Are journalists hired by a company to write about that company — or its products/services — producing journalism, or is what they’re doing more accurately described as marketing?
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An exchange at one of the a.m. ONA ’12 Unconference sessions — “Is Tumblr the new Time Inc.?” — struck me as quite the philosophical one-two punch. An audience member posed the original form of the question above, which I’ve paraphrased to add context, and it struck a nerve with panelist Jessica Bennett, executive editor of Storyboard, Tumblr’s… ‘zine? Is that term still in use, or am I just showing my age? Oh, and BTW, Facebook has one, too: Facebook Stories, which was also represented on the Unconference panel, despite being absent from the session’s submitted title.
People working for a company writing feel-good stories about using the only product produced by said company… seems like a no-brainer: marketing, it is. But hold on a second — I’m not done yet.
Conversely, a follow-up comment from a member of the panel — suggesting that in a certain context, one could call everything on Twitter “journalism” — definitely struck a nerve with the crowd. An interesting notion, but of course, utterly ridiculous — so much so that it struck me as lashing out. Spend two minutes on three random Twitter feeds, and I’m pretty sure it will be quickly apparent how preposterous that last notion is. (I’m sorry to say that the whole exchange happened fast, and I’m not 100% clear exactly who on the panel made the Twitter comment.)
Before I wander too far into the forest here, let me take a moment to clarify: I’m not throwing rocks at Tumblr, or Facebook. I’m merely laying the groundwork for a discussion I believe 1) has merit, and 2) is incredibly interesting… Pondering the definition of journalism is something I always find really fascinating, and even moreso when the definition(s) I’m hearing from someone else unleashes the kind of defensive volley I saw exhibited in that giant yet sparsely populated back conference room at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco a few Saturdays ago.
On one hand, I can see Bennett’s perspective. In addition to their content appearing in reputable web publications (since we’re not quite yet to the point where we can drop the “web” from that noun), what she and the editorial team at Tumblr are doing is telling stories about their community — not unlike the kinds of community news readers laud and crave. Those same stories that many in newsrooms shovel only to fill holes and keep the paychecks flowing while waiting for that juicy exposé on a respected government official to fall into their laps. After all, we’re all Woodwards and Bernsteins at heart.
On the other, I’m fairly certain the stories — often interesting features/interviews reflecting on culture, issues, people and places — wouldn’t dare make Tumblr seem like anything less than a Mecca of hipster diversity and the future salvation of individuality currently being drained by other more popular — dare I say, mainstream? — methods of social media. Call it a hunch.
No doubt, storytelling is storytelling, and every “boring” community snewser (see what I did there?) is an opportunity lost by a journalist who didn’t bother to elevate it. Trust me; I’ve had the good fortune to work with a reporter or two who found ways to make even the most mundane of assignments — on any topic — blossom into compelling reads. Any. Topic.
But good stories aren’t at issue here. Again, the question here is: Is this journalism?
Forbes called it “newspaper-like.” I could be wrong, but the “-like” in that headline — in the headline! — didn’t strike me as being put there solely because they lack a concrete community or a physical product, especially since its previous coverage of Storyboard highlights the fact that most of the content it was churning out initially was not original to the extent of being sued. And The Atlantic’s take on “the microsite.”
It’s clear Ms. Bennett sees herself views herself as a journalist to the core, and you needn’t be in that particular unconference session to know that. Her posted resumé contains several entries headlined “Newsweek,” another from the Village Voice, and a New York Press Club award named after a pioneer in investigative journalism.
Tumblr clearly concurs, given her title — executive editor — as well as the fact that they have an editorial department (not a marketing department) that produces content for Storyboard.
It will be interesting, for sure, to see how this department, its site and its staff evolve. No doubt. But until they get themselves cops and city hall beats, I’m thinking I’ll stick to the traditional definitions of journalism.
As my ideaLab project unfolds, I have also been educating Esri about our workflows — current, theoretical and otherwise. Thinking through those processes led me to this rather simplified take, both in content and presentation, about how our content evolves:
Digital-first reporter workflow
POST tweet tweet *click* tweet tweet tweet tweet *click* tweet tweet RT tweet tweet tweet RT tweet RT *click* tweet tweet tweet RT RT tweet tweet tweet tweet RT tweet tweet RT tweet tweet tweet RT tweet (write) UPDATE (write) (write) SEND call call (write) SEND callllllllllll (write) SEND (write) (write) (write) SEND (write) call (write) (write) SEND call (write) SEND. File. G+ Facebook RT tweet tweet RT tweet Facebook link link link link tweet Facebook g+ tweet tweet call call (write) Final Update.
Digital-first photographer workflow
tweet tweet *click* tweet *click* tweet *click* tweet tweet *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* tweet *click* *click* *click* (record) (record) *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* (record) *click* *click* RT tweet (write) *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* (record) *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* (write) (write) upload Upload UP.LOAD.SEND. Facebook G+ RT tweet
Digital-first editor workflow
Tweet RT RT curate Edit POST RT RT Storify UPDATE Storify Storify UPDATE down/upload_photo (write) (write) down/upload_photo Edit UPDATE RT RTRT curate Edit down/upload_photo Edit Edit curate UPDATE G+ Facebook RT RT RT curate Edit UPDATE curate curate curate (build) Storify. link (build) mapify. link (build) datafy. link Editcurate package Final Update.
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WHAT’S YOUR TAKE? Granted, there’s always cause to do things differently from one situation to the next. But I think the above is a pretty fair snapshot of our optimum mode of operation. Certainly this version could be much more visual, and the design editor in me will probably attempt to loop back around to that at some point. In the meantime, I’d love to see what other people’s take on such things might be. If you’ve got one to share, feel free to post it here, or tag me on Twitter @designerGNA.
I’ve long thought there’s a way for newspapers to tap the audiences in what I call “underground social media” — Reddit, 4chan, digg, Plurk, FARK, others — and I’ve been chewing on this blog post about it for some time.
For those who aren’t familiar, these are forums for interaction via user-generated refers to existing content produced by others… Less geeky translation: Social media consisting mostly of links and +/- reactions to said links, for the most part. I’ve seen them called social readers, aggregators, social bookmarks, social discovery sites and even just “internet services.”
I’m calling them “underground” since they’re wildly popular but rarely come up in daily conversation. “So, I was on Fark the other day, and came across the most hilarious post.” Uh, no. You post the link, often with a wisecrack, and move on with your life, barely noticing the obvious url branding.
So I started noodling around this post a couple months ago when I, ahem, stumbled upon a use of Reddit I’d never seen before: the Reddit list as survey. ONA used it to engage its membership, and anyone else who felt like playing along, to pick sessions for this year’s conference. I participated a couple times, and I suppose it started me percolating on this post. By the time I caught a demo of our new commenting system — Disqus, which reminded me a lot of Reddit — I knew I needed to get a lot more comfortable with social readers.
Reinforcing the point was a Disqus commenting system demo I was asked to sit in on a few weeks back, coupled with a Quora inquiry — as in, “Do you use it?” — from a fellow social media enthusiast.
Full disclosure: I’m not personally a fan of these sorts of sites. I’m willing to admit that I might just be weird, not weird enough or, at the very least, terminally uncool. (Thank you for being shocked.) It could also be my design background getting the better of me; all those sites just look like a jumbled mess of links — not the sort of social media that appeals to me, though some have made strides in that department. I liken each of them to a shopping mall (another environment I don’t particularly relish), full of lots of places full of stuff I probably won’t buy (in this case, click). Random browsing seems to not really be my thing; surfing or shopping, in reality or online, I generally start out with some kind of actual purpose. Where I might wander after that will probably depend on what I do or don’t find, as well as what other sorts of things that might come to mind along that journey. Arguably, that’s still random in nature, but certainly not in its genesis. I signed up to be emailed now and again with “interesting” posts from a couple of them, but not very many of them got me clicking unless I was reeeeeeally bored, or in severe need of procrastination fodder.
That said, given the extreme popularity of all those sites I mentioned above (and a few I’ll talk more about below) — as well as their innate ability to propel posts to viral status — it seems like folly not to familiarize myself with what they have to offer. They’re exactly the type of social media that appeals to many of my cousins, who are fast reaching that target age group news media is constantly attempting to reach. In fact, one of them, a college student at Berkley, recently told me that he first heard about Osama bin Laden’s death on 4chan. His smirk indicated I should have nosed out a few more details, but I got distracted by a shiny object, and we never got back on the subject.
And so, I dipped my toe in via social media. I would say that was a logical entry point for someone like me; most certainly, it’s led me to click on more social reader posts — specifically Reddit and StumbleUpon, as the others don’t seem to tweet much — in the past month than my entire life previously up until that point. And I have to admit that I’ve found a few gems among the rough — a lot of rough.
Not my first cave-diving adventure
A couple years back, I dinked around on digg some, but I think that was more because I’d heard about the fervor over its redesign, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it was the “flawed” new design, but nothing I experienced there led me to visit that site more than a handful of times once the fury faded. Upon a recent revisit, however, I noticed they now have a “Newsrooms” feature in beta. If they figure out a way to curate local news for users, I could see where this might help us out — or become our worst nightmare, I suppose. I’m choosing to remain positive — and keep at least one eye on it.
Same deal, kinda, with StumbleUpon, which also got my attention upon word of a redesign. The rest I’d only really visited when someone passed along a link, generally to some kind of time-wasting yet HILARIOUS meme.
I did make a run at GetGlue, which strikes me as the couch potato’s FourSquare. No judgments, but… If you don’t get out much, if you’re often glued to the gaming system of your choice, or if you make a point of watching episodes of the most popular shows as they air — and want to be “rewarded” for doing so — this is the “check-in” social media you should be checking out. (And if I were in features, I’d start brainstorming how this social media could be useful. Since I’m geared more for news, though, I’m putting that one back on the shelf… for now, at least.)
Pinterest initially struck me as a similar sort, and arguably is exactly like the rest I’ve mentioned. But since it lacks the ability to +/- a post (in terms of actually rating the post, not like Google+’s answer to the “like” button), not to mention its rather high-profile popularity, it makes more sense to lump it in with more mainstream sorts of social media.
I suppose one could argue that certain areas/aspects of craigslist and Wikipedia are also forms of “underground” social media, but let’s just put them in the “not so much” column, and move forward.
Funny how the planets align
Last week, I was sent a link to a story about BuzzFeed.com. But before I had a chance to read it, I storified what I now realize is a somewhat related example for our Inland papers and deployed it to our three websites at kind of the worst time ever — after 5 p.m. Friday. When I checked up on it Monday morning, though, it had received 750ish hits — not too shabby, especially considering how minimal an effort it to pull it together in the first place… a positive lesson for future (and better planned/developed) undertakings, I’m thinking.
And so, since it did that well with basically no help from me, and since I was in the mood to test out a couple of theories about the BuzzFeed items I’d read about, I decided to dust it off, change the headline (to something more BuzzFeed-ish), and give it a Monday morning run. By the end of the day, it had surpassed 1,200 hits, and eventually topped out just above 2,500. Amazing.
But here’s the bad news: Only a few hundred of those hits are views from any of the three papers where I posted it, according to Storify stats on that post that seem in line with what I’ve dug up on Omniture. Most of the clicks, it seems, are coming via Storify, and really I’m guessing I have Google & Co. to thank for any traction whatsoever, as well as the fact that I was unable to change the original URL to a more accurate (and less perceivably salacious) SEO than I would have liked. (Still need to check up on the stories included in that Storify to see how they might/not have benefited from the increased exposure. Stay tuned on that.)
THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA (and its aggregators): After I’d all but hit the “publish” button on this post, I happened across this one-two punch of a Storify that stands as a pretty remarkable example of what social media of all kinds, brought together by yet another form of social media, can do. According to the Storify by user Ben Doemberg, the donation drive originated on Reddit, while 4chan users worked to weed out the perpetrators (a movement that was quashed by 4chan monitors). Meanwhile, the Storify that pulled it all together has 1.6 million hits and counting — a Storify record — was picked up by the likes of Mashable, Gawker and the Huffington Post… Storify’s built for sharing, after all.
What do you think? (+/-)
I think social readers, or whatever you want to call them, bear discussion — and investigation, and experimentation — about how journalists could make use of them beyond the occasional attempt to make the a specific sort of oddball story go viral. Seems like we could do better, especially since I’m not sure we’ve ever even really tried.
Let’s start with “What’s your favorite ‘underground social media,’ a.k.a. ‘social reader’?” I’d love to hear about it, and why you like it. Tag me @designerGNA or comment below with links to some of your favorite posts, or any posts worth checking out for whatever reason.
In the meantime, I’m going to finish up reading this BuzzFeed post I found on Why Digg is Better Than Reddit, which seems a touch more useful than this post about Plurk vs. Twitter, though not as instantly entertaining as the fact that Reddit has a 4chan page it describes as “The utter cesspool of humanity. The very lowest common denominator of humor. The Bottom of the Internet.” And yes, I already read the post detailing the five things I need to know about the TomKat divorce.
Maybe there’s hope for me with this whole random browsing thing after all.
If you don’t already know, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins blogged on Wednesday about the creation of a curation team for Digital First Media. Rather than immediately releasing an official job description, as you would with traditional job openings, they instead asked for input into what a curation team should do, via Twitter or in comments in their respective posts. They also invited responses via blog posts. (Ahem.)
Typically, I’m all over these kinds of online conversations, hashtagging my ass off. Not yesterday. First, because Wednesdays are the days I’ve set aside to work on my ideaLab projects, so I spend them on the Esri campus, semi-out-of-reach of what’s happening in the newsrooms and other realms of our organization. It helps me focus on what I’m trying to learn and do, and is also a bit of a courtesy toward the Esri staffer who has spent his Wednesdays at my side, teaching me about some aspects of data I never really took the time to learn; showing me the ropes and some snazzy features of Esri’s fairly robust programs; and setting up meetings with other Esri personnel who have an interest in what news organizations today need — and what they want.
Consequently, I didn’t hashtag any of my tweets #dfmcuration. In fact, pretty much the only tweeting I did Wednesday was for the weekly #dfmchat, and for my weekly Esri Instagram journal of sorts.
The other reason for being off-grid in this case was that I wanted to develop a real answer on my own. I didn’t even read the full blog posts about this job until just a few hours ago, and I still haven’t yet looked at a single comment or tweet on the matter. Perhaps that’s folly, but I just felt like I needed the isolation on this answer, at least initially. (If I change my mind on anything, I’ll note it at the bottom of this post.)
I promise I’ll make up for all of that in the next couple days. And beyond.
So here’s what I came up with:
At its simplest, curation at this level is Twitter lists of valued, verified and authoritative tweeters for as many aspects of news as shades of blue in the sky: national and regional collections of everything from lawmakers to philanthropic and nonprofit organizations to weather sources; helpful resources for victims of everything from fire and flood to foreclosure and scams to domestic violence; world and national news media, and maybe even the paparazzi; sports teams and official fan sites; and everything in between — or solidly trending. Same thing on Google Plus. Same thing on Facebook. Same thing on… You get the idea.
Curation is gathering valued, verified and authoritative links to all our properties’ bonafide social media in as many social media platforms they’re utilizing — and then some.
It’s looking for opportunities to leverage social media in ways that augment Thunderdome coverage and increase reader engagement, likely through tools like Storify, VeriteCo., Delicious, blogs, Facebook pages and timelines, Google Docs; plus more I can’t think of at this late hour and some I haven’t even heard of yet.
It’s discovering new tools that aid — or even ease — the aggregation process, with bonus points for those that cater to both web and print. Or discovering new ways to achieve that same objective using “old” tools. Oh, and keeping them all handy in a shared arsenal.
It’s collecting valued, verified and authoritative data — maps, databases, spreadsheets, charts, whathaveyou — of wide relevance, significance and importance — Census data, election results, voter turnout figures, Congressional district boundaries (before and after redistricting), Olympic counts (medals, records, participating nations, etc.), foreclosure rates, fire/flood/major mayhem maps, etc. — in formats that’s readily accessible by any, or many, of our 75 properties’ websites, should they need it in a pinch or for a project.
It’s pulling together links and available authoritative source information on all of those topics and then some into centralized locations readily accessible by reporters and editors across DFM, including links and means of communication with other DFM properties.
It’s creating instructional and “best of” packages of content from across those 75 properties for distribution on Storify, Paper.li, Delicious, blogs, etc.
It’s teaching, empowering and mobilizing newsrooms across DFM to do as many of these same things as possible on the local level — local officials, agencies, restaurants, businesses, personalities, sports teams, etc. — with the goal of establishing that local newspaper as the go-to resource for anything relating to that community.
And it’s providing back-up to those organizations when national news breaks in their back yard, and curation is the last thing they have time for, but something their community greatly needs.
As I see it, a curation team at the national level would lead these charges, deploy these tactics and continue furthering the development of curation editors/teams across all DFM properties. At least, that’s my take. Eager to see what others had to say on the matter Wednesday, and to talk more about this topic in the weeks and months to come.
While the bulk of my Social Media Month challenges focused on the “Big 3″ — Twitter, Facebook and G+ — I also sprinkled in a few sorts of social media tools that took the next step, be it forward or sideways.
Enter Storify, Klout and CoverItLive — ”the rest” of my Social Media Month challenges, as it were:
Storify: While I personally am experiencing some technical difficulties with my Storify account on iPad, I’m still a big fan of the platform and anticipate using and discussing it quite a bit as I ramp up my own social media efforts.
- Like most new social media experiences, the best way to get started is to dive right in.
- Gives your audience engagement more purpose.
Klout: Though it has as many critics as fans, Klout can help you track your own successes and find quality commenters.
CoverItLive*: Augment your coverage of special or wide-interest topics.
* CoverItLive announced some changes last week that have sparked a bit of fervor among users that had come to rely on it for dynamic coverage of live events. On a personal level, I’m rather disappointed to see it slip from our grasp before we were really able to make good use of it at the papers I work for. But there’s no point in dwelling on it, and thankfully, DFM’s Mandy Jenkins (& Co.) issued a fast response with some feasible — and inexpensive — alternatives.
about.me: After you do a global profile check, log them all into a global social media calling card.
tumblr: Tumblr is a social media worth pursuing, but it might take awhile to find the right fit.
Other general tips:
- Social media clients help you make sense of your social media accounts, and make them work for you. If your main interaction with your own Twitter account is posting from its home page and flipping through your main feed, you’re doing it wrong.
- Never stop trying something new. If nothing else, it can give you a new appreciation for more familiar social media avenues — and make you more receptive to the next big thing.
