KosmoReporter

Social Media and Blogging Guidelines

Social media and blogs are important elements of journalism. They narrow the distance between journalists and the public. They encourage lively, immediate and spirited discussion. They can be vital news-gathering and news-delivery tools. As a journalist you should uphold the same professional and ethical standards of fairness, accuracy, truthfulness, transparency and independence when using social media as you do on air and on all digital news platforms.

Truth and Fairness

• Social media comments and postings should meet the same standards of fairness, accuracy and attribution that you apply to your on-air or digital platforms.

•Information gleaned online should be confirmed just as you must confirm scanner traffic or phone tips before reporting them. If you cannot independently confirm critical information, reveal your sources; tell the public how you know what you know and what you cannot confirm. Don’t stop there. Keep seeking confirmation. This guideline is the same for covering breaking news on station websites as on the air. You should not leave the public “hanging.” Lead the public to completeness and understanding.

• Twitter’s character limits and immediacy are not excuses for inaccuracy and unfairness.

•Remember that social media postings live on as online archives. Correct and clarify mistakes, whether they are factual mistakes or mistakes of omission.

In television news you quickly learn what makes a good video story and what should be information put in a script for the news anchors to read.

Video stories have become a vital part of online and newspaper multimedia reports, but not every story should be turned into a video report.  I thought I’d ask three television news videographers to help us in our quest to figure out what makes a good video story and when should it only remain a story in print.

Chuck Denton is a multiple Emmy award winning news videographer based near Los Angeles.   He has 23 years of experience and has been a long time freelancer for CBS, FOX, NBC, and ESPN. He’s also won awards for his video editing.

Bonnie Gonzalez works as a one-man-band for an Austin television station.  She’s been a reporter/videographer for more than five years, and admits doing it all has taught her to be creative and resourceful.

Jim Kent is another news videographer with a long resume.  Jim has 10 Emmys and has been awarded Region 10 Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association.  Jim has more than 20 years experience and has freelanced for Fox and ABC.  He owns his own company in Phoenix called ArtGecko Productions.   

An Iraqi government plan to impose restrictive rules on  news media represents an alarming return to authoritarianism, the Committee to Protect Journalists has warned.

CPJ denounced the rules - which call for news organisations to disclose staff lists and identify sources if complaints are made about stories -  and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government to abandon their repressive plan.
CPJ’s review of the plan found rules that fall well short of international standards for freedom of expression and that appear to contravene the Iraqi constitution, which provides for a free press. The new rules would effectively impose government licensing of journalists and media outlets, a tool that authoritarian governments worldwide have long used to censor the news.
“The regulations suggest either a lack of understanding of the news media’s role in a democratic society, or a deliberate attempt to suppress information and stifle opposing views,” said CPJ‎ executive director Joel Simon. “Either way, the rules should be rescinded immediately so that the media can do its job free of government intimidation.”

When news broke in late January that James O’Keefe and three other men, two of whom were costumed as telephone repairmen, had been arrested by federal authorities and charged with “interfering” with the phone system at the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, observers of all sorts shared a similar response: What were they thinking?

Thanks to a statement O’Keefe has posted at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.come and an interview he gave Monday night to Fox News’s Sean Hannity, we now have a pretty good answer to that question. Landrieu had drawn the ire of some conservatives for her participation in a deal that helped advance health care reform, and the anger had grown amid claims that her office was avoiding calls from constituents. O’Keefe told Hannity:

We wanted to get to the bottom of the claim that [Landrieu] was not answering her phones, her phones were jammed. We wanted to find out why her constituents couldn’t get through to her. We wanted to verify the reports.

And while O’Keefe has acknowledged that, “on reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation,” he also told Hannity he was operating in an established tradition: “We used the same tactics that investigative journalists have been using. In all the videos I do, I pose as something I’m not to try to get to the bottom of the truth.” During the interview, he and Hannity name-checked a few specific predecessors, among them PrimeTime Live’s Food Lion investigation, 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline NBC, including its “To Catch a Predator” series.

The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another question to be untangled here — perhaps one more relevant to the smaller papers who might be thinking of following the Times’ example:

What is the underlying economic value of online news, anyway?

Media economist Iris Chyi [see disclosure below] has a few ideas about this problem. An assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, she has been researching the paid-vs.-free, print-vs.-online conundrum since the late ’90s. Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media. In other words: Even as audiences transition from TV/print news consumption to the web, they still like the traditional formats better for getting news, all other things being equal.

Now, this seemingly makes no sense: How could a format as clunky, messy and old-school as print “beat” such a faster, richer and more interactive medium on likability?

The Canon Vixia HF200

A couple of weeks ago,  I wrote a post about video cameras. In the comments to that post, Kathleen Flores, adviser at UT-El Paso, wrote:

I'm considering the Sanyo Xacti. It is only $160 but has no microphone/headphone inputs. I want to get something inexpensive so that I can purchase at least four or five cameras and equipment (I could make a mojo kit for $250) to make them accessible for our students. Has anyone used these or have any other suggestions. I would rather get more students doing some basic multimedia than just one or two using the more expensive equipment. Whenever a new student wants to use our more expensive equipment, I always shudder and hope they take care of it. I was thinking that this route would encourage more experimentation and participation.

I don't have any personal experience with that camera, but I do want to reiterate my personal preference in the quantity vs. quality debate as it regards video equipment: where possible, try to do both.

Krishna Bharat

In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers.

Google launched Fast Flip to help bring old-style page flipping to the web, promoting higher forms of visual journalism and sharing ad revenues with publishers. Then came Living Stories, a new format for updating stories at one URL, designed in tight collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post. Google realized old-line media were hurting (and lashing out at them), so they wanted to help.

"Specifically for Google News, we don't see publishers as our competitors. We don't have a product without their content," said Josh Cohen, senior business product manager of Google News. "There's really a symbiotic relationship there. We don't have a product without high quality content to index, whether it's on Google News or Google overall. So part of it is there's interest in making sure that content thrives online. There's a balance there of the benefit that we certainly get from being able to index the content, and the benefit we give to publishers in the form of traffic."

I recently went to Mountain View, Calif., to visit Google headquarters, known as the Googleplex, to talk with Google News creator Krishna Bharat, now a distinguished researcher at Google, as well as Josh Cohen, who was in town from New York. Bharat provided background on the origins of Google News (as well as a peek into its future), while Cohen explained how he is spearheading outreach to publishers. The following is an edited transcript of our chat, as well as video clips.

Five journalists from French speaking radio stations are to be cut off from the world for five days with their only source of information being Twitter and Facebook in an effort to determine the value of information received through social media.

Le Parisien reports that under a project called "Behind closed doors on the net", which will take place between the 1 and 5 February, the journalists will have no access to TV, radio or print media and will have to get a view of world events through social media alone.

"It is often being said that the traditional media are threatened by these alternative sources of information, " said Philippe Chaffanjon, director of the radio station France Info. "But what view of the world do you get through Facebook and Twitter?

The news isn’t just about stories anymore. Increasingly, people discover their own news by directly exploring local information—via software applications that make raw civic data easier to understand.

(This is part of a series of guest posts by Amy Gahran. Amy is looking how news organizations and other institutions can implement the findings of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, This joint project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute Communications and Society program produced the report, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.”) By Amy Gahran

Civic data applications can be web-based (such as OaklandCrimespotting and other crime maps), mobile (such as SeeClickFix), or layered onto social media (such as the DC 311 Facebook app).

Most journalists and news orgs don’t have the technical skills to build civic data applications on their own. However, their insight into the news value of local civic data could make civic apps even more useful and engaging. If more journalists would team with programmers, the result could be a wealth of civic apps that are not only popular with (and useful to) communities, but that also help support news organizations and journalism.

rids

It’s not just newspapers struggling to find their way in the digital era. Many content companies — broadcasting, film, music, publishing, and gaming — are grappling with the same business model uncertainty.

In a recent survey (pdf), the consulting firm Accenture asked 102 content-industry leaders to pick the biggest hurdle they face. Overwhelmingly, executives pointed to the hunt for a viable business model. And since they’ve asked the same question (sort of — see below) for three years, we can look at how execs’ thoughts have shifted over time.

First, the data shows a clear decline in what Accenture calls the “pay-for-play” concept — something like what we in the news context would term micropayments or “the iTunes model.” In 2007, 23 percent of respondents were banking on micropayments as the next top business model. In 2008, that number dropped to 11 percent. In 2009, it fell to just 8 percent.