Archive for the ‘ Social Media ’ Category

5
3
Feb

Real-time success! A Live Tweeting Update

Today was one of those days that makes you remember why you love this business so much. And if ever a case was made for every reporter in every newsroom having a smartphone, today was it.

When I walked into the newsroom this morning, the publisher was talking to the city editor and our temporary mobile journalist about a call he’d gotten from a local high school. His son attends the school and they were informing parents about an apparent shooting threat. They told parents they could keep their kids at home or come pick them up if they had already been dropped off. Heavily armed police officers were guarding the school and calls were starting to come into the newsroom from panicked parents.

Since we are on Day Three of our live tweeting experiment, our intrepid journo with the Droid headed up to the school to see what he could find out. As soon as he arrived, the information started flowing right onto our front page. And it was an awesome sight to behold. He was able to get in and speak to the plethora of parents who had arrived to pick up their kids and find out more information from the police and school officials.

The next thing I know, I’m getting a flood of Facebook friend requests (our Twitter updates flow to our Facebook page) from people following the story on our website. When they held an impromptu press conference to assure parents their kids would be safe to come back to class, Jack used Qik on his Droid to send it live as it happened. When it ended, I was able to embed the video right into the full story another reporter wrote when all the excitement died down.

We were able to tweet – as the words “the suspect has been arrested” as the words were coming out of the Administrator’s mouth, flowing it to our site and thus making our leap into real time news. It was incredible to behold and the best part is the entire newsroom, from my usual ‘bah humbuggers’ to the ones who’ve embraced it, could finally see all of this in action.

I think it’s one thing to talk about the Hudson River landing and Twitter’s role there, or Twitter’s role with Haitian relief to these folks, but it’s simply not going to “sink in” until they can see it in action locally like they did this morning.

It’s been an awesome morning. I will stipulate that by also saying I am terribly glad nobody was hurt and that the threats never came to fruition. My daughter graduated from this very school only last year.

Yesterday, we held an impromptu meeting to discuss some issues with this experiment and to see what could be improved. Some lessons from that – and from this morning are below:

  • How can we flow images and video to our own site instead of sending traffic away to Twitpic or Qik? – It can be done, but it’s clunkier than simply using the tools built into apps like Twidroid or Tweetie. I think we’d have to build an app from the ground up, which is beyond our ken. And Barbie.
  • Will a non-Twitter user understand how to disseminate the information we are sending into our Juitter extension? Does it become confusing to follow when the latest tweets are on top? – I think today proved that this really isn’t an issue. I have yet to hear from anyone who was glued to our coverage today complain about the order in which tweets arrived.
  • Reign in the ‘casual observations’ such as “I’m moving on someplace else” or “Bob left the room”. – When reporting news on our front page, we should keep it to the news and leave off the ambiance a little. This is fine for regular tweeting, but maybe not so much on our front page. I haven’t decided whether I agree with this yet. Still pondering.
  • In today’s big news story, when reporting real-time, avoid phrases like “I’m hearing that ….” and reporting rumors. – I’m of two minds on this. I can see that a newspaper reporting ‘I spoke to a lady who says her kids tell her students carry guns to school’ might give credence to false information. On the other hand, one of our reporters said that when you’re reporting live on the scene, the rumors become part of the story. I can see that. I think it’s a very fine line, though, between ‘just the facts’ and reporting the mood and observations of a scene like that.

What do you think?

5
1
Feb

Live tweeting. An all-day experiment

For the next two weeks, The Independent will be live tweeting all day, every day. What the hell am I talking about? Don’t I already tweet all day every day?

Not like this.

We had the crazy idea to spend 8 hours a day (barring travel time) each weekday traveling around the town an tweeting what’s happening right now in Grand Island. From pothole repairs in the cold to a trailer fire, our Presentation editor, Jack Sheard,  (also known as the only guy in the office with a smartphone – a Verizon Droid to be exact) will go out and about either with a reporter or photographer, or on his own and cover our town.

And we will feed those tweets into a beachfront spot on the front page of our website

Today is Day One.

What have we learned so far?

  • That Yahoo Pipes don’t like it if you send them too many search queries, so we had to remove the twitpic feed.
  • That the Twitter account we wanted to use for this, @GIRightNow, won’t feed into Juitter properly and we have no idea why. So Jack is using his own account for this, which works perfectly fine. Go figure. It’s probably some API annoyance with @GIRightNow being a new account or something silly like that.
  • That we have “dead air” so to speak while Jack is driving. Although, it seems like dead air to us because we’re watching this closely, but it probably doesn’t to the average, casual reader stopping by the page. Even so, we’re going to use the dead time to point folks to parts of our website that they might not have known existed.
  • That filling 8 hours a day in our small-ish city might be quite a task :)

There will be more lessons learned I am sure and I’ll either update this post or start a new one with those as we go. Here are some questions we’ve had about this experiment:

What’s the point of it? A new way to create stickiness on the website and drive pageviews (we hope).

What happens when the two weeks are up? We hope to show the value of Twitter for our readers and to our newsroom (and possible advertisers) by being able to get the news (the important stuff and the casual ‘why are they fixing potholes in the Winter’ stuff) to our readers and further brand us as the go-to source for local news and information. After we see how this experiment goes, we may decide to find a permanent spot on the website for the latest tweets and incorporate more news that may not make it online or into print there from all of our reporters.

How can you spare the time to do this? We just had to make the time, cover shifts and work as the awesome team we all are to be able to do this. We feel it’s important to experiment. It’s better to try and fail than not try at all. Most of all, we want to improve our readers’ experience when they visit our website.

Keep an eye on us. We’re doing good things.

13
21
Jan

Tools you can use

Right now is a great time to be a geek. And to be a geek in a newsroom is even better. The amazing array of tools and websites available to make your life and your job easier has never been better. Below is a list of tools I really love, tools I wish I had access to, and tools I think would be fantastic in the newsroom. Some will be obvious if you’ve read any of my blog here and some things might surprise you. For example, I do not own a smartphone (GASP! THE HORROR!) but I would give my eye teeth for one. Having said that, I do manage okay with my regular old cell phone.

On with the list.

Tools I can’t live without:

Twitter. Obviously. Not only the service itself, but the huge assortment of third-party apps you can use with Twitter to really maximize its usefulness. Services like AudioBoo, Twitpic, Twitvid, and now Post.ly (which is quickly becoming my favorite) really make the Twitter experience – and the social experience – rich and satisfying.

I’ll break down these services:

AudioBoo: Simply the best option for posting brief audio clips online. Think of it as a micro-podcast. Uses include breaking news alerts, quick interviews, movie reviews, How-to tips (any kind of tips really), event coverage… the list goes on. Take a look at their Featured Boos to get a good idea of how folks are using it. The beauty of it is how easy they let you embed and share your Boos – if you can share or embed a YouTube video, you can share or embed a Boo.

You can Boo via their gorgeous iPhone app (it works just as well with an iPod Touch, but you’ll need Apple’s headphones/mic combo to do so.); You can upload or record a Boo right from your PC, and they now offer an app for the Droid as well (from reading the user reviews there, the app may need some tweaking still.) I love AudioBoo.

TwitPic: This service is a bit more subjective, depending on what you’ve got for a cell phone. Those of you with a spiffy smartphone have a lot of photo options such as YFrog or Tweetphoto. Personally, I hate YFrog because of its slow loading times, sometimes photos don’t load, and the site is too “busy” for my tastes.

For my part, I adore TwitPic. It works with any phone that takes photos, is as easy as emailing to a special address, and can handle large bandwidth loads well these days. I have a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone. I’d love a Droid or iPhone, but right now, both are cost-prohibitive for me. But, my little Virgin phone has served me well. I’ve used it extensively on vacations, for everyday ‘OMG look at all the snow!’ pictures, and I’ve done a little reporting for the paper with it.

Twitvid: I cannot get over how simple it has become to get video out there so quickly. Twitvid is just one of a number of excellent services out there, such as Qik and 12Seconds and Posterous (more on Posterous in a bit). Twitvid happens to be easiest for me to use because again, I don’t have a spiffy-cool smartphone. For those of you lucky people who do, Qik is awesome because you can also freaking STREAM VIDEO right from your phone. How cool is that?

But I use my trusty Flip Ultra, and upload to Twitvid as soon as I’m back at my computer and bingbangboom it’s uploaded and out there. The website allows you to post from your camera, from your phone, you can email it, or record from a webcam, and the ability to share the videos across multiple platforms is a plus.

Cover It Live: I cannot say enough wonderful things about Cover it Live. I’ve had so much fun with this amazing software for a long time now and tried many different ways to make it useful for my paper. It’s perfect for covering breaking stories, interviews, debates, live events (similar to radio doing ‘remotes’ on location), Q&A’s, and really just look at their site for more examples.

My newspaper’s owners require us to moderate the hell out of everything which can be a huge hindrance. But Cover It Live makes this dead easy without making people feel like they’re being moderated. The producer sees each comment before it ‘goes live’ and can choose whether or not to let it through. If a participant is trusted, the producer can allow them to comment unmoderated.

Cover It Live has so many features that will rock your socks. Feed in Twitter updates via user or hashtag, stream live video, you can drop ads in, upload photos into the chat, polls, a newsflash/scoreboard feature, replays, live editing (to fix all those pesky typos on the fly), and so much more. Here is the full feature list. Seriously, if I had to recommend one service (apart from Twitter :D ) it would be Cover it Live.

Posterous: This website is really amazing. As of today (January 21st, 2010) it has gotten even better with a new edition that I will talk about in just a moment. First, Posterous makes posting a blog, a video, an audio clip, or pictures so simple my grandmother could do it. Ok, maybe not my grandmother because she’s never touched a computer, but really, any technophobe would be able to handle this. All they need to know how to do is send an email with attachments.

That’s the beauty of Posterous. It magically takes your email attachments, be they audio, video or JPGs or just plain old text and turns them into slick blog posts which you can then share across a whole slew of popular platforms.

For a newsroom, Posterous is turning out to be an ideal way to gather user-generated content from your readers. By giving them a special email address associated with your paper’s Posterous site, readers can simply email you their bad weather/cutest puppy/sports photos and videos. You have full moderation control as well. The only drawback I have found with Posterous so far is that because it’s email, be prepared to deal with spam.

Today, Posterous announced the addition of Post.ly which lets you easily upload and tweet your multimedia stuff. Fantastico!

Facebook: Ahhh Facebook. Forget MySpace. Blech. A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. But for the purposes of a newspaper, it’s a good idea to be where your readers are no matter what the platform is.

Send your paper’s Twitter updates to Facebook. Let people share photos, videos, or links with you there. Join in on any comment threads that get started. Just like Twitter, the most important thing you can do is interact with your fans/friends/readers.

Don’t have anyone you can spare to manage your Social Media aspect for the paper? Spread it out among the staff. But this is important – don’t neglect it or ignore it if you don’t understand it. It will only hurt you in the end.

Tools that would rock in the newsroom:

A smartphone of some kind: I think every newsroom should equip their staff with an iPhone/Droid/Nexus. One of my coworkers just got a Droid (iPhones are not available in our area) and we’re both convinced that it is the single greatest tool a journalist could have.

As it is right now, I’ve got to carry my Flip, my cell phone and my iPod Touch which normally isn’t a big deal, but as I discovered on a vacation last year, juggling all of that while trying to capture a moment is hard. One phone to rule them all, I say!

Publish2: One of the best ways to collaborate with fellow journalists and aggregate links and stories for your readers. It’s a wonderful tool that I’m having trouble getting my newsroom interested in.

Just take a look at the sheer number of journalists you can collaborate with: P2 Directory

Some of the tools you get access to include a fabulous WordPress plugin, a browser bookmarklet to make sharing easier, widgets, and access to the Publish2 Ning network where you can bounce ideas, ask for help, share your own knowledge with so many journalists it’s not even funny.

Tools I wish I had access to:

iSites: Newspapers need to get on the ball with a decent smartphone app. I know the bigger newspapers have either paid a developer or have one in-house that can create gorgeous apps. I am jealous of them. But for smaller market papers who do not have that kind of budget, iSites feels like a decent solution. There are similar sites, such as DoApps.com, but after sifting through their blog I could find no pricing information whatsoever. That tells me it’s likely very expensive (and if not, why not post your pricing in a visible spot?)

iSites will create an iPhone  app, and beginning in early February according to their excellent live support person, a Droid app right away, and take care of the submission headaches for you. For a flat fee of $25, You get a lovely app fed by your RSS feeds. You can categorize by feed and if you wish to monetize it, you can pay a reasonable $99 per year fee and include AdMob in your App. I really like this solution and I’m hoping to get it approved for my newspaper.

Let me know in the comments what tools you love, what tools you wish you could use, and which ones would rock your newsroom!