#social reporting

[toolskimlikes]

Moments

What it does: Sort of like a more visual Storify

[toolskimlikes]

What it does: Create antiviral social media. Good for truthing

[toolskimlikes]

What it does: Very quickly lets you copy Twitter lists to your account.

[vprotonotarios]

[tmampel]

"Think outside the box" - auch in der Sozialen Arbeit eine gute Idee!

“Think outside the box” – auch in der Sozialen Arbeit eine gute Idee!

SocialLinks #22

© Ivelin Radkov – Fotolia.com

In dieser Woche sind mir drei sehr unterschiedliche Beiträge ins Auge gesprungen. Alle drei sind sehr interessant – haben aber nicht unmittelbar etwas miteinander zu tun. Auf den ersten Blick. Auf den zweiten Blick wird der “Rote Faden” sichtbar: Es geht um Innovation. Und im Besonderen um die Frage, wie sich der Sozialbereich in bestimmten…

View On WordPress

[bui]

On when to embed tweets {gripes}

I love embedding tweets in stories. I'm all about it, especially when it takes the place of a quote.

The idea being, sometimes, people will tweet things that they wouldn't say into your mic, or in front of your notebook. Sometimes, Twitter brings a truth serum to our lips.

Or, Twitter will be a good place to find sources, where you can quote their tweet and follow up with an interview later.

Social media sourcing can be a great way to get parts of the story you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. It's a good way to display that in-the-moment thought, or quip.

But it's not a good way to fill space. 

Take this HuffPo story: 

To take a step back, social media shouldn't be used to fuel lazy journalism. It should never be a replacement for shoe-leather reporting. For a phone call.

And it should always be verified. Were they there? Did they see it? Do they have something to add?

What worries me is the idea that social media reporting is a good substitute for actual reporting. It's not. It's a good tip-sheet. It's a good tool, not a replacement.

The telephone is used to make the call. Twitter is the telephone. It's the mechanism by which we can touch our audiences. Using it does not mean you know how to ask the right questions, or call/tweet the right person.

There still needs to be good reporting behind it.

[annatlewis-blog]

I explored the new social reports in Google Analytics and updated the post when Backlink information was added. I think there are two conclusions that can be drawn from this:

Links and social now count for similar things in the search algorithm

Google can pick and choose which features stick to their privacy policies and which don't.

It's great to see the links reports, but strange to see users faces, user names and the exact times that the links were created. Google are serious stalkers and now sharing their data, and I like data, but I don't like being stalked...

[bui]

How a tweet turned into a DDOS attack {stories from the front}

Sometimes, I play reporter (for those of you who do not know, I was a reporter for years before I moved over to social/web).

Last night was one of those nights. 

Earlier in the day, our friends at the LATimes broke a story: Someone had posted a bunch of personal information on LAPD officers. The immediate question was "who?"

Around 5 p.m., the reporter who sits next to me figured it out. It was a hacker group called CabinCr3w. 

What did the other news sites do? They said "a hacker group." The initial stories did not list the group's name at all.

I have a personal interest in Anonymous, and the cloak-and-dagger side of the Internet thanks to dating one too many developer/nerd types. 

As Tami called the LAPD, I hit up the internet. I looked at the group's tumblr, their twitter, and all their various profiles trying to find the post where they listed the info and anything else I could get. Then, using what we had, I tweeted.

Here's what happened after that tweet.

I had more questions, so I asked them to DM me. We followed each other and then I got a DM that linked to an IRC chatroom.

I interviewed them.

Right about this time, we experienced a heavy load of traffic — what amounts to a denial of service attack. If you've ever experienced one of these you know it's either that you hit something big or that there was an organized attack. We've had one before, but that was as a result of our stuff living on the same server as conservative news outlet. 

What is important about this to me is that no one else thought to tweet these guys. Other news outlets were too cautious or didn't know to link to them or call them out. 

Because I sent out one tweet and @ mentioned the subject of the story, we got the story behind the story. 

That's important to me. Being "of the internet," I have always felt like few people have gotten Anonymous and hacktivism. I barely get it myself, but I've made an effort to learn as much as I could.

I asked CabinCr3w is they launched the DDOS attack. They said no. I asked if we had reported their involvement correctly and fairly. They said yes.

Just because they're a part of a cloak-and-dagger movement doesn't mean they are any less legitimate than any other source. 

The lessons?

@ mention subjects of stories, even if you haven't interviewed them

Everyone is worth of an interview

Getting a better story using social media doesn't take a large amount of mining or work. Sometimes, it's a simple tweet.