Roy Greene, senior assistant metro editor at the Boston Globe, explained in an article on Poynter.org how the paper used crowdsourcing to complement its World Cup coverage.
He described the four steps the Globe took, starting with creating a simple, web-based questionnaire, to identify Boston.com readers who were travelling to South Africa. The questionnaire asked for information including full name, hometown, email address, job, plans for the tournament and favourite team, and asked whether respondents would be willing to speak to a reporter. The form was posted on the home page and the soccer page just before the launch of the World Cup, and Greene saved the responses that he thought could be valuable: about a dozen, he specified.
He emailed these people to confirm details and seek photos, and then invited those who "showed potential" to contribute dispatches from South Africa. He explained what the Globe was looking for, "an interesting vignette or encounter during a game or with fans, something compelling about where they were staying or visiting."
The paper received several worthy submissions, and Greene concluded that "overall, this was a fun and colorful slice of the World Cup picture that gave our readers fresh local perspective and a diversion from the yellow cards and penalty kicks." Next time that the Globe makes this type of effort, Greene said, the paper would ask broader questions on the first submission form, to get a fuller impression of the potential contributors, and would make it possible for responders to upload photos via the form.
Many news organisations are looking at harnessing the power of the crowd to improve their reporting, now that so many members of the public are armed with cameras and are easily contactable by mobile phone. Greene writes that he was inspired by Amanda Michel's efforts at ProPublica to encourage reader participation in collaborative reporting projects. Other examples of crowdsourcing include Ushahidi, which offers a platform to allow news organisations and others to invite the public to contribute information which is then aggregated on a map, and which has been used in various crisis situations. A recent experiment at the Journal Register Co to produce its papers using crowdsourcing and free Internet tools was deemed successful.
Using readers as sources seems to be a valid reporting technique to complement, rather than replace, traditional reporting, as long as there is a way to establish that what they offer is accurate, and that their contributions are clearly identified.
Source: Poynter
Showing posts with label breaking news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breaking news. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
How to Use Twitter to Break News on Your Site When Staff's Away
Covering breaking news immediately with small or shrinking staffs can be difficult at any organization.
That was, until now.
Matthew Stoff of The (Nacogdoches) Daily Sentinel shared an excellent Twitter breaking news widget tutorial (including the code needed) that he and Lead Developer David Durrett created.
In an e-mail interview, Stoff said they have been using the tool since January, "The reporters were excited because it meant no longer relying on Web staff to publish up-to-the minute headlines, which, for us, is a process that is slower than we'd like. As a result, we've been much more flexible about getting intermittent updates published quickly. I'm referring to new facts that don't warrant an entire rewrite by themselves, but help to flesh out a breaking news incident."
In the published guide, they explain the practicality of this tool for small news staffs with tight deadlines, "The newsroom at The Daily Sentinel, a small East Texas newspaper, did not frequently publish breaking news alerts to its Web site because posting those stories quickly required technical expertise. When news broke and trained Web staff were not in the newsroom, the news would often go unpublished until much later in the day.
"We wanted to take advantage of Twitter's ease of use so that reporters and editors with little or no training could post headlines quickly without special software and without having to memorize a technical process. The resulting method uses e-mail as the interface for posting short headlines (which are actually Twitter messages, or "tweets") to the Web site. If you can send an e-mail, you can post breaking news."
The tutorial they created uses Twitter's ability to break news quickly by feeding a modified Twitter widget on the homepage to create "Breaking news" text alerts at the top of the Web site (Similar to what CNN does on its Web site fairly regularly). What makes this tool extra useful is that unlike similar fixed Twitter badges, when there's no breaking news updates, the breaking news box is hidden from viewers.
While this is an excellent tool, in the tutorial they caution, "You'll probably want to keep the TwitterMail address and the Twitter account login information to trustworthy staff who will be using it frequently. In theory, any malicious person with that information could publish damaging information to the Web site from outside the newsroom."
Stoff also provided screenshot examples and explanations:
Stoff says, "A kidnapping led to a regional Amber Alert, and we were able to get details of the suspect's description out to the public much faster than we would have if we had had to wait to build a story and a post it through our regular CMS. When it was all over, we were also able to get the news of the suspect's arrest out much faster."
source: poynter.org
That was, until now.
Matthew Stoff of The (Nacogdoches) Daily Sentinel shared an excellent Twitter breaking news widget tutorial (including the code needed) that he and Lead Developer David Durrett created.
In an e-mail interview, Stoff said they have been using the tool since January, "The reporters were excited because it meant no longer relying on Web staff to publish up-to-the minute headlines, which, for us, is a process that is slower than we'd like. As a result, we've been much more flexible about getting intermittent updates published quickly. I'm referring to new facts that don't warrant an entire rewrite by themselves, but help to flesh out a breaking news incident."
In the published guide, they explain the practicality of this tool for small news staffs with tight deadlines, "The newsroom at The Daily Sentinel, a small East Texas newspaper, did not frequently publish breaking news alerts to its Web site because posting those stories quickly required technical expertise. When news broke and trained Web staff were not in the newsroom, the news would often go unpublished until much later in the day.
"We wanted to take advantage of Twitter's ease of use so that reporters and editors with little or no training could post headlines quickly without special software and without having to memorize a technical process. The resulting method uses e-mail as the interface for posting short headlines (which are actually Twitter messages, or "tweets") to the Web site. If you can send an e-mail, you can post breaking news."
The tutorial they created uses Twitter's ability to break news quickly by feeding a modified Twitter widget on the homepage to create "Breaking news" text alerts at the top of the Web site (Similar to what CNN does on its Web site fairly regularly). What makes this tool extra useful is that unlike similar fixed Twitter badges, when there's no breaking news updates, the breaking news box is hidden from viewers.
While this is an excellent tool, in the tutorial they caution, "You'll probably want to keep the TwitterMail address and the Twitter account login information to trustworthy staff who will be using it frequently. In theory, any malicious person with that information could publish damaging information to the Web site from outside the newsroom."
Stoff also provided screenshot examples and explanations:
Stoff says, "A kidnapping led to a regional Amber Alert, and we were able to get details of the suspect's description out to the public much faster than we would have if we had had to wait to build a story and a post it through our regular CMS. When it was all over, we were also able to get the news of the suspect's arrest out much faster."
source: poynter.org
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
When ‘Tweeting’ May Become Preference for Breaking News
WHEN Stephen Fry was trapped in a broken elevator in London earlier this month, he pulled out his cellphone and sent a short text to his more than 160,000 “followers” on Twitter.com: “OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Center Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours.”
He even sent a picture of himself to illustrate his predicament. Nearly immediately, many of his “followers” replied to the British actor, author and comedian with return “tweets” — as the brief, 140-character or less texts are called.
Charmed by the responses, Fry “tweeted” back, “Your brilliant comments are keeping us all [hysterically] cheerful.”
In a Twitter-fied world, no one ever needs to feel alone or unconnected.
Fry is now the second-most popular individual on Twitter, trailing only President Obama, who has about 250,000 followers. (The Obama “tweets” have gone silent, however, with only one entry since last November. Conversely, Fry has “tweeted” some 1,400 times in the last 200-plus days.)
Twitter has quickly become the preeminent way to go about “micro-blogging,” sending short real-time comments to the world and especially to anyone who signs up as a follower.
When the service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online.
Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out.
“News no longer breaks, it tweets,” blogged Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster, last November during the Mumbai attacks. “If newspapers are the first draft of history, then blogs are the scratch pad. And in front of blogs are tweets,” he said.
Twitter is a classic example of the “law of unintended consequences,” says Matthew Fraser, who tracks the world of online social networking. At first, he says, people shared the “micro-banalities of life,” like “I’m at McDonald’s having a Big Mac.”
But Twitter has now “morphed” into something with real value and utility, says Fraser, co-author of “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work, and World.”
More and more Twitterers share useful information, in essence giving the “headline” and sometimes sharing a Web link that points to more information, says Fraser, the former editor in chief of Canada’s national daily newspaper, the National Post.
Twitter’s mushrooming growth has observers wondering if it could possibly be the next online phenomenon. The service is starting to grow beyond geeks and early adopters and beginning “to hit the mainstream,” says Louis Gray, a technology blogger in Silicon Valley.
The service has attracted 4 million to 5 million users, 70 percent of whom joined in 2008, calculates a recent report from HubSpot.com, which analyzes business activity on the Web. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened each day, and traffic to the site grew by more than 600 percent in the most recent 12-month period, HubSpot measured.
Last month, Twitter passed Digg.com, a successful, established news aggregation Web site, in market share of visitors, says Heather Dougherty, research director for Hitwise, an Internet measurement and analysis firm. And Twitter is “probably much bigger” than the Hitwise statistics show, she says, because much of Twitter’s traffic flows through mobile devices or other third-party software that isn’t being captured in Hitwise’s data.
But where’s the business plan?
Facebook, the popular social networking site, tried and failed to buy Twitter for a deal some valued at half a billion dollars. Like Facebook, Twitter has yet to make a penny for its founders. It’s living on money from investors. According to the Web site Techcrunch, a recent infusion of more than $20 million in funds means Twitter has, in theory, a value of $250 million.
But that’s only if a way to make it pay for itself can be found. “We plan to build Twitter Inc. into a successful, revenue-generating company,” the company Web site says. “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand, which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.”
Even if Twitter fails, it’s already proven that micro-blogging is here to stay, Saffo says. Second Life and World of Warcraft weren’t the first to jump into the online role-playing arena, he notes, but they were the ones who figured out how to make it pay. “Someone will figure out the model” for profitable micro-blogging, he says.
Charging a fee to use Twitter isn’t likely. “Anytime you have a service that is free, customers are going to expect it to stay free,” Gray says. Advertising would seem to be a logical next step, but other social networks have found that users find them intrusive. “They see it as a social space,” not a commercial venue, Fraser says.
But businesses might be willing to pay for a Twitter presence. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company plans to discuss revenue sources this year and that paying for “commercial usage” is a possibility.
Another is that a big player, like Google, might buy Twitter and add it as a feature.
Meanwhile, the ways people use Twitter continue to proliferate. For consumers, it’s become “a big complaint box” where Twitters can voice their dissatisfaction, Dougherty says. That, in turn, “is making companies pay attention to Twitter” to see what is being said about them — or even start their own Twitter accounts, she says.
Celebrities beyond Fry are beginning to use Twitter to talk to their fans too. Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong, Stephen Colbert, Shaquille O’Neal and Tina Fey are among those sending tweets, each attracting thousands of followers.
Some might charge that Twitter is still largely a vast wasteland of self-indulgence and irrelevancy. But Twitter’s best days may still be ahead, Saffo says. “It’s already become a new news form, and I think it’s in the process of becoming a new literary form.” He notes how Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, brief and profound, was influenced by his use of the telegraph, which meant he had to get to the point quickly.
Twitter, Saffo says, may become “Haiku in the age of attention deficit disorder.” The 140-character limit “really forces the writers to compress their thoughts into a very short space,” he says.
Twitter is a “disruptive” technology because it is in “real time,” Gray says. With blogging, “there’s still a lag between when they post and [when] you get it … If you want to find out something that is happening immediately, the place to go is Twitter and not Google anymore. And that’s revolutionary. And that’s why Google, in my opinion, should be watching this closely.”
Source: Christian Science Monitor
He even sent a picture of himself to illustrate his predicament. Nearly immediately, many of his “followers” replied to the British actor, author and comedian with return “tweets” — as the brief, 140-character or less texts are called.
Charmed by the responses, Fry “tweeted” back, “Your brilliant comments are keeping us all [hysterically] cheerful.”
In a Twitter-fied world, no one ever needs to feel alone or unconnected.
Fry is now the second-most popular individual on Twitter, trailing only President Obama, who has about 250,000 followers. (The Obama “tweets” have gone silent, however, with only one entry since last November. Conversely, Fry has “tweeted” some 1,400 times in the last 200-plus days.)
Twitter has quickly become the preeminent way to go about “micro-blogging,” sending short real-time comments to the world and especially to anyone who signs up as a follower.
When the service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online.
Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out.
“News no longer breaks, it tweets,” blogged Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster, last November during the Mumbai attacks. “If newspapers are the first draft of history, then blogs are the scratch pad. And in front of blogs are tweets,” he said.
Twitter is a classic example of the “law of unintended consequences,” says Matthew Fraser, who tracks the world of online social networking. At first, he says, people shared the “micro-banalities of life,” like “I’m at McDonald’s having a Big Mac.”
But Twitter has now “morphed” into something with real value and utility, says Fraser, co-author of “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work, and World.”
More and more Twitterers share useful information, in essence giving the “headline” and sometimes sharing a Web link that points to more information, says Fraser, the former editor in chief of Canada’s national daily newspaper, the National Post.
Twitter’s mushrooming growth has observers wondering if it could possibly be the next online phenomenon. The service is starting to grow beyond geeks and early adopters and beginning “to hit the mainstream,” says Louis Gray, a technology blogger in Silicon Valley.
The service has attracted 4 million to 5 million users, 70 percent of whom joined in 2008, calculates a recent report from HubSpot.com, which analyzes business activity on the Web. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened each day, and traffic to the site grew by more than 600 percent in the most recent 12-month period, HubSpot measured.
Last month, Twitter passed Digg.com, a successful, established news aggregation Web site, in market share of visitors, says Heather Dougherty, research director for Hitwise, an Internet measurement and analysis firm. And Twitter is “probably much bigger” than the Hitwise statistics show, she says, because much of Twitter’s traffic flows through mobile devices or other third-party software that isn’t being captured in Hitwise’s data.
But where’s the business plan?
Facebook, the popular social networking site, tried and failed to buy Twitter for a deal some valued at half a billion dollars. Like Facebook, Twitter has yet to make a penny for its founders. It’s living on money from investors. According to the Web site Techcrunch, a recent infusion of more than $20 million in funds means Twitter has, in theory, a value of $250 million.
But that’s only if a way to make it pay for itself can be found. “We plan to build Twitter Inc. into a successful, revenue-generating company,” the company Web site says. “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand, which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.”
Even if Twitter fails, it’s already proven that micro-blogging is here to stay, Saffo says. Second Life and World of Warcraft weren’t the first to jump into the online role-playing arena, he notes, but they were the ones who figured out how to make it pay. “Someone will figure out the model” for profitable micro-blogging, he says.
Charging a fee to use Twitter isn’t likely. “Anytime you have a service that is free, customers are going to expect it to stay free,” Gray says. Advertising would seem to be a logical next step, but other social networks have found that users find them intrusive. “They see it as a social space,” not a commercial venue, Fraser says.
But businesses might be willing to pay for a Twitter presence. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company plans to discuss revenue sources this year and that paying for “commercial usage” is a possibility.
Another is that a big player, like Google, might buy Twitter and add it as a feature.
Meanwhile, the ways people use Twitter continue to proliferate. For consumers, it’s become “a big complaint box” where Twitters can voice their dissatisfaction, Dougherty says. That, in turn, “is making companies pay attention to Twitter” to see what is being said about them — or even start their own Twitter accounts, she says.
Celebrities beyond Fry are beginning to use Twitter to talk to their fans too. Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong, Stephen Colbert, Shaquille O’Neal and Tina Fey are among those sending tweets, each attracting thousands of followers.
Some might charge that Twitter is still largely a vast wasteland of self-indulgence and irrelevancy. But Twitter’s best days may still be ahead, Saffo says. “It’s already become a new news form, and I think it’s in the process of becoming a new literary form.” He notes how Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, brief and profound, was influenced by his use of the telegraph, which meant he had to get to the point quickly.
Twitter, Saffo says, may become “Haiku in the age of attention deficit disorder.” The 140-character limit “really forces the writers to compress their thoughts into a very short space,” he says.
Twitter is a “disruptive” technology because it is in “real time,” Gray says. With blogging, “there’s still a lag between when they post and [when] you get it … If you want to find out something that is happening immediately, the place to go is Twitter and not Google anymore. And that’s revolutionary. And that’s why Google, in my opinion, should be watching this closely.”
Source: Christian Science Monitor
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