Should journalists confirm information before passing it along on Twitter? On Thursday many journalists unknowingly perpetuated a hoax that CNN had suspended Piers Morgan due to the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal, sparking a conversation about whether journalists need to slow down before tweeting. Others have chronicled the spread of the rumor, including TheNextWeb and Ross Neumann with a Storify. But as people were issuing mea culpas to their followers, Reuters’ Felix Salmon wrote a provocative post on his Tumblr blog, suggesting that Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper. Topsy With iOS 9, Search lets you look for content from the web, your contacts, apps, nearby places, and more. Powered by Siri, Search offers suggestions and updates results as you type. There are two ways to use Search on your iOS device.
Job Search Hashtags on Twitter Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular social media job search tool for professionals and students as more career experts, recruiters and employers join the Twitter ranks to post their advice and job opportunities. But with thousands of different people to follow and countless tweets to read and search through, it can be challenging for anybody to identify exactly what they are looking for. This is where hashtags come in handy. For those of you who are new to Twitter, a hashtag is essentially a keyword or label following a “#” symbol that people post in their tweets to “tag” their messages in specific categories and/or make it more searchable for those seeking tweets on specific topics.
Facebook Tells Salman Rushdie He Has to Go By His Given Name, Ahmed Rushdie - Alexis Madrigal - Technology This is the sort of thing that makes you wonder what real names policy is all about. Today on Twitter, Salman Rushdie detailed his adventures with Facebook's name police. "Amazing. 2 days ago FB deactivated my page saying they didn't believe I was me. I had to send a photo of my passport page.
Less Is More: Using Social Media to Inspire Concise Writing Overview | How can online media like Twitter posts, Facebook status updates and text messages be harnessed to inspire and guide concise writing? In this lesson, students read, respond to and write brief fiction and nonfiction stories, and reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of “writing short.” Materials | Slips of paper with brief stories (see below; one per student), computers with Internet access Warm-Up | Before class, select six-word love stories from The Times’s Well blog, in the post itself and in the reader comments, to share with students.
Government backs down on plan to shut Twitter and Facebook in crises The government has climbed down on plans to ban suspected rioters from using social networking websites in times of civil unrest. The home secretary, Theresa May, told social networks at a meeting on Thursday that the government had no intention of "restricting internet services". Research in Motion (RIM, the maker of BlackBerry), Facebook and Twitter were summoned to the meeting with May after David Cameron signalled a clampdown on the sites following the recent riots in England. The social networks were poised to face down the government on its plans, which they warned could usher in a new form of online censorship in the UK. However, government ministers sought to back away from the prime minister's comments and instead focus on how law enforcement could better use Twitter and Facebook in emergencies. A Home Office spokeswoman described the meeting as constructive.
Twitter study casts doubts on ministers' post-riots plan Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest. A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting. Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger. The unique database contains tweets about the riots sent throughout the disorder, which began in Tottenham, north London, on 6 August.
Boston Globe creates a Twitter board for the newsroom There once was a time (cue the piano music, sepia tones, and Ken Burns effect) when one of the major components of newsrooms was the Teletype machine, a novel technology that delivered dispatches from the tiniest reaches of the United States and the farthest corners of the globe. Newsrooms outgrew the technology, or at least grew into newer, faster technologies, like Twitter. Which could explain why the Boston Globe newsroom now has a funky bank of monitors that displays Tweets throughout the day, as well as headlines from their websites (more on that in second). They’re calling it the Information Radiator. The name may sound a little super-villain-y, but it’s accurate: Goal One of the experimental installation is to increase the dissemination of information. Goal Two is to increase familiarity with the new world order at the Globe, which this fall will split into two online entities, the free Boston.com and the subscriber-focused BostonGlobe.com.
The Jekyll and Hyde problem: What are journalists, and their institutions, for? Jay Rosen, in his 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, shares a story which I think is of vital importance for those trying to understand the debate about “news gurus” kicked off this week by Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review. In his book discussing the long, strange career of an idea — the idea of “public journalism,” the notion journalism was better when it remembered its primary professional obligation was to public life — Rosen recounts the moment when the idea became (momentarily) corporate stunt. In 1995 the Gannett Company, then as now the largest US newspaper company as measured by circulation, took out a front page ad in Editor & Publisher, writing: “WE BELIEVE IN PUBLIC JOURNALISM — AND HAVE DONE IT FOR YEARS.”
Twitter, the conversation-enabler? Actually, most news orgs use the service as a glorified RSS feed As much as we tout Twitter for its conversational abilities — for its revolutionary capacity to create discursive, rather than simply distributive, relationships with news consumers — many major news organizations are still using the service as, pretty much, a vehicle for self-promotion. A new study, released today by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, studied 13 news organizations, large and (relatively) small, from print, TV, and radio…and found that “mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.” Fully 93 percent of the postings over the course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization’s own website. And they really mean primarily using Twitter for self-promo.
Most journalists use social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a source A US survey has revealed that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors use social media sources for researching their stories as 56% say social media is important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote. However, with 84% most journalists use information delivered via social media rather cautious as they think it is less reliable than information delivered via traditional media. According to the research conducted by Cision and The George Washington University, for their online research all journalists are using Google, followed by 61% which are turning to Wikipedia.
Topsy: Now Searching Tweets Back To May 2008 Looking for old tweets? Look to Topsy. The service has just expanded to have what it claims to be the largest searchable collection of past tweets, over 5 billion of them, stretching back to at least May 2008. That makes it more comprehensive than Google’s Twitter search or even Twitter’s own Twitter Search. Topsy will be sharing the news itself later today, on its blog. Short text messages show surprising storytelling power in Norway tragedy Even the young person who sends and receives hundreds of text messages per day is unlikely to think of them as acts of reading and writing. Most text messages, including mine, are delivered in casual code for humdrum purposes, a mode of expression that makes communication seem as automatic as breathing. Roy: coffee?
The Twitter Explosion June/July preview»Whether they are reporting about it, finding sources on it or urging viewers, listeners and readers to follow them on it, journalists just can’t seem to get enough of the social networking service. Just how effective is it as a journalism tool? By Paul Farhi Senior contributing writer Paul Farhi (farhip@washpost.com) is a reporter for the Washington Post.