Our sister site SocialTimes recently spoke to Vadim Lavrusik, manager of Facebook’s journalism program. Lavrusik talked about why Facebook is the Rolodex of today’s journalists and how they can use the social network to report. Some of the takeaways:

Finding Sources
For finding people, journalists can type in phrases like ”College students in New York, NY” and “People who work at Facebook and like the New York Times“ to target a group of people if they don’t have a specific person in mind. From there, examining a person’s profile information such as a friends list or relationship status can be a starting point for verifying his or her identity…

Discovering Content
Facebook is also a good source of eye-witness videos and photos that journalists can discover and request to use in their stories, said Lavrusik. For example, a search for “photos taken in Breezy Point” conjures more 1,000 images of the New York City neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012… Read more

The Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism announced a new program today aimed at measuring media impact. With $3.25 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lear Center Media Impact Project hopes to help news outlets and journos understand engagement on a deeper level. Sure, journalists can measure engagement by number of retweets or Facebook ‘Likes.’ But just because many people retweeted a headline doesn’t mean that the story will promote change. (Especially if they haven’t even read it.)

“The metrics that have been used for this have been astonishingly primitive,” Martin Kaplan, director of the Lear Center, told The New York Times. The center is in the process of assembling a team of journos, analytics experts and social scientists to figure out how media affects the behavior of consumers. According to a post on the Knight Blog, the project aims to: Read more

With 20 years of experience, AllthingsD’s Kara Swisher has set the bar for reporting on the digital scene. In the latest installment of So What Do You Do?, she spoke to Mediabistro about the real reasons for her success.

“Whenever someone says, ‘Oh, how do you do it?’ I tell them that I make more calls then they do. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Swisher explained. “People make a bigger deal of it, but I think I just work harder than other people. That’s all. There’s no secret sauce or anything.”

As for how other reporters can make a name for themselves online, Swisher’s advice was simple: “Be accurate; know your stuff.”

Read the full interview at So What Do You Do, Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of AllThingsD.com?

– Nicholas Braun

You’ve still got a week before your journo-sweetie will need an actual Valentine’s Day gift. But we’ve got you covered if you haven’t come up with the perfect way to say you mean the world to me. The 10,000 Words team put together our annual round up of valentines just for the journalist in your life.

This is our fifth year at it, so if you don’t find the appropriate sentiment in this year’s batch, definitely check out the previous editions for even more journalism love: 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.

Got a good valentine idea that we missed? Share it with us @10000words using the hashtag #journolove and maybe we’ll add it in or use it next year.

There’s more!
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Holidays are just around the corner and we know most of you who read this blog have a journalist or two in your life that you’ll be shopping for. Here are the recommendations from our entire 10,000 Words crew for journalistic, geeky, fun gifts. We also have a holiday gift guide from 2011 that is still relevant (2010, 2009 and 2008‘s versions are fun, too!). Anything we missed? Add your favorites and must-haves in the comments. Read more