Social stories: Reporting (predictable) presidential elections
Here are a few examples of how we've tackled social news of the Egypt and Syria elections at The Wall Street Journal.
1. Geolocating questions on Facebook – and getting more than 10,000 comments.
We knew we had a large Facebook following of people from Egypt to the main Wall Street Journal Facebook page. A quick look at the analytics showed Egypt as fifth on the list of countries where our followers live and Cairo as the second in the list of cities (after New York).
We therefore geotargeted a question for Egyptian followers.
Here's the conversation on Facebook.
// <![CDATA[ (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); // ]]>
Post by The Wall Street Journal.
Here's a follow-up blog post.
2. Highlighting the spoiled ballots
Tamer El-Ghobashy, one of the Journal's Cairo-based reporters, noticed people were sharing photos of spoiled ballot papers, with some choosing to vote for Ayra Stark, Christiano Ronaldo, Florentino Perez or Sergio Ramos rather than for Sisi.
His round up of ballot papers is well worth a look.
3. A Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Tamer
That's taking place at noon ET / 5pm UK time / 7pm Cairo time tomorrow (Wednesday).
Tamer El-Ghobashy will answer questions on Egypt.
4. A Twitter custom timeline on Syria
Voting has been taking place today in Syria's 'election'. Some of the one million Syrians living in neighbouring Lebanon voted at the embassy in Beirut last week.
The Journal's Syria correspondent Sam Dagher has been doing a fantastic job of tweeting the election build up and day itself.
In Maidan district #Damascus voters at polling station were regaled by Damascene sword dancers & #Assad chants #Syria pic.twitter.com/nYBQ8D7Kdr
— Sam Dagher (@samdagher)
June 3, 2014
Using the custom timeline feature in Tweetdeck I was able to create a list Sam's tweets and share the curated list.
Take a look at the list (it's worth scrolling back so you can see the who week of coverage). Here's a post where we embedded the timeline.
Perhaps we should end with this bright tweet from Sam.
Amid all the heartache and pain in #Syria this young balloon vendor in #Damascus still manages to smile pic.twitter.com/6A0Kk3YYQ3
— Sam Dagher (@samdagher)
June 2, 2014