Kamis, 26 Januari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

New Facebook data: Be topical, ask questions, and tell jokes to win audience

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:02 PM PST

Write about current affairs. Add in a little commentary (or a question). And, for the love of all that is holy, include a link.

Those are three of the takeaways from some new data that Facebook just released on the use of its Subscribe feature —  the social network’s way to let journalists and readers connect without broaching the knotty issue of “friending.” Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik and Betsy Cameron write: “People discover journalists to subscribe to on Facebook through their friends in News Feed; Facebook search; our "people to subscribe to" recommendations engine (which shows you who your friends are subscribing to and recommends journalists based on your interests); and other organic discovery mechanisms, such as simply seeing who your friends have subscribed to.”

But onto the stats, specifically, the ones that stick out about what content journalists are posting:

  • About a quarter of posts by journalists pose a question to readers, a tactic earlier Facebook research substantially increased engagement.
  • Posts that include both links and a little commentary or analysis generated about 20 percent more clicks.
  • Ask for it: Language like “read my story” or “check out my interview” bumps up engagement (clicks, likes, etc.) 37 percent.

The post also outlines some fuzzier numbers on how content types and styles can increase engagement:

Commentary and analysis on current events and breaking news receives 3x as many likes and 2x as many shares as the average post. Also, highlighting controversial stories on debatable subject matter can double the number of likes and shares the post receives.​

Reader shout-outs can increase in feedback by as much as 4x. Also, asking for recommendations can lead to a 3x increase in comments.​

In-depth analyses on global issues can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and 2.5x increase in shares.​

Powerful photos can yield an increase of a 2x in engagement (likes, comments and shares). Also, behind-the-scenes photos resulted in up to a 4x increase in engagement (likes, comments, shares).​

What else works? Being funny: “Humor in posts or a humorous picture can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and almost 5x increase in shares. Humor often shows the lighter and more personal side of the journalist, which is likely why it results in higher engagement.” Go check out Facebook’s post for more details and data.

Gina Chen: Breaking-news situations require a breaking-news approach

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 10:30 AM PST

I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate.

In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now journalists need to imagine what it’s like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what medium or format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ.

Let me give an example to illustrate my point. My family and I were driving back north from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about halfway through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip when suddenly traffic stopped. We tried to find a AM radio station to figure out the cause of the delay — and how long it might last — but we couldn’t find one for that area.

So we turned to Twitter. As my husband drove, I typed I-81 into the search field and instantly found tweets about the delay and — even better — descriptions of what the road was like miles ahead of where we were. These were real-time observations from motorists — hopefully from passengers, not from drivers tweeting behind the wheel. I continued to monitor Twitter throughout that harried night, which included multiple stoppages on I-81, including one caused by a massive pileup that came after we passed through that stretch of roadway.

A few aspects of this example are notable for journalists.

  • We were relying on tweets mainly from “regular folks,” not journalists. A few television and radio stations were tweeting, and a highway-safety Twitter account was quite helpful. But a newspaper was noticeably absent from Twitter until the next morning, when a traditional news story was posted. The news story was helpful to fill in the blanks of the night, but as a news consumer what I really need was information in the moment. What was most helpful were the tweets from local motorists who offered suggestions for alternate routes to bypass I-81 for a stretch, or tweets that explained at what milepost marker traffic was flowing again. That way, we would know when an end to the waiting was in sight (or not.)
  • The most frustrating part was not knowing the local geography. People would tweet that I-81 was bad in a particular town. But, not being from the area, I didn’t know if that town was in Virginia (where we were) or another state where snow was falling along I-81 — or if it was ahead of us or behind us. In some cases, it was an easy problem to solve: I switched to the maps app on my phone and searched for the town. But sometimes this was futile (towns too small to show up on the map, tweets contained local nicknames instead of town names) — and it was always an extra step. I could sometimes figure out where people were tweeting from based on their Twitter accounts — but honestly, that was too much work. I needed information fast, with as little effort as possible, to figure out whether a tweet about “bad roads” on I-81 would pertain to the part were were going to be hitting soon.

For journalists, this example offers two lessons:

  • Pause a moment from writing your story and let your readers know what the heck is going on now. The massive pile-up was certainly a major news event for this community, and it sure deserved a traditional story in print and online. But communicating the story in the moment is the most important part of your job in the middle of a breaking news situation. I was thankful for the non-journalist tweeters — but I would have loved more official information in tweets from more news organizations.
  • As they say in real estate, the key issue is location, location, location. Whether you are tweeting about a massive pileup, slick roads, or just a road stoppage caused by construction, include location information. I know traditional AP style rules dictate that the state name should not be used when writing about the community where the news organization is located, under the theory that people already know where they live. But this rule should not apply to social media or online news, where people from outside your community may be using your information. Having a “VA” somewhere in the tweets I was reading about I-81 would have simplified my efforts to figure out which tweets applied to the stretch of road we were driving on and which did not.

For journalists, the best way to figure out what information readers need from you when you are covering an emergency is to imagine yourself in their position. In my example, imagine yourself craning over your smartphone trying to find out what’s going on, as your tense spouse tries to keep the car on an icy road and your two children sleep in the backseat, blissfully unaware of any trouble. What information would you want and how would you want it in that situation? Then give that to your readers.

The Public Insight Network, now swimming in data, launches its own reporting unit

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST

Public Insight Network sources

American Public Media’s nine-year-old Public Insight Network now claims more than 130,000 sources — that is, ordinary folks across America (and as of November, South Africa) who contribute their personal experiences to PIN’s massive database. It’s a gold mine for journalists reporting stories about, say, families facing foreclosure in San Diego or business owners deciding when to hire in St. Paul. As it describes itself:

Every day, sources in the Public Insight Network add context, depth, humanity and relevance to news stories at trusted newsrooms around the country…

Using our industry-leading platform, journalists and citizens reach beyond pundits, PR professionals and polemics to inform themselves and each other, strengthening the communities they serve…

Thanks to our technology, editors, reporters and producers can quickly find and learn from thousands of people who have experience or knowledge on a story we are covering. We call this the Public Insight Network, and it relies on everyday people — our public sources.

The problem is, most of PIN’s rich data is going to waste. “One of the things we learned early on,” said Linda Fantin, director of the PIN initiative, “is the amount of intelligence and amazing insights and stories that people have shared with us quickly overwhelm a journalist’s ability to get that information out there.”

So APM, as part of its unflagging hiring spree, is bringing in journalists to help turn more of the data into stories. While PIN will continue its primary mission serving 60 newsrooms, the new team will generate original reporting. And they’re starting without a distribution plan, or even a defined medium — radio? print? Tumblr? — hoping to let people drive the reporting and story forms.

“How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance?”

PIN is full of “unstructured data,” as Fantin calls it, “that’s never seen the light of day, because most traditional story forms are about quoting three or four people and getting a lot of context, and the rest of it is kind of buried in the reporter’s notebook.” What if, instead of three or four people, you could talk to a thousand people?

The team’s upcoming first project is an election-focused, month-long “virtual road trip,” asking Americans how their expectations and values have been tested or changed and whether presidential candidates reflect those values. Journalists will follow the established PIN model: The network puts out queries to its pre-existing sources and encourages new people to participate with a simple web form. Sources who can answer a query from experience are asked to fill out a questionnaire and, if willing, agree to be interviewed on the record.

The reporting is “a little different than certainly a lot of the reporting I’ve been involved in for 35 years,” said Jacqui Banaszynski, the recently hired editor of PIN’s reporting efforts. “As we report, we’re going to constantly go back into the network and talk to people and ask questions, and we’re going to let the discovery process help us keep determining where the story goes.” It’s journalism as a process, not a product.

And Banaszynski hopes to find a news outlet to pick up the work — be it a print partner such as The Washington Post or The Charlotte Observer, one of many participating public radio stations, or someone else. For now, the reporting will live on a Tumblr blog called Dispatches from the American Now, which is launched today. The PIN website is being reconfigured to serve more as a news site.

“At first that was a frustration for me, because when I do journalism I like it to actually go out into the world,” Banaszynski told me. But now it’s liberating, she said. Banaszynski and Fantin have deep newspaper experience; others on the team contribute radio skills. “We’re going to let our skills determine how we’re going to tell the story, as opposed to taking a story and shoehorning it into an existing frame.”

PIN has also hired two reporters and an engagement editor; the team is now hiring an associate editor and, soon, an additional journalist to focus on the results of news games such as APM’s Budget Hero.

Fantin said PIN’s new emphasis on process journalism ties in nicely with its recent acquisition of Spot.us, David Cohn’s platform for crowdfunded reporting. Individual journalists who raise money for stories will now have access to the Public Insight Network.

“One of the ideas we’re kind of toying with is a notion of funding a query,” Fantin said, as opposed to a story. “A journalist puts together a set of really interesting questions, and a community says…’we would love to see those questions put out to knowledgeable people and hear back what they have to say.’” The difference is the journalist has not decided ahead of time what the story is, because the questions could yield unexpected answers.

Fantin said traditional news operations are built on a model of scarcity: A small number of people have the information that a large number of people need. She hopes PIN will change that paradigm. “How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance? How do you have more voices shape the story, help you know where to go, and even help vet some of the assumptions that you’re making?”
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