MulinBlog: A digital journalism blog

When I wrote about how news media make use of social media tools such as Twitter, one practice that is frequently mentioned in various accounts is the use of Twitter hashtags. I want to write a post to answer questions a beginning multimedia journalism student may have: Continue reading →

I want to share with students about how today’s reporters use social media in their everyday work. From my readings and research, I summarized some typical uses of social media in journalism, all with real examples I came across on the web. Continue reading →

A research conducted in 2011 had some interesting findings about how the mainstream news media use Twitter in their everyday news operations. The mainstream media included in this study are Washington Post, New York Times, Huffington Post, NPR, USA Today, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Wall Stream Journal, etc. Here’s some highlights of the report: Continue reading →

One typical use of Twitter by journalists is to dig for interview sources for breaking news. Most major news media and reporters have twitter accounts and there have been ample instances for how Twitter plays a critical role in breaking news.

Twitter is like a running river with voluminous fishes swimming by, so how could reporters find the interesting or newsworthy fishes (sources)?

Journalists now live in a world where average citizens may break news faster/earlier than the media; for instance, two separate tweets announced the death of popular singer Whitney Houston earlier than AP confirmed the news.

However, these two sources only have a few dozen followers and didn’t get much attention until after people found out they came out earlier than AP. However, the fact that these two tweets were not immediately picked up by the press speaks to a challenge for social media journalism: there has not been a viable way for reporters to identify a topic before it surfaces, or identify a useful source with few followers.

One recent development that has received some attention is a tool called SRSR (standing for “Seriously Rapid Source Review”), which, according to its developer, “would be helpful for journalists to find and assess sources in Twitter around breaking news events.” The features of this tool include “Automatically Identifying Eyewitnesses”, “Automatically Identifying User Archetypes”, and “Visually Cueing Location, Network, Entities.” The developers conducted some pilot tests with encouraging results. However, this tool still has its limitations before it can be put up for real applications.

Continue the thread in a previous post about what skills the industry looks for – I came across a post by a veteran journalist who said he was often asked the question of “what editors look for in new hires?” He copied a job ad in his post saying the job description is a perfect description of what it takes to be a future journalist, and recommends that directors of journalism programs across the nation be familiar with the list.

I’m copying that job ad here. I will write a separate post for some thoughts about what this job ad means to multiplatform journalism education. Continue reading →