MySpace has launched a trail advertising platform across its site aimed at giving advertisers great control over what they do across the social network.
The Community Builder platform allows advertisers them to build and customise campaigns.
The platform also providers analytics to help gauge performance.
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.
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?
AOL has announced that it’s buying social network Bebo for $850 million in cash.
Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. Continue reading
Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry.
Possibly one of the best example of how newspaper websites aren’t tapped in at all when it comes to reporting breaking news via mobile devices.
Mark Comerford makes the point by highlighting his Twitter buddy @documentally who crashed his Landrover this morning and recorded the events on Twitter and through Seesmic. Thankfully, no-one was hurt (the vehicle has more than a few scars though) and friends on the social network were able to help provide information on recovery services.
The compelling factor was that Mark blogged all the events, linking to the Tweets and video, pretty-much in real time as things were unfolding.
Breaking news events have been documented like this before across Twitter – news groups in the US have also used the immediacy of these services to good effect, especially for last year’s fires in California – but have you ever seen a newspaper, national, regional or local, in the UK ever try this out for their rolling news stories getting people coming back again and again for updates?
Thought not.
The use of pictures from social networking sites to illustrate news stories seems to be a growing practice among news providers across the media.
Yet an internal memo from the BBC, quoted by Media Guardian, raises the ethical and legal implications of using these images:
1) context: these images are published by users for the intended audience of friends and others within their network and not for the wider world to scrutinize.
2) copyright: who owns the copyright to these images – the user or the host site? Not likely the news provider.
While Steve Herrman on the BBC’s Editors’ blog has been posting for a while on the ongoing ethical debate around this issue, many social network users may not be aware of what happens to their copyright when they submit photos to networks like Facebook and MySpace.
Facebook’s terms and conditions on user submitted content are initially rights-grabbing (the emphasis below is mine):
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Yet the terms go on to state:
Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this means while the user still ‘owns’ content, such as the photos they submit, Facebook can license these images out. As such news organisations would do well to steer clear of using these images without a licence and tempting Facebook into a legal battle.
For the user, however, it comes down to trust: trust that their content won’t be licensed in this way by the social network. Shouldn’t Facebook be doing more to ensure that this doesn’t happen with or without licence, for the ethical reason stated above?
According to the site, Facebook apps will soon be easier to embed on external websites. But how can news organisations direct users from the social network to their sites?
ABC News and Facebook have entered a formal partnership to deliver political news through the social network.
Facebook’s politics section will carry live debates and allow users contribute to surveys, discussions, polling, as well as accessing ABC News videos and headlines on the site.
Facebook devotees will also be able to offer support to political candidates and follow ABC News reporters on the network.
Away from the dedicated news page, an application will let you access all this information from your profile page.
I particularly like the reporter’s mini-feed that seems to be a mishmash of formal reporting and on-the-fly uploads and updates.
ABC News isn’t the first news provider to get in on the social media phenomenon. The New York Times has a presence on Facebook and the Washington Post has dedicated some serious time to developing applications.
However, ABC’s move looks to have significant depth and resonance about it.
To highlight the partnership, claims the New York Times, the two companies will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on January 5.
“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News, told the Times.
“This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”
Jay Rosen told the Journalism Leaders Forum @ UCLAN, about the next project for NewAssignment.net – having someone report a beat in conjunction with the a social network.
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/rosen.mp3]