Interesting stuff I saw online, Jun. 1 to Jun. 8
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Jun. 1 through Jun. 8:
- Boston Police Would Tweet A Zombie Attack | NewsTechZilla - "I love things like this; when an organization or company I assume is otherwise faceless is able to properly use social media (by, gasp, being social), it always kind of makes me happy."
- ConvoTrack - Loads comments from Twitter, digg, etc. on any page - "This simple bookmarklet will load comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning the article and will load it in a handy sidebar."
- 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization - "Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter."
- Is this useful? An account of how I started blogging and how it changed my journalism - "Pete told me this was known as “crowd-sourcing” and had a wide range of potential applications for newspapers. I can not stress enough how helpful it was to have someone that I could call to have coffee with and pick their brains on how the web “worked”. I started to look at journalism in a new way through Pete’s explanations of blogging."
Interesting stuff I saw online, May. 30 to May. 31
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from May. 30 through May. 31:
- Four observations about charging for news that are often overlooked - “Plenty has been written about the futility of erecting pay walls — much of which I agree with — but a few points are often overlooked.”
- 100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009 - “High quality free Wordpress Themes have become harder and harder to find in the past year, with the influx of premium themes, more and more designers and developers are selling themes (and rightly so, they do amazing work). But, that aside, the quality is certainly there, and we are sure you will be impressed with this Wordpress theme compilation for 2009.”
- Getting the mean out of comments - A group of citizens meeting on the evening of May 20 in Knoxville over sandwiches and sweet tea might be end up influencing how news sites across the country view and manage comments.
- Cyberbullying: What the research is telling us… - “Delivered to the Year of the Child summit, this talk surveys the current research on cyberbullying and online harassment, pulling in Pew Internet data as well as the work of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, Internet Solutions for Kids and other academics and scholars researching this topic.”
Interesting stuff I saw online, Apr. 27 to May. 16
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Apr. 27 through May. 16:
- Random House shuts down Kindle text-to-speech for their titles - Awesome. Another industry tries to bully its way though changing technology rather than adapt.
- IOC: All Your Blog Are Belong to Us - Implications for news organizations that recruit local athletes to blog for them while at the Olympic Games? "The Sports Journalists' Association is reporting that the International Olympic Committee has issued guidelines for athlete bloggers at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games."
- Taking Online Discussions Back From the Bullies - Andrew Alexander, WaPo: "I believe that online, The Post should tolerate precisely the kind of moronic, anonymous, unsubstantiated and often venomous comments accompanying the Kellermann story. It's the essence of free speech."
- Blogger Wins $225,000 Settlement Over Public Records Delay - Citizen Media Law Project: "Sharkansky's story is a great example of how bloggers can contribute to the public dialogue. Sharkansky saw a hole in news coverage of an important event and took it upon himself to fill it."
- Dying is No Reason to Give Up Online Social Life | Firstcoastnews.com | Strange - "In today's world of always-connected social media, there's no reason to stop interacting online simply because you're dead."
Interesting stuff I saw online, Mar. 30 to Apr. 20
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Mar. 30 through Apr. 20:
- Chicago Tribune: Newspapers try to maintain civil, intelligent conversations with readers - News organizations increasingly are trying to figure out how to maintain conversations with readers while keeping the discourse civil and thoughtful. The reality is, love it or not, if readers aren't allowed to chat on your Web site, they'll simply go somewhere else to do it.
- Listening to the Dot-Comments - washingtonpost.com - Doug Feaver, "writing in defense of the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs." It's a wonderful column.
- Leading your staff into the Twitterverse « Transforming the Gaz - Steve Buttry's beginner's list for journo-Twitterers: "This is the tip sheet I will suggest that editors read after the seminar. While this is geared for top newsroom leaders, some of the advice should be helpful to any journalists who are not experienced with Twitter."
- 10,000 Words' Landmark moments in citizen journalism - 10,000 Words: "Depending on whom you ask, citizen journalism is either pushing journalism forward or is unaccountable vigilantism. Either way, it is shaping the way we consume our news….The following is a timeline of events in which ordinary citizens shaped the news, followed by an analog description of each landmark moment."
In further defense of uncomfortable comments
April 10 cover of the Post-Dispatch's Go! magazine.
Cross-posted from The Editors Desk, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s blog about the news industry and our news organization.
In early August, STLtoday.com started allowing readers to post comments on our news stories (in addition to our blogs). We’ve discussed the reasons behind that decision and how we monitor story comments before. But it bears a re-examination in the wake of one story late last week. More on that in a moment.
Increasingly, we know that the audience for news and information online is not a passive one. More and more, readers are looking to be engaged and to interact with the media that they read and watch. A survey last year by the Associated Press Managing Editors group backed up that point — although the readers split evenly (at the time) over whether comments enhanced or hurt the credibility of news sites.
“Many of us have come to recognize that the age of ‘We report it, and you read it and view it’ is over,” said Howard Finberg at the time. He is director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, a Florida think tank on journalism. “The audience has demanded much more.” Read more
A Kentucky paper’s pre-Internet reader comments
David Greer
Reader comments existed before the Internet. And David E. Greer knew how to make the most of them — using an answering machine and a printing press. Below, he tells us his experience, which I thought could teach us something about reader comments today.
Greer, now member services director for the Kentucky Press Association, shared his story in an e-mail after reading my piece on story comments in the last edition of the ASNE’s The American Editor. He allowed me to publish an edited version of his comments here.
* * *
In 1990, I had just been named editor of The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, a 16,000-circulation daily in Elizabethtown, Ky., 45 miles south of Louisville. It’s home to Fort Knox, in a county with 100,000 residents, making it Kentucky’s fourth most populous county.
I came into the job with a few years experience as a reporter and editor at smaller papers. Along the way, I had also done talk radio in the 1970s during Watergate. This, of course, was long before talk radio became real popular.
At The News-Enterprise, I kept getting readers who called me on the phone and just wanted to talk about local issues, politics — stuff that you might hear discussed on talk radio. Lacking any other easy outlet, my readers would call me. So, I got the idea of putting a transcript of some of their calls in the paper with my written response in boldface printed under the reader comments. Read more
Workplace use of social networking still an issue
My colleague Tim Barker wrote today about the divide among some St. Louis-area employers over whether to allow their workers to use social networking sites while they’re on the clock. He cites the concerns from some employers that they are another way for workers to waste time and the benefits to the bottom line aren’t proven.
Tim’s story quotes Christine McCarty, an account executive with St. Louis-based Mercury Multimedia, who uses these tools all the time at work. She said her company is about to close a video production deal that originated through a Twitter contact. She also smartly notes that it doesn’t work if you’re mercenary about it.
“If you are constantly promoting your brand, that’s a big turnoff to other people,” McCarty said. “You have to be involved in the discussion.”
Tim’s story says employers tend to be more open to letting workers use “business oriented” sites such as LinkedIn rather than “social” sites like Facebook and Twitter.
He also cites a University of Melbourne study that just came out yesterday. The study says, “Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce.”
The study’s author, Dr. Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says: “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9 percent than those who don’t.”
Another strategy for skeptical employers: Measure whether the work is getting done and stop worrying so much about whether people are “wasting time.”
19 Qs and As from ASNE’s story comment webinar
On March 31, the American Society of Newspaper Editors presented a webinar for editors and publishers focused on story comments, the cover story of the most recent edition of The American Editor. I wrote a column to complement the cover story and was a co-presenter of the webinar with Saundra Keyes, author of the cover story and professor of journalism at the Reynold School of Journalism at the University of Nevada. Here are the questions participants asked — and our answers.
What do you say to those in the newsroom who believe comments reflect badly on our publication?
Kurt says: I remind them that a relatively small percentage of the thousands of comments we get are distasteful. Most of the comments are on point, cogent and worthwhile. I welcome their help in reporting the bad comments so we can deal with them, and I remind them that this is part of the culture of our business now. Commenting and discussion will happen somewhere, whether it happens on our site or not. They should take some responsibility for helping maintain the quality.
Saundra says: I say those people are often right. We’ve made it possible for people to anonymously post inaccurate and sometimes damaging comments. In doing so, we’re abandoning standards of accuracy and accountability that have long distinguished journalism from other forms of public communication. We know these postings are here to stay, and that at their best, they add value. So the question is what we can do to make them better. Read more