Using social media to report on the elections
TBD.com, the new Allbritton site out of Washington, DC is using map mashups and social media to help tell the story of today’s primary elections. On the site, you will find good use of the liveblogging tool CoverItLive, where voters are reporting about their experiences at the polls. TBD has also built a mashup map [...]
Surge in social media referrals to video
Social media is becoming a key traffic driver to online video. A report published (.pdf) by Brightcove and TubeMogul this week found that Facebook and Twitter are growing faster than search in sending traffic to video clips. While Facebook and Twitter are growing faster, the search engines still send more traffic — 64% comes from [...]
MTV brings Twitter to live TV with VMAs
If you watched the MTV Video Music Awards last night — and why wouldn’t you? — then you saw MTV’s big Twitter wall and online Twitter Tracker. Working with Twitter and Stamen Design, MTV tracked the number of tweets that mentioned various people in the awards show in real time, displaying it in “bumps” scattered [...]
Social networks as a source of daily news
A new study by the Pew Research Center says that Americans are consuming more news than ever, with continued growth online — 34% said they went online for their news yesterday. When you add mobile, email and social networks to the equation, that number jumps to 44%. When you break it down, only 7% of [...]
Washington Post starts #wherewereyou hashtag
The Washington Post had a great and tremendously simple idea to encourage people to share their 9/11 memories on Twitter — it created the hashtag #wherewereyou. The hashtag became a trending topic on Twitter, generating a flood of responses. “The Post’s solution was elegant and organic at the same time: It took a basic question [...]
Chicago to offer press passes to freelancers and bloggers
The city of Chicago has just taken a big step forward in recognizing that “the media” isn’t just for the permanently-employed pros in radio, TV and newspaper. According to Chicago Reader, Chicago’s City Council voted to amend its rules regarding press passes. (Shouldn’t they be called “media passes” by now?) Freelancers and bloggers can get [...]
New York Times – NYU hyperlocal partnership launches
UPDATE 3:31 ET: The site is now live. The hyperlocal partnership between The New York Times and NYU, “The Local East Village,” launches today. (It’s not up yet as of this posting, but according to a tweet from NYU’s Jay Rosen, the site will be up later today. We will update.) According to a press [...]
Social media takes center stage in San Bruno explosion
Updated: A big explosion in a high-tech city has sparked a torrent of citizen and media coverage over social media. One of the most emotional tweets to come out of the San Bruno fire is this one from @hector: He followed up with a tweet explaining that his cousin is missing, as well. According to [...]
The 100 most influential media Twitter accounts
Daniel Romero, a Ph.D Candidate at Cornell University, worked with HP to come up with a list of the 100 most influential media Twitter accounts. The algorithm measures such things as how frequently the accounts are retweeted and clicks per link. Here are the top 10… @name Name Followers Influence Rank 1 @mashable Pete [...]
NY Times, Betaworks working on social news service
The company behind TweetDeck and Bit.ly is working with the New York Times to launch a social news service called News.me. “We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space,” said John Borthwick, CEO at Betaworks. It’s still in stealth mode, and both Betaworks and the Times are providing few details. But the [...]
Considering Quran coverage in light of social media
Update: The pastor has called it off, but the small Florida church with plans to burn Qurans on September 11th has raised a plethora of media ethics questions. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo posted this refreshingly-honest tweet moments after news broke that the pastor canceled the event. I suspect that Cuomo is not alone with this [...]
The hyperlocal news effort that’s bigger than Patch
You’ve heard about Patch, but what about Datasphere, the company that’s launched more hyperlocal news sites in more communities than AOL? Today it announced it landed another $10 million in funding (for a total of $26.5 million) as it continues to expand with partnerships with TV stations owned by Gannett, Fisher, Raycom and LocalTV. “Having [...]
Aggravated local news viewers and social media
Poynter’s Al Tompkins has been holding focus groups with local TV news viewers for a decade. “There is a blowback building out there,” he writes after his latest focus group meeting, this time in Cincinnati. “The public seems more skeptical, more aggravated and less tolerant of what we are reporting.” Viewers want reporters to take [...]
Intersect aims to connect people through stories
A social news site based in Seattle called Intersect just debuted in beta today with an ambitious goal: to encourage people to share stories, mapped by time and place, to see where their paths might cross. The site is the brainchild of Peter Rinearson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Microsoft VP. Here’s how it [...]
NPR debuts local sites focused on one topic
A group of NPR-affiliated radio stations has launched “The ARGO Network” — sites that pick one area of interest in their community and focus exclusively on it. Local stations are rolling out 12 sites, supported by a $3 million grant from the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The sites are niche verticals, with each station choosing its own topic — The Informant focused on cops, courts and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example. Each station had to agree to hire a reporter dedicated exclusively to its ARGO site and respective Facebook and Twitter accounts. The sites are independent of the stations’ companion sites — they look almost nothing like their radio sites. Many of the stations’ official sites don’t link to their ARGO sites, which means the ARGO sites will really have to stand on their own. Interestingly, the ARGO sites are all powered by WordPress and appear in blog format.
According to a press release, The ARGO Network stations will be interconnected to highlight stories from other network sites: “One of the key goals of ARGO is to create an online ‘niche’ experience that invites an exchange of views across the community – bringing together people with different perspectives to explore ideas and solutions.”
On the social side, the sites include curated lists of stories from other sites. The sites note that their latest links are “a current mix of content filtered by our blogroll, Delicious, our Twitter list, and Daylife.” The grant that is funding the project only lasts through the 2011 fiscal year, so NPR will have to find a way to continue to support the project beyond then.
Click through below for a list of the sites, stations and areas of focus:
Social media play key role in Boulder fire
Updated: A wildfire is burning above Boulder, Colorado, and Twitter and Facebook are playing an important role getting out the latest information on the fire’s path. When the Boulder Sheriff’s emergency alert system failed, its emergency operations center asked that residents use Twitter and Facebook to help spread the word of mandatory evacuations, reports the [...]
NY Times’ latest hyperlocal site launches next week
Back in February, the New York Times announced a collaboration with NYU to launch a hyperlocal site in the East Village, and today they’ve set a launch date — next Monday, September 13th. “We intend to add new value — in all media formats — to the East Village’s already rich and vibrant online presence,” [...]
Blogger catches Boston Globe’s site running ‘adult’ ads
Last week, the Boston Globe ran an editorial calling on Craigslist to remove its “adult services” listings, which it did over the weekend amid pressure from state attorneys general. But today, the Globe is caught with egg on its face for doing the same thing. In what we described as a “conflict of interest,” the [...]
