Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Twitpic: the price of free online services

Apparently Twitter users are cross because Twitter-friendly image upload service Twitpic has changed its terms to allow it to sell on users’ uploaded images for a profit. Yes – it’s annoying. And yes, it flies in the face of what copyright law intends. But, you know, that’s what happens when we get used to the […]

Friday, March 25th, 2011

How to be a social media editor

Social media editor Chris Street talks to UCA Farnham online journalism students on the power of social media in journalism and the skills you need to succeed online, compared to traditional print journalism. (Hint: there is no real difference at all).

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Facebook vs Twitter user infographic

In case anyone has missed it, here’s an interesting infographic from Tweetsmarter.com comparing the profiles of Facebook users versus Twitter users. A couple of interesting points: Twitter is a publishing platformOnly 27% of Twitter users log in every day – but 52% update their status every day. That means those updates are coming remotely from […]

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Tameside Council blocks microbloggers – because they get the story

Tameside Council has declined to provide “Twitter accreditation” to bloggers and other citizens – thus supposedly preventing them from reporting via social media from council meetings. It seems the council is much more comfortable with the idea of “professional journalists” covering its activities. Could this be that they are less of a threat? The Daily Telegraph […]

Monday, May 31st, 2010

#Twilliterate?

It seems Twitter users can’t actually spell “Israel” – as the top six trending topic worldwide right now demonstrates. Perhaps the mainstream media has nothing to fear after all… [UPDATE: Oh, all right – it’s one way of spelling it. But not the US or UK English way, which is interesting in itself…]

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Bloggers are not so parasitic on news media as we thought

Via Bristol Editor, here’s an interesting post from Advancing the Story on the divergence of mainstream media content from the blogosphere and social media. A survey by The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has found that: The stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead […]

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

UK election coverage 2010: Twitter vs the BBC

Just for the hell of it, I spent last Thursday night’s election on Twitter (on TweetDeck, since you ask – thanks for the tip, Soilman). At the same time, I watched the BBC’s new coverage. I wanted to see what value, if any, each one had in following and understanding the events of the night. […]

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Online journalism by the book

I’ve been rewriting some undergraduate course descriptions for online journalism and I’ve realised I have one big problem with them. I can’t think how to update the recommended student book lists. One problem is that whatever I choose has to have longevity. Every time a course is rewritten, it has to be validated by an […]

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Evidence that Twitter is really for journalists

The sad news that venerable journalism industry magazine Editor & Publisher is to close apparently reached fourth place in Twitter’s trending topics list yesterday. Which seems to confirm my theory that it’s journalists who are all over Twitter like flies on a dead dog. According to the E&P web site: The name “Editor & Publisher” […]

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

How the social web has changed the journalist’s working day

Part 1;    Part 2;    Part 3;    Part 4;    Part 5; How does a cutting edge, web-aware journalist’s average working day compare to how it was five years ago? More from Reed Business Information editorial development director Karl Schneider’s talk to journalism students at UCA Farnham. Then Research for a beat (eg: crime) Calling contacts – police […]