Social journalism: Community building through social networks

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A presentation to the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit in Seattle on 10 ways to use social networks and social media to engage local readers. The 10 ideas for building local community: 1. Be first with breaking news 2. Leverage Twitter 3. Enable conversations 4. Get widget-happy! 5. Community video 6. Geocoding & citizen photography 7. Create local map mashups 8. Hook up with Facebook 9. Tap into sharing economy10. Study, borrow, steal

Transcript of Social journalism: Community building through social networks

JD Lasica President, Socialmedia.bizjd@socialmedia.biz

Social journalism: Community building through social networksPacific Northwest Newspaper Association SummitSeattle, Sept. 17, 2009

Relax!

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/pnna

Flickr photo “relaxation, the maldivian way” by notsogoodphotography

(all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval)

http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

Making sense of all the new terms

“Social media:Any online technology or practice that lets us share

(content, opinions, insights, experiences, media)and have a conversation about the ideas we care about.

http://socialbrite.org/glossary

Explosive uptake in social media About 200 million blogs

5 of top 10 websites are social media sites

57% have joined a social network

39% subscribe to an RSS feed

YouTube = 10% of all Internet traffic

Every time someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for social reasons

120,000 new blogs launched every day

1.5 million blog posts per day (17 per second)Sources: Universal McCann: Wave.3: Power to the People, 2008; various

Social networking and journalism

Cartoon courtesy of John Cole, The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Penn.

New metrics for participatory age

Old metrics: eyeballs, page views, stickiness

New metrics: engagement, participation, passion, interaction, comments, uploads

10 ideas for building community

1. Be first with breaking news 2. Leverage Twitter 3. Enable conversations 4. Get widget-happy! 5. Community video 6. Geocoding & citizen photography 7. Create local map mashups 8. Hook up with Facebook 9. Tap into sharing economy10. Study, borrow, steal

1. Be first with breaking news

SMS alerts

Twitter to break verified news

Live-blogging of public events

Moblogging to upload photos from mobile device

Latinos, African Americans > greater use of mobile devices

Best usage is to drive users to story on your site

Buzznet, Foneblog, Fotopages, mBlog, mlogs, phlog.net, Snap, Textamerica, Webshots. Cross-posting?

Several free useful tools

Useful free tools: • CoverItLive.com • Scribblelive.com • Google Docs

Examples: Obama’s health care speech, Sonia Sotomayor hearings, Rod Blagojevich impeachment, NFL playoffs.

Use your site as acommunity forum!

Live-blogging to drive conversation

2. Leverage TwitterSan Diego wildfires: KPBS + USD

Red River flooding in North Dakota

Flight 1549 “Miracle on the Hudson”

BusinessWeek: 40 journalists on Twitter.

MuckRack.com: feed of Twitter posts by journalists

Make Twitter work for you

“Twitter is just amazing. It's the perfect tool for journalists.”— Arturo Duran, CEO, ImpreMedia Digital (El Diario, La Opinion, et al.)

Train your staff on how to use TwitterNot a broadcasting medium to distribute headlines

Start by listening & observing, but then:Be human, be conversational, not detatched

Unlearn the conventions of journalism

@ElDiarioNY: after 5 mo., 5% new traffic from Twitter#1 traffic driver: retweets

Don’t ghettoize social media

@dsarno Business reporter, LA Times

@jamesjanega General assignment reporter,Chicago Tribune

@kimpainter Health columnist,USA Today

Tweeting done right: 70-30 Rule

Omar GallagaAustin American Statesman

3. Enable conversations

Avert registration fatigue & BugMeNot syndrome

Identify & engage influencers

Scope out Twitterers with large # followers. How do their interests intersect with your site’s?

Learn about how people in your community use social media

Connect with social media influencers through search.twitter.com, PlaceBlogger.com, etc.

Ask people around you (neighbors, students, young people in your newsroom) how they use social media

Use hash tags to join conversations

At left, widget found at: http://journchat.info

Find relevant hashtags through hashtags.org or Twitter Search

Join (but don’t spam) conversation threads

Start your own hashtag

Some hashtags to latch on to: #health #sports #latino #education #democracy #politics #Obama #news #media #journalism #journchat

4. Get widget-happy!

Highlightcommunity events Indy.com staffers pick the best local events to highlight on the site’s front page.

Tap into community conversations

Real-timeconversations

Tap into the conversations that are already taking place in your community: Widgets let you post tailored discussions — both by topic and by geographic location.

Create widgets for your business, opinion, politics, sports sections.

Promote community service

Left: AllforGood.org helps you find and share ways to do good in your community.

Right: UnitedWeServe: Bottom-up volunteer opportunities at http://serve.gov

Live video streaming

ImpreMedia teamed up with the PBS NewsHour to live-stream the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. Went from 20,000 streams during 2008 campaign season to 45,000 streams this past spring. PBS provided the signal & video player, ImpreMedia provided the Spanish translations.

6. Geotagging & citizen photography

Visitors to Flickr could see photos of the 2007 disaster taken from multiple vantage points. Many new digital cameras and mobile devices, like the iPhone, come with geotagging enabled by default.

Minneapolis bridge collapse

Geotagging an art walk

An afternoonwith smart phonesDan Gillmor took a class of journalism students at Arizona State University out for a stroll and created a cool Flickr map with more than 120 photos captured with G1 smart phones.

“It was absurdly easy,” he says.

News organizations should enlist community members with geo-location capable devices to cover designated community events.

Community photo albums

NewWest.Net created a group pool on Flickr for readers to add photos to. People have added more than 16,000 photos. http://www.flickr.com/groups/newwest

NewWest.Net

7. Create local map mashupshttp://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/

AtlantaBoston

CharlotteChicagoDallasDetroitHouston

Los AngelesMiamiNew YorkPhiladelphiaSan Francisco

San JoseSeattleWashington, DC

Everyblock

Over the line?

An anonymous publisher compiled a mashup of public campaign donations records, including the donors’ street address, and published it.

8. Hook up with Facebookhttp://apps.facebook.com/mndaily/ http://www.mndaily.com/

Reward points

http://apps.facebook.com/mndaily/

Readers win points if they post a news story, share it, invite friends, send a letter to the editor, etc.

Top scorers win prizes like Twins tickets, T-shirts, a bag of goodies.

15,000+ additional monthly visits, greater # comments, revenue potential

Charlotte Observerhttp://apps.facebook.com/observerfacebook/

9. Tap into the sharing economy

• Rich source of free commercial material.

• Flickr: 15 million Attribution licenses

• Flickr: 10 million Attribution ShakeAlike licenses

creativecommons.org

flickr.com/creativecommons

socialbrite.org/sharing-center

Creative Commons

Don’t do all the heavy lifting

Partner with smart people. Use your community.Use free: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, CCUse open source: WordPress (and its plug-ins),

Drupal, et al. Steal good ideas. Build on what’s come before.

Flickr photo by Jason Means

10. Study, borrow, stealStatesman.comMoms Charlotte charlotteobserver.com/moms

TechCrunch.com

MashableNewWest.Net

Politico.comProPublica.org

HuffingtonPost.com

BlogHer.comThemediaconsortium.org

The Local: http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.comBaristanet.com

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/sites

InlandSocal.com

Hyperlocal

Partnerships with local businesses

Emphasis on dining, movies, music

User-submitted photos, video, content

Riverside Press-Enterprise

Momaramahttp://blogs.pe.com/moms/

Indy.com

Periodismociudadano.com

Recent comments

Tags

Embedded video

Twitter lifestream

Pointers to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blip.tv presence

Global Voices en Español

2-year horizon

Embrace change as an opportunityLaunch pilot projects, get a toeholdTalk with your users about what you’re planningGet top brass to use social mediaNew metrics: engagement, participation, comments

Flickr photo by jonrawlinson

Innovate!

Dare to fail. If you’re not failing at something, you’re doing something wrong. (“Fail often, fail fast.”)

“We have to change our entire corporate-industry behavior. We’ve got to stop overplanning and over-analyzing and turn

our battleship into a speedboat.” —J. Todd Foster, managing editor, Bristol (VA) Herald Courier

"Rocket Man" on Flickr by Dave-F

Resources

Socialbrite.org

Knight Citizen News Network: kcnn.org

Social Media Club: socialmediaclub.org

BeatBlogging.org & NewAssignment.net

Spot.us: crowd-funded reporting

CiiJ: ciij.org/resources

Thank you!

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/pnna

Image: Universal McCann: Wave.3 report, March 2008

jd@socialmedia.biz

twitter: @jdlasica