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5 tools to boost your Instagram campaigns
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Useful for any social media journalists looking to incorporate more uses for Instagram in their field. I also like the Backspaces app.
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Smartwatches and the digital future of news | Journalism.co.uk
The words "wearable tech" will soon become wearisome to my ears I think, but for now I'm learning as much as I can about it, and this piece from J.co.uk is a useful addition to the sum of knowledge.
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A Running List of What We Know the NSA Can Do. So Far. - WNYC
I really like this as an approach to a story - the 'what we know' approach invites readers to consider 'what we don't know' and to add to the sum of information contained here. I don't know if you call this journalism or open curation of data, or whether the two are more or less the same thing. But it's very interesting, and something I plan to try and introduce more of in my new role .
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Macro Social Sites Are Just A Part Of The Digital Puzzle
Additionally, unless you want to sell out and go for high-bounce traffic from low-value, disinterested users macro social sites probably won’t send you the highest volume (let alone quality) traffic anyway. Build connections and community with smart, niche and passionate audiences. You’ll win every time
Sunday, 26 January 2014
This week, I've been reading... (weekly)
Sunday, 19 January 2014
This week, I've been reading... (weekly)
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Bafta nominations 2014 - liveblog | Film | theguardian.com
fair play to the Guardian for attempting to liveblog a BAFTA list, which appeared to be speed-rapped. And fair play for holding up hands and saying 'we were a bit pants'. Sometimes you try things and they work, sometimes they don't. "It's impossible to liveblog two people reading a list. Apologies. We will have a full list of nominations on the site shortly, along with a gallery of the key nominees and Peter Bradshaw's reaction."
Sunday, 12 January 2014
This week, I've been reading... (weekly)
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If you love something, set it free: a lesson for old media | Outsider/Insider
"I have no doubt that the higher-ups at every major media organization would say, if asked what their mission is, that they want to deliver the news, inform the public, uncover important stories and of course (for many) make a profit while doing so. If that were really true though, there wouldn’t be an apparent need to tightly control all aspects of that mission. If you love something, in other words, you have to set it free. I hope it’s a lesson old media can learn before they become totally obsolete."
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Ezra Klein and the problem with top-down control | Media Nation
This commentary was published earlier at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What should a 21st-century news organization look like?
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"We examined some of 2013’s most successful tweets, measured in terms of clickthroughs and retweets, to see what connects with these readers and where our investment of editorial effort really paid off (the data comes from SocialFlow, whose system the Times uses to manage some of its major Twitter accounts). We also looked at some of our strategies and tactics to encourage a variety of types of reader engagement with our journalism using Twitter."
Sunday, 5 January 2014
This week, I've been reading... (weekly)
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How BuzzFeed mastered social sharing to become a media giant for a new era (Wired UK)
The Buzzfeed story is a good read, although the tone is a sometimes little starry eyed. Perhaps the journalist was hoping to defect. Anyway, I found this an interesting read, particularly the move into hard news reporting.
- f there is a science to BuzzFeed's content strategy, it is built on obsessive measurement
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Facebook News Feed Redesign Changes Struggle to Court Users - Mike Isaac - Social - AllThingsD
"Most people think of Facebook in a similar way: It’s a place to share photos of your kids. It’s a way to keep up with friends and family members. It’s a place to share a funny, viral story or LOLcat picture you’ve stumbled upon on the Web. This is not how Facebook thinks of Facebook. In Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, Facebook should be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” He wants a design-and-content mix that plays up a wide array of “high-quality” stories and photos. The gap between these two Facebooks — the one its managers want to see, and the one its users like using today — is starting to become visible. "
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New data show where Facebook has (and hasn’t) made the shift to mobile – Quartz
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Twitter / ScottFilmCritic: If you only see one frog who ...
I love this. No matter how smart you think you're being, Twitter will be smarter.
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Slideshare presentation by James Whatley, a dude who absolutely knows what he's talking about. And - of course - one of the Big Things for 2014 is disposable social.
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Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messenger apps | Technology | The Observer
""I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days," said Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London. In the last few years she has used Facebook less and less because she doesn't want "the whole world to know" what she's doing. When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because "it's more personal". For similar reasons, some 78% of teenagers and young people use mobile messengers to plan a meet-up with friends, according to research advisory firm mobileYouth."
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Young people don't do journalism. Oh yes they do but not your model
This made me think about a number of assumptions I have, but mostly I've bookmarked it because of Q's multiple responses in the comments. He says: "The young have become creative online. Some feel in the traditional system, a lot of stories created by that traditional media was negative and stereotypical. With, no or very little good news. So, with the aid of the internet they have created an alternative, and can now be in control of their own stories and imaging, and get that to their own audiences. They can also now decide the balance or weighting of a story with a good or bad light, and the checks or control on them is via the social platforms they are serving. If the audience doesn?t like the content, it takes seconds for the content creators to be notified and contested. Of course within all of this there are online haters sitting behind keyboards that hate anything posted online. However, now the content creators are also the audience or very close to them this once again leads them to feel that they don?t need the support of traditional media, which has misshaped and wrongly defined them in the past. Also, one has to question the fact, why very few young people even read the traditional media and their journalistic stories? ... If... they see media created by social platforms they respect by content creators they trust, and their friends reinforce that on social media, they will engage in conversation and might even SHARE the good news to others." (He also tells a story about a conversation with a Guardian journalist about gangs that a) made me cringe and b) made me look at the whole way UK media report on gangs in a different way.
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The cup and the knife: the reality of caring for someone with dementia
" In the end my dad died of dementia, but also because dying was the easiest way to treat him." An honest and upsetting account of watching a loved one disintegrate through illness. One of the best pieces of writing I've read for a long time.