Social media has wrecked my blog*

I am a lazy blogger but it's not my fault. Twitter and Diigo are to blame for my indolence, and Blogger has a part to play in it too. 

You see, it's so easy to just tweet a link, perhaps with a (very) short opinion, or save it to Diigo and get that site to sweep my curated links and comments onto this blog once a week, that I have gotten out of the habit of writing longer thoughts here. 
Classic example: 

 
This is in the Social Journalism group on Facebook - it's not a secret group although you need to request to join, so I don't thing screengrabbing the image is bad form. 
I read Ian's post and thought he made a very relevant point re verification, cynicism and the requirement to check something out because it seems too incredible to be true, but I couldn't link to it because FACEBOOK.  
That meant I couldn't tweet or share it either,
So I was about to give up when I suddenly thought "I could put it on my blog" - and it was a true OMG moment; I really had forgotten that my blog was there for such things. 

In addition to the other social channels taking over, I actually don't like Blogger much as a platform, but I continually fail to find the time or energy to relocate to another one. See? Again, a lazy blogger. Both these things really need to change.

So how to get out of the habit of tweeting and bookmarking, instead of blogging? Does it even matter, in the scheme of things? 
I started the blog six years ago to test social tools and ways of storytelling, and it gradually morphed into a 'thoughts about changing journalism' (I meant that in both senses btw) and now it's a linkroll of things I find interesting to read, because I tend to forget about it for other things.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this - Nieman Labs says the blog is dead and cites 2014 as the year of its expiration. The Atlantic goes further, and says that the Stream of online organised information is now The Thing - fresh and now are what matters. 
That must mean the River of News is at an end, not so much dried up as diverted into a backwater. (Dave Winer's reference to RSS, which I see crops up in the Altantic's comments, incidentally).

But, although I'm a lazy blogger I enjoy being a blogger, and while I enjoy and celebrate the nowness of the Stream, the River is also important to me. 

I think there is room for both; in the same way we're grappling with how to present longform journalism to readers in a way that is compelling and engaging (which, in English, means they stick with the story rather than going off to look at a list of 19 Things You Did When You Were a Teen That Will Make Your Teen Cringe!). 
At the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo, we've worked with Shorthand this month to create two immersive stories around football - here and here - which taught me a lot about the ways we should structure longform. More importantly, both articles were sharp reminders of the idea that if it doesn't work on mobile, don't bother doing it - swathes of work was cut from the MCFC story because they simply didn't make for a good mobile experience. 

So, two things. I need to be less lazy about my blogging and I need to work on my relationship with Blogger, or find a new partner. New month, new attitude... new home?


* The title of this post is of course provocative and wrong - after all, blogging is social media as far as I'm concerned - but it was the best way to describe this post in a pithy headline.

 

Definitely NOT another 'How Journalists Should Use Pinterest' post.

I've read various articles recently about Why Companies Should Be Using Pinterest (I haven't saved any of them, but Zemanta will no doubt provide the latest selection as I write this - it's like trying to put down a hydra). 
However, any social media wrangler in a newsroom knows a site has to be proven earn its keep before more than tentative attention is invested. And how do you even start to overcome this chicken/egg scenario? It's a Google+ sized problem for most of us. 

But this week I was asked to share some of my tips for using it, and as I started to set them down I realised that I wasn't thinking about how to use it as a journalist and 'drive audience' I was writing out my learnings as a user. I've set up various accounts and boards on titles I've worked on but I also use it myself, for all sorts of things.  "My name is Alison, and I'm a Pinner".

I found it very useful as a student, for example and these are the boards that consistently pick up followers because they're really niche (that was my first learning outcome).

I like Pinterest for sharing and driving lifestyle and Buzzfeed-style traffic - it’s easy to create boards, followers - once secured - are loyal; every time they log in, your content is highly visible, as it displays automatically on their homepage. But although it's a visual site, Pinterest is branching out, as it announced this week: 

Articles will now have more information - including the headline, author, story description and link - right on the pin. So when you find articles about things you're passionate about... they're easier to save and organise. 

And share, it should add. I like the idea; it takes away some of the issues around Pinterest's laid-back (to say the least) attitude towards ownership and copyright; it does have a certain 'if the user doesn't care, why should we?' attitude towards that. 

Thinking about how I use Pinterest (ie. without my work hat on) gave me some ideas about how you can use it with your work hat on. So here are some of my tips on getting the most out of Pinterest, written with my enthusiast's hat on. This is definitely NOT another 'How Journalists Should Use Pinterest' set of tips: 

1. Spend some minutes through the day reviewing http://www.pinterest.com/popular/ - you can see at a glance what’s hot (bit like Twitter’s trending list. 

2. Linking your social media accounts to follow mutual users offers a quick if haphazard community base that you can build on and tweak as you go. These people are already engaged with you on other platforms and are so likely to be interested in the visuals you pin 

3. It is female oriented, but there are football clubs doing their thing with success. Pinning badges with slogans and inspirational quotes from club heroes, that link through to more visual content, is likely to be more shared.

4. Joining a group (also called a community) board (you need to be invited to do so) dramatically boosts your own followers and drives repins when you’re starting out. 

There is a basic directory of group boards http://www.pinterest.com/groupboards/ but there's nothing as useful or discovery-linked as, say, Twello. 

You might need to do some speculative following and emailing of your appropriate pins to get invited to the board but once you do, repin numbers can shoot up. I was invited to join a popular 'Home' board courtesy of my 'Next Home Ideas' board - and my follower numbers have consistently grown since then for other boards too. 

5. Pinterest users may not realise it, but they are a content farmer’s dream. People will use the search facility to look for ‘cute puppy’ ‘lose weight fast’ ‘10 amazing [whatever] facts’. It's like e-How, but actually not annoying. 

6. A feature in print about someone who’d lost 10 stone for their wedding, that was pinned as ‘lose weight for your wedding, fast’ works across the Alpha Female categories of Food&Drink, Health&Fitness and Weddings, and is a quick, permanent, win.

7. Category boards search is your friend. If the audience isn’t using search, they go straight to the categories list.

Pinterest categories that attract significant followers and repins are all around lifestyle -

Home Decor, Animals, Food&Drink, Health&Fitness (just look a the Popular category to see just how much) and after that probably Hair&Beauty, Weddings and Women’s Fashion with maybe Travel too. 

These give you access to people who are motivated to re-pin and share content, possibly it in smaller niche numbers but pins around celeb fashion and how to replicate it have worked well for me in the past. 

8. Pinterest categories are alphabetised so Animals is the first category anyone browsing the site sees. A great board of regularly updated, pinned animal pix linking to stories will capture the idle browser and also build up followers quickly.

It doesn’t have to be about cute puppies - true life stories are hugely shareable (although if you find yourself welling up at the amazingness of US animals, I advise running the tale - tail? - through Snopes.com before you believe a word) as people like to add their own comments under the pin. It also means you get user engagement and comments to reverse publish if desired.

9. Don't beware Geeks; they bring gifts of audience and sharing. The Geek category is very engaged. Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, nerd affirmations... all these things are shared repeatedly. For newspapers with access to celebrity interviews, film reviews etc, or photogenic locations where shows or films beloved of the Geeks have been shot or have featured (hello, Cardiff!) it's, well, a gift.

10. Embedding pins within your own CMS allows you the opportunity to invite your audience back over to Pinterest to discover stories they might have previously missed, sign up, start following you, etc etc.

11. Because Pinterest has integrated Facebook login options and actively encourages users to follow that route, a user has to opt out of it cross-posting their activity onto their Facebook stream. And I guess there are many, many pinners who simply miss the 'Skip' option Facebook hands them.

So, from a media point of view, there's the potential of hitting two new audiences when someone repins you - once on Pinterest, and once on their Facebook profile.

12. Finally, adding the ‘pin it’ button to your bookmarks bar is the fastest way to pin something to your boards quickly from the Record site. It’s here http://about.pinterest.com/goodies/ under the apps. It makes life a lot easier!

And you can also add a Pinterest widget button to let users pin your stories off the site, of course, should your developers be feeling kindly disposed towards doing some coding.

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Tweeting and filming council meetings? Oh, go on then....

The Daily Post's Right to Tweet campaign continues to roll forward (we even made Roy Greenslade's blog) but since we've launched it there have been a number of other instances of newspaper journalists and councillors falling foul of the 'can we/can't we' ad hoc approach. 

Some of the recent examples can be found here (Hounslow) here (Oldham) here (Rotherham) and a number of Welsh councils, according to the director of the Electoral Reform Society,
Among the councils named by the ERS was Anglesey. However, good news on that front: 

COUNCILLORS on Anglesey are being encouraged to take to Twitter and Facebook to engage with communities – while the press and public will also be free to tweet from meetings.

Anglesey council is drawing up a social media protocol for members which sets out how elected members should interact with people on social media but warns “inappropriate” use could end in a standards hearing.

A draft report for the island authority also states it will permit the use of social media by the public and even allow for people to film proceedings on smartphones [my italics - purely because I'm so delighted to read such a sentence] as long as they do not disrupt the meeting.

You can read the full story here; the vote does have to be cast to set the plan in stone, but it's a really positive step forward and one that sets a standard for others. Da iawn, Ynys Mon. Hopefully we'll see others following in your footsteps soon.

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Why does live tweeting put councils in a spin?

The issue of tweeting in the council chamber has caused some debate lately, and I'm happy to hold my hand up as someone who helped the discussions along.
I've also been ridiculously busy at work, and so there hasn't been much time to blog about local authorities and their varying views on anyone - press, public, councillor, officer - tweeting during the business end of proceedings. 

To recap, the Daily Post* sent a reporter to cover a budget meeting at Wrexham Council and it became apparent that a Twitter rule - in place for more than a year but unenforced, in our experience - would prevent real time reporting, and thus impact on our rolling news liveblog.  

The standing orders dictated:

 "Proceedings at meetings may not be photographed, videoed, sound recorded or transmitted in any way outside the meeting without prior permission of the chair".

I've covered council meetings since I was a trainee reporter. I have watched (genuine list alert) snoozing councillors reflex-vote, tantrums worthy of two-year-olds, recommendations voted through because the reporter sat next to me called out "move progress!" and a mayor utter the warning: "Allegations have been made about me, and if I find out who those alligators are..."
I've watched councillors make the most moving, impassioned pleas on behalf of their electorate, block economically-sound but culturally-wrong recommendations, make principled stands against cutbacks or planning outrages, and conduct cut-and-thrust debates that made a democratic difference.






None of the above - good or bad - needs to be reported retrospectively. Google 'council chamber live stream' and see all the authorities who let the electorate watch the democratic process as it happens 
Wifi, Ustream and a will to make it happen - that's all our councils need to make a significant contribution to the transparent, open government. 
Being more open means more scrutiny, and potentially more criticism, but it also means more feedback, interaction and opportunity to talk to people. 
I don't know why some councils embrace opportunities for transparency and others shy away from it. The subsequent fallout is never edifying - at best, it means the kind of nonsense the Daily Post is trying to negotiate a path through, at worst, well, all sense of perspective is lost.

Anyway, there was quite a lot of coverage, not least in the Post, and we've got a Right to Tweet campaign running now that is calling for consistency across public bodies, rather than ad hoc interpretation of constitution rules... 

The Twitter ban incident (hashtagged as #twitterban but never to be referred to as #Twittergate) was covered in various media; among the articles were these here and here and here. 

We even made the chief executive's weekly email to staff (instantly leaked to the Press, of course): 

[Twitter policy] can of course change in time as the Council further embraces technology, it doesn’t however, change as a knee jerk reaction to an editor who it appears only communicates with her readers via “twitter”.

The annoying part of that comms is, of course, the "twitter" bit. It's a PROPER NOUN, for heaven's sake, and don't get me started on the quote marks...
 
Ways to wind up in Rotten Boroughs, No.348
 . 

I don't seek out Twitter spats but I do feel strongly that if reporters and the public can use mobile devices to transmit information from court, there is no reason why they should seem permission to do so from public meetings. 

Guidelines can be useful (maybe 'switch off your phone's volume' or 'ensure your behaviour doesn't distract others') but if the Attorney General doesn't think the decision rests with his judges, then why should it rest with committee chairmen?

So, it's an issue we aren't letting subside - there's a Daily Post campaign underway now as a result of us being refused tweeting rights during one council meeting - and the problem is spreading. 
Louth Leader reporter Sam Kinnaird was thwarted in a bit to amend Louth town council's standing orders to allow live tweeting, this week and tweeted that fact. 
Two councillors backed it out of the whole full council; I see from the report the Mayor took the view that journalists should 'have the courtesy to do it from the foyer'.
Quite how the dignity of the chamber is offended by someone quietly sending texts from a mobile phone escapes me. 
In other Lincolnshire news, Boston Borough Council has also banned tweeting of its full council meeting today. 
The Boston Standard report says

The borough authority currently only permits people to use Twitter during cabinet meetings and says its constitution will have to be changed to allow the social media site to be used to provide live updates from other meeetings.

Constitution, You'll find it in the dictionary under S for Smokescreen. 

Twitter is viewed as an appropriate communications tool by the House of Commons - possibly not a bastion of courtesy but certainly the seat of democracy, and tweetin' since 2011 - and at the Senedd. 
Welsh Secretary Dvaid Jones believes in it, Obama couldn't wait to tell the world he's secured four more years...
I just wish our locally elected representatives would try to catch up.

 

* Yes it's a personal blog, but work inevitably bleeds into it sometimes. Like it says here, these ramblings are not the opinions of Trinity Mirror. 

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Juxtaposition and the benefits of snark

I think next year, instead of running that newspaper stalwart the Review of the Year, I might suggest a round-up of Front Pages That Never Were.
The topic came up after Dan Owen and I had a good hard stare at a splash page the other Sunday night, and reluctantly reached the conclusion that we Just Couldn't.*
This was the first iteration:

If you can't see what needed to be changed, well done for having a mind free of snark.
If however, you are now rolling on the floor hooting at the idea of a Wales Skipper Could Have Killed van Persie/18 Fractures in Pub Attack double-act, then you're exactly who we had in mind when we decided we Just Couldn't. 
You prompted us to redo the blurb, sans RVP's footballing brush with death; you helped edit that front page. Because although they are obviously different stories, it's way too easy to see them as a mash up.
This is what changed (on that particular edition, at least) 

When a newspaper fouls up, especially on the front page, some users laugh, some reach for the caps lock and just about everyone reacts like no one has ever made a mistake in the history of the world before. 
I view it a bit like an entire street rushing to surround a postman and collectively yell at him YOU DELIVERED THAT LETTER TO THE WRONG HOUSE!!! PATHETIC POSTMANISM!!!
I also tend to take a 'there but for the grace of God...' approach when other publication's blunders are crowed over and, ultimately, everyone loses interest and moves on after a few hours; Twitterstorms burn bright, but don't generate a lot of heat. 

Nevertheless, it's a good tool for the development of audience-informing-content. No matter what sort of ding it gives to one's ego, the fact that social networks allow people to give instant feedback - often unfiltered - can be a learning experience. 
Juxtaposing straps or headlines like this has happened for years; pre-internet they might find their way into Press Gazette or Private Eye, and there would be some gentle ribbing.
I can't say if the Daily Post's clashing juxtaposition would have led to an outpouring of online hilarity but I can identify it as the sort of clash that has the potential to. 

Knowing what triggers the social hive mind (be that lolcat, tyop or sweet little video of a blind dog with a guide cat) is handy, and it translates from online into print more often than not. 

Every trainee journalist arriving on a paper is told to write for a fictitious reader (in the Pembroke Dock office of the Western Telegraph, our lodestar was Mrs Evans, of Lower Pennar. Twenty years on I still have a strong mental image of her.) 
We've historically been told "Write for your readers" - to have that everyman/everywoman in mind and make sure we connect with them, to be 'Like Us' and hit our demographs.
But now our readers aren't limited by geography or print availability any more - some of my readers might never have set foot in North Wales, but they are - sometimes fleetingly, sometimes deeply - engaging and becoming a part of the creative process, via the internet.

Tweeting photos of the creation of Wales on Sunday's front page ahead of print deadline on a Saturday night helped market the paper; got people talking about us and sharing the front. More memorably, it massively spared our blushes once, when a follower pointed out a typo in a footballer's name. 
It's important to me that the Daily Post is shared socially every night, for those reasons and for one more - with our policy of talking about what we're doing, on the liveblog or on social networks, it's puts the cap on a day's work for us and for our Facebook and Twitter networks, where friends and followers might have been following our progress and contributing. 
So, there's my rather upbeat view on the nature of snark. 
Of course, the next time the Daily Post makes a mistake (like this - fleetingly online, ffs, but screengrabbed forever, of course) I will be as cross with the interwebs as ever. Until the bandwagon rolls on to the next unfortunate, of course.  

* Dan suggested I use the Daily Post's Saturday editor's column to talk about on how we decide what the front page looks like - I did pen a less detailed version for that, but had so many thoughts around the subject that didn't fit into a 370 word template (and that probably weren't of any interest to my readers) I figured it was worth firing up the blog to post something. Belatedly.

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The rise of the retweet junkie

I thought I'd tweeted off my chest the things that appalled me about the 'be first or be right' social media minefield following the shattering horror of the Newton shootings. 
 But then I read this post by Andy Dickinson, and it struck a chord. It made me realise I hadn't blogged a lot recently because I was either posting tweets or just using Diigo's bookmarks-to-blog option and not bothering to otherwise update my blog. 

 Writing my thoughts down here has only ever brought me clarity, and wise words of advice or support from people who stopped by to read them. I don't have time to do the tool exploration and testing I used to on here (which, incidentally, I really miss) but if I can't find 10 minutes a week to consider the stuff that's annoyed, inspired, smacked me between the eyes with its brilliance or helped me shape how I think, do or feel about journalism, then it's a poor look-out.  
Cheers, Andy.

Anyway, to return to where we came in the social media 'first or right' issue. I tweeted this a few hours after the shootings, which I had to follow on my iPhone, as I was travelling (and mostly followed via Twitter) 

Strange days when people jostle in a race for retweets, rather than for the truth.
— Alison Gow (@alisongow) December 14, 2012

I was angry and perplexed that opinion and rumours were being peddled and passed on as if they were nuggets of Golden Truth. 

Even Jeff Jarvis got himself tied in knots after taking on trust the Twitter account of the (wrongly) identified shooter was genuine and real.
It wasn't the right account. hell, it wasn't even the right name. Cue this.

But mistakes like that aside - and taking as read the fact that how people react on a social network is but a sideshow to the enormity of this tragedy - what I saw on Twitter on Friday night was depressing. 

It wasn't about racing to share information, and I actually don't think it was about being first, a lot of the time; it was about ego, and the retweet boost. 

Journalists can be needy creatures. When I was a reporter I wanted the front page; not much better than landing a belting story and being told it's going to be the splash - it's Hack Crack. 

On Twitter, Hack Crack becomes Retweet Smack, and it's available to all, courtesy of the site's Interactions option which shows just who and how many times your tweet has been favourited or shared.

Four or five years ago, I was sitting down with journalism students and urging them to use social media to raise their profiles, and market their work and themselves. 

I still believe that's vital, but I also think the whole 'be your own brand!' clarion call has helped create RT monsters. 

RT monsters don't need news breaks to exist - their bible is Favstar, and you've probably encountered them on a day-to-day basis. 

Typically, they're the user who takes your Twitpic link, deletes your tweet, and reposts it with their own, or they steal others' jokes and ideas, and post them as their own - Twitter's Witty Writers brigade gets very vocal about this. 

Retweet junkies abound on Twitter. I think Pat Smith summed up the issue of neediness and validation perfectly with this, during a discussion about the Newton Twitter frenzy:

@josephstash @alisongow separate to this tragedy, the fevered search for constant validation through traffic/social is a huge problem
— Patrick Smith (@psmith) December 14, 2012

Validation - now there's a thing social media was made for: How many followers do you have? How often do you get retweeted? Who, exactly, are your followers - any good ones? What's your Klout score, your Favstar ranking? Who likes your Instagram? 

Personally, I want my journalists to validate facts, not themselves. You can be a brand without letting it become the most important thing about you.

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