Recently in Journalism Category

Moderated by Kevin Anderson. Initial presentations from the panel:

Laura Kuenssberg, business editor, ITV News

When she started on Twitter, there were no guidelines, there were no BBC journalists using it. She got permission for a three week trial during the party conferences, and from there it became a fundamental part of how UK political journalists operate - including how they get tip-offs and keep up with contacts. 

It's a simple rule: don't let them say anything on there you wouldn't be happy to let them say on air... It's another outlet, one with different potential and ways of working, but it's still an outlet. 

Don't say anything you don't know to be true. On the other hand, you can't ignore the stories that everyone is talking about but you can't confirm. Label what you know and what you don't know. The massive explosion of social media has made this a very common judgement to make.

Neal Mann, digital news editor, Sky News

Everyone was using it. Stories were developing on social media. Guido Fawkes was using it. A lot of us were winging it, making it up as we went along. 

Again, if you're not happy saying it on air, or even a talk show, you shouldn't be putting it online. However, on social media, there is a level of interaction - there are jokes and humour, and you have to let the journalists join in that. Journalists can act and anchors in the information storm. 

But we have to engage in it. Before they would never engage in a rumour. There were riots of rumours in various towns - our job was to check and say if the rumour was wrong. We have to recognise that social media users aren't stupid. People see other services, so now we have to reference each other.

Katherine Haddon, head of online, English, AFP

People often have more access to social media than tradition media in some other countries.

Twitter is an early warning system for news. International forces have Twitter rows with the Taliban - they're very hot on Twitter and social media generally. 

The agency's chief editors have issued guidelines which boil down to following the same standards as they do for the wire. Reporters must identify them, they must inform line managers of accounts and they avoid tweeting breaking news - because that's their business model.

Tom McArthur, UK editor, Breakingnews.com

New to the landscape - started in 2009, only took on full-time editors as of 2011. They're trying to be positive, fair and get things out - while giving their sources credit.

We encourage our editors to use their personal accounts - but don't say anything you wouldn't say on the site.

Questions

Q. Are your contracts changing to cover ownership of the account?

LK: People got into a terrible state about me taking my followers. You can't take them - they can unfollow you with one click. They're not "property". I never owned the people who followed me. It was an amicable agreement with the BBC.

KA: It's more like a reporter's readers than their contact book. A columnist who's a brand will have an audience follow you.

NM: What are they going to do with it? If they give it to someone else, and the followers don't like them, you've lost anyway.

Q. Breaking news - when should you do it?

LK: As soon as you can, and in the fastest way. If you have a camera, do it on camera. If not, tweet,

KH: You have to take account of your customers - ours are the news companies, not the audience.

NM: But sometimes things drop on Reuters twitter feeds before they do on the wires. We've all got tow phones - our correspondents call it in and tweet it at the same time. It's still quicker on social media.  Court cases we run just off Twitter as its the only way of getting it out.

Francois Nel: Coudl I ask Liz about Facebook Subscribe?

Liz Heron: It is a personal account they start to use for work. I don't really have an answer yet, but I will develop one over the next couple of years.

Q. Are people over-stepping the libel laws on social media?

NM: There was a lot of that during the Jefferies situation. Journalists are getting involved to remind people that there is contempt of court. The key thing in social media is the nodes, the influencers. We often need to step in when a celebrity starts tweeting things.

Q. Is it conceivable that a staff journalist that was completely person, and not used in a work capacity, that they say things on that don't have work consequences?

LK: It probably is if you only put the most vanilla, mundane things in the world on there. And journalist with a byline, a findable name, would find it pretty tough.

KH: It's very difficult. As a journalist you always have to be conscious that whatever you do could be scrutinised. Any march you go on could be interpreted as a statement.

NM: If you look at the language of print journalists and broadcast journalists on Twitter - the print journalists will swear on twitter. Broadcast journalists never do.

Q. Media organisations increasingly rely on freelance staff - what sort of guidelines should they have?

NM: I was freelance for my first three years of using social media. As a freelancer you're more aware. The same advice should apply.

Q. Facebook comments - what do the panel think about different types of commenting?

LK: It is different when you know who people are. Guido Fawkes - very lively comments, and pretty much everyone there is a pseudonym. In the UK we're at an early stage with Facebook and news.

Q. How do you use the services differently?

KH: I keep Facebook for personal stuff - just close friends. And Twitter is for work.

NM: Twitter is faster and more newsy. Facebook is slower, and much more personal. I post music videos I like, for example, not just news. Facebook cogent hangs around much, much longer. Sometimes things stay there for a long while. I look at the key pieces of content, and put those on Facebook.

Martin Belam, The Guardian

It's a way of breaking the cite of having to leave Facebook to visit The Guardian. 77% of visits from Facebook to The Guardian only saw one page. Wanted to improve that.  The more you see your friends faces, the more you use some content, say the Facebook people. Frictionless sharing.

They used their own content API - so they could build the app in about five weeks. They got a lot of negative feedback about the app. Some people are very negative about the idea of Facebook. There are 750m people using Facebook who could be reading our journalism - and aren't. They're over 5.7m installs of the apps. Over 54% of the users are 24 and under - that's an audience they struggle to reach. It's a love it/hate it proposition. Over 25 years olds in the testing sessions refused it. Younger? They installed it straight away. They feel that they're being "educated" rather than wasting their time. Archive content gets a new life. An old story about models and body image has generated 1000 new comments two years after it was published. A contemporary discussion around archive content. Every story becomes a landing page.

They're doing continuous design updates. Facebook has a saying: "move fast and break things". And they do.  The Guardian team delivered the app to Facebook's specification, and Facebook changed it a couple of hours before launch... (and this forced an emergency bug-fix). Forces them to work at Facebook's pace. They do get some revenue from sponsorship in the app.

Timeline - Facebook investing heavily. The success of their move will drive the success of the app.

And they won't attract a young audience with a print product...

Chris Hamilton, BBC

BBC Twitter accounts were "hand-cranked" - they focused the editorial remits of three accounts. Focused on the quality of the tweeting - build on the automated headlines, and don't just do what everyone else is doing. A human voice, but a BBC voice. We needed to "add value". Photos, graphics, links to the correspondents. Taking the best of what the programmes are talking about, and putting it out on these three core accounts. They have follower targets - but engagement metrics are much more important. There are editorial guidelines. They use @names whenever they can. The top tweets rom last year were both from the Japanese Tsunami. Pictures often do fantastically well. Lightening hitting the Eiffel Tower was number four...

They're now working on workflow models - they don't want to be building a separate social media news team.

Google+ - engagement and quality levels are high. Like the NYT, they're finding hangouts very interesting.

Facebook - BBC World News, BBC Hausa, BBC London etc. Each for different audience, so lots of engagement.

They had 7/10 of the most commented/Liked posts from UK media.

Nate Lanxon, WIRED.co.uk

Nothing reminds you to post to Facebook like a giant photo of Mark Zuckerberg. They have a photo which is passed around the office. Whoever has it, is responsible for posting that day. Just using RSS just gets you headlines, and people ignore it. The more people who ignore it, the fewer people see your stuff. You need to be interesting.

They don't get a lot of traffic from Facebook. It's not about archive content - it's about pictures of chainsaws - or random stuff they get from PRs. One day - Facebook went public; not much interest. A chunk of their roof falling in? Loads of interest. Our Facebook page isn't about driving our fans to WIRED - it's about driving WIRED to the fans. Most of their traffic from Facebook is from Likes, not from the fan page. People will share stories based on headlines alone! Move sharing buttons nearer the headline and using Facebook comments are high on their agenda.

Timing: they chose the (arguably) worst times. Recommendations say 8pm and weekends. Their key times are first thing in the morning, at lunch, and 3pm in the afternoon. And finally 5.30pm, for the just-about-to-leave work traffic.

Twitter is better with automation.

Darren Waters, MSN

For MSN it's about managing conversations with millions of people talking at the same time. How do we manage that conversation. The MSN newsroom is a bit bijou. They have to be very strategic about how they use their resources.

How do you make sense of the barrage of information now the balance has tipped towards the audience. We've gone from who we regulate social media to how do we fuel it? Darren is their first head of social. The team all have social contracts with targets, and documentation of what they know. They do best practice sessions for their teams. They remove bots where they make sense. They try to understand the rhythms of their audience, and consolidate accounts (quality not quantity). 500 comments on a post on Facebook - what's the value? We know that if people engage on social media, they'll visit five times more often per month, and spen 7.5 times as long on the site.

They're not using recommendations and trending panels on their site. 90% of their tweets from branded accounts are human-powered. Being human gets 10 times the response. They're getting real traction from liveblogging. Getting readers tweets into their liveblogs makes a huge difference to response. They're moving towards a multi-screen social focus.

They want to develop tools to make sense of social media. baby steps for now, but in the coming months he hopes there will be products that really make use of traditional news skills and live content in one place.

Questions:

Measurement?

DW: using Facebook Insights to monitor success. Drives him mad. You need true metrics, but you also need to educate editorial teams still about what's working and why. We need a tool - Insights plus other data - that tells people why things work.

MB: They use both Insights and Omniture. Can link up Facebook and activity on their own site

CH: Analytics was at the heart of it, for the feedback loop. Facebook Insights plus a bunch of other stuff.

NL: Smaller volume of content, so they're going more on instinct. The use Insights - blessing and curse - and Google Analytics.

Kevin Anderson (moderator): Al Jazeera use Chartbeat

increase engagement on Twitter?

CH: Work out what you can offer that other people are.

MB: LinkedIn is a social media dark horse we're all per-looking

DW: Picking the right content for the audience is key. They post more light-hearted stuff to Facebook and the serious stuff on Twitter.

Klout/Kred?

DW: We've used Klout, but probably just for the sake of measuring things. He's not sure of the value.

NL: Never logs into Klout.

Gabrielle Laine-Peters: If influence is to do with follower numbers, you're getting it wrong. It's the new penis envy.

NL: There was a Twitter rush. People with 1m followers often don't send much traffic.

MB: Is a big fan of algorithms and sci-fi and robots, but thinks that this is a job for people. Human-powered, human judgement.

Any experience in building optimised content for specific communities?

CH: BBC strategy is to focus on the core accounts. (So, uh, no… Very "mainstream" media answer)

General question about different types of content and different content agendas

MB: Facebook doesn't follow the news cycle. They don't do much breaking news or liveblogging in the Facebook apps.

DW: You're getting so much information about the likes and interests of their audiences through Facebook for the first time. How much we react to that in the next 12 to 24 months will be interesting. Will we start commissioning new content based on this incredible level of detail? This real view of the world will be a big challenge to newsrooms.

Some discussion of the frictionless sharing in Facebook, Belam pointed out that there's lots of criticism on Twitter, but the limited number of apps doing it so far means its more obvious. There may also be a generation issue here. Facebook is becoming a web within the web, says Lanxon. Belam says that Facebook now has a weight of numbers that it's going to make a shift like the MySpace to Facebook one very, very hard.

Liz Heron of the New York Times wants to talk about the new social media landscape we find ourselves in - and it's very different than it was a year ago. There are burgeoning amounts of social networks, and Obama is using hangouts on Google+, driving by requests from ordinary people.

400+ NYT journos on Twitter, 50+ using Facebook Subscribe.

2011 was an incredibly newsy year, and brought social media into the new mainstream. The arab spring, natural disasters and the occupy movement all played our on social media. The NYT is using a huge range of social media to push our quality content, while remaining sceptical in their reporting. Slew of training, best practices and worked on social media verification. She's not the only one with platform fatigue... The question is no longer "wether to engage" on social media, but how to distinguish themselves from  others doing it. And how do they scale as new platforms emerge?

The US Presidential Elections are driving this. Livetweeting the debates and primaries is no longer enough. Everyone is doing it. There's noise from other journalists, from everyone else. Instead, they're trying to report in real time. They have a real time fact-checking team, for example. She has a dozen (!) interactive developers on her team. They've built their liveblogs into a one-stop shop for news on the debates as they happen. Tweets are curated from a pre-defined list of people close to the debate. They also pull out the best readers' tweets on the homepage. The media cacophony also deserves its own coverage. Two reporters analyse the media coverage and Storify it - a liveblog of liveblogs. They are using both Facebook and Google+ to gee the readers direct access to the candidates. They also enable genuine two-way conversation between their readers and their journalists.

As the November election approaches, they know they have to keep innovating.

The iEconomy investigative series that looked at the human cost of Apple's manufacturing practices. The name was chosen because it would make a good hashtag - they call this "hashtag science". For this story, they put material out on Chinese networks, and them reverse translated the responses for the US audience.

The key with emerging platforms? Be strategic.

• What are the strengths of the platform?
• What are the big topics?
• How can we distinguish ourselves?

Facebook is a larger network than Twitter - that's why they have been experimenting with Facebook Subscribe, especially foreign correspondents, and the "how you live" desk. The foreign correspondents have a wide audience who are grateful for the chance to interact. One Facebook query on Liz's account garnered 500 responses for a story on depression.

Google+? Its strengths are deep discussion and Hangouts. They're pretty excited about the Hangouts in particular. They're also being strategic on Tumblr and Quora.

Three pieces of advice:

1. Be stragetic
2. Be different
3. Strive for meaningful interactions.

Questions

Using a tool called Mass Relevance - plugin what you want, and out comes a beautiful queue of Tweets. Haven't really looked heavily at archiving.

Lots of debate about measurement of success.  The NYT has journalistic measures and referral measure. And the pay"fence" is designed to be social media-friendly, so all links from social media go straight through. And digital subscriptions are exceeding expectations.

Time spent on social media? It should be integrated into your process, not in addition to it.

Joanna Pieters, writing about meeting the readers of a specialist magazine for the first time:

In a flash, it all made sense. These men were experts. They knew buses and lorries intimately. They got a huge kick out of using their knowledge to build collections with significance to them, show off their expertise and take the rest of the model industry to task. And they read the magazine because it talked to them as experts, taking them seriously and sharing their passion.

This is why good niche blogs and sites work so very well online. Take those words - talked to them as experts, taking them seriously and sharing their passion - and engrave them on your brain as you produce content for niche audiences. If you don't respect them, they won't respect your content.

John Robinson wants to know what we would do if…

* Half of your employees — including those in the newsroom — don’t read the paper (except for their own stories)?

Sadly, that's been the case in pretty much every big magazine I've worked on. News reporters are particularly notorious for never bothering to read the features, in my experience, leading to the occasional embarrassment when the run something in news that was published in a feature a month before…

I've not really felt inspired to comment on the whole "should journalists check facts" furore, because, really, me rolling my eyes doesn't make for great blogging. But I couldn't resist linking to this:

One example: the word “maintenance” seems like it should only have one “a” in it. It should be “maintenence,” right? But it’s not. So is it our job as reporters and editors to spell it correctly?

The Macalope:

And then we’ll go through the whole “alternate-year Apple device disappoints spec-crazy nimrods” rigamarole, as if the entire class of technology pundits suffered blows to the head as small children and can’t remember anything from more than six months ago. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot.

It really would.

A panel discussion the changes in media wrought by the latest technology, moderated by Thomas Crampton. Not surprisingly, Paul-François Fournier, Executive Vice President, Orange Technocentre defines media as, essentially, businesses that produce content, which is a pretty broad definition. Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications & Commerce Group, AOL thinks that keeping traditional media away from the innovative, digital media is vital to stop new efforts being crushed.

Is Techmeme media? Gabe Rivera, Founder & CEO, thinks it is, even though they don't write any of the content. The term "media" is overused, he suggests. When people say "media" they almost always think of broadcast media of various sorts. Bruno Patino, Senior Executive Vice President, Strategy Digital Director, France Télévisions Group & France 5 talks about the evolution of television and people start constructing social conversations online around TV shows as they watch them. This represents a loss of control for the media; they're still in the game, they just don't control it any more. And that's not a bad thing. It maximises the experience.

Rivera suggests that most social media isn't really integrated with existing media, just sort of bolted on the end. Very often tweets are just amplification or repetition. Fournier points out that media is changing on multiple fronts. TV is evolving into the multi-screen experience. Other media is now being published through social networks. There is lots of experimentation, and there will be failures and successes we learn from.

Patino argues that people don't "deliver" the news any more, you give up control of your news when you publish it, and people will absurd it into their networks. The context in which we are telling stories is changing.

Crampton moves on the conversation from social to local. Social is about scale; local is the response. Garlinghouse reminds us that traditional media has struggled to fund local coverage for decades. Patch is AOL's attempt to reverse that - targeted at areas of around 50,000 to 80,000 people. But he thinks Twitter is garbage - or at least he says as much before he starts back-peddling, throwing out the world platform instead. He thinks there's a huge opportunity at the intersection of the social graph, the interest graph and the local graph. Crampton challenges the sustainability of the Patch model, and Garlinghouse says that the experiment will play out over the next few years. Some Patch sites are already profitable.

Scaleability is the key question, says Patino. We used to call local 500k to 600k. That's not local on the web. The ground is changing everywhere, so the old volume business model just breaks.

Alexia Tsotsis from Techcrunch challenges the relevancy of local media. Patch is at about 10m uniques in 18 months - but it's clearly a challenge, says Garlinghouse. But to say that local community is irrelevant is short-sighted at the very least. Patino thinks that we have to find a solution, so that local powers continue to be monitored. But Rivera wouldn't do a local site. There are plenty already - and by definition, there isn't much to aggregate and filter. The abundance just isn't there. Garlinghouse points out that stories of national importance can start in local areas - it's something like citizen journalism curated. The question is: are local merchants interested enough to advertise on the platform?

Is mobile passing the desktop for media yet Probably not, says Rivera. However Twitter says that over 50% of its activity is on mobile, and it's over 30% for Facebook. Garlinghouse would like to see more customisation of news experience based on your social, mobile and interest graphs. Patino certainly thinks mobile is the new frontier for TV and very important. They're looking at iPhone and iPad appellations that allow you to catch up with, and share, TV. And Fournier suggests their DailyMotion deal was driven by similar considerations.