Listening and following back on Twitter

@johnrobinson: I admit I'm suspicious of media folk who join Twitter, attract 100s of followers & follow only a handful. They're talking but not listening?

@smalljones: @johnrobinson don't fear the followed, they are simply stuck in broadcast mode.

@ryanbruce: @johnrobinson Very few people can pull off not following people. Then they are simply a 140 character newsletter.

@jiconoclast: @johnrobinson I think your instincts are sound. Many media folks see Twitter as just another one-way publication medium.

@robyntomlin: @johnrobinson Agreed. There needs to be give and take or it's just broadcast. Best when it's a conversation.

@johnrobinson: I mean, I love addressing an audience, too, but reading you guys is much, much more entertaining and informative.

@BIF: @johnrobinson To me, the value of Twitter is listening in on what folks are talking about. Plus we've gotten some great stories via tweets.

@kiyoshimartinez: @johnrobinson Dunbar Number reality & having a good signal/noise ratio could be a good reason. Not everyone has equal value to you.

@johnrobinson: @kiyoshimartinez I got that. But 1,000 followers and 32 followed?

@chrislowrance: @johnrobinson Personally speaking, I keep my list short because otherwise I can't keep up with everyone.

This is an old discussion in Twitter years, hashed out by many in the pre-Ashton and pre-Oprah days, but still a stumbling block for some users on Twitter.
It seems particularly difficult for some people in the media, those most likely to consume massive amounts of information and to suffer the guilt of not being able to consume it all.

Some points:
1. No, there are no rules on Twitter. But there is etiquette. Following back is generally accepted good Twitter etiquette.
2. Unread tweets piling up in your Twitter stream are not like unread magazines piling up in your living room. You don't have to feel guilty about failing to consume all the information.
3. Following back on Twitter is not like accepting a connection on Facebook or LinkedIn; it's a looser connection. It's not like following back gives away all your social and personal data, as can happen when you accept a friendship on Facebook. Your words are already out there on Twitter, if you have an unlocked Twitter account and you're trying to broadcast your messages. (Of course, you can always have another, real, friends-and-family private Twitter account.)
4. Half the value of Twitter is for listening and reporting. People cannot send you private, personal messages if you don't follow them back. So if you ever plan to use Twitter for gathering information, asking questions of others that they might not want to answer publicly, you should follow people back. Or if you want to be accessible to people offering you unsolicited information privately, you should follow people back. If you ask a question and seek information, without following people back, you will place a barrier of frustration in front of your sources. Many of them won't try to to get over that barrier.
5. There is a thing as the Dunbar number, a theoretical limit to how many relationships people can sustain. And there is such a thing as a time limit on how much online social networking can fit into a balanced life. And there is such a thing as a tension between broad, shallow networks of contacts and deep, narrow networks of contacts, and even gender differences about what people prefer. Those anthropological and psychological implications are part of the fascination of social networks. You get to choose. But take time to understand the implications of your choices.

Self-promotion: Read more about listening to Twitter and figuring out the Twitter news cycle at twitter cycles.

Hurricane Twitter

The Biloxi Sun Herald twittered Hurricane Gustav. The Wilmington Star-News twittered Hanna.

Leslie Wilkinson twittered the July 30 earthquake in California. She was among the first in the nation to do so.

So obviously, news organizations and individuals are seeing the power in Twitter.

Plenty of examples exist on how to use it, and plenty of people have written about the mechanics.

So try it out. Create an account and follow some of these people to see what's going on: @ckrewson @robyntomlin, @andrew_dunn, @saragregory, @shanbow, @smalljones, @romustgo, @johnrobinson, @cnewvine (AP!), @rmathieson, @acarvin, @CNN_Newsroom, @SNOhurricane, and even @frankdeloache in Salisbury.

Read @andrew_dunn's case study of Twitter during Hurricane Gustav. Check how @ckrewson separates his "personal brand" from a professional brand at @PhillyInquirer. @KaylaC does the same separation in Charlotte with @WCNC.

Beyond those mechanics and examples exist some intriguing points about networks, community, professional and personal brands and separating the two, boundaries among parents and children and managers and employees, self-awareness, self-obsession, transparency, privacy, the Dunbar number (Google it), signal-to-noise ratio....

Start thinking about all that while reading Clive Thompson in the New York Times magazine on digital intimacy.

I could go on. But I won't right now, because I crave some real face-to-face community. But let's talk about it more. And try it.

Interactivity

Sometimes, you just have to "see" a story to get an idea of its scope. Merging video, text, photos and graphics gives such a richer story than just reading an article or watching a video.

StarTribune.com proved the power of this with its "13 Seconds in August" project looking at the I-35 collapse.

Now, the folks at DesMoinesRegister.com have shown us -- in ways made possible only by using the power of the Web -- the terrible damage to a town destroyed by a ferocious tornado. The Des Moines team has assembled graphics, photos, data and stories into an amazingly interactive package that's worthy of emulation.

Charles Apple, at VisualEditors.com, quotes the Registor's data editor, James Wilkerson, about how the project came together:

For base data about the properties, I scraped the county assessor’s web site using a perl script and put the results in a spreadsheet. There were about a thousand records for Parkersburg.

One of our graphics people, Kelli Morris, walked the route of the storm, taking pictures and talking to survivors. She then used the property spreadsheet to link to “after” pictures and built a library of survivor stories from her data and stories we published. We later went through all of the properties for which Kelli had pictures and downloaded the “before” photo from the assessor’s web site.

A parcel map shapefile was not available in a timely and affordable manner. So another graphics person — Craig Johnson — built his by hand. He then built the Flash display using some dummy xml data. Putting Kelli’s spreadsheet in mySQL, I built an xml page in php, which was used to fuel the final display.

The end product is something I believe is truly unique and visually powerful. It also shows what can be accomplished by graphics folks who understand how to use data and think ahead about how to best weave it into their work.

Wonderful example of the power of merging data and multimedia.

Committing Journalism in Fewer Than 140 Taps

The Times calls it "microjournalism" — using Twitter to instantaneously file reports from the field. The story focuses on how a few writers are using text messages to Twitter in order to report from the campaign trail.

Microjournalism is the latest step in the evolution of Mr. (John) Dickerson, who worked for years at Time magazine, and has moved from print to online articles to blog entries to text messages no longer than 140 characters, or about two sentences. “One of the things we are supposed to do as journalists is take people where they can’t go,” he said in an interview. “It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room.”

Some might consider the idea of a barrage of text-messaged snippets about the presidential election the final dreadful realization of the news media’s obsession with “sound bites.” And spending time with the Twittered campaign reporting can mean wallowing in skin-deep observations, anonymous trashing of candidates and more than you would want to know about the food and travel conditions for the reporting class.

But it is genuine, and at times enlightening, which is more than you can say for the candidates themselves, who have also taken to using Twitter to update their supporters. (The septuagenarian Ron Paul, for example, is an ardent Twitter user, it appears, though he has a penchant for exclamation points that would make a teenager blush. Typical Ron Paul Twitter message: “Thus far in the race, I’ve received more votes than Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. Freedom is popular!”)

ACES meeting in Rock Hill

A quick reminder that the Southeast chapter of ACES is holding a meeting from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Rock Hill Herald. There's no charge, but organizers would appreciate an R.S.V.P. For more details, go to the ACES message board or e-mail Holly Kerfoot.

Among the planned topics:

• Doug Fischer Fisher, a USC professor who writes one of my must-read blogs, Common Sense Journalism, will lead a discussion about moderating a small-town citj site such as Hartsville Today.
• Teri Boggess of the N&O talks about "Sports as News."
• The N&O's wire editor, Jon Wallace, will dive into the campaigns with a discussion on what copy editors can do to give readers the news they need in forms that are easily digestible.
• "What's Up" — an opportunity for copy editors to talk about issues in the field, or just get to know colleagues at other papers.

Notes from the Intertubes

• The latest in photo manipulation: content-aware resizing. And I thought Photoshop's rubber stamp tool was cool...
  
  


• Over at VisEds, Robb Montgomery and David Dunkley Gyimah post a clip on what it takes to be an "interactive multimedia video journalist." Whatever you want to call it, it's a pretty cool clip (imagine a news segment produced by the director of "Se7en." Much different from anything you'd see each night on the TV news. But is something like this feasible in a world filled with deadlines?
  
  


• Given that we're in the midst of a redesign, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion here (or even in my nook of the newsroom) about how the Merc is going about its redesign. I like the idea that they're trying to make things transparent, opening up the discussions, etc. I'm not sure I like the three-section idea they're going with. But desperate times do call for desperate measures. What do y'all think?
  
• Here's the Merc's Rethink site ...
• And the blog about the redesign (which features a lot of talk about "how to stay innovative").
  
• There's an interesting Google Groups thread.


• Finally, I'm not sure who to credit, but there's a pretty cool (and helpful) Google Maps mashup of Mecklenburg's missing people. Wonder if we could use these sorts of features as a springboard to a full-out crime map a la Raleigh or Chicago. Now, we need to get advertisers on board to sponsor these sorts of Web features. With all the investment we've made in video, why do we still not have ads accompanying the videos? I'd much rather watch those than have to deal with one of those accordion ads that floats down from the top of a page, or from that annoying guy who pops up at the bottom of the home page and starts talking to me.

More praise for Fort Myers

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, which seems to be an incubator for new ideas at Gannett, won APME's first Innovator of the Year award for its "culture of innovation." This is the paper that has mobile journalists armed with laptops, audio recorders and wireless Web connections out patrolling neighborhoods for "hyperlocal" news. The paper also earned a lot of buzz (on this blog and elsewhere) for its crowdsourced story on sewer problems.

I like the idea of both these things -- allowing community members to get involved with investigating a story and unleashing reporters from their desks. But, man, it seems Fort Myers is getting a lot of traction from one story a year ago and a lot of ribbon-cutting stories. (Have you heard of other crowdsourcing success stories? Know of any people who admit to being devoted readers of hyperlocal news?)

Am I being too cynical?

(Oh, the other finalists for the APME award: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. The AJC was nominated for its newsroom overhaul. The D&C got the nod for its RocDocs, which gives online users access to data, maps and investigative reports assembled by the newspaper.

The Tribune and synergy

Very long article from the December/January issue of AJR details what synergy and centralization meant at the Tribune. Some of the stuff they've been talking about, like standardized design of websites, seems to be hitting reality, and folks at Visual Editors are discussing it.

The AJR article also deals with calendar listings online, a la Event Tracker, and centralized and decentralized efforts.
Advice on the AJR article: scroll down to the first large W dropcap, and start reading there.

Newspaper staffing levels

Jack Shafer at Slate compares staffing levels at The Washington Post and The New York Times in 1972 and now. Credit goes to Trent for finding the article.
One quote:
If hard-news sections take a disproportional hit as papers rescale, all the iPhones and Googles in the world won't matter.
The full story.
Read the comments too. It's worth pondering how our new technology has broadened the work of newsroom employees, not just made it easier. And is it more efficient to have mojos who do everything vs. assembly-line jobs? Indianapolis is outsourcing photo toning; but if someone sends a reporter an emailed mugshot, should that reporter be able to put it into production herself, or should she hit the forward button through three other people to get it in the paper?

Copy Editors and the Web

Pam Robinson has started a series of potentially revealing interviews talking with copy editors about what (if anything) they're doing as their papers shift more emphasis online.

She starts with Jonathan McCarthy, editor of Newsday.com. Highlights:

• Many copy editors are already doing the work that helps make web sites go; they just may not realize it. Good web sites rely on good headlines and tight copy. In our case here at Newsday we have asked copy editors to think a little differently about how headlines work and what might make a good web story. Aside from the copy, anyone in the newsroom should take some time to find out as much as possible about their site’s audience. That will aid them in understanding what works and what doesn’t.
• By relying on the Web for breaking news, stories for the print edition should be more analytical, longer and useful. In its best model, a good web site makes a good paper better.
• The best thing anyone can do to take control of his or her work on the web is to become engaged with the Internet. See what your competitors are doing. Think about who might want to read your work and how they might find it. Promote your work on the web by getting it linked in blogs and message boards. Suggest multimedia ideas (videos, audio, photo galleries).

The 3 a.m. shift

E&P has a pretty good look at how Gannett's much-touted "Information Center" approach is faring a year after being rolled out. The papers say the approach -- more updates to the Web, a renewed focus to be ultra-local, inviting readers in on conversations -- has generated much more Web traffic. One paper says it's up 72% month to from last year.

• I liked this quote from a Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst:

  "They are giving the reader something rich. People who might not go to the site for news will go to find out home prices. It is an opportunity to serve advertisers better by connecting with the local audience and a number of local advertisers."

• The article does allude to concerns within a few of the operations that each newsroom is being asked to do too much, but there isn't a lot of explanation.

• In Rochester, N.Y., the paper is learning that the online features can drive print circulation. Editors discovered this in September when they prepared a multimedia package on local sex offenders, which included a database of registered felons and various audio and video reports.
  
  The Web package was prominently placed on the home page on Sept. 28 to promote much of the same material in a Sunday print presentation three days later. The effort resulted in the biggest Sunday single-copy sales of the year, with 4.9% more than any other Sunday. That record was broken two months later when the same approach was used for a report on police overtime.

• In Phoenix, the paper partnered with Arizona State University to pay 15 students $10 an hour to cover local news online during early-morning hours.

• In Parsipanny, N.J., where a Web editor works the overnight shift to keep feeding the Web and trying to grow the overnight audience, the editor says the approach has changed the mind-set of staffers.

  "It is less of a print-driven approach," he says while chatting in his office, "being absolutely as local as we can be and getting readers involved as often as possible." The early jump on the Web is key, he adds, noting that the paper's monthly page views jumped from 3.3 million in March 2006 to 4.9 million in March 2007.

Web first at Lawrence

After reviewing stories sent from the field via e-mail, editors at the Lawrence, Kan.-based Journal-World post content to the Web through a content management system that is accessible from home. In addition, reporters leave cell phone numbers on their voice mail messages so that sources can reach them after hours. According to ME Dennis Anderson, the newsroom is now staffed nearly 24 hours a day. He initially offered raises to those who embraced these new convergence tasks, but now it's expected of everyone

Cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, MP3 recorders and hand-held scanners are just some of the gadgets the reporters use to submit a variety of multimedia content from the field at any time of day. To handle this influx of all-hours information, Anderson encourages establishing an after-hours phone call order to determine which late-breaking stories receive coverage first. He also suggests becoming more selective as to which stories earn the “breaking news” label.

The Journal-Times “Web-first” model enables readers to follow online developments throughout the day by offering e-mail and text messages of breaking news to its readers, who can then submit their responses and participate in online chats based on weekly topics. Although the sometimes-spotty use of chats has decreased the number of letters to the editors, the reader-moderated comments often contain leads for future stories.

Source: Inland Press

NYT moving more copy editors to dayside

... to handle more copy being pushed to the Web. According to a report at Gawker, Editor Bill Keller talked with employees about the "gradual reallocation of resources from print towards digital" and about copy editors being moved to the day side, so that there could be a "greater flow of fresh quality edit material."

Not sure, though, what to make of this quote from Keller:

"We can't let our reverence for quality become a straitjacket in new media. The Web environment is different. ... We can offer guidance but we cannot insist on the same control we exercise over print."

My response: Why not?

But this is something I've struggled with for a while. In general, I don't read things on the Web as thoroughly -- or as critically -- as I do in print, and I'm sure I'm not alone. The kind of error that I might clip out and snark at endlessly if it appeared in print barely fazes me online. But does this more casual acceptance of errors mean that we shouldn't strive for "the same control we exercise over print"? And, if that's the case, why do we not have more people editing elements on Charlotte.com? We've already devoted resources to online calendars, slideshows, blogs, reporting -- but why no online editing?

Meanwhile, 45 miles west ...

The Shelby Star, with a circulation of about 15,000 and a staff of 19, is experimenting with some of the most innovative digital technologies in the industry. Use of blogs, moblogs, video and an integrated newsroom are among the innovations being rolled out.

So far, the changes made — the overhaul of the way the paper gathers, produces and publishes news – have generated an 84 percent increase in Web readers.

In addition, the Star is working on something called the Star Car – a WiFi-enabled mobile Internet reporting vehicle. The installation of this is scheduled for next month, with the launch coming in July.

Sez the publisher:

The second thing we're doing is really focusing on driving traffic on a day-to-day basis. We're learning to be strategic about not only what news we break, but how we break it.

We've tried to learn from TV news on this. They do a lot of teasing and 'holding back' on news and content to lure viewers into their newscasts. We're doing the same thing — dribbling out information, sometimes slower than at the pace we actually collect that information, to encourage users to revisit the site for updates. ...

All of this is contingent on monetising these increases in overall consumption of our products. How and when will that happen, I don't know, but I'm very confident it will happen and we'll continue to be strong news organisations that simply focus on multiple mediums.

Source: journalism.co.uk