#twutorial workshop for the Farmington Daily Times

I am leading a workshop this afternoon for the Daily Times in Farmington, N.M. I will use tips or techniques from many, perhaps all, of my #twutorial posts:

Step one for using Twitter as a reporter: Master advanced search

Use lists, TweetDeck, HootSuite, saved searches, alerts to organize Twitter’s chaos

Denver Post staffers’ #theatershooting coverage demonstrates Twitter breaking news techniques

Hashtags help journalists find relevant tweets and reach more people

Advice and examples on how and what journalists should tweet

9 ways to find helpful people and organizations to follow on Twitter

To build Twitter followers: Join the conversation, tweet often, be yourself

10 ways Twitter is valuable for journalists

Updated Twitter time management tips

Don’t be selfish on Twitter; tweeting useful information is good business

What’s the best way to view Twitter’s users? 16 percent or 30 million

Twitter data shows journos’ ‘burstiness’ boosts followers

#Twutorial guest post from Alexis Grant: A simple Twitter strategy that will dramatically grow your network

#Twutorial guest post from Deanna Utroske: Tips for twinterviewing

#Twutorial guest post by Menachem Wecker: How to use Twitter to find the best sources

#Twutorial guest post by Jaclyn Schiff: How using Storify can help you find great sources

Getting started on Twitter: #twutorial advice for a friend

Should a journalist livetweet a funeral? If so, how?

Use Twitter for conversation about an event, not just promotion

How to verify information from tweets: check it out

In addition, these two posts that predate the #twutorial series cover some of the points I’ll make in the workshop:

Suggestions for livetweeting

Updated and expanded Twitter tips for journalists

And I’ll use this Andy Carvin Storify acount as an example as well as this Denver plane crash.

Here are the slides for my workshop today (I may not use all the slides and probably won’t get to the case study that the last several slides cover):

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Clayton Christensen advises the news biz in ‘Breaking News’

I won’t be blogging for a few more days about Clayton Christensen‘s Nieman Reports piece Breaking News, but I want to acknowledge it and encourage reading it. (I’ve been too busy to dig into it, but plan to do so this weekend.)

Mark Potts, one of the smartest voices about digital journalism, calls it “maybe the most insightful, important article on the future of the news business since Clay Shirky’s legendary ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable‘.” (I blogged about the Shirky piece when it was published in 2009.)

When I was at the American Press Institute from 2005-8, we partnered with Christensen on the Newspaper Next project. I came to respect his insights about business and disruptive innovation greatly. I wish the newspaper business had followed the Newspaper Next recommendations more aggressively. I encourage people in the business to read Christensen’s latest piece (co-authored by David Skok and James Allworth). And I’ll have more to say on it soon.

Update. I have now blogged some thoughts on Christensen’s Breaking News.

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Hustle on earthquake story brings traffic from search and social

Kaitlyn Yeager

Hustle has always been important in journalism. Its importance has grown as news breaks quickly and search engines and social media bring traffic to the first media outlets to report a story.

Kaitlyn Yeager‘s hustle in quickly posting a story on tonight’s New England earthquake — and smartly making it easy for search engines to find it — brought more than 16,000 views to the story in just over the first couple hours.

After hearing about the swift success, I asked Kaitlyn, a member of the Digital First Media Connecticut breaking news team, to explain what she did and how. She responded in an email I have edited lightly:

Honestly, I think the biggest things were speed and search-engine optimization. Matt DeRienzo (DFM’s Connecticut Editor, who is from Maine, where the earthquake was centered) emailed that his Facebook friends were reporting it, and I clicked to Twitter and saw my feed blowing up.

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Twitter data shows journos’ ‘burstiness’ boosts followers

As I noted in yesterday’s post on a couple of social media workshops, Twitter data has confirmed that I am teaching best practices for journalists in using Twitter.

On the opening night of the Online News Association 2012 conference Thursday, Mark Luckie of Twitter released results of a study of journalists’ use of Twitter and engagement with those journalists’ tweets. I found one small surprise in the data, but mostly it confirmed specific points that I have made in several workshops and blog posts for journalists, including just the day before.

So I’m firing off another #twutorial post, straight from #TwitterHQ.

Let’s start with how the study defined engagement:

@shirleybrady @stevebuttry Engagement is interactions with your tweets (replies, retweets, clicks on links)

— Mark S. Luckie (@marksluckie) September 21, 2012

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Workshops on elevating your Twitter use and engaging in breaking news

Breaking news Twitter training with @stevebuttry @mercnews # #twutorial @insidebayarea @cctimes twitter.com/tyska/status/2…

— tyska (@tyska) September 19, 2012

I led two workshops yesterday for Bay Area News Group journalists.

At the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif., I discussed ways for journalists who have started using Twitter to get better use of it. We discussed several topics I have addressed in recent #twutorial posts: search, hashtags, organizing the chaos, time management, building followers, how and what to tweet. (Time ran out before we talked about livetweeting in much depth, but that’s on the slides and I wanted to include the link since we did discuss it briefly.) Here are the slides I used:

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How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work

Digital First means different priorities and processes for journalists.

The name and approach of my company, Digital First Media, is getting a lot of attention in journalism, and other companies have declared they will follow a digital-first approach. But I don’t think the approach is yet widely or well understood. As I’ve visited our company’s newsrooms, I’ve heard again and again from editors that they are “all in” for our digital emphasis. But in the next breath, some editors ask questions about what Digital First means for them and their newsrooms. They believe but they don’t fully understand.

Digital First is way more than just publishing breaking news online and shooting video (though it involves both). Steve Yelvington explained:

Digital First is about making the future your first priority, with everything that implies.

It requires restructuring all your priorities. Not just when you do it, but what you do and how you do it.

In a series of blog posts starting today, I will attempt to explain what those priorities mean. I will explain for my Digital First colleagues as well as for the curious and skeptical journalists who are closely watching our efforts to redirect and redefine journalism.

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Reach out through Facebook to gather information on tragic stories

A longtime fact of journalism is that when tragic news breaks, we need to get information and reaction from people under great stress. Sometimes they don’t want to talk to us. Sometimes, though, they reach out publicly to friends and supporters on Facebook.

Lisa Yanick-Jonaitis of the Morning Sun in Mount Pleasant, Mich., a Journal Register newsroom, did an outstanding job earlier this month using Facebook to gather information, including the tragic conclusion that a missing woman was found dead. I asked Lisa to share her reporting techniques with colleagues on a Google group. Then Jim Brady and I decided it would make a good blog post.

Lisa used names in her email, but I have edited this to remove the names. I’ve linked to a couple stories above, so you can see the end product and what I’m writing about. However, I don’t want this post to show up in Google searches for the names of the people involved. Journalists can sound insensitive and detached discussing how we cover tragic stories, and I don’t want to add to their pain by having this column show up inadvertently in search results for their names. So here’s Lisa’s account of the story behind the story, with names replaced by generic references such as “the wife” or “the boy.”

When I logged in to Facebook Sunday evening, from home, on a normal day off, I certainly didn’t expect to be bombarded with breaking news questions and information.

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Advice for building engagement through newsroom Twitter accounts

Like many institutional Twitter accounts, Journal Register Co. newsroom accounts need to be more engaging and conversational.

We tweet a lot of links to our content. But we’re not very personable. In the coming months, I will be working with JRC colleagues to strengthen engagement on newsroom Twitter accounts. I’ll start by sharing some best practices here. I’ll blog later about using Facebook. I’ve already shared some advice for individual journalists using Twitter. Today I focus on branded newsroom accounts (whether that’s the lead newsroom account or a niche account focusing on a topic such as sports or a beat).

The specific practices start with some guiding principles in use of social media: Use good sense. Practice good journalism. Be creative, aggressive, accurate and ethical.

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Resources for journalism ethics

This list of resources was initially published on my blog in September 2009. I have added some links but have not checked to remove any outdated links.

I will be leading a discussion on journalism ethics in November for the American Society of News Editors and the Reynolds Journalism Institute. It will be part of the ASNE Ethics and Values Forum.

ASNE Ethics and Values Chair Mike Fancher is compiling a reading list for participants and asked me to submit some of my writings about journalism ethics issues. After passing the links on to Mike, I thought they might have interest to a wider audience. So here are links to my own writing on journalism ethics, followed by valuable resources on ethics from other sources:

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