ReporTwitters On Facebook/Wired Reporters

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on December 27th, 2008 in · 1 Comment

Newsitem: We are now on Facebook. Let’s work on a few projects together which involve Twitter and opportunities for reporters and or developers. Ideas and reactions to these projects on Facebook please!

Two ideas:

1) Project:
MELD is a Northern UK initiative that wants teams of min. three people to work together on creative ideas for media clients wishing to get fresh, innovative ideas for their audience relations. Minimum one journalist, two designers per team.

Anyone want to do something with a Twittering reporting type idea?

Meld says its mission is to unite journalists and designers; “Journalists know how to find a story and to tell it well. Interaction designers know how to get that story out to the right audience. MELD will bring the best of both worlds together to find out what happens when the two worlds collide.”

Teams will work on real briefs from Industry partners, including Sky News Online, Haymarket and Johnston Press.

I myself (ave@contentclix.com) for starters am interested in people wishing to conceptualize reportwitters (ie reporters on an assignment, twittering) into a Widget. Any takers? We could collaborate, and present our ideas at Meld. Or to other media outlets.

2) Same idea perhaps, but offer it on a crowdsourcing platform www.ideablob.com. Is a competition that starts every month and get ideas voted up through crowdsourcing. Winner gets 10,000 in cash to start up a venture.

TypePad Gives Away Free Blogs To Journos - Gets Inundated With Emails

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on December 4th, 2008 in · 0 Comments

We must be doing something wrong here at reporTwitters. Six Apart has been inundated with applications from laid off journalists who it promised to grant freebie TypePad blogging accounts.

The what´s called ´TypePad Journalist Bailout Program´ was launched to cheer up reporters that have been made redundant and with dwindling newspaper circulation figures, the number of laid off journos is frighteningly high. Yet even TypePad was taken by surprise - the 20 to 30 slots for the blogging accounts which usually carry a price tag of $150 were gone within seconds.

Apparently around 300 email applications were sent. The lucky journalists are entitled to tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the Six Apart advertising revenue-sharing program. Hey guys, sit in our Newsroom - it´s free and way cosier!

via Aimgroup.com

Local Newsblogger Beats Regular Media With Twitter

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on May 29th, 2008 in and · 2 Comments

brentpic1-2.jpgHarrisonburg is a small Virginia city with a population of less than 50,000. The town wasn’t exactly Happenstance until Brent Finnegan decided to liven things up by supplementing his alternative newsblog, Hburgnews.com, with a communal Twitter account. He called on his readers to text in news and soon he and his cronies outpaced the regular news media covering breaking news. This is an interview with Finnegan about his Twitter project.

-Brent, what’s your Twitter project about?

I decided to try a “Twitter experiment” on hburgnews.com early March after reading comments by new media blogger Jeff Jarvis about Twitter. I wasn’t sure how (or if) it was going to work. That’s why I called it an experiment. The basic idea was that I can’t possibly know everything that’s currently going on in the city and county. Individually, we all occasionally witness events like car accidents, fires, high wind damage, flooding, power outages, police raids, and other “breaking news” as it occurs. I thought the [Twitterized] sum of those eyewitness accounts could be very useful on a local news blog like hburgnews.com
I wasn’t sure how to harness the information, so I asked readers to register for a Twitter account specifically for hburgnews.com. I then used the newspaper blog’s Twitter account to follow participants. I took the “with friends” feed and embedded a flash badge on the newspaper blog.

-What have been major milestones?

Since implementing Twitter in March, there have been several Twitters that have prompted breaking news stories! Collectively, we were able to move that information much faster than the [competing] local media could keep up with.

-Has there been attention from the regular media?

I know that reporters from the three local media outlets are aware of the Twitter experiment, but I don’t think they are planning on implementing one themselves. We have one newspaper, one TV news station, and one AM radio station that covers local news.

-Can others replicate your system, should they be interested?

The beauty of utilizing Twitter on the news blog is that the readers can play an active role in reporting the news as they see it happen. It’s a huge leap in the evolution of citizen journalism.
The downside to the way we’re implementing Twitter is that Twitter is essentially set up for one user. With Gmail, you can set up as many accounts as you need for different purposes. If someone already has a personal Twitter account, they can’t use their cell phone for their hburg Twitter account. Other local Twitter users are currently excluded from the hburg Twitter because they also post non-news related content.

Interview With Marilín Gonzalo, An Ex Twitter Newspaper Reporter

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on May 25th, 2008 in and · 1 Comment

This is the second profile of a reporTwitters.com member. Marilín Gonzalo (twitter, blog) is a rather active Twittering journalist from Argentina living in Madrid. She was involved in the web’s first Twitter-based newspaper, 20Palabras.com. This interview focuses in on that project.

marilin-Marilín, Who are you professionally?
I’m an online journalist. I’ve done TV, radio and press, but since two years I’m focusing on internet content.

> -What did you study in school?
I have a degree in social communication and broadcasting.

> -What’s 20palabras and how long has it been going?
20palabras was an amazing journalism experiment based on communicating via Twitter. It started on August 2007 and went on during six months. It was the first time that a group of unknown-to-each-other scattered journalists in different cities sent their news over the internet and mobile phones to keep an up-to-date website with the latest information from the place where things were happening, without a centralized newsroom.

> -What news did the project cover mainly and why?
20palabras was the first Argentinian news website made entirely for mobile devices, thus it was focused mainly to an Argentinian audience. Its different sections covered an array of issues going from traffic jams in Buenos Aires to stock exchange fluctuations in Tokyo. Around 20 journalists could transmit their impression at the very moment they got the news, in just a few words (20 palabras means 20 words).

> -What was your role in it all?
Based in Madrid, I reported for the international news section.

> -Have you published tweets yourself alongside full length stories ever?
Of course, I tweet everyday since over a year now. I have found in Twitter a powerful tool for communication, on both sides, it’s a source of news, and it’s also a way to share a piece of data with the world. Maybe you don’t have the big scoop, but you have some useful info that completes the frame for the whole landscape. Maybe you just ring a bell, and that’s great, and when there are so many interesting people in here, the speed of it all is very interesting. Unfortunately, most of my jobs don’t allow tweeting, or somehow the information that you are giving out is controlled. But I think I would definitely Twitter all the time professionally if it was allowed.

> -How do you mainly interact with your Twitter audience?
I tweet a lot. Twitter has created a new impulse to write and to interact far more. I think we used to write blogs before, but our conversation was somehow slow, and lately not really interesting.
In my experience, people on Twitter point so many new issues out and not only subjects but opinions, meanings and clues about what’s happening, that it’s just not possible for me go one day without writing. And now I’m talking about my blog, cause when I want to resume, to gather information about something being heard/said, I go back to my blog and write about it.

mariliin2> -What do you think the opportunities are for creating (an independent) Twitter service that newspapers would be interested in?
Everybody wants to be on Twitter. Twitter is the hype tool now, but what is more, Twitter has made us say things, communicate in a different way, making things shorter, quicker, more interesting.
Twitter is an amazing new tool but it’s not so easy to use it as a promotion channel as many communication agencies like to think. It can be really tricky if you think you can control what it’s said about something. There’s a huge amount of virality involved and you should really be experienced to make a good use of it.
There have been some attempts to create independent alike services to cover specific news or events, but they haven’t had major success. Maybe because the valuable thing in Twitter is not only the tool but also the community around it.

> -What do you think are good examples of Twitter supplemented reporting and why?

Twitter has proven to be *the* tool for conventions, big events and also mass media transmissions like TV programs or special outcomes. Twitter is great to serve as that backchannel, and here in Spain lately we had the experience during our last presidential elections. The two main candidates had a debate on TV, and the debate was so hot on twitter, with the comments of journalists, bloggers and the rest of twitterers from the blog community, that it really made a difference in the way that people, at least internet people, took part on the political debate. And that interest spread out in blogs and other websites.

> -How do you see Twitter/microblogged news reporting evolving?
I’ve always seen that direct link between twitter and journalism. So when they called me to be part of 20palabras.com staff it seemed so logic that it would work, now or in the future, that I said yes without hesitating. There was no business model at that moment, and we did it cause we just wanted to make it happen.
In those six months the project improved. We reached 20 thousand visitors, many suscribers and a lot of interested people. But unfortunately it didn’t get a valid business model and most of the staff were engaged in other projects. So we decided to stop it. 20 palabras showed the potential of a twitter-news-style for journalism. You have to understand that we did not simply relay headlines of news articles, but that we expressed the news itself in only 20 words.

> -Do you ever rely on Twitter for information?
Not completely of course. As a journalist, I always check the sources before publishing. Most of the big news issues recently I first read on Twitter. Twitter is especially useful as a complement with other tools, as blogs and media, but not as a standalone device.

Contact INFO @ reporTwitters.com if you want to be profiled as a Twittering reporter here too.

Finally The News Media Wake Up To Twitter

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on May 19th, 2008 in and · 1 Comment

Newspapers appear to have finally have noticed that Twitter is a useful tool. Sadly, it took the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province for the message to hit home. The BBC and Reuters have put developers on creating an alert system scanning Twitter and other social-media such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook for breaking news items, much the same way as anyone can do (read this reporTwitters blogpost for hints).

What’s interesting however is that both Reuters and the BBC not only want to get the news alerts first but also plan to get access to witnesses’ tweets, photos and videos. I am still busy finding out how they’re setting it up but would guess that they have trained journalists dedicated to Twitter.

Most other media can be described as having just woken up to Twitter. Their hype over Twitter’s use as a reporting device is still pretty much just that; mere hype. In the past days editors have gone haywire over the medium that’s faster than they themselves as well as the official seismic agency, but it’s unclear if they’re getting in on the game directly themselves. Virtually none of the established papers tapped into direct Chinese earthquake information that they said was so readily available. Only a few one- off Tweets were included in newspaper reports featuring social media content about the earthquake.

The decision to adopt Twitter in newspaper coverage tends to mimick the very same processes as you see elsewhere; people exhibit an interest in Twitter, leave it for a while and then become major addicts. Those editors that have made it to stage three tend to be totally crazy about the tool.

Good examples of a converts are BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker and Guardian journalist Charles Arthur. Baker makes the point that despite ‘all the drivel’ on Twitter, what’s making it a powerhouse of proportion is first and foremost the fact that its user base;has been exploding recently.

“The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here’s why I’m looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers”,

writes Baker. That’s very true; Web analytics company Compete reported that Twitter’s traffic virtually doubled between February and April to almost 1.2 million users. What’s more important is that the visitors’ time spent on Twitter quadrupled during that month.

Unlike Business Week and Google’s earlier complaints about blogging’s diminished use for editors because there are so many of them, Baker says the sheer numbers game is to Twitter’s advantage. Why? Well, you get instant replies to any question asked! Baker asked his readers some questions concerning using Twitter, including

“Should we all be Twittering?”

He got over 200 replies within seconds. Any reporter would agree that that’s invaluable.

The Guardian has also definitely woken up to Twitter’s true potential and is well into relaying social media content. The paper has been raving about Twitter’s use in the Chinese earthquake, underlining that the

“service has proved its worth: the earthquake in China was, it’s claimed,
on Twitter before it was on the US Geological service’.

What’s more, the paper recently published a guide for
those ’scrathing [their] head’ (ie us here at ReporTwitters) outlining the benefits of Twitter. Charles Arthur says

“The applicability of Twittering to doing pretty much anything - which certainly includes reporting - is very interesting. The other day I was thinking that the first big news event where we talked about “the internet” being first to transmit the news was the Kobe
earthquake of January 1995. Many people say that blogs were preeminent after the terrorist attacks of September11. Then of course mobiles used for video (and Flickr photos) came into their own during the July7 bombings in London. Maybe this has been Twitter’s media proving. (Also, what events have we missed out where mobiles or the web proved themselves?)”

Reporters at Venturebeat.com not only use the medium one way (posting its news items on a Twitter account like most news organizations do) but publishs their Tweets in their publication, exemplifying Twitter’s use in fast paced journalism;

In an article
assessing just how mainstream Twitter is, Venture Beat’s MG Siegler says

“We’ve seen this before. Last year, several smaller earthquakes were reported first on TwitterThe mainstream media largely ignored this fact, but it happened nonetheless. Now, with so many people thinking about
Twitter valuations, and whining about Twitter not being mainstream, the service is starting to garner attention for the wrong reasons. At the end of the day, what difference does it make if it’s mainstream or not? It’s very useful for situations like this, and it’s actually helping people. We saw that during the San Diego fires last year as well.”

That comment is great because of course it’s all about the information itself and not about Twitter. Which could however do with the staunch backing of existing information networks as embodied in the news media. That point is underscored by Mr Siegler shortly afterwards, when he publishes an obligatory
complaints letter to Twitter for service downtime, published in the San Francisco Industry Standard.
It will be interesting to see where it all goes. In many ways we’ve completed a circle, and news authorities are thinking hard and deep about the implications of citizen reporting.

Jeff Jarvis pointed out in the Media
Guardian where the game is at, saying “Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coalmine”, when referring to the Reuters and BBC initiatives to develop tools for scanning social media.

One big question is whether leaving portions of news gathering in the hands of random individuals is a good idea. News coverage might be no longer about

“waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over”,

as Jarvis says, but about the random people close to the scene who

“will still go and do what journalists do: report,
verify facts, package, and take their own pictures.”

In this light, an important assessment of the Twitter explosion for what it’s worth in newspaper context took place a few weeks before the earthquake rocked China. It was a study published in New
Scientist magazine Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Leysia Palen, into the use of social networks during the California wildfires last October and the Virginia Tech shootings last April.

Palen concluded that

“Instead of rumour-mongering, we see socially produced accuracy.”

And she added that

“Members of the public play an absolutely critical role in disaster response.”

The study was damaging for the established media, pointing out
inaccuracy and distortions.

“The mass media were furthermore deemed unreliable because they had no access to remote areas from which website users with an internet connection were reporting and took to reporting on the sensational issues, such as fires close to celebrities’ homes. Now we’re seeing what happens when you superimpose a technological layer on top of that,”

Palen said. Ouch. It’s only one study of course and I would imagine that there’s plenty of scope for opposing material, but nevertheless.

Palen’s article in New Scientist had the invigorating headline “Emergency 2.0 is coming to you”. That very phrase ‘emergency 2.0′ sounds just right. Perhaps the only thing that a clever media outlet needs to do is to capitalize on an already existing capacity, ie people’s urge to report emergencies. Create a site for just emergencies and build on the self organization.

Newspapers Bend Over Backwards In Praise Of Twitter

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on May 15th, 2008 in and · 1 Comment

I have been scratching my head the last few days numerous times because of all the Google News alerts about the established news media’s interest in China Twitters.

I am the proud possessor of some sort of Iphone (an Orange SPV C550 - fell in the water twice, blowdried it twice, still works fine) and have emails coming to me via this thing the whole day, wherever I am.

The reason I am mentioning my phone is because mobility very important in reporting these days. The situation in China underscores this. But it’s not the first time this year that Chinese grassroots efforts have prompted me to keep my phone powered up the whole time. When the protests in Tibet broke out recently, I was hugely impressed at the efforts of a few Twitterers in China to tell the outside world was was going on and created a Google News alert to read the latest news stories citing them. On my IPhone. Hoping to sympathize with their blood in the streets reports from the safety of my back garden. You know the feeling that spurs such interests. It’s a mixture between toys for girlz and a craving for new adventure that’s ever so justified because it inspires real work activity too.

I had expected a flurry of newspaper reports about the Chinese/Tibetan Twitters but somehow the news remained slow. So to help the effort along a bit, I wrote a blog post outlining some helpful hints by the Chinese/Tibetan Twitterers to Western editors wishing to get in contact with them and their cronies.

I copied and pasted the blog post into an email to be sent out to 200 editors around the globe. The next days, not a single response. Also virtually no Google news alerts about the Chinese Tibetan Twitter activists. I guess it was due to the success of the Chinese authorities fooling journalists taking them on a trip to China to show how things work the Chinese way.

Those that went on the trip were mainly reporters working for tiny news organizations who promised not to break the hugely irrational rules the Chinese imposed. The trickery is interpreted by the Chinese as implicit approval of their censorship. Let’s hope this will firmly have been relegated to the annals of history by the time the Olympics are finished.

Here at ReporTwitters we’re watching out with a keen eye for that news development that will convince editors of the glorious merits of Twitter as a reporting tool. The proverbial ‘big break’ for reporTwitters will have to be something that will lead editors to adopt technology tracing down any twitter user anywhere and get them to report back to the newspaper. Within the space of five minutes.

It is very difficult marketing such a service to editors by means of mailshots or a one size fits all soap box message because every newspaperhas their own peculiar online strategy. All the more reason to focus on big events and rely on this self evidence.

This might have been what’s happened over the last few days during the Chinese earthquake. The incessant newspaper reports praising of the role of Twitter in covering the Chinese earthquake are however somewhat baffling.

Some people analyzing the Twitter obsession with the Chinese earthquake attribute a lot of it to Robert Scoble. This top Twitter user in terms of followers dedicated plenty of attention to the disaster. Not without reason; the earthquake was reported on Twitter before it was reported anywhere else. That’s a big deal in itself. But the Scoble effect established or underpinned some very interesting dynamics which center all around authority and individuals.

I at first was inclined to believe this to be rather bad news. Thinking ReporTwitters to be doomed because the mechanisms of what’s agenda setting and what not are hardly any different from what determines what makes news in the newspapers themselves. I had been hoping that a big event itself would dictate what’s newsworthy and even though I like Scoble and value his opinion, I dreaded the Scoble effect.

But what is all the more surprising to me now is that newspapers don’t stop producing articles about Twitter’s role in the Chinese earthquake coverage. And singing its praises! True, Twitter is an emergency tool at its very roots, and it’s consoling that it’s obviously strongest in its original function.

I wonder if the event will lead to a renewed interest in using Twitter in newspaper reporting. Perhaps the needs that modern newspapers are meant to have for a direct connection with readers is slowly evaporating as more and more online activities go underway. Some newspaper reporters themselves are taking on new reporting styles very similar to your off beat Twitter witness. Take for instance the Guardian’s Matthew Weaver’s report on the Chinese earthquake.

Rather than getting in touch with grassroots reporters, something online newsventures like Ohme are banking on, newspapers are taking to facilitating their own staff with the tools and tell them to adopt new reporting styles that are even quirkier than the online manifestationings of popular individuals.

In the next few days I will be making an inventory of the newspapers comments on how useful Twitter is and compare it with their online plans. Hopefully that will yield some rational inspiration for what moves to make next.

What To Do When You’re A Reporter Wishing To Tout Your Expertise

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on April 29th, 2008 in · 1 Comment

It doesn’t often happen that reporters are stuck for subjects to write about, but as the online world increasingly harnesses us to be equipped with magnificent tools for just about every thinkable situation it should come as no surprise that there are dedicated websites sourcing inspiration.

To find expert academics on any topic, try ExpertSources. I have tried and tested these people with much satisfaction, both on the quality of the experts (most of them are people that have PHd’s in just that obscurest of issues that you happen to wonder about on a blue Monday morning) and the swiftness of the service. All the experts signed up there are eager for press citations and have consented to answering journalist queries as fast as they can - that’s why.
Journalists themselves can of course also sign up as experts.

Same goes for a motivational speaker website called TheRightAddress, also a UK based service. It offers an impressive roster of speakers whose bios are an inspiration to read. The list contains an Olympic Gold medalist, a former EasyJet marketing director, the jungle explorer Benedict Allen, Phil Ashby, who’s marketed as a genuine hero, scores of business people and there’s even an environment professor.

You can either book a motivational speaker directly or add them to your wishlist. I checked to see if there were any writers or journalists in the directory and found only a few broadcast personalities. This is where TheRightAddress is outstanding though. It provides very helpful advice to determine what kind of speaker you actually are after. If you follow the pointers, this lands you not with a one size fits all personality but rather with a person whose life experiences make them tailored to your audience perfectly.

That is not to say that reporters with some track record to speak of shouldn’t sign up. The rewards are handsome; therightaddress charges around GBP750 to 1,000 per event and I would imagine that a sizeable portion of that goes to the speaker. No mean feat for a bit of decent work and a networking opportunity that’s healthily challenging.

Newspaper Editors Answer Questions About The Future Of Journalism

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on April 28th, 2008 in · 0 Comments

The Editor’s Weblog is publishing impressive interviews with an lengthy list of newspaper editors about the future of journalism. Issues discussed include the impact of the digital revolution on journalism, the rise of reader participation in news coverage and the question whether print newspapers are likely to survive until after 2014.

Among the editors interviewed are
- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

It is hard to determine the trends without generalising to the beyonds and that is why I recommend you read the interviews separately. They provide key insights from the myth busters who themselves are increasingly misunderstood.

Free Proofreading Services At Puffread

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on April 8th, 2008 in · 8 Comments

The beauty of online web2.0 writing projects is that many start out as unpaid collaborations and turn into profitable businesses in no time. A proofreading service called Puffread.com is worth checking out for both its high quality services and its business model.

Writers can submit articles to Puffread for free and paid proofreading services. The quality of the free deal is excellent because of Puffread’s brilliant business model which allows voluntary proofreaders to progress to paid editing assignments. That means that the proofreaders will try their utmost to achieve a consistent zero errors track record. Writers can have their articles proofread by more than one proofreader, all for free. Or if you still feel iffy, you can simply submit your work to the professional section and just pay up.

puffread.png

Google To Organize Human Ignorance

Posted by Angelique van Engelen on April 1st, 2008 in · 0 Comments

This isn’t this year’s April fools joke. Google CEO Eric Schmidt a few hours ago announced the company’s plans to organize all human ignorance. The project is touted to be a computational task that can only be feasibly undertaken by Google. When it’s completed Google users will know automatically because next to the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on the search option will be a button which reads ‘I’m Feeling Ignorant’.

At a recent press conference, Schmidt said he’d asked the Google engineers to think of the largest project they would be able to undertake. Several engineers apparently answered that organizing human ignorance is a task no other company could undertake. “Admittedly, human ignorance is vast — perhaps unlimited – but our goal is to organize all of it. Consistent with our mobile strategy, we aim to provide anytime, anywhere ignorance”, Schmidt told reporters.

Google has already tested the scales here, organizing only a small portion of human ignorance. Turned out it’s not going to be a mean feat. “The process so strained our servers that they melted the steel shelves they sit on. We had to take the servers off-line to cool them down”. Schmidt said.

The advantages that this leap in the dark offers are manifold. If a person were embarking on a particular task they could use the Google created repository to map out a path of enlightenment. “Students young and old can expose themselves to ignorance on a scale never before imagined. People will be able to walk around ignorant. Dazed and ignorant. In any country. At any time”, reports PC World.

Schmidt said he’s positive that there’s no other company competing on this front. “I can say with confidence that we know of no other company undertaking this task.”

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