Using Facebook for a TV investigation: Proof that social media are great reporting tools.

Digital note-taking tools: A review of free and low-cost software to help you keep track of information.

How to learn social media skills at mid-career: A three-point plan for getting up to speed on social media.

Is there any hope for quality in local TV news?: Review of a documentary that paints a gloomy picture.

Why journalists should learn to love data: Tips and tools for working with data that can lead you to great stories.

Do-it-yourself interactive graphics: How to use ManyEyes.

Recommended journalism textbooks: Originally posted in 2008, an updated list leading off with the second edition of Advancing the Story.

Secrets of the TV stations of the year: The shared newsroom culture and personal connections behind the three 2011 winners.

How to interview children: A tip sheet on how to talk to kids on camera.

Resolve to be a more enterprising reporter: What is takes to turn better stories (posted on New Year’s Eve 2010).

What did I learn by looking back at this list? It seems pretty obvious that tips and how-to posts are most popular with NewsLab regulars, so one of my goals for this year is to bring you more of what you’re looking for. If you have specific requests, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s to a terrific 2012.

This was the year that Al Jazeera English made its mark in the U.S. with its coverage of the Arab Spring, says the Huffington Post. It was also a terrible year for NPR, as top bosses were ousted and the network got a big story terribly wrong–falsely reporting the death of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Biggest interview scoops of 2011? HuffPo gives credit for most of its top 10 to TV networks, with ABC in the lead for snagging the first interview with Giffords, among others. Also on the list, NBC’s Bob Costas’ interview with ex-Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, which Costas later said came as a complete surprise and was set up at the last minute by Sandusky’s lawyer. Maybe it belongs in a different category: scoops that fall in your lap.

In television, it was a year of departures, says Tom Jicha of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. In TV news, he highlights the end of Katie Couric’s less than stellar five-year run as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I’d add a few more.

• Meredith Vieira stepped down from NBC’s Today Show, also after five years. “It wasn’t working for me in terms of my personal life,” she said.
• Christiane Amanpour was eased out as host of ABC’s This Week just over a year into her tenure with the broadcast still mired in third.
• Keith Olbermann, unceremoniously dumped by MSNBC, found a new home for Countdown, doing the same shtick for fewer viewers, on Current TV.
• Glenn Beck, boycotted by advertisers, parted ways with Fox News and started his own Web channel.

So many anchors and reporters left CNBC this year, one critic wondered about “brain drain.” And there was one more memorable departure–Andy Rooney, the longtime curmudgeon-commentator for CBS’s 60 Minutes, died in November.

Broadcast-related entries on Mashable’s list of top digital journalism events include the rise to Twitter stardom of NPR’s Andy Carvin and a new emphasis on mobile delivery, calling CNN’s acquisition of the iPad app Zite ”arguably the biggest mobile move by a news organization.”

The list of biggest journalism gaffes of the year, courtesy of HuffPo, includes several recent whoppers, including Fox News’ use of an Obama photo to illustrate GOP poll results and NBC’s Chuck Todd flipping the bird on air. There were plenty of local screw-ups too, including the Minnesota anchor whose slurring newscast video went viral who was later arrested for DWI. And the Minneapolis station “investigation” that claimed dog meat was for sale in New York’s Chinatown apparently based on a reporter’s having misheard the word “duck.”

For my in-depth take on more serious trends in local TV news, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer. I’m writing that chapter again for the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report, The State of the News Media, due out in March.

“Lord, no,” says Jen Lee Reeves of KOMU-TV, who’s on the faculty at the University of Missouri.  ”You can teach yourself anything. You just need a little quiet time.”

At this week’s Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans, Reeves shared a simple, three-point plan for getting up to speed: play, create and connect.

“Jump in and play with free stuff,” she advised. ”Share what you love.”

Start by setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, if you don’t already have them, and use the same picture and name everywhere. Make sure you create a profile with your work information on it. Consider claiming your name on about.me and point people to your content.The point is to establish yourself online.  ”If you call someone to interview them, they are totally going to stalk you,” Reeves said. “If you don’t have a presence online they’re going to be suspicious.”

Next, build a website or a blog and start writing about something you care about, whether it’s cooking or working out or something else. Reeves blogs about her daughter, who was born with one hand. What has she learned from that experience? “It made me better about doing journalism,” she said. “I learned how to build a community on the Web and Facebook and I’m now using those skills for the newsroom.”

If getting personal online feels uncomfortable, write about the experience of reporting a story and link to your own work.  ”I wouldn’t republish a story, but taking a screen shot is perfectly OK,” Reeves said. In addition to her blog, she also has her own “named” website, jenleereeves.com, where she writes about media.

Bottom line? “Our readers, consumers are everywhere and we need to reach out to them everywhere or we are going to miss a source,” Reeves said.  ”We know journalism. Let’s prove it, on all platforms.”

The most obvious answer from Kimberly Wilson of Social News Desk and Josh Rickel of Mass Relevance is to engage with them. Ask questions, put up polls, join in the conversation by replying to comments–all good ideas they shared at the recent Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans. One cautionary note, however. Be sure you know why you’re asking a question and let your viewers in on the reason. Case in point:

If you just put something like that out there to get a conversation started, people can wind up confused or even panicked.

But what if your social media posts generate little to no response? It’s frustrating, I know. Take a look at NewsLab on Facebook and you won’t see a whole lot of activity, despite my best efforts. What should I be doing differently?

Research from Facebook offers a few suggestions. I rarely post on weekends but I should–especially on Saturday, when posts get 20% more likes and comments. The message for newsrooms is that your social strategy can’t be a Monday-Friday project. Make sure the weekend team is on board and active too. The same goes for nightside. I tend to post early in the morning, when traffic spikes, but I rarely post at night, missing users who check in after dinner. And my posts tend to be brief, which is not a good thing on Facebook. A post of five lines or more can draw 60% more comments and likes.

On Twitter, I rarely ask for retweets, finding it somewhat annoying when others do. But Wilson and Rickel say you should. If you add “Please retweet” 51% of followers will do it. “Please RT” gets 39% to act. And people retweet more in the afternoon than in the morning. Who knew?

What’s giving me a headache is the quandary I’m now facing—maybe you are too—over what to do with my page on Facebook.  For years, we’ve been advising journalists to separate their personal and professional presence on Facebook, which is exactly what I’ve done with NewsLab. But Facebook’s new “subscribe” feature now lets you create public posts on your personal page that everyone can see (if you allow subscriptions), while restricting others to friends or friends of friends.

The subscribe dilemma

There are several advantages to the new system but also some pitfalls. Once you allow subscriptions on your personal page, all of your friends are automatically subscribed to your public posts. If you’ve friended people only for professional reasons, you can now subscribe to their posts (presume they turn on subscriptions) and unfriend them. They’ll still see your public posts and they’ll never know you took them off the list. Lavrusik says Facebook deliberately chose the verb “subscribe,” which doesn’t carry the same implication as “friend.” For journalists, it’s certainly less of a stretch to subscribe to a public official’s posts than to become his or her “friend” or “fan.”

Another plus of the new system is that anyone whose friend request you ignore automatically becomes a subscriber to your public feed. You don’t have to do anything and they won’t necessarily know you didn’t accept their request. Nice.

Timeline trouble?

The changes don’t stop there. Facebook’s new timeline view gives users more space but makes information more accessible in ways that may be discomfiting. The good: Status updates are no longer limited to 420 characters; anything longer used to have to be sent as a note, but now a post can run up to 5,000 characters.  And photos in the timeline are bigger and snappier. An album cover photo gets the most real estate so it’s important to select wisely.

The timeline also makes it easy to see everything you’ve ever posted by date, without scrolling to the bottom of each page and clicking “view older posts.” It allows you to add information retroactively (and get rid of it, too). The goal seems to be to make Facebook the repository of your entire life story, or at least the story of your online life. One critic says this change will make Facebook a stalker’s paradise. If you haven’t cleaned up your profile lately, there’s no time to waste. Employers are certainly going to use the new feature to learn everything about you.

Here’s another potential pitfall. The status update type defaults to whatever you used last, so you have to be careful not to send “friends only” posts to the whole world if your most recent post was public. One positive new feature is that you can change the type of post retroactively, so if you goof and you’re aware of it you can fix it.

Profile vs. page

But the “subscribe” feature only applies to personal profiles, not pages. And some of the features of pages—most importantly the traffic “insights”—don’t apply to personal profiles. So if you decide to use the subscribe feature and post both personal and professional items on your personal page, targeting them to different audiences, you won’t know as much about who’s reading what you write as you do now, using a page. See why my head hurts?

So what would you do? Should I activate the “subscribe” feature and use my personal profile to post professional stuff for public consumption?  If I do, should I keep the NewsLab page on Facebook and cross post there? I welcome all suggestions!

Carvin’s 55,000 plus Twitter followers helped pinpoint landmarks in online photos, translate Arabic, identify accents and track down information more quickly than he could have done on his own. “My followers had expertise that I could never imagine. I didn’t have a producer or experts, I had Tweetdeck and my tweeps.”

But reporting on Twitter is like getting a thousand foot view from a helicopter, Carvin says. “The work I’m doing cannot replace the work that field reporters do. It’s important but a complement to what others are doing, especially when you can’t rely on one source on the ground or when you can’t get there at all.”

Carvin talks to NPR reporters every day, sharing what he’s learned and connecting them to sources who are willing to talk. “My work informs what [the reporters] are doing and I’m pretty sure this could happen at the local level.”

What has he learned? “The people who follow you on Twitter are your most important assets,” Carvin says. “They can help you if you take the time to talk with them and learn who you can trust.” Carvin advises reporters to spend at least 15 minutes a day building and nurturing their social media community, just as they would cultivate sources they’ve met in person. And when using information acquired via Twitter, give credit where it’s due. “If you get information on Twitter and you don’t acknowledge where it came from, you run the risk of people thinking you are exploiting them and then they may not help you.”

That’s all great advice, but my favorite tip from Carvin was a suggestion that grew out of his experience when a plane went down in Reno, Nevada. He searched for tweets about it by location, of course, but he didn’t search for “airplane” or “crash,” as you might expect. Instead, he plugged in “OMG” and “Holy shit” and within minutes had a link to YouTube video of the crash. How’s that for a new reporting strategy?

If you’re talented, aggressive, responsible, innovative, socially adept, digitally awesome and perpetually energized, you’ll fit in just fine at the Statesman Journal….Submit a 200-word cover letter, 3-4 clips showing range of work, and a resume…Or impress us with your digital coolness by Tweeting your online resume link to @BillChurchMedia.

A quick look at Church’s Twitter feed shows he’s had plenty of responses. Most of the time, he simply @replied with thanks. But not always.

Guenther’s online resume is worth a look. What sets it apart from several others who tweeted links to Church? First off, he’s gone to the trouble of getting his own URL, which indicates a certain level of familiarity with the Web. Second, it’s clearly a resume and not a blog. Everything you need to know about the job candidate is on one page, with embedded multimedia clips and links. There’s also a handy quick link at the top to download a PDF of the resume for off-line reading.

To create the page, Guenther used a free, do-it-yourself resume template . The HTML template is downloadable; you just edit the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver and then upload it to your website. Once the page was online, Guenther tells me he simply opened it and converted it to a PDF using Adobe Acrobat. He then uploaded the PDF to his own site and changed the code for the “Download PDF” button on the page so that it points to his PDF file. “You have to just know a little HTML,” he says, “but it’s a really nice template for sure.”

Guenther’s main site has a lot more bells and whistles, including Flash projects and a link to his blog. But when asked for a link to his resume, that’s exactly what he tweeted. More props to Guenther for clearly following directions–something employers also say they’re looking for.

[Thanks toIJNet for pointing us to the newspaper's ad.]

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Consider this clip from Tuesday night’s NBC Nightly News report on the East Coast earthquake by correspondent Lester Holt:

That shot of the collapsed wall must have looked familiar to the YouTube user who posted this video from Tysons Corner, Virginia, racking up more than a quarter of a million views in less than 24 hours:

Putting that video on the air may qualify as fair use, but NBC never mentioned where the video of the collapsed wall came from, airing it full-screen with no chyron.  While that may or may not be a violation of copyright–and case law in this area is still evolving–I’d argue that the lack of attribution is a problem.

Most stations I contacted said it’s their policy to credit video to YouTube.  ”Almost every instance where we use it is a fair use instance where we are commenting on the video,” says news director Stacey Woelfel of KOMU in Columbia, Missouri. “We always super it as YouTube video.”

At KUSA in Denver, reporter Kevin Torres says the station’s policy is to attribute video to YouTube, either with a CG or in narration. “We don’t typically use someone’s YouTube handle,” he says.

“I would argue that it’s a transparency issue– letting viewers know and see where you got the video,” says news director Dan O’Donnell of WGAL in Lancaster, Pa. “It’s also a last resort.  We make EVERY effort to reach the person who posted the video on YouTube to see if we can get the original emailed to us– or posted on our own UGC website, ‘U-Local.’”

And then there’s radio. The Voice of America’s guidelines prohibit the use of audio from YouTube videos on the grounds that “YouTube’s terms of service stipulate that embedded content cannot be manipulated or downloaded for use away from www.youtube.com.” VOA reads that to mean that video can’t be downloaded either, so it requires any YouTube video that’s shown on TV to be shot within its actual YouTube page.

We haven’t even touched on the most basic question you have to ask when considering YouTube video: Is it real? Contacting the poster, as WGAL attempts to do, is one key step in verifying not only the source of the video but the truthfulness of the content.

Does your station have a policy or guidelines on the use of video or audio from services like YouTube? If not, maybe it’s time to develop some.

The guide doesn’t go very deep, either. Despite the teaser that the guide will help you verify facts, there’s almost nothing in it about verification. A better source on that comes from from Craig Kanalley of the Huffington Post, creator of Breaking Tweets, who posted this tips on his Twitter Journalism blog in 2009.

So by all means take a look at Twitter’s guide but don’t stop there. Craig Silverman of Regret the Error has an excellent best practices guide for social media verification in CJR.  The Knight Digital Media Center published its own Twitter for Journalists guide a week ago that’s also worth a look. It includes links to some newsroom guidelines for using Twitter and other social media. If your newsroom doesn’t have guidelines, I strongly recommend that you consider developing some.

Among other things, you might want to consider how to handle tweets that turn out to be wrong, like this one:

Is it enough to tweet corrected information without mentioning the earlier error? Should erroneous tweets be deleted? Whatever you decide, it’s a good idea to explain your policy and why you chose to go that way.

As for all the tips on verifying information from Twitter, I think it’s most useful to remember some basic questions you’d ask about information from any other source and consider them in a social media context:

1. Who says? Check user bios, websites and blogs to see if they are who they say they are. Look at their associations–who follows them and who they’re following.

2. How do they know this? If locations are enabled on tweets, make sure they’re coming from where they say they are. Check links for details and photos that could establish location.

3. Who else knows this? Look for multiple different sources, not just retweets of the same information or the same information being shared by people who know each other (see #1).

That’s not enough, of course. You have to do your own reporting. If you can’t send a reporter to the scene, use social media to question what you’re reading. Send an @reply or ask your followers to help you. That’s basically how NPR’s Andy Carvin helped to uncover the gay girl in Damascus hoax. The lesson? No matter how many cool tools we have at our disposal, it’s still journalism, folks.

“Few reporters use smartphones as a research device,” Briggs says–a missed opportunity, in his opinion, because smartphones are “location aware.”

As an example, Briggs described how he might use a smartphone as the “Internet in your pocket” to cover a hypothetical breaking news story involving the evacuation of a Las Vegas hotel.

What are Briggs’ three favorite mobile tools for journalism?

1. Twitter
2. Foursquare
3. Google Maps

“Not enough journalists are ‘mobile natives,’” says Briggs,”people who truly know how to use the device for information gathering, tapping into the power of everything you can access.”

Sourced from: Advancing the Story