by Roland Legrand

Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience.

But many journalists don’t know how to get the full benefit of online social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. They sign up, fill in forms, and … nothing happens. Or they have a lot of fun with friends but admit that, professionally speaking, their online network activity has little or no value. To get the full benefit of social networks, journalists have to be do more than just sign up; they have to be engaged and active within their networks. And that means they need to carefully think about what image they want to project of themselves, to a group of watchers that might include both personal friends and business colleagues.

Who are you?

In our newsroom workshop on social media, we talked a lot about Facebook. The main lesson of this discussion was that Facebook tries to be everything for everybody. That means that journalists can customize their pages to get the most out of them, but they should first think hard about what they want to achieve there.

There is one fundamental question for journalists in social networks: Who is it you want to reach? Or to put it another way, what kind of conversation do you want to engage in?

If your beat is covering bankers, chances are that you have to deal with a relatively conservative group of people. Maybe it is not a good idea to befriend them on Facebook in the same way as you would befriend your “real friends,” showing those funny pictures of that crazy party… But at the same time you do want to talk to these bankers in an informal, human way, without putting them off.

To help you run a page that caters to both professional and personal contacts, Facebook gives you tools to customize what you want to show to whom. These tools help you project an image of yourself that facilitates contacts. Facebook’s “privacy settings” allow you to control the access to the different components of your page: profile, search, newsfeed and wall, applications.

For every bit of information you can say who gets access: everyone, your networks and friends, friends of friends, or even specific individuals.

Whether you are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or whatever, you should invest time in your profile. LinkedIn is clearly a network for professionals, but many other networks are everything for everybody, and it is on these networks that you have to decide how you want to present yourself.

Asking, answering, starting conversations

It is a bit odd to go to a bar, stay silent and almost invisible for the whole evening, and than complain that you had no interesting conversation. Yet this is exactly what happens a lot on online networks.

LinkedIn has a terrific system of questions and answers. You can ask questions to other people in your network; you can even specify the sector which you target for an answer. You can also answer other members’ questions, of course, a good way to get recognition as an expert in your field.

It is obvious there are a lot of opportunities here for journalists to ask questions or to announce that they are working on a story.

Each and every time you have a deeper contact with a source, whether it is online or in the physical world, you should try to connect also on a social network — but which network depends on your source. In that way your online friends are maybe not “real friends,” but they will be much more than just “followers”.

To start a conversation, you have to know who is out there and what kind of people there are in your sector. You will soon find out that the “degrees of separation” between you and most people in the sector you cover are very limited. You’ll discover new people who are connected to those you already follow. It is always very interesting to look on Twitter to see who that interesting new contact is following herself, to give but one example — most social networks allow you access to that kind of information.

If you feel you have a strong reputation in your sector and lots of people follow you on social networks, it could be interesting to start your own specialized page. Nothing stops you from creating a Facebook group which deals exclusively with your beat.

Linking it all together

So, instead of saying “Here we are now, entertain us,” you engage in online conversations and you even start them up. You will have a group of close contacts who you know pretty well, a group of contacts you are less familiar with, and a group of people which might be interesting but whom you hardly know them.

It is fashionable to look down on people who gather lots of followers because it seems they deal in what are called “weak ties” as opposed to the “strong ties” we have with our closest friends. Often, however, those weak ties can bring you unexpected and highly useful information and support. The “strong ties” share too much of your own background to give you radically new insights. It can be the weak ties that turn out to be very efficient.

A show of hands in the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette illustrates how editors and reporters are using the Facebook social netowork.

Having many followers or “friends” also helps to promote your articles, videos, pictures etc. Don’t rely exclusively on your newspaper’s marketing department!

In your sector, you are the main representative of your newspaper, radio or television station or blog. Having good online conversations is probably more important for the brand of your publisher than yet another marketing campaign.

Of course, it is also important for you as an individual journalist. It is important to behave like a one-person enterprise, because, at the end of the day, that is what you are. It helps you to survive and flourish in difficult times for the media, and it helps your publisher.

So do not hesitate to have elaborate profiles and to engage in conversations on many online networks. Tools such as ping.fm let you send out messages and links to many networks with one simple click. However, don’t forget to listen carefully to reactions you get and engage in conversations — and to send out links to other stuff than just your own articles.

How to keep an overview of all this? Enter FriendFeed, a feed aggregator that groups almost everything together in a fast moving stream of information, and you can customize, slice and dice that information and your contact lists as you want.

Guidelines and pleasure

Media institutions have had to grapple with the fact that social networks are knocking down the wall between journalists’ personal and professional circles. The Wall Street Journal recently issued new rules of conduct for its employees regarding social networks. I do agree with some of these rules, like the warning against misrepresenting yourself using a false name while collecting information for an article. (Although maybe there are exceptions in an investigative journalism context), but there has been some criticism of the rules. One of the most interesting reactions came from venture capitalist Fred Wilson, focusing on three rules:

• Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
• Don’t discuss articles that haven’t yet been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted. . . .
• Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

Wilson reacted:

This misses the chance to make their reporting collaborative. Of course, they should discuss how an article was made. Of course, they should talk about stories as they in progress. Net natives — as WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch calls them — understand this.

Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. also provide the opportunity for reporters and editors to come out from behind the institutional voice of the paper — a voice that is less and less trusted — and to become human. Of course, they should mix business and pleasure.

I think this is a most profound reaction. If we journalists want to survive, we will have to learn to come out from behind our institutions and to speak in a human voice — to engage in genuine conversations.

What is your take on this? Do you feel online social networks are crucial for your job? And how should we behave on those networks, being journalists?

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Pittsburgh newsroom photo by Robbmonty via Flickr Creative Commons

by Julie Posetti, May 27, 2009

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction.

So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists? I interviewed 25 of the journalists I follow on Twitter (most of them Australian with a smattering of South African and U.S. respondents) to find out first-hand.

This is the first installment in a two-part MediaShift series on the theme of journalists and Twitter.

Twitter-mania

Black Saturday (Pic. courtesy News Ltd)

In Australia, where journalists are literally in a Twittering frenzy, the platform was incorporated into mainstream news coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires which devastated the southern state of Victoria in February. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where I used to work, pioneered the use of the technology during the disaster with impressive results.

And last week, during violent storms and flooding in the states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW), it was evident how embedded Twitter had become as a component of ABC radio’s breaking news coverage. Reporters from remote regions through to network stars and even the corporation’s Managing Director are Tweeting their way into unprecedented public engagement. As Leigh Sales, anchor of the respected nightly news program Lateline, told me: “I’m giving Twitter a red hot go.”

But as I watched my Twitter-feed flood with news of the deadly storms, I saw something else racing up the trending topics chart: the London industry gathering #media140 called to discuss the role of Twitter in breaking news. Inevitably, the debate canvassed the views of resistors and detractors who argued “Twitter isn’t journalism.” Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs. journalism debate? Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.

Evidence of resistance was also broadcast in Australia this month on the national ABC radio program Life Matters. In an episode devoted to the impact of social media, host Richard Aedy declared himself a skeptic and said he didn’t see the point of platforms like Twitter. He found some support within his audience — an older, educated, affluent crowd (disclaimer: I’m a regular listener!). But many called the program to describe how social media such as Twitter could be useful social connectors and information sources. While one of his guests plugged the virtues of Twitter, another, respected veteran science broadcaster Robin Williams ridiculed the platform, proudly telling listeners he was very connected and yet didn’t even have a mobile phone.

However, the producers invited lillsteners to participate in the discussion via Twitter and the experiment was a success. Twitter users — some of whom had never previously heard the program — tweeted their way through it, posting hundreds of comments and making an impression on the skeptical host. I was invited to appear on the next edition of the program to discuss the Twitter political reporting experiment I conducted last September with my students and the emerging role of Twitter in journalism. By that stage, there was less “But isn’t it just inane public belly-gazing” and more “It strikes me this is a little like citizen journalism,” which was good to hear as the program’s weekly talkback sessions are a natural bridge to social media enhancement and potentially a younger, expanded audience.

Nevertheless, Twitter (in conjunction with other social media platforms) is changing journalism and these changes need to be carefully scrutinized with open minds.

How do journalists identify themselves on Twitter?

Most of the journalists I interviewed tweet openly, acknowledging their professional identity and real name in their personal Twitter page biographies, even if they use an online nickname. Only one locked his account, meaning he had to approve potential followers before they would be able to view his tweets. However, several deliberately withheld the name of their employer to avoid perceived conflicts of interest.

But the themes of trust and credibility, honesty and transparency came up constantly as significant features of successful social media engagement and most of the journalists I interviewed had connected the dots.

“Because I use Twitter to source content (and) find news tips, I think it’s best to be open about where I’m coming from,” said Gary Kemble, the ABC’s Online Opinion Editor. He’s also responsible for the broadcaster’s @abcnews and @articulate Twitter feeds.

The ABC’s national youth affairs correspondent, Michael Turtle agreed.

“I think the very nature of Twitter lends itself towards having an open profile and being honest about who you are,” he said. “The power of the site is the ability to connect directly with people and engage in conversations. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective if you chose to do that anonymously.”

When asked why he tweeted openly, John Grey, online editor of the Murdoch-owned Brisbane Courier Mail, said: “Call me wacky, call me weird, but I think people are more likely to have an interactive relationship with a human rather than a bot.”

Freelance journalist Rachel Hills acknowledged her upfront tweeting as being consistent with the need for interactivity between the reporter and the audience in the digital age.

“I have adopted this relatively open approach because I view the future of media (or at least the kind of ideas and issues based work that I do as a freelancer) as being about hosting and facilitating conversations — interacting with the people who care about the work that you do is vital,” she said.

However, ABC Adelaide news reader and producer, Jacqui Munn reflected the caution that some journalists feel about the merger of the private and the public that occurs in social media spaces like the Twittersphere. She switched from tweeting openly to anonymously once her journalistic identity was revealed.

“I wasn’t looking to use it to communicate as a journalist and didn’t feel comfortable being judged professionally for just shooting the breeze with friends and other somewhat anonymous acquaintances,” Munn said.

How are journalists using Twitter?

Professional journalists are using Twitter to enhance and augment traditional reporting practices. It’s another tool in their kit and many journalists, like ABC radio producer Andrew Davies, are now logged onto Twitter throughout their working day.

“I try and start my day by looking at what people are saying (and) talking about on Twitter,” he said, “I love being able to read all the fantastic links to interesting websites, ideas (and) news that people have sent out.”

Reporters I interviewed are using the platform to “broadcast” links to content they or their news outlet have produced in an effort to build a new audience. Some also contribute to or manage organizational Twitter accounts on behalf of their employers. A few use it as a live reporting platform and some employ applications to share images, audio and links to other online content they find interesting. Many are using it to crowdsource contacts, story angles, background and case studies. In fact, when I began researching this story, my first move was to tweet a request for journalists to respond to questions about why they were on Twitter and how they used the platform. I received useful feedback and uncovered a number of new contacts via this method before conducting more extensive online interviews.

The ABC’s Michael Turtle uses Twitter regularly to monitor public debate which he acknowledges influences his storytelling.

“It sometimes helps to use Twitter to gauge opinion on an issue,” Turtle said. “You would certainly never claim the views online are representative, or seek to pass off a collection of tweets as an accurate poll. But it can point you in the direction of certain views, which can help guide some of the questions you might ask or angles you might follow-up.”

Most journalists I interviewed monitor the feeds of sources on their beats as an adjunct to website and email accounts. They check their competition and try to keep up to date with hot industry issues. For some, it’s replaced their RSS news feeds and for others it’s a way of networking with peers and developing mentors. It’s the end-of-day bar debriefing and a reporting tool rolled into one.

Journalists Marketing Themselves

As journalism and entertainment continue to merge, and reporters increasingly become media personalities, image conscious journalists are gaining awareness of Twitter’s power as a branding and marketing tool. This is paramount in the mind of the ABC’s Leigh Sales who has developed an Australian Twittersphere cult-following with a unique blend of news and wit. She says the jury is still out on the real value of Twitter to her.

“It’s hard to see the application for me, given that I only have 1,000 or so followers, yet my program rates around 300k.” But she pointed to the potential value of such a following in marketing her books.

@leighsales ABC Lateline host

However, journalists are also beginning to see the value in using Twitter to interact with their audiences, recognizing the inevitable breakdown of old media strictures that separated news producers and receivers and reinforced a top-down approach to media consumption.

“Like other broadcasters and newspapers, we use Twitter to alert others to new stories and to invite feedback — but we don’t believe it should stop there,” observed Sky News) Australia deputy director of digital news John Bergin). “Our strategy doesn’t think of the viewer ‘out there’ spatially and conceptually. One of the most interesting things about Twitter is that there is no strictly defined audience. Every participant has the same tools to articulate his or her point, to frame an issue, to set an agenda. The space between news producer and news consumer has collapsed. We try to use Twitter as a means of inviting them into the newsroom, asking them what they think, what questions they would like us to ask our guests, and so forth.”

Subverting PR and Getting Jobs

Some journalists also reported using Twitter as a means of subverting the increasingly dominant modern PR machine. They said it allowed them to quickly go beyond press releases and official sources, like lobby groups and politicians, by interacting with followers who provided alternative perspectives, useful background and sometimes crucial facts in a story.

Finally, the journalists I interviewed mentioned the role of Twitter as a sort of media job agency. The Sydney Star Observer’s Harley Dennett highlighted the value of networking with senior journalists and editors at major Australian publications on Twitter.

“I comment on news of the day hoping potential future employers will notice how witty and informed I am,” he said.

This strategy worked for one U.S. college graduate. After initially failing to make an impression via email, Ashley Reynolds direct-messaged via Twitter the News Director at WYMT TV (http://www.wkyt.com/wymtnews) in Hazard, Kentucky. It worked. He replied via Twitter, set up an interview and she’s about to start work as a reporter on his news team.

“As far as I know, I’m the only one who contacted him through Twitter, so I really stood out,” she said. “With direct message you have to sell yourself in 140 characters. So in order to sell myself I had to be short, sharp, and simple.”

Breaking news in Twitter

Harley Dennett responds to an interview request via Twitter

In addition to using Twitter to monitor breaking news — like a mini wire service with public participation — and for the dissemination of breaking news, the ABC has also assigned reporters to live-tweet events, such as the Queensland state election this March.

Other reporters interviewed pointed to the value of Twitter search — a function which allows users to search on specific terms or phrases which are often grouped by relevant hashtags — to easily monitor community reporting of major breaking news. They also pointed to recent moves by public officials to release news via Twitter ahead of issuing press releases or staging media conferences. This means Twitter is being used not only as a place to cover and monitor breaking news, but also a place for sources to break news.

But the public is less likely to trust news broken on Twitter than that which is delivered via traditional news outlets according to Harley Dennett, who says audiences still attach credibility to detail as he discovered when he broke a story on Twitter recently about the closure of the Federal Magistrate’s Court in Sydney.

“Sometimes people don’t believe me when I reveal something on Twitter before the full story, with supporting quotes and documentation, comes out in print or online,” he said. “It’s hard to prove something in 140 characters when there’s nothing to link.”

Journalists would be wise to exercise similar caution, as two stories from Sydney this past fortnight demonstrate. In the first instance, a journalist writing for the online publication Crikey attacked Sydney Morning Herald technology reporter, Asher Moses (who did not respond to a request for an interview) for inappropriate tweeting. Crikey was later forced to apologize when it was revealed that some of the offending tweets actually came from a fake Twitter account.

In the second incident, it was revealed that a marketing company had been tweeting under the guise of the NSW Police Service about policies and crime in a social media experiment inspired by Barack Obama’s use of Twitter in his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The @nswpolice Twitter account had attracted 2,000 followers and forced a disgruntled police media unit to tweet under another handle before Twitter shut down the imposter site.

In the next installment of this two part series on journalists’ engagement with Twitter, I’ll look at the implications of the clash between the personal and the public in the Twittersphere along with the regulation of reporters’ tweeting by their employers and the ways in which Twitter is altering traditional practice. I’ll also provide a list of tips for journalists starting out on Twitter, crowdsourced from those already active in the space.

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She’s been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter

by Alfred Hermida, December 1, 2008

Here’s a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads, spending almost $30 million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver’s sewage.

This is what the first-year students at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia did for their final big assignment of the semester. The stories were published a few days ahead of Vancouver’s local elections on November 15 on our student publication, TheThunderbird.ca.

Following the Election

Election news is one of the main staples of journalism, so having a vote on our own doorstep provided a great learning opportunity for the class. For this assignment, the students each had to find, research, report and produce a news story.

But they also have to come up with a sidebar that would complement their main piece, and consider what format this should take. This reflects our multiplatform approach in training graduate students to work across different media while at the same time maintaining quality content. We all know what a challenge that can be, even in the newsroom.

Many of the students are comfortable with technology and eager to experiment. But this is not just about adding video or audio to a story because you can. Students are taught to consider how using multimedia can enhance their journalism, making critical decisions about why one form of media works better than another to tell a particular story.

When student Alexis Stoymenoff wrote about the mayoral candidates singing at an event, she also posted short clips of the performances. The videos enhanced the written piece by allowing readers to see what the story was all about.

Another, Brandi Cowen, looked at how students new to the city were excluded from the local poll, producing a map showing different voting rules across Canada. This provided an easy and intuitive way to examine what could have been a rather dry written piece.

Unraveling City Politics

Despite all the new ways to inform readers about civic issues, some basics remain. Students can’t forget that, no matter what tools you use to tell a story, the most important thing is to do the legwork to make sure that the underlying story is accurate. The students still had to research the local political scene, a task especially daunting given that many of them are from outside Vancouver and have only been living in the city for a few months.

Students attended several debates between the mayoral candidates

Getting a grounding in local politics was key to this assignment, as this West Coast city has its own peculiarities. National parties aren’t represented on a local level. Instead there are Vancouver-only parties. And local councilors are not elected according to city district. Rather, the ten candidates with the most votes overall are elected.

Therefore it was important to have faculty on hand who could help guide the students. Fortunately, our Canwest Visiting Professor for this semester is Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig. As a regular commentator on city politics, he brought considerable knowledge and connections to the classroom.

He was instrumental in persuading the premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, to talk to the students about the political issues in the province.

Still, it proved hard for students to gain, in just a few weeks, the sort of understanding of local politics that a city reporter develops over years. Our advice was simple: Keep asking questions. Sometimes the hardest part of being a journalist is admitting that they don’t know something, or don’t quite understand it.

As budding reporters, it is understandable that a student might be concerned about appearing ignorant. But there is nothing wrong in pressing for a clearer explanation and asking for more details. Curiosity and perseverance pay off in the end.

Less is More

In the end, the students learned that not every story needed a multiplatform approach. Learning how to use multimedia to successfully tell a story sometimes involves learning when not to use multimedia. It’s not about adding audio or video just because you can.

One challenge the students faced was working on stories that were not going to be published for a couple of weeks. Many started their newsgathering by attending debates between candidates or election-related events in communities. But the spot news generated by these events would be woefully out of date by our publication deadline. Instead, we urged the students to look at the issues that can come out of these events, and find the stories that brought the topic to life in a topical and relevant fashion.

Sewage was an electoral issue that was not widely covered

Our aim was for the students to produce local stories on issues that were largely absent from the day-to-day coverage of the campaign in the mainstream media.

As a result, we ended up with a wealth of content. For example, at one of the mayoral debates, neither candidate was willing to commit funds to the Outgames due to be held in Vancouver in 2011, at a time when the city was spending millions on the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Student Magally Zelaya used that as the starting point to look at the reaction from Vancouver’s gay community, which prides itself on its economic and cultural significance to the city. For this story, we decided that the most effective way to enhance the main story was a Q&A on the Outgames, rather than try to use multimedia just for the sake of it.

Another, Brent Wittmeier, reported on the debate over building homes in church parking lots and also chose text for the sidebar. Even in a multimedia medium like the web, sometimes plain old text may be the best way to enhance a story.

For the students, the local elections offered an opportunity to take their skills out of the classroom and apply them in a professional setting. It gave them a grounding in the politics of the city and a way to showcase their multiplatform journalism. But it was also about making decisions about using multimedia and thinking critically about how best to tell the story.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: November 23, 2008

It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

Anil Dash, a former blogger and current vice president at Six Apart, announced the program Nov. 14, shortly after the company made its own staff cuts. Mr. Dash fired off a blog post: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”

On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”

Brooke-Sidney Gavins, a broadcast journalism student at the University of Southern California, is hoping to be chosen to help her nascent writing career. “I understand that there may not be a ‘guaranteed’ job with a major media organization after I graduate,” Ms. Gavins said. “A lot of new journalists are going to have to build their careers more guerrilla-style by selling their stories and promoting their work all the time.”

For Johanna Neuman, a veteran White House reporter and blogger who was recently laid off by The Los Angeles Times, the program would be a chance to continue writing about politics and float book ideas in the hopes of landing a publishing deal. “I might just start putting chapters up and see who salutes,” Ms. Neuman said.

Mr. Dash says he hopes to eventually accept every applicant. “How do we do right by all these people?” he said. “That’s exactly what’s keeping me up at night.” JENNA WORTHAM

by Alfred Hermida, October 27, 2008

Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism.

We started by first asking what a multimedia story is not. After all, go to any news website and you are certain to see stories being told using a combination of media. But just because an online story has multimedia elements does not mean that it is a multimedia story.

By multimedia story, I mean a story that smoothly integrates video, text, still photos, audio and graphics. Usually, news websites fail to combine mediums in their stories, instead posting stand-alone text or video stories side by side. Often such stories are print or broadcast content that have been “repurposed” for the web. Repurposing is understandable, growing out of an economic need to make the most of the content by distributing it across several platforms.

But journalists need to understand that the Internet is not just another distribution channel. This is the starting point for multimedia journalism, defined by journalist and educator Jane Stevens as:

Some combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a website in a non-linear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.

This means that journalists need to think on different levels as they conceive of a story and its treatment. It involves taking a multifaceted approach to a story and working out how best to tell it with the media available. The attraction for journalists is the ability to tell a story in multiple ways, making information accessible in ways that go beyond the standard news article in print.

Thinking Beyond Tools

Working in multimedia today is much easier than it was in the early days of online journalism 10 years ago, when journalists needed to have an intimate knowledge of HTML to use the web. Even textbooks produced just a few years ago devote chapters to HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets).

Today there are a plethora of tools to produce video, slideshows, maps and other multimedia works. Ten years ago, many of these features would have required programmers, but today they have become so simple that ordinary journalists can use them.

In the classroom, I’ve found that students are eager to tell their stories in text, photos, video and more. Sometimes, it is hard to rein in this enthusiasm. I try to remind them that our goal as journalists is not to give the audience everything.

One of the key roles of the journalist remains making editorial decisions on what is the most relevant and compelling information. What you leave out is an important as what you include. In one case, a student added stills from a presentation to explain a complex, technical issue. But without the commentary, the images were meaningless and confusing.

In any case, not all stories lend themselves to multimedia. Just because you can shoot video cheaply or produce an audio slideshow quickly, doesn’t mean you should. The best multimedia stories are multi-dimensional. They might include action that can be captured on video, or a process that can be illustrated with a graphic. Perhaps there is a strong emotional component that can be captured in a still photograph.

This requires that every journalist have some degree of multimedia literacy. At the very least, I expect my students to understand what kind of stories work best in what medium.

Making Practical Decisions

For this class, I shied away from just showing lots of examples of multimedia journalism, although I did point out the award-winning in-depth report on the Taliban by Canada’s national newspaper. Instead, we spent the time putting to practice these multimedia literacy skills.

For one exercise, we took a story idea from one student’s urban beat and broke it down into the different elements of the story. The idea focused on an art project in Vancouver that sought to educate children about the history of the city. We then discussed which medium was best suited to tell the different aspects of the story, using as our guide a cheat-sheet on multimedia story decisions developed by Mindy McAdams at the University of Florida.

Mindy McAdams

One student suggested a photo gallery with drawings by the children alongside archive images of the city. Another proposed putting together an audio slideshow with photos of the children and clips of them talking about the project. Another idea was a timeline of key moments in Vancouver’s history. There was no shortage of ideas, but in each case, students had to explain why they picked a particular choice of medium.

McAdams’ cheat-sheet is a practical first step for journalists in legacy media seeking to explore the online world. Print reporters tend to default to telling stories in text, while TV reporters will default to video. Yet the new digital media landscape means that journalists should think about what might really be the best format for a story.

Multimedia literacy is rarely discussed in newsrooms, but journalism students of today should learn it in preparation for entering the newsrooms of tomorrow.

If you have good examples of multimedia journalism, please share them in the comments below.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

Photo of Mindy McAdams by William Couch via Flickr.

by Simon Owens, October 7, 2008

Tagged: cnn, ethics, kcrw, zdnet

Implementing strategies developed by millions of office workers who have honed the practice of flipping from computer solitaire to spreadsheets at the first sign of a lurking supervisor, I hid my blog from my co-workers. I had been a blogger for nearly four years by the time I entered the newspaper industry in 2006, and when I later accepted a reporting job at The Smithfield Times, a small Virginia newspaper, I had been blogging for half a decade.

Given the widespread distrust that many within the newspaper industry harbor toward the blogosphere, I understood from the beginning that I was walking a thin line. In the reporter’s quest for objectivity, the question of how much the presence of a blog can undermine his reporting duties is one that is rarely fleshed out, especially between the reporter and his employers.

Perhaps the obvious thing to do in such instances would be to suspend publication of a blog or website completely, but as with millions of young Americans who have become ingrained in social media, blogging has essentially become inextricably linked with who I am as a person. I’ve often wondered what I would say if a publisher or editor told me that I would have to cease blogging or risk termination; I honestly don’t know if I would comply.

To avoid having to make such a decision, I sunk into a don’t-ask-don’t-tell cloud of non-disclosure. I developed strict rules to govern my blogging behavior and hoped that these guidelines would save me on the inevitable day that someone took the few moments to Google my name and click on the first item at the top of the search results.

Maintaining Objectivity

I’m not the first journalist to consider the implications of running a personal blog while simultaneously working full-time at a media company. Gary Scott registered the Blogspot account for his blog, Reporter G, in February 2004, but he didn’t begin penning posts there until after he left the newspaper industry — where he had worked as both a reporter and editor — and became a radio producer. Scott wrote for and edited a string of California newspapers from 1997 until the end of last year, when he accepted a producer position for “To The Point” and “Which Way, LA?” on KCRW, a public radio station in Santa Monica.

Gary Scott

I asked whether he was hesitant to enter the blogging fray while still in newspapers, and whether maintaining a personal blog as a radio producer posed less of a risk. He agreed that working behind the scenes makes him less vulnerable, explaining that the multiple layers of review that separates him from the host provides at least some cushion. But he said that he still maintains the philosophy that a quality journalist must approach any issue without passing judgment, and insisted that this philosophy is reflected in his personal blogging.

“I don’t think those standards preclude blogging, but they certainly create challenges that you really have to sit down and think about,” Scott told me. “You don’t just start practicing at it and hope everything turns out, because…this is kind of like the permanent record that we were all warned in school that we had but we didn’t. You put something under your name and it’s out there and essentially it’s there forever…It’s not that people can’t have opinions, they do, but it can easily compromise you if you make an offhanded comment about something being stupid, or something ridiculous, or that someone should or shouldn’t have won an election, and then three months or three years from now you have to interview that person [and] they have that as evidence against you.”

KCRW doesn’t have a written guideline for writers, although Scott said his bosses say that he needs to be sensitive about what he writes and should keep his immediate boss, Warren Olney, informed about the blog when appropriate.

Would that mean a reporter can’t talk about his beat in a personal blog? Scott pointed to a recent story about several current and former L.A. Times staffers suing Tribune Company owner Sam Zell as one that might see some crossover coverage between his blog and his radio show.

“If I’m on my blog saying ‘hurray for the L.A. Times employees for filing this lawsuit’ and I try to put a show together, I think it’s a little bit disingenuous to try to get people on the management side [of the L.A. Times] and tell them we’re going to give them a fair shake,” Scott said. “And it’s also a matter of not compromising myself, so when I call them up and ask them to be on the show they won’t say, ‘Well, I know who you are and what you said and I don’t think I want to have to deal with you guys.’”

Scott said he recognized that running a personal blog might pose too much of a risk for a reporter, depending on the beat. If a journalist is covering city hall, for instance, that closely knit group may be averse to the kind of coverage afforded by a blog, potentially damaging the reputation of the news organization for which the reporter works.

What Not to Cover

Though many major news outlets have yet to develop any comprehensive policy that specifically addresses blogging, there have been a few that have ventured into the fray and attempted to remove the fog of ambiguity around the do’s and don’ts within the medium. Andrew Nusca, a recent Columbia University journalism school grad and editor and producer for ZDNet (part of CNET, which was recently acquired by CBS), forwarded me a copy of the blogging policy that his company made available to him.

From the very beginning, it stresses every form of disclosure, demanding that the employee alert his supervisors to the blog’s existence and ask permission before mentioning anything even tangentially related to his work. For instance, a blogger must get permission before even mentioning that he’s a ZDNet employee.

“If you receive permission to identify yourself as a CNET Networks employee, or if you are readily identifiable as an employee of the Company or a particular property, you should include the following disclaimer within your blog: ‘This is my personal blog and is outside of the scope of my employment with CNET Networks and [insert relevant brand],’” the policy states.

Andrew Nusca

Interestingly, it also mandates that the blogger should “do your homework,” essentially requiring that the employee must adhere to the same journalistic standards in his personal blog that he would in work. “Check your facts and give readers enough context to understand whether a particular post is written to report, analyze or offer an opinion on an issue,” it says. “Use citations and provide links to other relevant topics. Correct any mistakes.”

Given his recent graduation from J-school, I asked Nusca whether his professors had addressed how to simultaneously exist in both the traditional news world and that of social media, and he responded that though those issues were certainly noted, no “set-in-stone lessons” were given.

Before graduating, Nusca had interned for several major news outlets, including Men’s Vogue and Popular Mechanics. But as with my blog, Nusca’s blog The Editorialiste, preceded his full-time staff position in the industry. I found that our blogging philosophies were mostly similar in that we shared the same red flags when it comes to where to draw the lines in blogging.

“Personally, I have the divide that I just generally don’t write about anything that goes on at work,” he said. “Because I started the blog before I got where I am now, the topic was already sussed out. Just by the nature of having chosen a topic that doesn’t require me to be on the inside of anything, that prevented me from digging my own grave, so to speak. I also hold certain principles for myself. Anytime I criticize another media company or anything, I’m doing it on my own. I never claim to be speaking on behalf of the company.”

Potential Consequences

When speaking to sources for this article, the nature of objectivity inevitably reared its head. Is the search for unbiased coverage bound for failure, and if so why should it matter if one betrayed his or her true subjective viewpoints in a blog post?

“I’m in the camp of respecting the fact that people aren’t objective because they are human and opinionated,” Nusca said. “But I have the utmost respect for those who know where and when to use it. If the venue is established, the rules may change. If I’m a White House correspondent and my name is very well known…it may be less of a good idea to keep [a blog], because you are inexorably tied to your organization at that point, which is unfair but true.”

Many media organizations would agree that this tie exists, even when a journalist is technically off the clock; several have tried to keep their employees from tarnishing any perceived objectivity at the company. One example is when CNN released a detailed employee blogging policy earlier this year. The 1,200-word document addresses nearly every form of social media and bars every single worker from writing about any issue that CNN covers or may cover in the future.

The policy was instituted after the firing of Chez Pazienza, who announced his exit from CNN on the very blog that caused his termination. “What was the reason for my abrupt and untimely dismissal?” he wrote in February. “You’re reading it.”

Chez Pazienza

Pazienza’s firing rocked the news media world as thousands of bloggers debated the reasoning of his canning and whether CNN was justified in pushing him out. He had been a relatively low-level producer at the news network when one day one of his superiors confronted him about his postings on not only his personal site but also on Huffington Post and the film review blog Pajiba.

Though the higher-ups at CNN cited an arcane reference in the employee handbook that banned CNN employees from writing for outside publications without prior approval, Pazienza said that at least one of the network’s employees admitted that it was Pazienza’s opinions — which were sometimes transparently partisan — that had irked CNN management. (CNN did not respond to two email requests for comment).

Pazienza’s subsequent bitterness in future blog posts toward CNN was immediately obvious; I subscribed to his RSS feed shortly after the debacle and rarely have I seen such an unfettered dishing of dirt. Perhaps the most consistent message he pushed out to his growing readership was his theory that CNN really didn’t understand blogging, despite its constant “lip service” to the medium.

I asked Pazienza whether he felt he had crossed the line when it came to the sometimes-naked opinions he had published on his blog. He responded by calling objectivity an expletive, arguing that it’s only a perceived notion.

“There’s just been for a long time organizations that have been able to keep journalists on a tight leash,” he said. “They had control over how your reporters, your producers, your writers — how they were perceived by others. There wasn’t a way to make your opinion known to everyone via the Internet, and now you can. Before it was ‘don’t join a political party, don’t walk into a bar and start blabbing politics or anything like that,’ but other than that you can pretty much live your life as a reporter — you can lead your life and not have to worry about your readers knowing what your true feelings were.”

The former producer pointed out that a sizable percentage of the millions of college grads who are entering the workforce are doing so with lives that have already been well documented online, whether on social networking sites or blogs. Therefore, he argued, a media organization’s attempts to shutter someone’s personal life displayed online are futile.

“I wrote something awhile back where I said that one of CNN’s problems with its draconian policy is that unless they figured out a way to grow universal soldiers in a vat somewhere in Sweden for the next generation of journalists, if you go strictly by what they say in [CNN's blogging] policy, they basically cut themselves off at the knees from having anyone new hired,” he said. “Because every kid that walks into that job now, that kid is on Facebook or MySpace or has a blog. His or her opinions are very well known.”

Pazienza did show some restraint while running his personal blog outside of work. He said that while working at CNN, he had made sure to refrain from ever identifying himself as a CNN employee on his blog. He also drew the line when it came to mining information gathered from sources and later regurgitating them on his blog; he felt that using company resources to fuel your blog content was unacceptable.

Publisher Ultimately Approves

Back in June, I emailed over 250 newspapers editors across the U.S. to ask them whether they would allow their own staff writers to maintain personal blogs. Of those who responded, 44 percent said it wouldn’t be permissible or that they would have strict caveats as to what subjects could be covered on such a site. But what was also remarkable was that most of the editors admitted that they had no formal blogging policy in place.

And what about my own experience of maintaining a blog while not disclosing it to my publisher? A few days before I left my last job at the Smithfield Times — for one that would require me to spend nearly every day reading and writing in blogs — the newspaper publisher mentioned off-handedly that he hadn’t even realized that I had a blog until three months ago. I recently phoned that publisher, John Edwards, to ask him how he felt when he discovered that one of his reporters had been writing a blog during his free time.

Edwards, a 40-year veteran of the newspaper industry, argued that a reporter who covers a board meeting and then goes home and opines about it online would be engaging in the same conflict that would exist if an editorial opinion writer were to simultaneously write for the news desk — two departments that most newspapers keep separate. I asked if it would have been permissible for a reporter to write about non-beat issues and he replied that in most cases that would be fine. But he did say that disclosure of the blog to a publisher is also appropriate.

“And the only thing that ever troubled me with you is that I didn’t know about your blog for a long time,” he told me. I asked how he had found out about my website, to which he replied that my editor had alerted him.

“And what did you think when you found out?” I asked.

“I was surprised,” he said. “And then when I found out how successful you were with it I was very pleased. But I was very much surprised by the whole thing.”

And then I asked him the question that was on the tip of my tongue during our entire conversation, the question that had always been at the back of my mind while I was working for him: “So if I had come to you and said, ‘John, I have a blog that I write for. I only write on it during my nights and weekends and I never mention my workplace.’ What would you have said?”

“I would have wanted to read it,” he replied, and then paused for what seemed like a very long moment. “But ultimately I think I would have been OK with it.”

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com.

Via Media Shift

by Mike Rosen-Molina, September 25, 2008

Tagged: contests, journalism, videocameras, videos, youtube

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

Pulitzer Center calls for citizen journalists to cover forgotten stories for Project: Report

It’s an unmistakable sign that the site is growing up, struggling to become something more than a repository of funny videos of cats falling off of things while still maintaining the community vibe that’s made it so popular. Project: Report aims to motivate people outside the established news media — the ordinary people that make up the bulk of YouTube viewers — to take up reporting. The contest is open only to non-professional journalists; even frequent freelancers are excluded under the rules, although journalism students are encouraged to compete. The idea of using a payment incentive to encourage quality reporting may mean that YouTube soon won’t just have an army of citizen journalists but an army of quality citizen journalists (or semi-pro journalists), interested in telling stories rather than just passing along comic moments.

The Rules

Project: Report is a three-round contest for aspiring journalists to dip into video reporting. For the first round, contestants are asked to create a short video profile of someone in their community. YouTube partnered with the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit that supports international independent journalism and uncovering underreported stories. The Center’s journalists will judge the entries and choose 10 semi-finalists.

In the second round, those 10 will compete to tell local stories with global impact. Five second-round winners will go on to tell the story of an under-represented community — with an added twist. According to the YouTube press release, “Each of the finalists will be provided with two additional Sony videocameras to give to members of the group they are reporting on, so that they can participate in the telling of their own stories. The reporter will then use this footage and integrate it into the telling of the story of five minutes or less.” Rounds two and three won’t be judged by professional journalists, but rather put to a popular vote by the YouTube community.

Winners in each round receive video technology prizes from Sony. First round winners also get to participate in a journalism conference hosted by the Pulitzer Center, while second round winners will get one-on-one mentorships with a professional journalist as they head into round three. Finally, the grand prize winner also gets a $10,000 grant to travel abroad and will get to work the Pulitzer Center on an important global story.

Jon Sawyer

Pulitzer Center executive director Jon Sawyer sees the contest as the first step toward fulfilling YouTube’s potential to showcase “serious” reporting.

“The Pulitzer Center works to raise the quality of American journalism, and part of that is to keep attention on important news stories,” Sawyer told me, “To that end, we created a channel on YouTube, where we now have about 50 or 60 videos up. They’re getting good traffic; we put one video about Iraq on YouTube, an 8-minute serious piece, and it’s got more than 300,000 views. It demonstrates that, even without any advertising, people are interested in serious journalism on YouTube.”

More Than Accidental Reporters

Project: Report is the brainchild of YouTube news & politics manager Olivia Ma and political director Steve Grove, who have long touted the site’s potential for more substantial reporting. Through Project: Report, they hope YouTube can become a home for a form of journalism rarely seen in the online video world: longer form story-telling. Until now, YouTube reporting has largely been confined to the “citizen with cameraphone at the right place at the right time” variety. That’s largely the brand of amateur journalism that traditional media has tried to tap into with its various overtures to the cameraphone set — including CNN’s iReport and Fox News’ U-Report.

YouTube’s earlier journalism projects likewise focused on the accidental journalist. YouTube launched one of its first such projects in 2007 with a video asking Iowans who brought cameras to their state caucuses to send in coverage of the event.

“That wasn’t really a focus project, more of a ‘If you’re out there and happen to be shooting video, then send it to us,’” Grove told me. “This is more robust and focused, something targeting an audience that wants to delve deeper and really tell a story in much more the way that a journalist would.”

YouTube’s Steve Grove and Olivia Ma announce the start of Project: Report

Grove prefers to avoid the term “citizen journalist,” noting that the contest is aimed at people whose interest in reporting news goes beyond just showing up with a camera but extends into telling a compelling story. He prefers to refer to entrants as “aspiring journalists,” noting that the contest targets journalism schools.

Finalists receive support from Pulitzer Center journalists with the goal of creating winning entries that could pass muster both with YouTube viewers and any traditional media outlet — and narrowing the gap between professional and citizen journalists.

Most online journalism contests aimed at non-professionals have generally focused more on content than technique, promoted by advocacy groups asking for works about a certain issue or arguing a particular point of view — like Sunshine Week’s Monthly Essay Awards through Helium. In contrast, Project: Report is more about learning the tools of journalism.

Not the Nine O’Clock News

It isn’t the first time that YouTube has been used for journalism, but it does seem to be the first time that the Internet video site has moved to get into the game itself. It follows similar moves by YouTube’s parent company, Google, to dip toes into journalism with its extensive election coverage page and the addition of comments on Google News stories.

Although YouTube is fostering and encouraging journalism, Grove doesn’t see the site as competing with traditional journalism outlets.

“This isn’t a case of YouTube getting into the journalism business,” he said. “We don’t have editorial control over the content. It’s not like we’re setting up the YouTube news bureau. It’s more about empowering people to use technology. It’s our responsibility to highlight and serve users by connecting them.”

Although Project: Report is an independent endeavor originating from YouTube, Google spokesperson Kate Hurowitz pointed to it as an example of how Google products are becoming a platform for citizen journalism.

“Our focus [at Google] is on organizing information and making it accessible and useful,” she said. “We’ve created a number of easy-to-use tools, including the voter information page and My Maps, that are making it easier for users to find news and information. Rather that thinking of these tools as journalism per se, it might be more accurate to think of them as helpful tools for citizen journalists.”

Others agreed that, while journalism is a booming trade on YouTube, key differences exist between it and traditional news outlets.

“This shows that YouTube can engage in a network-type function, but instead of the old ‘pushing out’ function, it can empower people to create their own programming,” said David Perlmutter, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas.

Perlmutter is encouraging students in his new media and politics class to enter the contest.

“YouTube allows that expression because it contains interactivity,” he said. “TV networks are declining in terms of viewership. When I was a kid, there was just ABC, CBS, PBS and some Japanese monster movies on UHF. Everyone watched the same things, but today it’s fractured. There are only a few shows, like ‘American Idol,’ that everyone sees. People are recognizing that YouTube can be more than a repository of random bits of entertainment.”

But Why a Contest?

Focusing on the cash prize, it’s easy to be skeptical that a contest is the best format to encourage journalism. Mark Hopkins of Mashable predicted an outcome with “one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.” Hopkins suggested that the prize money could better be spent in seeding various smaller documentary projects. That’s something that Current TV has done well over the past few years.

While YouTube could sponsor more reporting through smaller, individual grants, there’s always the problem of getting people to watch them. Grove pointed out that it’s precisely the contest format that gets entrants more exposure.

“One of definitive things about YouTube and online communities is that the wisdom of crowds is a great signal for content,” he said. “Great videos rise to the top based on what viewers think, not what people behind the screens here at YouTube think. Not having a popular vote wouldn’t be true to the YouTube spirit. The popular vote helps get people inspired to view the videos. It will require journalists to use the web how it’s supposed to be used, using interactivity to promote their work.”

Whether YouTube will hold similar contests in the future depends in part on the response to Project: Report, but Sawyer and Grove are optimistic. So far, over 205,000 people have already viewed the contest’s call-out video posted on the Pulitzer Center’s website.

New Media Bytes blogger Shawn Smith wrote that the real value in Project: Report could be in connecting citizen reporters to their local media outlets. Those outlets, looking for their next star reporter, would do well to check out prospective journalists’ abilities on YouTube. That increased visibility could be a real boon to aspiring journalists in a tough job market.

What do you think about Project: Report? Do you think YouTube can become a home to more polished semi-pro journalism? How might local news outlets work more closely with YouTube to motivate people to produce stories for them as well? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

 

by Mike Rosen-Molina, 12:13PM

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

read more…

by Alfred Hermida, 6:25PM

 

Alfred Hermida

At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow.

At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs.

The advice for graduates was that they need journalism plus a new set of skills. The basics of journalism — curiosity, passion, accuracy, serving the public interest — were still important. But journalist students also need to learn about how the digital revolution has changed, and continues to change, the media.

This involves understanding how people are consuming media and how content flows online, as well as being aware of the importance of community and the conversation taking place online. Teaching journalism has become “journalism…plus” as Robert Scoble says below.

Here is what folks at the ONA had to say in a series of video interviews I made with my Nokia N95 cell phone

YouTube has announced a contest for aspiring documentarians and journalists to take home $10,000 for creating a series of journalistic pieces to go towards beefing up their “reporter” content selection. This isn’t the first thing they’ve done to emphasize their efforts to grow this sector of the service. A quick catalog of the recent posts to the YouTube company blog shows that almost exactly half of the last 20 posts concern something to do with citizen journalism on YouTube.

read more…