But what happens when that hacked account has more than a half million followers? When it’s verified and belongs to one of the most venerable international news organizations? When the hacked content isn’t a questionable link but what would be the most major national security story since maybe ever?

Well, that happened yesterday when the Associated Press saw its account compromised and 71 hijacked characters about explosions at the White House sent the stock markets briefly down and got notice of everyone from the FBI to the SEC. The hacked account was quickly taken offline and suspended. But as Ryan Sholin pointed out this morning when the account was reinstated (but briefly before the offending tweet could be deleted) — more than 4,000 people had retweeted that note (and those are only the ones who used the RT button instead of quoting or adding their own commentary). continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In this corner: Journalism

As the underdogs trying to maintain a presence and a living wage, we all know journalists have the power of story-telling and, hopefully, credibility, when news breaks. This Nieman Lab post illustrates the timeline of breaking the Boston bombing on Monday. It shows social media users were able to catch events up to the minute, but it’s only when Reuters retweets it that it becomes News.  

That’s all because of context. Journalism takes its hardest blows when it forgets that its mission is to provide context. To keep up with social media, journos have fallen prey to the allure of being first. Cable news outlets broadcast, and then tweeted, information about the ongoing investigation and hunt for the bomber without verifying information. Instead of relying on their credibility, their only other strength, media outlets engaged in a strange feedback loop citing each other, updating homepages and official tweets in a dizzy little dance. 

No shortage of adrenaline in our nation’s newsrooms today

— Christoher Hayes (@chrislhayes)<ahref=”https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/324648568008876036″>April 17, 2013

No shortage of adrenaline, but certainly a shortage of facts. 

And in this corner: Social Media

In the midst of breaking, or not-quite breaking, news, social media was aflutter with corrections. 

Social media is now the watchdog of the fourth estate. If it weren’t for social media, no one would have realized until it was too late how silly some of the reports coming in from mainstream media outlets were. 

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“I think a lot of people get caught up on just trying to build Web traffic and posting things that aren’t really essential to the core of what they’re all about, writing to the lowest common denominator, etc.,” he told Mediabistro. “You now see sites and media properties that tweet about breaking news that has nothing to do with the core of their editorial platform. And that’s the stuff that may give you short-term eyeballs and short-term gain in traffic or circulation but, ultimately, you’re going to alienate any kind of core audience that came to you for what your original intent was.”

Read more about how The Fader is thriving in the digital age in So What Do You Do,Andy Cohn, President and Publisher of The Fader?

– Nicholas Braun

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Each week, we’ll discuss essential topics with social media thought leaders that will help you develop a cohesive marketing strategy and amplify your presence across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Unfortunately, trolls abound in the online world and can drown out those offering constructive criticism. How can you tell the haters from those that are worth responding to? And how can you manage your time when it comes to responding to criticism? In the latest Mediabistro feature, social media experts weigh in on how to handle negative feedback in a way that’s best for you and your audience.

One big piece of advice: don’t just delete.

“How you handle a negative comment says much more about you than the comment itself,” said Shama Kabani, CEO of The Marketing Zen Group. “Removing a comment can lead to others accusing you of censorship and, at worst, can lead to a PR disaster.”

For more, read 7 Tips for Responding to Negative Social Media Feedback. [Mediabistro AvantGuild subscription required]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s been a busy week in the digital blunders department. Deadspin’s expose on Manti Te’o’s non-existent girlfriend is shocking for the simple fact that all it took was some old fashioned fact-checking. That the Gawker Media sports blog “without access, favor, or discretion” scooped traditional sports media like Sports Illustrated and ESPN, among others, is a big deal — and a rather simple one.

It’s J-School 101. Always ask questions, ask until you get a real answer, and make sure you have real facts, dates and numbers, to back up your claim. Of course, it’s easy to look back and see where everything spiraled out of control. The online news world is exciting, fast paced, and usually effective. It’s easy to spread a good story online; it’s now twice as hard to make sure it’s true.

Here’s a quick refresher:

1. Follow The Links

In the digital age, it’s safe to say that most journalists will repost, retweet and report on a story if enough media outlets are linking to it. As long as there are enough outlets reporting on a story and those outlets are credible, it can seem safe to pass it along. But don’t we all know that feeling of finding yourself in a link loop? One blog links to a story and that link leads us to another story and another one linking back to the same quote and then you find yourself back at the first story, never getting to a real source? It’s easy to call off the search when the original “breaking news” post is on a questionable or obscure news source. It’s not so easy when the “facts” comes from a Sports Illustrated cover story (oh, to be a fly on that wall today!) or ESPN.

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When news broke about the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last month, those on Twitter were some of the first to hear about death counts and momentum in the investigation. We all know Twitter is one of the best tools for engaging with a story, but as the news unfolded, so did the corrections. It’s a good time to reflect on some best practices for reporting on Twitter. As we come upon the one month anniversary mark for Sandy Hook and deal with new tragedies this week like the hostage situtation at a Los Angeles mall to a ferry accident in the East River, here are five things to keep in mind when big news breaks.

1. Facebook Is Not Your Friend

Most corrections resulted from faulty Facebook searches for the alleged shooter. Even as law enforcement insisted they had yet to confirm the identity of the shooter, news organizations like The Huffington Post, Gawker, Buzzfeed and even cable news organizations began posting pictures of Ryan Lanza. And they were all wrong.

Facebook has never been championed for its search capabilities. Despite the fact that Facebook’s speciality is connecting, it’s often easier to Google someone for their Facebook profile than it is to use the social network’s search bar. Even a simple search for your best friend’s rather particular name can turn up over three pages of results. You’re a reporter, not Sherlock Holmes. Use Facebook for clues, but don’t bet on the fact there is only one name per city when news breaks.

2. Read Your Retweets

We’ve written about the dangers of relying on retweets as a journalism strategy. But the fact that a lot of users are retweeting without clicking through doesn’t mean you should, too. News is breaking but take the time to read the articles before you click. Most times, the wrong information passes quicker than the correction. Retweet responsibly.

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According to an Adweek story, which shared information from Tynt—a company that tracks copy and paste content from roughly 600,000 publishers’ sites and reviews 30 billion data points each month—users are still very fond of using the old-fashioned Ctrl-C  and Ctrl-V keyboard shortcuts when sharing content.

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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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Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella analyzed 2.7 million tweets that contained links, and his findings show that the retweets and click-throughs had only a sad Pearson’s correlation coefficient of .038. More vividly (and perhaps this is a stat that’s easier to understand), an entire 16.12 percent of the link-containing tweets Zarrella analyzed generated more retweets than clicks.

Digesting those stats, that means your assumptions are probably right when you notice a weirdly fast retweet, or see a RT of something that you already recognize as not true: Zarrella’s study implies many people tweet a link without even clicking on that link.

Forget about “RT are not endorsements.” RTs may not even be an acknowledgement that a particular link was clicked, let alone read.

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Story “weight” is intuitive on paper. There’s what’s above-the-fold, and on top of that, there’s clear positioning of pieces, with one more prominent than another. There’s differences in headline size, perhaps subheads. In some cases, there’s teasers to other stories to read once you’re inside the paper. When you get to the actual stories themselves, often times there’s another indicator: length in inches. Design works to show your eyes where to go, and what is editorially important to look over (perhaps over cereal, or a cup of coffee).

Home pages replicate this idea in part. Article pages are getting better at this, or at least people are making a case for it. Apps for tablets often do this as digitally close to a newspaper as possible. But social media doesn’t really replicate the “story weight” capability of a paper at all.

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According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s “Social Media and Political Engagement” report, just 28 percent of American social media users have “used the tools to post political stories or articles for others to read.”

Interesting on its own, but better with context. What’s the percentage of “social media users” in America? According to Pew’s report, it’s 60 percent who use “social networking sites” (categorized as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+)  and/or uses Twitter. In other words, it’s 28 percent of only 60 percent of Americans who are the ones sharing the political links you see during your daily reporting activities. Doing the math, that’s under 17 percent who are social media-sharing the political links you eat and breathe.

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The larger aim is that a thorough understanding of the Twitter community – placed at least in the back of one’s head – could help one from being heavily influenced by that scary hive-mind (if it’s true), and regardless, put into perspective the general sentiments that may soak in when one repeatedly scans TweetDeck.

Understanding the community in any medium you regularly use, not just Twitter, is a good practice. There is always a filter bubble wherever we engage online—we tend to regularly admit that, and some of us take steps to pop it by whom we follow and what we search for. The recent findings I’ve compiled about Twitter, however, seem of a particular importance, for they shed some light on what may be a wider filter bubble (“filter fish tank”?) of what is increasingly many journalists’ anchor.

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The page on which they are chronicled, after all, is a timeline of sorts, tracking whatever tweets you decide to attach a star. It’s essentially curation, even if often unused. It’s another platform to reach folks — particularly the most curious — and convey information, hopefully all while keeping an experience fluid.

I don’t know anyone who regularly checks a Twitter user’s favorites, of course. But favorites are there, and you have to expect it happens. At bare minimum, it’s fun to go poking around on your follower’s favorites and see how they’re using them.

So that’s what I did: poked around, but on the favorites pages of some journalism organizations I follow. The result? Usually some laughs (which isn’t necessarily bad).

Below are some examples of what I saw, some of which are kind of funny. The conclusion? Many a time, at least to the average user who stumbles upon them, a journalism organization’s usage of the “favorite” is rare and/or obscure.

The New York Times (@nytimes)

Kudos for favorite-ing that last one?

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We’ve written about ThingLink before, but as more notable newsroom uses pop up, it’s worth again walking through where its strengths lay.

To do that recap: take a look at this interactive image that former contributor Elana Zak, now social media producer for The Wall Street Journal, used as an example in our previous piece. It was inspired by this tagged image by Berliner Morgenpost. Hover over the dots.

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