Instagram has become an unlikely, yet important, online tool for journalists, bloggers and citizens. Not only is it a great way to shoot stylized photos and on-the-go location shots, but it’s also a smart outlet to turn to when looking for eyewitness accounts of major news — people often turn to Instagram thanks to its quick sharing with social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.

However, these past few weeks have changed the service in a radical way, and now is the time to determine whether it’s the right tool for your photos and your personal use.

1. You Won’t See it On Twitter

This season has been a rocky one for Instagram and one of its biggest propagators, Twitter. Two weeks ago, the companies had effectively “broken up,” with Instagram no longer hosting images through Twitter’s API. Twitter snapped back, effectively distributing its own Instagram clone (with filters to boot) right in its native TwitPic system. Read more

Recognizing a new tool at The Boston Globe is a gateway to worthwhile discussion on social media strategy: not everyone likes, has access to or uses the same digital thing. And that’s great for journalism.

Journalism.co.uk has a nice read on the wall-o-local-Instagram pics that the Globe is test-driving in its newsroom. Appropriately named “Snap,” the project is a result of a partnership with the MIT Media Lab, and it displays every local Instagram image on a big map of the area. Neat on its own (i.e., worthy of an Instagrammed pic of its own), and notably, it’s also being used for helping find sources for local stories.

There’s definite newsroom utility to display social media data like this on a map. You naturally are exposed to events, with pictorial evidence, that you may not have otherwise paid attention towards. And you can can pinpoint where that action is happening. That’s practical on a day-to-day basis, and particularly helpful during event like Hurricane Sandy, where much is going on and you’re looking to move your reporting fast. It’s clearly a useful tool (and if it isn’t yet clear, I’d certainty love to play with it.)

What I think is worth noting beyond the obvious ingenuity, however, was the main story that according to the article Chris Marstall, creative technologist at the Boston Globe, actually produced during Hurricane Sandy. After spending “about eight hours staring at Snap” during the storm, this piece says that Marstall didn’t know what story to pick up and write. “Eventually I figured out that the interesting story to tell was that everybody was staying home and getting drunk in their apartments, doing a lot of day drinking,” he said.

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Earlier this week, Instagram announced that it would be bringing its profile pages to the Web. Currently, Instagram has been a mobile-only entity, where users could upload images only through their mobile devices and browse friends’ and brands’ pages only through mobile devices.

Now, this is going to change, according to an Instagram blog post announcing the move:

“Your web profile features a selection of your recently shared photographs just above your profile photo and bio, giving others a snapshot of the photos you share on Instagram. In addition, you can follow users, comment & like photos and edit your profile easily and directly from the web.”

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There’s a lot of pressure on journalists and news organizations to be everywhere, not just when it comes to feet on the ground reporting but also when it comes to tweets, pins, posts, etc. on all form of social media.

We’ve even encouraged the trend with tips to maximize your presence on everything from Google+ to Pinterest. Which is why this Pew Internet & American Life Project’s study about how photos and videos are shared socially caught my eye.

Their findings shed some interesting light on how many (or few) people are actually using these various networks. (This wasn’t the focus of the study but looked interesting, so I created this graph.)

Primarily, their questions were about how many adults post photos/videos online and how many share them, and whether the media they post/share was their original creation or that of someone else. Nearly half — 46 percent — of the online adult population surveyed indicated they post original photos, while 41 percent share photos they’ve found online on social networks. Overall, their study found that 56 percent of Internet users do at least one of those activities, posting their creations or sharing someone else’s. News organizations rely on both: The eye-witness videos from the scene of the event and the “curators” who share the organization’s videos and photos so other online users can find it.
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Instagram, the wildly popular photo sharing service (which got a lengthy write-up in Saturday’s New York Times) holds a lot of potential for news organizations. This is especially true, considering the service’s rapidly growing user base and the promise of bringing Instagram to the iPhone (and iPod touch/iPad)-only app to other platforms, like Android. In that spirit, here are four ways news organizations can use Instagram.
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