Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » social network

Facebook study finds Independent’s content was shared and liked 136,000 times in one month

Sarah Marshall — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:21:42 +0000

Facebook has published a report on the way the Independent uses the social network to share content. The study has found people liked or shared content from the Independent 136,000 during a “recent” month.

These actions were then seen 68,845,050 times on Facebook, with a click-through rate of 0.53 per cent.

The study also found “each action through a social plugin”, such as the recommend button, has driven an average of 2.67 referrals back to the Independent. It also found Facebook referrals result in readers spending an average of seven seconds longer on a destination page.

The Independent’s success in engaging with readers using Facebook and traffic referrals form the social media site increasing by 430 per cent last year has been well documented by Journalism.co.uk. Jack Riley, the Independent’s head of digital audience and content development explained in this post and this podcast, how the Independent has created specific Facebook pages for football teams and columnists such as Robert Fisk, whose page has accumulated more than 24,000 fans.

The first stage of the implementation of the Independent’s Facebook strategy involved adding the recommend plugin at the top and bottom of the article; the second involved the creation of open graph pages for columnists and sports teams.Similar Posts:

‘Like Twitter on steroids’: New social network XYDO launches in beta

Sarah Marshall — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:43:46 +0000

Digg gets drunk, has a threesome with Reddit and Newsboiler, which results in XYDO.

That’s how social news network XYDO, which launched in public beta yesterday, was described in one tweet.

Jeffrey Bates, co-founder of Slashdot.org, opted for:

If Reddit and Hacker News are social news 2.0, XYDO is clearly 3.0 and beyond.

And author Jesse Stay likened it to “Quora meets Digg” and “Twitter on steroids”, according to XYDO’s website.

If you’ve used Digg, Reddit, Newsboiler and Quora, that’s all you need to know. If not, read on.

XYDO takes a bit of getting used to and I’ve not come across any handy video guides, but the following should help you find your way around.

What is XYDO?

XYDO is a social news network that takes stories from your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Users then collectively prioritise and organise stories by pushing them up or down the list. The ranking is influenced by clicking the green arrow up, the red arrow down and by sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

You will automatically be following the people you follow on Twitter and you will be assigned to various communities based on your Twitter connections.

You can view either news from your ‘connections’ or from your ‘communities’ and get a story list in a form which suits you: by custom RSS, email, tweeted links or Facebook.

So what does XYDO mean for journalists and newsrooms?

It is a source of stories. It is a way of networking, discussing stories and tailor-making your own news story feed.

You can also join communities (like ‘media and journalism’, which is already set up) and even create your own community.

It is also a way of increasing site traffic. You can submit stories, which will then be ranked by others on XYDO.

You can follow @xydoapp on Twitter. “Media experts” from XYDO also curate various communities on Twitter channels. You can follow @x_mediajourn for “the best news and blog posts on the topic of media and journalism”, for example.

Read more about XYDO on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Musings from Sussex.Similar Posts:

Slatest: ‘News Dots’ graphic for connecting stories

Judith Townend — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:36:04 +0000

Slate Magazine’s Slatest blog introduces a new way of visualising stories: ‘News Dots’ presents the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network.

“Subjects – represented by the circles below – are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.”

View the graphic at this link…Similar Posts:

Update on Wired Journalists’ new look; Publish2 claims it now has 20 per cent of all journalists in the US

Judith Townend — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:38:32 +0000

As reported on the main site, the social network Wired Journalists is now looking rather different; it has been incorporated into Publish2, the social journalism venture based on a belief in the link economy. Since no terms of the deal were disclosed in the announcement, Journalism.co.uk was keen to know more. Publish2 CEO Scott Karp didn’t reveal the details of the agreement but added this statement:

“Creating a social network for our journalist community within P2 was always on our roadmap, and WiredJournalists presented an opportunity to buy instead of build. It was a great fit. WiredJournalists grew from nothing to more than 3,000 journalists in 18 months.

“The frontline web producers, reporters, and editors using Wired Journalists are exactly the journalists we’re bringing together at Publish2 to collaborate and share links with each other and their readers.

“With this deal, Publish2 now has the equivalent of 20 per cent of all journalists in the U.S, since launching less than a year ago.”

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ReportingOn – end of Knight News funding and the next stage

Laura Oliver — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:42:22 +0000

Back in February last year, Journalism.co.uk caught up with Ryan Sholin, director of News Innovation at Publish2, about his project ReportingOn, which had received funding from the Knight News Challenge.

“I call ReportingOn ‘the backchannel for your beat,” Sholin told us.

“This isn’t about the craft of journalism – this is about the nuts and bolts of finding angles, sources, and data to bolster local news reporting.”

Today the funding from the initiative comes to an end, but that doesn’t mean ReportingOn will – in fact Sholin is gearing up for the launch of version 2.0, which will see the base of the platform, built using Django, go OpenSource

You can follow developments with the project on its blog or Twitter account. But we thought it was time for an update from the man himself:

What changes are being made that will affect the user?
[Sholin] It’s an absolute re-imagining of the network. The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on. That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years.

So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions. There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network. You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in. [See Sholin's demo of the service as it stood on June 17 below]

Why was it necessary to make these changes?
Although the first version of ReportingOn was a great proof of concept, a fun experiment, and a solid first iteration of the network, doing all the development myself didn’t produce a feature-complete, extensible codebase that I could open-source and let the community build on. I wanted to take the next step to develop a backchannel for beat reporters that could be used as is, or reproduced as a question & answer tool for any purpose, especially by a news organization.

Has this involved significant amounts of back-end work/technological change?
Most definitely. The site has been completely rebuilt. It’s still built on the Django platform, but rather than me teaching myself this style of programming in the middle of the night and at the crack of dawn to demonstrate what one curious journalist might be capable of, it was built by the professional team at Lion Burger, who are also responsible for tools like Snipt.net and recently built afeedapart.com for the popular ‘An Event Apart’ series of Web design conferences in the US.Similar Posts:

Allvoices’ payment scheme for ‘citizen journalists’

Katarina Witzheller — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:56:57 +0000

Allvoices has launched an incentive program to reward its citizen journalist contributors for their work.

According to a press release, the scheme is designed as follows:
Contributors will be paid in relation to the quality of their submissions e.g. copyright violations of texts or photos are ineligible.
The amount of money is dependent on the feedback from the community and strength of the user’s profile.
The type of contributor and its rewards are divided into the following three categories:

• Stringer
- New or infrequent contributors, who organise their social network based around their work.
- Has had a minimum of 10,000 views for their contributions and 25 fans.
- Pay scale in this category is $0.25 per 1,000 page views.

• Reporter:
- Minimum total of 25,000 views for their work and 50 fans. For every 1,000 page views they earn $1.00.

• Anchor:
-Anchors are influential contributors beyond their social network and are closely followed by the Allvoices community, says the release.
- The criteria for being an Anchor is at least 100,000 views and 75 fans.
- Potential pay rate is $2.00 per 1,000 page views.Similar Posts:

MySpace launches cit-j project uReport

Laura Oliver — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:54:09 +0000

You’d be forgiven for confusing it with CNN’s iReport, similar name, similar project – US broadcaster Fox has expanded its citizen journalism initiative, uReport, onto MySpace [though can't seem to find a working link yet].

According to a press release announcing the launch:

“Members of the MySpace uReport community can become ‘uReporters’ by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including USA, World, Entertainment and Politics. This content could be featured in relevant programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page.”

The social network has already dabbled in some user-generated news coverage, having teamed up with MSNBC for US election coverage.

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – get office social networking restrictions lifted

Laura Oliver — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:30:42 +0000

Can’t Twitter or use social network sites in the office because of online restrictions or a strict office policy? Take your case to the Powers That Be, with examples of how it’s helping other journalists, in a bid to get any web restrictions lifted. Why not put out a shout on Twitter for success stories in your field? Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

News Mixer API spawns Iowa Content experiment

Laura Oliver — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:37:19 +0000

News Mixer, the final year project of programming-journalism students at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University aimed at breathing new life into commenting systems on news sites, was always intended to be developed and adapted further by third parties.

“We got a lot of the hard work out of the way and the code is out there for anyone to play with (…) it’s free. Use it,” Brian Boyer, one of the developers behind it, insisted in an interview last year.

The open source nature of the project has allowed three developers from e-Me Ventures to create Iowa Content – a WordPress-based widget that aggregates localised news content from a range of sources and is connected to Facebook Connect.

Iowa Content is based on News Mixer’s quip function – short-form responses to news items, ideally suited to Twitter or Facebook status updates.

Being linked with the social network will encourage readers to discuss and comment on the news – as well as share links via their profiles.

It’s in the experimental stage right now, but as the intro video below says, it’s about ‘grassroots creation of meaningful content’:
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CNN wins battle of online inauguration broadcasters, according to Omniture stats

Laura Oliver — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:42:28 +0000

Marketing-Interactive reports on stats from Omniture SiteCatalyst that suggest CNN attracted 136 million page views and served a record 21.3 million live video streams on CNN Live, as of 3.30pm (EST) yesterday.

According to the report, CNN Live’s use of Facebook boosted the figures with an estimated 1 million users updating their status on the social network through the CNN site.

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News sites get social for Obama inauguration

Laura Oliver — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:08:08 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Social network for journalism researchers

Laura Oliver — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:14:57 +0000

Journalism lecturer and blogger at the Online Journalism Blog (OJB), Paul Bradshaw, has set up a rather nifty social network for journalism and news researchers using Ning:

“It’s an attempt to provide a way for journalism students and academics to get in touch with others researching the same area, exchange ideas and tips, and ask for help on everything from finding relevant literature to sourcing contacts and the best research methods.

“Research is traditionally a solitary, frustrating endeavour. It doesn’t need to be. If you work with journalism students, please encourage them to join the network and contribute a question or an answer,” writes Bradshaw on the OJB.

There are 139 members at time of writing, so go get yourself signed up.Similar Posts:

NYTimes people get together with NYTimes people

Judith Townend — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:29:23 +0000

‘Oh my god, we read the same newspaper!’ It’s like Guardian soulmates, but Stateside, and not necessarily for single people. Ok, so it’s not at all like a singles website at all.

In fact, today saw the public launch of the New York Times social network, TimesPeople. As we reported in June it’s a social network that links up the NY Times audience through their shared interests.

It’s a free service, which allows:

RSS feeds with the latest activities of other users in each network, which can be synced to their updates to their Facebook news

Users to join in public activities, including readers’ comments, recommendations, reviews, ratings

“We created TimesPeople as a community built around sharing news and information, giving our readers a way to connect with other like-minded readers,” said Marc Frons, chief technology officer of digital operations, at the New York Times, in the release. “TimesPeople is a great way for our readers to discover content on the site they might not have otherwise.”Similar Posts:

Brand Republic: Jewish Chronicle launches social network

Laura Oliver — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:36:48 +0000

The Jewish Chronicle has launched a social networking feature on its website. As previously reported by Journalism.co.uk, the paper’s site is run using open source Drupal software.Similar Posts:

FT.com: CNBC and LinkedIn combine business audiences

Laura Oliver — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:58:53 +0000

Financial news channel CNBC and professional social network LinkedIn are forming an alliance, highlighting the growing importance of advertising to specialist online communities.Similar Posts: