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Social Media Journalist: ‘USG is the most overrated social media ‘news’ craze’ Jack Lail, Knoxville News Sentinel

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Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry. This week, Jack Lail of Knoxville News Sentinel.

image of Jack Lail

1) Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jack D. Lail. I’m the managing editor/multimedia for the Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I am in charge of the editorial content on our family of websites that include knoxnews.com and govolsxtra.com.

2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
AIM, Twitter and Facebook mainly. I dabble in lots of others. Email? Is that a social media tool? Live in it. Google Reader? Certainly use it every day.

3) Of the thousands of social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or newsgathering tool?
I continue to think the unsexy RSS feed has the largest potential and is the most important tool. Twitter and Facebook have potential.

Next is blogging, if you consider that a social media tool. It is critical for mainstream media to adopt and adapt. Because it is a web native publishing platform as well as a social network, it engages and creates community in very effective ways.

Not a software tool, but the iPhone is the biggest game changer in terms of new platform. I’m actually starting to believe the hype about the mobile web.

Users get that product and every other hardware maker is improving their smart phone offerings at a more rapid pace. Did we just go from Gopher to Netscape in the mobile space?

4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
YouTube and Facebook notwithstanding, user-generated content seems to be the most overrated social media ‘news’ craze or the most ineptly executed by traditional media organisations.

I think you’ll see a few sites that thrive at this and nail it and everybody else will suck. There seems to be a difference also in layering in news in social media sites and creating community around news.

Obviously, there are more social media sites being launched than can be supported by audiences or business models. Is it spring and time to prune?

Breaking news coverage on Twitter of fire in East London

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London-based twitterers have broken the news of a huge fire in East London.

Tweets describing the spread of a black cloud of smoke in the Stratford area of the city are the first reports of the incident – before any accounts online from the mainstream media.

The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

Again according to Twitter The Press Association has now put up pictures of fire.

Sky News are now showing live coverage on the site and a quick search on Google News suggests Sky was the first mainstream media to file on the story at 12:34pm. Sky seem to have been the first news organisation on the scene and are now providing regular updates and a map pinpointing the location of the fire.

A ticker across the top of the BBC News site promises “more soon” reporting a “large plume of smoke” rising from a fire in East London”.

A brief report on Reuters also appeared at 12:39pm.

Tweets from Martin Stabe, new media correspondent with the Press Gazette, say the smoke cloud is now covering PG’s offices based in Underwood Street. (As Martin points out in a comment below, the cloud appeared to be covering the PG’s offices, but was actually further away. Still, he updated his Twitter accordingly and very quickly.)

Was anyone covering it earlier than the Twitter correspondents mentioned here?

UPDATE: reports are that the fire began in a disused bus depot – here’s a view of what the site looked like before it started.

Twittering the Californian bush fires

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Two Twitter users in San Diego, California, have been posting updates on wild fires sweeping the south of the state.

Users Nate Ritter and Viss have combined eyewitness updates on the state of the fire with useful info for locals, like evacuation procedures and meeting points, showing just how well this device can be used in a news environment.

Yes, there are limitations: you have to know about Twitter before you’d come across something like this, and (as Ritter’s last Tweet says) at some point your Twitter correspondent may have to go to bed.

Still these guys, who are also posting photos of the fires to Flickr, seem to be providing more frequent updates than the mainstream media – bar local radio station KPBS, which has got in on the Twitter action too.

Not only do KPBS’ Tweets feature on their main site as a ‘Real-Time Updates’ section, but the outlet goes even further in showing off Twitter’s scope using alerts to direct readers to local authority announcements, a url for a Google map of the fire, traffic updates and addresses for evacuation centres.

Figures are frequently the focus of these alerts and these are later fleshed out into full-blown news pieces.

KPBS obviously sees the one service complementing the other, but other news organisations may disagree: why ‘leak’ breaking news through Twitter first? Because a local readership will return to the site again and again for the public information aspect of the service and stay for the more in-depth news analysis. I was looking for 4k movies in Digital MKV format movies 4k this is probably the best movie project for downloading. TakeFile is behind this whole site, but 4K movies are only provided on 4kmovies.

Whether KPBS uses Twitter on a day-to-day basis or has rolled it out for this special news event I’m not sure, but I’d like to know whether other papers are employing the device and in what ways?

How does the editorial process work and what are the limitations/freedoms for journalists of writing news alerts like this?