Teaching Social Media to Journalists

For mer than 12 years, I've been a strong believer in weaving online resources into a broad journalism curriculum.

Twitter and other social media tools should be implemented to every journalism class. I recently did this with an advanced sports reporting class I co-taught at Columbia College Chicago.

We created the web site Beyond the Game to showcase narrative storytelling, and linked off to each student's blog. We also created a Facebook group page to promote updates, and students were encouraged to post their packages on their Twitter feeds.

Here are some other creative ways to teach social media to journalists, based on a recent Poynter Institute live chat with Columbia professor and online guru Sree Sreenivasan:

• MuckRack's feed is an excellent way to see journalists in action on Twitter.
  
  
• Poynter's Ellyn Angelotti provides some great examples of how media outlets are effectively using Twitter.
  
  
• How students can avoid information overload on social media sites.
  
  
• Sree offers his own tips on Twitter.
  
  
• Mashable's Twitter guide covers the basics.
  
  
• Mashable also offers 10 ways j-schools are teaching social media.
  
  

Michael Jackson's Death and the Internet

I've long been an opponent of journalists using Wikipedia as a source for backgrounding people and issues they write about. (See a recent post on the topic.)

Exhibit A: CNN reported that a prankster posted false information on Michael Jackson's Wikipedia bio shortly after national media reported the pop star's death. The prankster wrote that Jackson was strangled by his brother, Tito, with a microphone cord.



Jackson's Wikipedia bio had more than 500 edits in 24 hours, some of the information accurate, some not. The site eventually had to block edits to the bio.

Advice I've always given student journalists: Use Wikipedia as a way of developing questions, not confirming answers. Go elsewhere to find the answers. But use Wikipedia carefully and sparingly. Because it's a wiki, anyone can post unconfirmed, false information to a bio. It's happened many times, and it has been picked up by the mainstream media.

And use the rule of three with any information you find. If you see a story or rumor, check it out with reliable sources. Internet-rumored deaths Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford and Sinbad in recent years all proved false once someone took the time to call a source close to the person.

Jackson's global appeal made the story the biggest Internet story ever in terms of traffic, surpassing even 9/11. But we need to factor in the fact that social media and mobile media attributed greatly to the surge of Jackson's traffic. Technology and news delivery platforms make a difference, as evidenced with this story.

The CNN story also reported that Google News, Twitter and celebrity gossip site TMZ had traffic issues after the story broke on Jackson's death.

Update: The Maynard Institute provided an in-depth analysis of the overwhelming coverage of Jackson's death.

Obama Calls on Blogger at Presser

President Obama caused a stir when he called on a Huffington Post blogger at a recent White House news conference.

This upset some established, traditional media covering the White House who suspected that the blogger was a plant and that the president knew the question in advance.

The Huffington Post and the White House both denied it.

Read more about it in this New York Times article.

Chicago's Online Entrepreneurs

Crain's Chicago Business had a great report on how some Chicago entrepreneurs are making Web-based projects work. Among the projects featured:

Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock.com;

Josh Karp's The Printed Blog;

and Brad Flora's Windy Citizen.

Social Media and the Iran Elections

Mashable and Breaking Tweets both have excellent timelines on the social media's coverage of the fighting in the streets after Iran's elections.

Newshour on PBS also had a great panel discussion about the role social media played in the coverage of the election protests, including censorship issues involving the Iranian government.

Google Search Tips on YouTube

Google posts some great instructional tools on its YouTube channel. I use this simple training video to help students better understand the different ways they can use Google search.

The first few tips are fairly basic, but later it shows how to use a timeline search for a research paper on green energy. It points out some great alternative techniques for expediting a general search. It's worth watching for a couple of minutes.

ConvoTrack Tool

I really like the new ConvoTrack tool, which allows users to track how a Web site is being mentioned in social network media such as Twitter, Reddit or Digg. It's really helpful to see how people are referring to a specific site and in what context. It's definitely worth bookmarking.

Beyond the Game Web Site: New Content

We just finished posting several new packages to the Beyond the Game Web site at Columbia College Chicago.

Packages include a stories on the closing of Driscoll Catholic High School; a feature on Chicago Slaughter player Chris Pisani, who overcame a hit-and-run accident to play pro football; a look at the economic impact on the American Le Mans Series auto racing circuit; a story and photo/audio slideshow on the Chicago Fire's crazy Section 8 fans and more.

The Advanced Sports Reporting students used Dreamweaver, raw HTML code, PhotoShop, SoundSlides, FinalCut Pro and Avid to produce the various packages.

The site also includes several broadcast packages on the Beyond the Game TV page.

You also can visit the Beyond the Game page on Facebook.

Journalists and Wikipedia

I've talked with students a lot about their use of Wikipedia. I've had some concerns with using the online encyclopedia as users can post any information they like to the entries. Media often cite Wikipedia as a source, yet have they fact-checked the information?

Sure enough, a college student in Ireland posted a fake quote to an entry about French composer Maurice Jarre as part of "an experiment." Sure enough, several UK media took the bait and published the fake quote as part of Jarre's obituary.

Steve Walling has built a great slideshow instructing journalists on how to use Wikipedia. I really like this piece of advice he offers: "WikiPedia should be the first place you look for information, not the last ... it should help you form questions for your story, not give you the answers."

Wikipedia for Journalists & Bloggers

View more presentations from StevenWalling.

The Masters New Media

When you think of The Masters, you think of Wood, Nicklaus and Palmer. Augusta National. Amen Corner. The rites of spring.

But over the years, The Masters has done a great job of weaving new media into the fabric of its event. It was among the first sports events of any kind to have a live scoreboard, launching one in 1996.

Since 2008, The Masters Web site is leverageing IBM's Many Eyes software to give you new ways to follow the event:

1) Data visualizations that allow you to track scores by hole, participants by country and follow eagles, birdies and bogeys, year-by-year, since 1946. The latter is a great fact-checking tool for any golf writer. The statistics are presented as charts and graphics to help readers understand the information.

2) Word trees and tag clouds, which have been popular on the Web the past year or so.

The site also has a blog, Twitter feed, Facebook fan page and a leaderboard widget that you can imbed on your blog.

Check them out at The Masters Web site.