AP offers some good social media advice, but not enough

You may have read this from me before about other news organizations: The Associated Press social media guidelines raise important issues but stop short of providing the excellent advice I would hope for from the AP.

I won’t go into chapter and verse on the AP guidelines. They are an improvement on the fear-laden guidelines I have criticized from the American Society of News Editors (like ASNE, AP’s policy is a pdf, an odd choice), Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. But they show too many glimpses of fear for me to support them.

The guidelines prompted enough internal questions that a managing editor, Lou Ferrara, sent out a memo saying the release of the guidelines was “coincidental” with the departure of Lauren McCullough as audience and engagement manager (she’s going to Breaking News).

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The Guardian shows newsrooms how to guide digital journalists

I have criticized other news organizations’ policies relating to social media and other digital journalism issues frequently in this blog:

• Wall Street Journal
• Washington Post
• New York Times
• Los Angeles Times

Time to lavish some praise on a news organization for it sensible approach. The Guardian shows why it is a leader in social media and digital journalism with its guidelines for blogging and commenting by journalists.

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Old media find comfort in study of Baltimore media (they didn’t look very close)

I followed this up with a subsequent post on Saturday, Jan. 16.

The reaction to How News Happens may tell us more about the news industry than the study itself does.

The study of the news ecosystem in Baltimore  was published today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, and news of the report was first published Sunday. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, editorsweblog and more tweets than I could count trumpeted the finding that most news originates with newspapers and those upstart blogs contribute barely a trickle of original news. The favorite fact cited was that 95 percent of stories reporting fresh information came from the endangered old media, newspapers primarily.

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Reviewing a year’s blogging

Reviewing 2009 on my blog (mostly for my own information, but I share it because that’s what bloggers do):

My most popular post by far (more than twice as many views as anything else) was my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, posted April 27. I proposed a detailed new business model for community news organizations. It received more links from other blogs and more tweets than anything else I’ve written this year. And interest in C3 remains strong. (After traffic on that post declined from June through September, it increased in October and November. December didn’t quite match November, but exceeded August, September and October). C3 gets more attention in a slow month than my average post gets total.

Everyone wants a blog post to go viral, but I’m glad I didn’t write something quirky that went off the charts. C3 was one of the most important things I’ve written this year (or in my career), so I’m pleased that it received more attention than any other post. I’ve been invited to make presentations dealing with C3 in Florida, Nevada, California, Texas, Siberia and Canada. I hope in 2010 to be writing about how Gazette Communications and other organizations are carrying out the vision of C3.

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Los Angeles Times shows its fear of social media

I can’t keep blogging every time a major newspaper releases fear-driven social media guidelines. But once again, I can’t resist.

The Los Angeles Times is the latest major news organization to apparently tell its staff to beware the dangers of social media. I don’t have time to critique this in the same detail that I did the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post guidelines.

But I count 19 words of mild general encouragement to use social media and more than 600 words of thou-shalt-nots and warnings of the terrors lurking below the water, including subpoenas.

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