Polis: The continuing digital transformation of the New York Times
Monday, 7 November 2011, 10:50
Arthur Sulzberger talk at LSE Polis, with some interesting points about innovations in how New York Times journalists use social media.
ReadWriteWeb: How Tumblr is Changing Journalism
Friday, 16 September 2011, 16:57
"ShortFormBlog uses a mix of Tumblr and Wordpress as its publishing platform. In particular, a plugin called Tumblrize. As Smith explained, Tumblrize "allowed me to take the WordPress backend (which I had invested a lot of work into customizi…
Teaching Online Journalism: Journalists, take another look at Tumblr
Tuesday, 28 June 2011, 15:51
"Tumblr is now one of the top 25 websites in the U.S., according to data from Quancast, as reported in a new article at TechCrunch. It gets close to 5,000 pageviews per second."
Journalism and social media whitepaper
Wednesday, 25 May 2011, 14:52
Daryl Willcox publishing has today released a whitepaper about how journalists have adapted to the rise of social media over the last five years, which I wrote for them.
The report is aimed largely at an audience of PR professionals who want an insight into how journalists think about social media, and it is being published alongside a survey about how journalists use social media. I must say some of the findings of that survey surprise me:
out of the
922956 journalists surveyed, over 200 made additional comments – some scathing, slamming social media as a pointless communication channel to manage, and some pointing to the fact they are now dependent on these websites as news sources.
Other findings of the survey were less surprising:
The survey also found that little more than one per cent of respondents claimed they were using social media less than they were 12 months ago, confirmation that journalists reject the notion that social media may be a fad.
One of the great frustrations of working on this project has been that the topic is so fast moving that the paper is inevitably out of date already. In the few weeks since I finished writing this, there has been quite a lot of additional information and new examples that I would have loved to include:
- The Project for Excellence in Journalism showed how Facebook had become a critical traffic driver to US news sites in 2010, while Twitter was making less of an impact.
- The Oriella Digital Journalism study found that journalists increasingly use social media – but also that the majority still don’t.
- The sessions of the BBC Social Media Summit provided a great deal of insight into how newsrooms in Britain and around the world view social media.
There have also been some interesting case studies in journalists’ use of social media, most notably the critical role of New York Times journalist Brian Stelter’s (re-)tweeting in breaking the story of Osama bin Laden on Twitter. In Britain, we have seen Twitter play an central role in the debate about privacy injunctions.
Somewhat less dramatically, Stefanie Gordon’s images of the Space Shuttle Endeavour provided an excellent case study of how images published on social media sites rapidly becomes incorporated into news organisations’ output.
Inevitably, the best way to keep up to speed with developments in social media and journalism is by participating in the link sharing communities that social networking sites enable. So here’s one place to start: my feed of social media and journalism links.
Mashiable: Tumblr Gets More Social, Launches Share Button
Tuesday, 10 May 2011, 12:44
"Tumblr has joined the ranks of social networks Twitter and Facebook by introducing the Tumblr Button. The Tumblr Button is designed to allow content publishers from across the web to better interact with the Tumblr community."
New York Times: Storify Collects Strands of News on the Social Web
Monday, 25 April 2011, 16:42
"Storify … is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Investors are…
New York Times: Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:20
"Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services…
The Atlantic: The 5 Keys to Tumblr for Media Outlets
Tuesday, 3 August 2010, 15:01
"for tech-savvy media outlets, it has not been exactly clear *what* to use Tumblr for. … So, leave it to ProPublica, an old-school investigative journalism non-profit to come up with the best use of Tumblr I've seen yet. It launched Officials Say the Darndest Things today, which presents funny or telling quotes by public figures."
New York Times: Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr
Tuesday, 3 August 2010, 11:54
"[M]any [media] outlets have done little more than set up a placeholder page [on Tumbler]. In his new job as a “media evangelist,” [former Newsweek senior editor Mark Coatney]’s role, and in some ways his challenge, is to help them figure out what to do next."
meish dot org: Consider Yourself On Notice
Saturday, 30 August 2008, 12:39
Meg Pickard thinks about Tumblr the way I do about delicious: "my digital scrapbook allows me to record some of the digital ephemera(/detritus) that I come across in my daily life online, and I can look back through it to find patterns…or not."
