According to Beatblogging.org, the Globe and Mail featured five photos that all originally appeared on Twitter as part of its main story yesterday on riots in China.
The images were posted by Chinese citizens using the service and picked up by Reuters – the Globe and Mail took them from the agency’s service and attributed both Twitter and Reuters.
An example of, writes Beatblogging.org, news worthiness overriding photographic quality (the pictures are taken on mobile phones); and the importance of curation as a skill for journalists and editors (Reuters will have had to go through many photos before finding these images).
What’s more it shows the ability of social media and online communities to break through the great Chinese firewall:
“Rather than fear social media and other emerging Web technologies, news organizations should embrace these new technologies. In this case, the Globe and Mail was able to print five incredible photos that illustrate the upheaval and deadly violence in China. These photos would not be possible without social media, and the world would be poorer without these photos.”
National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers represented in the top ten.
The Guardian’s the clear winner, as @GuardianTech’s place on Twitter’s Suggested User List means it has 831,935 followers – 78 per cent of the total. @GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992, @TimesFashion 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.
Complete list of national newspaper Twitter accounts
Other findings:
Glorified RSS Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc. (The 19 are the ones with a blue background in their URL and a yes in the last column).
No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
Rapid drop-off There are only six Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much – no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do – they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.
More on newspaper Twitter accounts:
Some papers publish lists of their Twitter accounts:
Why should journalists use hashtags in tweets? Craig Kanalley answers.
“Hashtags increase the likelihood of people seeing your tweets and therefore of your tweets getting retweeted. When they do get retweeted, they also keep your tweet circulating in the Twitter index and make it more likely for even more people to see it.”
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Interesting post from Thomas Crampton – not only because it flags up a promising internship role at the Phnom Penh Post, but more because of the requirements stipulated in that job’s description.
Candidates for the social media internship must have:
– At least 150 followers on Twitter
– At least 200 Facebook friends
– Administrator or creator of at least one Facebook group
– A blog with a Google Page Rank of 2 or higher
Which raises the question, as posted by Doug Fisher, what journalism/communication schools are teaching these skills?
“BREAKING NEWS: Prosecutors get a $170 billion judgment against Bernard Madoff. Ruth Madoff agrees to give up nearly all ass..”
Gahran says:
“The Journal, like some other news organizations, uses a popular service called Twitterfeed to automatically generate tweets based on an RSS feed. Normally, I’m all in favor of automation that saves time and effort, but Twitter is one place where automation usually doesn’t work, especially for news.”
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.
Multiple sources of information feeding in to CNN’s coverage of Iran led to two specific quotes in a report being lifted from individual tweets and attributed to ‘a source’ rather than Twitter.
CNN has admitted it was a mistake, but are there dangers in news stories such as the recent Iranian elections of ‘noise’ drowning out the ‘signal’ of verification/corroboration of sources?
Missed this list last week from Mark S. Luckie, which gives 30 simple activities journalism graduates could do to experiment and improve their online skills this summer.
Here’s the first 10:
1. Start a blog and post at least twice a week
2. If you already have a blog, write a post that gets retweeted 20 times
3. Shoot 100 amazing photos and post them on Flickr