Tag Archives: Twitter

Poynter: Washington Post sponsors trending Twitter topic for US midterm elections

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The Washington Post has sponsored a Twitter term to appear at the top of the Trending Topics today as it covers the US midterm elections, according to a report by Poynter Online.

This use of Twitter, the first by a news organisation according to the report, can be seen at work on the social networking site, where a label reading ‘Promoted’ appears next to the top trending term #Election and the top tweet is marked as ‘Promoted by The Washington Post’.

When users click on that topic, one of the Post’s tweets will appear above other tweets with the #Election hashtag — giving the Post prime real estate to promote its coverage and updates.

By being the only news organization using Twitter this way, the Post could rise above the din of election-related conversation and draw more traffic to its website.

Twitter clarifies guideline on tweet screenshots

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On Friday, Twitter announced its new look as well as some updated guidelines. There was one guideline in particular that raised questions for online publishers.

Don’t: Use screenshots of other people’s profiles or Tweets without their permission.

But following requests from techcrunch.com for clarification, Twitter indicated that these rules are not aimed at the news media, in print or online.

This isn’t a new part of the policy and was stated in the guidelines before. This serves primarily to protect users from their tweets being used as endorsements without their knowledge. Public tweets are public. But if you’re going to use tweets in static form (e.g. in a publication), you should have permission from the author/user. For instance, if someone famous were to tweet about liking something and then it was used on a billboard.

This doesn’t apply to broadcast — there are separate display guidelines about that. Our policies also don’t attempt to control the appropriate use of tweets in news reporting.

Greater Manchester Police tweeting a day’s crime

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Greater Manchester Police is using Twitter to update followers on all the incidents reported to them within a 24-hour period. Speaking to the BBC today, GMP chief constable Peter Fahy said the experiment, which is being conducted on a series of accounts including @gmp24_4, was in part a response to the media’s coverage of police work.

“The media doesn’t understand the nature of day-to-day policing,” he told a BBC News report.

Speaking on Radio 4, Fahy also talked about local media:

[W]e find it more difficult to get out information particularly with the decline in local newspapers, so it’s very much about public information. But it’s also to give a better picture to the public of the reality of police work. Crime is obviously an important part of what we do, but it’s only one part and so we’re trying to show the variety of police work but also the way that so many of our incidents are realted to wider social problems.

RWW: Who owns a fired staffer’s Twitter account?

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Who “owns” a Twitter account when a presenter gets fired? ReadWriteWeb asks the questions following CNN and presenter Rick Sanchez’s parting of ways over comments he made about Jon Stewart and Jewish control of the media.

His Twitter account @RickSanchezCNN has more than 146,000 followers at time of writing. Asks RWW:

Did CNN lose out on the social media investment they put into Sanchez’s personal account over the years? Ought they have driven all followers to an official company account instead, in case something like this happened? Presumably some people would see it that way, but social media is so personality-driven that wouldn’t likely have worked as well.

Full post at this link…

Study of French news sites: Facebook sends 13 times more referrals than Twitter

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Facebook sends 13 times more click-throughs than Twitter to French news sites, according to a recent study.

The AT Internet Institute research reports that Twitter was responsible for just 0.1 per cent of referrals to the country’s top 12 news websites, compared to Facebook which sent 1.3 percent.

By taking the same number of websites into consideration, Google’s share was 40.6 per cent in France, in other words 30 times greater than Facebook. This figure remains high, but we should not forget that the main function of a search engine, such as Google, is to suggest links to Internet users. This is not the case for Facebook. Moreover, on average for French news websites, Facebook generated more traffic (1.3 per cent) than the search engine known as Bing (0.8 per cent).

The French study looked at the average share of visits from 6th to 12th September.

According to its own report on the figures, paidContent:UK said Facebook was rated as the seventh “referral giver” to UK newspaper websites by the Newspaper Marketing Agency in May.

What can the new multimedia Twitter offer journalists?

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Twitter is launching a serious overhaul of its design, adding more multimedia options. An attempt to move people away from Twitter apps to using the tool via twitter.com perhaps?

The key changes as far as news organisations and journalists using Twitter are concerned are the additions of embedded video and images – e.g. rather than following a link to an image on TwitPic that image will appear within the tweet.


When reporting on a live or breaking news event using Twitter, journalists can now offer readers more and a more user-friendly, all-in-one experience. I can also see clever journalists using the embedded feature to tease stories with video snippets and by giving their Twitter audience more content encourage those followers to visit a news site and engage there too.

In terms of newsgathering, the new design should also prove useful. When a tweet is clicked, a sidebar showing details of the author or subject will appear, as well as relevant @replies, a map of where it was sent from if geotagged and other tweets by that author. Essentially, it’ll offer journalists a more efficient way to build up a profile of an individual tweet or tweeter and assess how useful that information or contact might be to their story.

The changes will be rolled out across all accounts eventually – for now, you can see more details about the redesign on the newtwitter site.

The 100 most influential news media Twitter accounts

Daniel Romero, a PhD candidate at Cornell University in the US, has produced some fascinating research into news organisations and sources’ influence on Twitter.

Using a study by HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab, which attempts to measure influence on Twitter, Romero has created a list of the 100 most influential news media accounts.


The BBC’s breaking news account, the Wall Street Journal, ESPN and the New York Times all rank within the top 25 most influential. But as our visualisation below of the top 25 accounts in the list shows (click to interact with it), a large number of followers doesn’t always guarantee you more influence – the quality of links and how they are shared also count.

(via Memeburn)

10,000 Words: Making better use of location-based networks

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Inspired by the successes of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Mark Luckie offers some starting-points over on his 10,000 Words blog about how journalists and publishers could make better use of the technology.

His suggestions include greater exploitation of first person media by pulling together items such as tweets, photographs and audio recorded within a geographical area for a multimedia record of events or news.

Luckie adds that newsrooms could create apps or check-in alerts which centre on the technology which is able to pinpoint places of interest, such as cinemas, restaurants and shops near to a mobile phone user and then provide them with relevant reviews and articles.

With a little extra tinkering, an app can also aggregate reviews from other locals or like-minded movie viewers.

(…) So far though, the majority of those companies that are exploring and taking advantage of the technology fall outside of the journalism realm. Hopefully, as these services and social media applications become more mainstream, newsrooms will be more likely to adopt them for their own uses.

See his full post here…

Twitter transgression almost claims another job in journalism

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There is no shortage in opinion that journalists using social media such as Twitter are armed with an invaluable tool for staying connected to their patch and enabling communication with an extensive community of sources and readers.

But recent cases of journalists being reprimanded or even sacked for comments made on the instant messaging site repeatedly remind us of the importance of using the mouthpiece with careful consideration. The need for caution was well illustrated by a Washington Post sports columnist this week who sent out a false news tweet from his personal account, which identifies him as a reporter, landing him in hot water with his employer.

Mike Wise was suspended by the Post after sending out a tweet suggesting that a Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback was being suspended for five games, despite Wise being well aware the figure was inaccurate. He claims it was a ‘test’ of how fast incorrect news can spread over the internet.

But while his test succeeded in showing how quickly that piece of misinformation spread through the web, it also left him with a month-long suspension to reflect on what he admitted was a “horrendous mistake”.

According to a blog post by the newspaper’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the fabrication of news is “a major journalistic transgression” and an action for which Wise is “lucky” to not have been sacked for.

WikiLeaks launches ThaiLeaks following government censorship

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WikiLeaks has launched ThaiLeaks, a web page of downloadable ‘magnet links’ to Thailand news items, after authorities blocked citizen access to the main website yesterday.

The whistleblower announced the launch of the new page today on Twitter. It said even if the new page is blocked citizens will still be able to access information through the links which “can be sent in e-mails, instant messages, even printed on paper, in order to keep information flowing”.

According to a report by the Bangkok Post, government officials said access was blocked on “security grounds”.