All bared
by Sharon Robins
It was a very social scene that our peers walked in upon so that we could begin our 15 minute presentation.
Imagine streamers, glasses of wine (aka apple juice), balloons and glittery small shapes strewn all over tables. And not forgetting the blowers and the party poppers.
Baring (nearly) All - tagged Party Scene!
Sorry, couldn’t find a party scene, amazingly the above is what Reuters found for me.
So, back to the presentation. The Prezi tool turned out to be a wonderful invention that suited our Social Media angle. It seemed to work well with the creativity of James Brown adding to the content on the canvas.
Achieved?
We have achieved a threshing of five very different people’s ideas and methods to deliver a presentation.
The structure of the presentation became a matrix by overlaying a vertical and then a horizontal stream of concepts that combined two individual structures suggested within the group.
Learnt?
Working as a group was equally rewarding as it was frustrating.
The burden was made easier by shared responsibilities but we all had slightly different study commitments. Therefore, it was exceedingly difficult to all be in the same room at the same time for planning purposes.
Consequently, as we got closer to “Baring All” day a more directive approach was taken where decisions were made by members of the group who had met and explained to any missing.
There was minimal time for further discussion or re-think; the time for that had been in the meetings before. Since we had initially progressed with a collaborative style of working this was a little discomforting.
But the clock had started ticking and we had a deadline to meet.
Done differently?
Retrospectively, it might have been easier to have undertaken the Social Media ten hour challenge in the Christmas break. Not that it would have been easy as I was working for most of it but certainly easier than the weekend we did squeeze it in.
Apart from the last few time sensitive days wherein we had set “must get done” tasks, our group worked collaboratively with and supportively of each other; with the end result our presentation.
Including; “Can you please make sure your phones are switched ON!”
SOCIAL MEDIA investigation & LEARNING EXPERIENCE
This blog is a record of our investigations and learning in relation to the question set to the group;
WHAT IMPACT ARE SOCIAL MEDIA HAVING ON ESTABLISHED NEWS GATHERING TECHNIQUES AND OUTPUT?
The Twitter feed is dialogue on our blog – hence the name Diablogue and is a feed from mediatress.
We would be delighted to receive your comments and invite you to take our poll:
Social Media’s power in situations where it is hard to report from
by Sofia Mostafa
Two good examples of Social Media’s power in situations where it is hard to report from are:
The Twitter Revolution – Where International media were banned from reporting during the Iran’s post-election protests in June 2009. Pictures on Twitter and videos on YouTube helped to both organise and publicise the opposition.
Another example is in northern Nigeria, where the BBC World Service found out about a government confrontation with a village about land rights using mobile phones. They had given one person in each village a phone which opened up for news ways of communicating.
Peter Horrock said in an interview with the Guardian. Social media is helping with reporting but it the ‘how‘ that is changing, and not so much the ‘what‘.
The Twitter revolution has however been criticised and Iran experts and social networking activists say that while the election protesters did use Twitter, most of the organizing was done through text messages and word of mouth.
Sysomos, researches social media and says there are only about 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they are from Iran. Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of the company thinks the idea of a Twitter revolution is suspect. She says in an in an interview with Business week “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size. The main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media”,
To weaken the power of Twitter and social media networking governments can easily take measures to close down sites and control the information out of the country. Last week the Iranian government did exactly that ahead of the demonstrations during last week’s anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.You can read more about it on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ts website where they condemn the Iranian government’s attempt to slow down the Internet and block text messaging.
Iran and Iraq are two of the most dangerous countries to work in as a journalist. According to CPJ 2009 was the deadliest year ever for journalists, especially local reporters covering corruption.
Oliver Poole was an Iraq correspondent for a daily newspaper, in the Baghdad war zone for five years. Two weeks ago he did a presentation at University College Falmouth and I asked him what impact he things social media will have on news gathering in conflict areas.
His answer is in the below video. (Courtesy of Edward Kiernon).
Social Media Challenge, French version results
Here’s a Guardian article about those French journalists who locked themselves in a farmhouse for five days, with only access to Facebook and Twitter, looks like their results were as inconclusive/mixed as ours.
The influence of Social Media
by Sharon Robins
A cop in Washington DC pulled a gun during a snowball fight. It became UK news on 22nd December as reported in a free newspaper for rail users, The Metro
The Metro, 22 Dec 09
Shown circled in the photo above, editorial by Miles Erwin reads; “… organised a mass snowfight via Twitter on Saturday..” with further down “Washington DC police department initially denied a gun was drawn but backed down after various YouTube posts proved the opposite.
Washington City paper blogged about it with pictures and video sent in. It is not clear whether the contributors, described as eye witnesses, were infact journalists out looking for material or geniunely citizens on the street.
Whatever the origin of the video footage, certainly many people saw it and it did influence the Police department’s final version and has made international news.
Showbiz
Radio Jackie target South West London with hourly 3 minute bulletins containing national and local news with half hourly summaries at peak times.
They currently use Twitter to follow a couple of their local MP’s and report accordingly but at this stage they are not crowd sourcing.
News & Sport Editor, Rod Bradbury believes that Twitter and Facebook are an invaluable tool for any journalist focusing on showbiz;
“..you know then you will be on Facebook and Twitter the whole time and you will be using those as sources.”
Click for the full Radio Jackie interview.
Skype
The immediacy offered by social media websites provided basis for the early coverage of Haiti following the earthquake that decimated their infrastructure.
Pressgazette.co.uk reported how various news teams scrambled for coverage with one of the first interviews being via Skype. Although Twitter messages were coming through, broadcasters had difficulty verifying whether messages and images were genuine.
After making contact via Facebook and while mobiles and telephones were down, Skype enabled people to give their own live eye witness reports.
Public not private
Returning to Twitter and it’s influence on news, that is to say keeping people informed or indeed being the news, consider the updates from SkyNews which came an hour apart:
SkyNews Good morning all. Another busy day – Sky’s team in Haiti still coming up with great stuff. It’s all here: http://www.skynews.com/haiti about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
SkyNews Apologies to those offended by my newsspeak – maybe “powerful, compelling stories” is more appropriate. JG (@scook94, @corneiliuz, @hjames) about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
I don’t imagine the majority of the public would think pictures of amputees, reports of lack of food and water, not to mention dead bodies piled up, to really be ‘great stuff.’
It would be interesting to know whether that statement influenced any readers to no longer follow SkyNews.
Twitter Criticism: Twit-storm of misinformation
Twit-storm of misinformation, Photo by Sofia Mostafa
In what’s being called a “Twit-storm of misinformation,” social-media websites have according to Misty Harris spread rumours, hoaxes and falsehood about Haiti.
Misty Harris recognises that Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and texting had a positive impact on the earthquake’s aftermath, helping with everything from rescue efforts to fund-raising campaigns. However, the technologies also “added noise to a crisis whose din was already overwhelming”.
She interviewed Advertising Age who described the post-earthquake cyber landscape as a “Twit-storm of misinformation,” with much of it related to relief efforts.
Ms Harris gives several examples of companies that have suffered from false information being spread on Twitter.
For example when USP announced its donation of $1 million, rumours spread on Twitter that that the company was also providing free shipping. The courier company had to spend a week influencing the online conversation to get the truth out.
Read the full article and get more examples here.
Posted by Sofia Mostafa
Social media: the news eco-system
In January 2010, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a study to answer the crucial question “where does news come from?” in today’s quick-fire media forests. The study examined all the news outlets that produced local news in Baltimore, Md, for one week, studying output, and the common news “narratives”. The study set out to explain who reports the news deemed as “important”; what role does social media play; and how does the news “eco system” work?
It examined the news output from 53 news outlets. That means all of the news narratives that came from every local identifiable news operation in the city. These outputs included radio, blogs, new media sites, television stations, newspapers and newspaper websites. The outputs were collated for three days during the target week.
The study looked at what percentage of news stories came from the various different media types. The overwhelming majority came from print. This was followed by television. Radio offered a small contribution, but the smallest producer of all was social media (new media). Critically, 95% of all the stories that contained new information came from traditional media, the majority being newspapers.
Out of the six key news stories that were followed, the study also looked at who triggered them. The study found that an overwhelming number of stories simply came from government, with only 15% from journalists doing their independent investigations. The role of social media was generally restricted to disseminating stories that came from other places. However, the study also says: “new technology was more prevalent as a way for media-both traditional and new-to break news more quickly. The web is now clearly the first place of publication.
12 of the news outlets studied did not produce any local news, they simply rehashed news that was already out in the media arena.
The study coined the term “echo chamber” to describe the online domino effect of posting and reposting stories. It found multiple examples of where information had not been attributed properly, and that sometimes original reporting was suggested when really the article had been ripped from another site and just copied and pasted in. In such a copy-and-paste climate, the official version of events became all the more important, to such an extent that official press releases would get pasted word for word.
Over the 3 days in question, the media organs of Baltimore city produced 715 different stories about local events, and these came from 41 outlets. 12 of the news outlets produced no original news. The majority of news came from local TV stations, that produced an average of 73 news stories per station.
Social media tended to have a local focus. However, it was often through very summarised accounts of news that had come from other media.
Analysis-Social media provided very few news stories itself: overwhelmingly it reposted stories that had been produced by other news outlets. They acted more as alert systems than producers of original news.
-Most of the news stories published through social media came from traditional news outlets: newspapers and television stations
Lydia
Ambient journalism & awareness systems
Alfred Hermida describes “para-journalism forms”, such as micro-blogging, as “awareness systems”.
Mr Hermida suggests that these broad, asynchronous and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that he describes as “ambient journalism”.
In an awareness system, value is defined less by each individual fragment of information but rather by the combined effect of the communication. This means we should not look at Twitter feeds as separate pieces of information but rather the “mental portrait” created by a number of messages over a period of time”.
The Future
With the increase in volume of information there is a need to reduce, select and filter information. Alfred Hermida believes one of the future directions for journalism could be to “develop approaches and systems that help the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection and transmission of news”.
Twitscoop and Scan are two web applications that are moving in this direction. Twitscoop aim to detect trends in real-time and visualise the “buzz” on Twitter.
NowPublic.comʼs Scan is described as the world’s largest participatory news network. It tracks the microblogosphere to “search the conversations on these sites based on keywords” and “find undiscovered news photos and videos by ordinary people.
The full article: “Twitter as a system of ambient journalism”
Read Hermidas thoughts on his blogg.
Posted by Sofia Mostafa
by Sofia Mostafa
Here are the slides and the text from Alfred Hermida’s presentation on ambient journalism at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University.
What about the future?
by Sharon Robins
The media guardian, 24th November 2009, reports After social networks, what next?
The bits I found interesting: LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman; “ I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life.
You might think, ‘who wants to consume all this useless information?’ but with some information it’s like with ice cream. It is not nutritious but people still eat it.”
Surely the Flake is nutrious?
Dr Kate Blackmon, an Oxford lecturer says the future is not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.
I would go one further after the chats I’ve had with newsy people and say a news team especially needs to crowd source and then it needs to crowd filter. Maybe Kate had said; “not so much about crowd sourcing but more crowd filtering.” Context can easily be changed by a lost word or two.
Just consider Emily Bell, Director Digital Content at the Guardian with 6,000 Twitter followers. Surely she doesn’t read all their tweets; not with three children and a husband too?
But those followers are access to a massive contact list who also have contacts. Thousands of sources.
Back to the article where CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone said; “I believe in the trend of openness. Using an open technology, creating an open platform and being more transparent. That is where we are heading.”
He also said Twitter isn’t a social network it’s an information network.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter , Professor at Harvard Business School, believes success hinges on connectors making and expanding that information network; On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors
She says; “Power goes to the connectors; those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment.
In essence, she who has the best network wins.”
