Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Using Posterous as a first-year student journalism teaching tool

It may be only July, but online journalism lecturers are eagerly preparing for the next intake of wide-eyed undergraduates in October. There has been a lot of change on the online journalism course at UCA in Farnham. For example, we’ve started using a group news site based on WordPress for first year students in semester […]

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Why your Facebook page keeps telling you it isn’t published

Apparently you have to “like” your own page before Facebook will publish it. Unless a page has at least one “like”, Facebook won’t let you go live with it (thanks, Squidoo). Which is so bonkers I can’t even begin to express it. And where’s that information in the Facebook help pages? Hmm?

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Facebook: why is the world’s most popular site so difficult to use?

Any reader looking to the right of this post will see a blank Facebook feed requiring a login to see a “Facebook public profile”. Or maybe a feed from my Freelance Unbound Facebook page. Or maybe they’ll see something else that I don’t see – because Facebook is nothing if not contrary. The other day […]

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).

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Freelancers: stay on Facebook all day and earn cash!

Or: “Survey predicts in boom in freelance social media jobs” Monday morning nonsense from the world of office surveys: OfficeCavalry.com says that social media is set to boom for UK businesses this year, and freelance workers will benefit: 15% of businesses will look at creating specific roles e.g. ‘social media manager’ or ‘online reputation manager’ […]

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Making predictions is hard – especially about the future of media

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a curious item – an alarmist video about the future of media (in 2014) made (or at least uploaded to YouTube) in the far-off days of 2007. The general thrust is familiar – software-driven news aggregation and user-generated content have combined to drive “the press as you know […]

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 […]

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 […]

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

How the media missed the real UK election story

[youtube width=”300″ height=”200″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVLnZfVfUnw[/youtube]The main problem for the media during last week’s election was that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real story didn’t happen at the count – where all the reporters were eagerly awaiting whatever electoral upset was on the cards – but at the polling stations. It was […]

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” […]