BBC CoJo: What’s the difference between curation and journalism?

BBC College of Journalism discusses a lively Twitter debate which took place at the weekend between Sky journalist Neal Mann and NPR’s social media strategist Andy Carvin. The blog attempts to move the debate on, looking at how journalism is changing as a result of social media.

On Friday, ‘mainstream’ media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah – Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate ‘today’ footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.

Was that a failure of mainstream media or social media? It was certainly a failure of journalism – and that’s the point: the differing strands of journalism and/or media are converging.

Full post on the BBC blog at this link

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On the Media: Andy Carvin and Twitter’s ‘new kind of journalism’

NPR’s On The Media show has Andy Carvin discussing how a ‘new kind of journalism’ has been created by social media reports from the Arab world. Carvin has been vetting sources and trying to verify individual tweets from the Middle East and North Africa since the recent uprisings began.

Listen using the embedded player below.

Full post on On The Media at this link

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Mashable: Are social networks becoming personal news wires?

To celebrate its five-year anniversary, Mashable is producing a series of posts on developments in social media. The latest looks at the impact of social networking on news consumption and the idea that social networks have become personal news wires.

Following a discussion of online “friends” evolving into our news editors, writer Vadim Lavrusik rounds-up some interesting ideas about ways to measure source credibility in the future for greater transparency online.

Though news is increasingly social and user-generated, the persistent fear is one of credibility and a flaw in measuring a curator’s knowledge on or interest in a topic. This problem could be improved by enabling users to develop more targeted news feeds on personalized topics of interest, but also by identifying specific sources and curators of information as more or less credible than others.

One idea he discusses, put forward by Andy Carvin a senior strategist at NPR,  would be to measure “who is knowledgeable” about a topic being shared.

This could also include sifting sources based on whether they are eye-witness to an event or are experts on the topic, both of which add value in their own way, he said. Such a model could then help establish a credibility index among users as sources, helping consumers better decide what information is credible.

See the full post here…

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Live webcast from NYC: crowdsourcing and journalism

Via paidContent, we see that a live conference from the New York Times building is being webcast right now (not sure for how much longer), with a stellar line-up: Brian Stelter, media reporter & Media Decoder blogger, the New York Times (moderator) with Aron Pilhofer, editor, interactive news technology, the New York Times; Andy Carvin, senior social media strategist, National Public Radio; Amanda Michel, editor, distributed reporting, ProPublica; Jay Rosen, professor, New York University; and Joaquin Alvarado, senior VP, digital innovation, American Public Media.

Live Webcast Happening Now: Crowdsourcing For Journalists, at NYT Building | paidContent.

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#FollowJourn: @acarvin/NPR social media strategist

#FollowJourn: Andy Carvin

Who? Social media strategist for National Public Radio.

What? Regularly blogs on social media developments at NPR; led its social media Obama inauguration coverage.

Where? @acarvin or AndyCarvin.com.

Contact? andycarvin [at] yahoo ( dot ) com.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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News sites get social for Obama inauguration

To mark President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, news sites are plotting and planning their online coverage already:

CNN

CNN’s going for the social networking angle, teaming its live video streaming site, CNN.com Live, with Facebook. Users will be able to update their Facebook status from the CNN site and see a stream of updates from their friends.

The updates entered via CNNLive will be tagged with the hyperlink ‘via CNN.com Live’ so Facebook contacts can click through to view the inauguration site from the social network.

NPR

At the end of last year, NPR used its inside blog to put a call out for social media ways to cover the inauguration. Among the ideas mooted in the post were:

• Citizen journalism iPhone app
• ‘Mobcasting’ – audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their experiences of inauguration day
• An inauguration #tag – for Twitter, Flickr, blog posts etc. The tag #inaug09 seems to be in use already.
• Maps of user-generated content

More help is wanted from techies and journalists – contact Andy Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter) via the blog post.

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After the blogging storm

The winds have slowed down to a tropical storm, but the Gustav blogging continues.

The mainstream media is reporting on the blogging phenomenon as well as the actual hurricane:  the Chicago Tribune looks at the decision-making power of blogs and FollowTheMedia comments that the hurricane may stop print, but not the web.

Meanwhile, over at Poynter, NPR’s Andy Carvin examines the role of social media in Gustav coverage.

As we posted yesterday, this was one for the Twitterers and they tweet on as people assess the damage. A quick twitter local search shows how the twitterers regard the media professionals…

Pictures can be found easily on this Flickr search and over at gustavbloggers.com they reflect that it wasn’t as bad as they feared. Meanwhile, to prepare for reportage of the next natural disaster, the Blog Herald offers its disaster blogging tips.

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