Tag Archives: CNN

For @GuidoFawkes, Twitter is a fad that will disappear; for @MickFealty, it’s a valuable tool

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Twitter is a ‘fad that will soon disappear,’ political blogger Paul Staines said yesterday.

Staines, who blogs under the alias Guido Fawkes, told participants at the Voices Online Blogging conference at City University that he has ‘not got the time’ to monitor the 3,000 + followers of @guidofawkes.

“How profound can you be in 140 characters?” he said. “I use Twitter to broadcast, but I go to individual bloggers for information.”

Staines argued that the increasing popularity of the site, boosted by celebrity users such as Stephen Fry and Oprah Winfrey, meant that ‘overload is inevitable’.

However, Mick Fealty (@mickfealty) creator of the Slugger O’Toole blog, agreed that Twitter is a ‘nightmare’ but insisted it remained an ‘important tool’ for journalists.

“I used it on the day of the US elections last November, when I was writing a live blog on the Slugger site,” he explained. “I canvassed for US readers to be mini-bloggers for one day.

He used feeds from people who were watching three or four American television networks, he said. “Within about two minutes I knew what had gone out on ABC, Fox and CNN, and I could give a clear judgement about what was going on.”

Fealty added that the site was an effective tool to generate information about an area where he had ‘no local or native knowledge’.

Twitter’s usefulness was a result of the ‘very smart and intelligent’ contacts he has made using it, he said.

“The value of Twitter is the value of people I follow,” he explained.

Journalism.co.uk reported from the Voices Online Blogging conference 2009. Follow @journalism_live on Twitter for live updates from a wide array of media events.

MySpace launches cit-j project uReport

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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.

Nieman Journalism Lab: How a user gave CNN Twitter success

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In this article and video (below), James Cox, the creator of Twitter account @CNNbrk, gives his thoughts on working with big news organisations and what having greater access to news means to the user.

NB: Since the Nieman story was published, @CNNbrk has broken the one million follower mark.

Full article at this link…

CNN takes control of CNNbrk Twitter account with nearly 1m followers

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CNN has confirmed to Silicon Alley Insider that it has now taken control of @CNNbrk – the Twitter account started independently of the news organisation, which now has close to 1 million followers.

According to the report, CNN has been working with its founder James Cox for more than two years.

“This is no-brainer for CNN, and we hope they paid Cox a lot of money for the account he’s nurtured. By adding more stories to the feed — and links to CNN’s site – CNN.com could generate hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per day. (CNN isn’t sure if it’s going to add links in the near-term.),” writes Dan Frommer on Silicon Alley Insider.

Stinkyjournalism.org: Time Warner comes under fire for Greg Gumbel infomercials

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Stinky Journalism has unraveled a tangled web involving CNN, its parent company Time Warner, an anchor for a rival broadcaster and infomercials run without proper identification, as required by the Federal Trade Commission in the US.

Full story at this link…

American Prospect: Are reporters reporting or making the news?

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Should journalists report, explain, but also ‘make news’, asks American Prospect’s Ezra Klein.

Klein refers to assertions made by CNN’s Ed Henry about a recent Obama press conference, in which Henry said his strategy was to ‘make news on something unexpected’ – a tactic that lead to the story on overturning the policy at Dover Air Force Base preventing media coverage of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full article at this link…

Microsoft’s Photosynth as a storytelling tool

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Speaking at yesterday’s Association of Online Publisher’s (AOP) editorial technologies event, Microsoft executive producer Peter Bale extolled the virtues of Photosynth as a new visual storytelling tool.

The experimental, but publicly available tool, was used by CNN in its coverage of the Obama inauguration to thread 100s of photos together. These create a scenic panorama but can also be drilled into using additional feature Deep Zoom:

Screenshot of CNN's inauguration website

Within MSN its being used five or six times a week and the team are learning more about its capabilities with each use, Bale told Journalism.co.uk.

The product is being deployed commercially e.g for motoring sections to show car interiors in high detail. MSN also used PhotoSynth to display professional and user-contributed images during the recent heavy snowfall in the UK.

“What we’d like to do a lot more of is multiple crowd-contributed pictures where you can get several hundred or thousand people contributing a picture of a similar event, stitched together in a communal panorama,” he explained. https://bmmagazine.co.uk/business/us-government-asks-max-polyakov-to-sell-firefly-shares-for-safety-concerns/

Photosynth works in combination with Microsoft’s alternative to Flash, Silverlight, which Bale says is ideally set up to enable map mash-ups and overlaying other content onto the threaded images.

Twitterfall makes it onto Telegraph newsroom screens

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Twitterfall, an app that lets you monitor new updates to Twitter on certain #tags or search terms, has been a fixture on the big screens in the Telegraph’s integrated newsroom for the last two weeks, according to this pic from Telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren (courtesy of TwitPic):
Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

The Twitterfall of #twitterfall is the first non-mainstream media news source to appear on the screens, Warren said in a Tweet, adding that it’s the same size as the projection of Telegraph.co.uk on the screens and given more space than Sky, BBC and CNN on the wall.

Obama inauguration coverage sets new live streaming record for AP

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It seems that more and more people are eschewing television in favour of online content, when it comes to obtaining and providing coverage of important events.

According to the Associated Press, eight million users watched the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States in Washington D.C on Tuesday, via AP’s Online Video Network (OVN).

At its peak, AP claim that as many as 374,000 streams were accessed concurrently.

This is a significant increase from the 80,000 live streams AP recorded during its coverage of the presidential election night in November.

In addition, 160 media outlets subscribed to their premium service, which provided a video widget allowing for multiple viewing angles of the event.

Static media also enjoyed a healthy rise, with AP Images and AP Exchange together recording an 80 per cent peak over regular traffic to their sites during the event.

In total, over 1,400 inaugural images passed through their services from around the globe.

AP were not alone in their online triumph. CNN shattered its own record four-fold, by attracting 136 million views of its website and 21.3 million viewers to its live streaming coverage.

Web users were so busy watching President Obama sworn into office that Google noticed a distinct drop in the number of searches performed during the inaugural address.