How social networks can inspire investigative reporting

Head of Media24's investigative unit, Andrew Trench, writes about how social networks can inspire in-depth reporting, citing a recent four-week long City Press investigation of Tony Yengeni as an example.

About a month ago a Facebook friend posted an interesting status update which directly led to four weeks of investigative reporting by the Media24 Investigation team and which culminated in front page leads carried in this past weekend's editions of Rapport and City Press about how ANC NEC member and convicted fraudster, Tony Yengeni, had broken the law.

It all started when my Facebook friend Herman Lategan (he gave me permission to use his name) posted an indignant observation. He had spotted Yengeni driving in his R1.7m Maserati and swanning about a luxury Greenpoint apartment complex.

The update got me thinking: How does Yengeni afford such a car? After all, he is a convicted fraudster after being sent to jail for getting a dodgy discount on a Merc, and can no longer serve as an MP.

As far as I knew his only salary was from the ANC as head of its soon-to-be-established political school.

And that's how a lot of investigative journalism starts.... with a simple question, a bit of curiousity and then some old-fashioned digging. But we would never have asked that first question had it not been for that Facebook update.

So, Media24 investigations reporter Julian Rademeyer started sniffing around and before long we had established that Yengeni had more than one luxury car and was a director of six companies in contravention of the Companies Act in terms of which it is a criminal offense to be a company director if you have a conviction for a crime of dishonesty. Using online social networks we were even able to source a picture of the Yengeni Maserati.

I think this is a good example of how online social networks can extend a journalist's contact base in ways that we could never imagine before. This is the potential power of crowdsourcing when you have tens of thousands of citizens out there, keeping the powerful on their toes.

In another story we are working on we have been able to develop a source providing useful information on a company which is up to no good using nothing but Twitter. One tweet and a couple of RTs later we had located someone which would otherwise have taken us many days, if not weeks, to locate.

This is another reason why I think it is not a good idea for media owners to deny journalists access to social networks on company networks - imagine the scoops which are passing you by?

Source: journalism.co.za

How to be a social climber on the digital ladder

There are a variety of ways to participate in or experience news via social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla... the list goes on. But in what ways should a journalist utilize social technology?
A few years ago, Forrester researchers Charlene Li (a Poynter National Advisory Board member) and Josh Bernoff created the Social Technographics Ladder. This graphic (below) defines the behaviors and interactions associated with social media by placing users into overlapping categories. Each rung on the ladder represents a specific set of behaviors, and people can move up and down these rungs. (The most recent addition to the ladder is the "Conversationalists" category.
How many of these rungs should today's journalist climb? I say every rung above "Inactive." Why? Because while there may be a learning curve for using specific tools, these categories describe behaviors that defined journalism before social media became the "it girl." Here's how each rung relates to journalism, from the top of the ladder to the bottom.

• Creators author a story.
• Conversationalists talk to people about stories, find sources, break news.
• Critics review, offer opinion pieces.
• Collectors research, create contacts and read publications on a regular basis.
• Joiners are part of a community, professional or personal group.
• Spectators keep up with competitors and other publications.

I am a Creator, Conversationalist, Critic, Collector, Joiner and Spectator. But, I'm not all of these things on every social network. I focus on the networks that I see being used heavily in my Lawrence, Kansas community: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla.
LinkedIn, MySpace and FriendFeed are not used as often by our audience at the Lawrence Journal-World, so I'm more of a Joiner/Spectator when it comes to those. But our websites have an active presence on them all.
Being an active part of these networks keeps us in touch with a tech-savvy, information-hungry portion of our audience. They're willing to participate in and share our content on a daily basis. On Twitter alone, if a handful of people retweet a link, it could reach hundreds of thousands of users new to LJWorld.com.
Where are you on this ladder of social interaction today? Have you been a social climber over the last few years?

Hint: If you're reading this, you're at least a Spectator. If you have an account on Facebook, you're a Joiner. If you leave me a comment, you're a Critic.

Source: Poynter Online

Thinking Digital: from newspapers to blogging to Twitter - and back again

SPEAKERS at the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle this week have covered a diverse range of subjects: from Twitter to how to save the world's problems via technology.
One panel covered the blogging phenomenon - where former blogger Stowe Boyd deemed blogging outdated - and another was from Newsweek writer Dan Lyons, who shared some controversial opinions on newspapers, "I don't see the point. They are dead. They are in denial."
Lyons was singing the praises of blogging during his panel, as he met with success whilst blogging as 'Fake Steve Jobs'. However Boyd, during the panel on blogging, stated that the "heat and dyanmism of blogging is gone", and pointed towards the rise of social networks - citing Twitter as a prime example. Conversely, although there were pro-Twitter panelists during the Twitter session, Lyons was cynical about its "pre-revenue" status and labeled it as one of the first companies to be hurt by the economic downturn.
There seemed to be a circle of opinions going around during these three panels. Perhaps the best conclusion to come to is that it is too early to write off newspapers, blogs or Twitter? Or maybe it is time to question the idea that they are mutually exclusive? Could the way forward for newspapers be further along the road many have begun to take, combining the new technologies with their traditional journalism and moving forward after the troubles of the economic crisis are gone?

Source: editorsweblog.org

Twitter rules for journalists at US newspapers

THE Twitter phenomenon has been swiftly spreading amongst journalists, as a tool to both find information and publicise stories. Recently several US newspaper have expressed concern about exactly how their reporters use the social network.
The New York Observer has reported on discussions at the New York Times about staff use of Twitter. During a staff strategy meeting on Monday, reporters Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Luo and Brian Stelter sent 'tweets' on what executives were saying about the how the paper might charge for online content, amongst other things: information which executives did not necessarily want to be made public.
Times executive editor Bill Keller took a firm stance against revealing the content of staff meetings on Twitter during a speech to employees on Wednesday, reported the Observer. He said that it was important that employees are as open as possible with one another about what is going on at the Times, and "the level of candor is likely to be diminished if people are Twittering fragments of the conversation to the outside world." He called for a "zone of trust, where people can say what's on their minds without fear of having an unscripted remark or a partially baked idea zapped into cyberspace." He also told employees that they must consider whatever they say as representative of the entire institution. Keller did agree that Twitter was a valuable tool for reporting.
The Wall Street Journal is also addressing how employees use social networks, with a memo sent to staff earlier this week outlining "ground rules" on employees' actions online. Its advice on Twitter is that "business and pleasure should not be mixed" and although "common sense should prevail," staff meetings should not be discussed on social networks.
Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli told Editor & Publisher that a senior editor must give approval before a Post employee can use Twitter, and added that "I would assume people exercise good judgement." A new Post policy states that "anything controversial should be checked with an editor before transmission." The Los Angeles Times made similar updates to its rules in March.
In a world where it is easier than ever before to spread information using tools just as Twitter, it is consequently harder to keep news under wraps. Clearly, confidential information should be treated as such and not broadcast on the web just because it is easy to do so, but it seems necessary that guidelines on what is public information and what is not must be clearly defined.

Source: editorsweblog.org

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

A local Twitter tool for local journalists

Twitterlocal allows you to follow posts on Twitter made by people from a geographical location of your choice.
Now a downloadable AIR desktop application, this is a must-have tool for local newspaper or broadcast journalists who want to monitor Twitter chat in their local beat.
For national journalists, it could be a useful tool to monitor chat around a breaking news event in a specific location, anywhere in the world.
Try, for example, entering Melbourne, Australia into the application with a 10-mile radius. You will see Tweets about the bush fires (if you are doing this around the date this post was published!)

Source: Journalism.co.uk