consump=on, we have to go and
get them, we have to go and engage
with the audience rather than
arrogantly expec=ng them to come to
us.
- Neal Mann, cited in Harcup, 2015

28. Journalists tradi=onally would have
just broadcast in the voice of their
organisa=on. That doesn’t work on
social media because everybody else is
using their own voice and people don’t
want to just hear from a robot. As a
result, journalists need to put
personality into what they do. The key
thing to understand is that you are
working for a news organisa=on, and
as a result you need to uphold their
standards and remember that you are
publishing on behalf of the news
organisa=on.
- Neal Mann, cited in Harcup, 2015

29. Since 2011

31. Blogs are not the same as conven=onal
news reports. Conven=onal, objec=ve,
third-person news repor=ng is a form of
storytelling that evolved with newsprint.
Blogging is a different form of storytelling,
which evolved with the web. You could
write a blog like an old-fashioned news
report, but that would be like having the
ability to broadcast a TV news bulle=n and
just using it to show someone reading out a
radio news script
- Andrew Sparrow, 2014

32. the best blogs have an authorial voice. . . .
Readers also accept this because the
author’s subjec=ve voice is just one of many
in the blog. Blogs like mine use a lot of
aggrega=on, and that means that if
someone like David Cameron gives a
speech, I may well include dozens of
different voices, in the form of tweets,
quotes and blogposts, from journalists,
commentators or poli=cians expressing an
opinion about what Cameron said. In this
respect, in being open to mul=ple
viewpoints, blogging is an inherently liberal
medium
- Andrew Sparrow, 2014

33. SPEED
vs
ACCURACY

34. Fast is unbelievably important on
Twi7er as a journalist, but you have to
be fast and be right. You will lose trust
immediately if you aren’t right. You
need to engage with a conversa=on in
a 24-hour news world that’s going at
an incredible speed, and be one of the
main voices in it, and to do that you
have to be quick – but you have to be
accurate.
- Neal Mann, cited in Harcup, 2015

35. “Accuracy, research, respec=ng sources,
clarity, understanding an audience,
knowing which ques=ons to ask, using
your ini=a=ve and being extremely
persistent.”
- Kiss, cited in Harcup, 2015