Twitter - 10,000 Words

The Onion Gets Hacked, Shares Insights

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:45:02 +0000

The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army has had its fair share of huge hacking attempts. With propaganda messages spilling out from outlets like the Associated Press and The Guardian, hacks from the group have become more prevalent than ever before on media outlets.

However, they made a mistake earlier this month: hacking The Onion. The online parody newspaper seemed an unlikely target of the SEA, but the result was very similar to other outlets — multiple tweets promoting Assad and the triumph of the SEA. Most outlets who have been victims of an SEA attack have reacted by merely announcing that it happened.

That wasn’t enough for The Onion’s tech team, which decided to break down every level of SEA’s multilayer phishing attack and describe to the public, in great detail, how the SEA managed to find its way to The Onion’s accounts.

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How Every Journalist Can Get More Retweets

Mona Zhang — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:17:21 +0000

For better or for worse, Twitter has become an essential tool of journalists and news outlets alike. Not only can it help in discovering or reporting stories, it’s also valuable in connecting with your audience and gaining eyeballs, which is why retweets are so important. In the latest Mediabistro feature, digital media pros give advice to journos and news orgs on how to ensure that your tweets don’t fall into the Internet abyss. For example, a common rookie mistake is:

3. You don’t have the right followers

When it comes to Twitter, it’s not just the quantity of your followers that counts but also the quality of your followers. “The more influential followers you have, the more likely you are to get to retweets,” said Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia University’s chief digital officer and a digital media professor at its journalism school.

Your followers’ followers can actually have a profound impact on the distance your tweets can go. “Think about the folks that are following you and who are following them,” Sreenivasan said.

Get four more tips in The Real Reason You’re Not Getting Retweeted.

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

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Teaser Tweets: Treat Them Like the Lede

Karen Fratti — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:30:08 +0000

As if researching, writing, and publishing a story isn’t enough work, we have to promote them, too. It’s easy enough with social media, especially if you have a social media guru in your newsroom. But it’s also easy to get caught click baiting on Twitter. Noam Cohen of The New York Times wrote about the Twitter account @HuffPoSpoilers this week, which tweets summaries of Huffington Post stories, which are usually tweeted with vigor — and lots of buzzwords. Often, the story isn’t as interesting as the tweet.

Don’t fall into your publications tweeting traps. Let them tweet what they will, but take matters into your own hand, too.

Whatever your platform, I think what comes before the link should be treated with as much care as your lede and 140 characters should suffice.

Remember the 5 W’s and the H. It’s hard not to bait your followers, but don’t make me wonder where, say, that earthquake hit. If it’s so far away from your target reader that they may not click on the link, you’ll have to live with that.

Unless you work for TMZ, lose the crazy adjectives. Did the congressperson really ‘explode’? Is Marissa Mayer really leading a ‘revolution’? Check yourself.

About retweeting. I often fall into the trap of tweeting story links with a vague, one word response. But I’m making a pledge to all my social media friends to start being more useful. If you tweet a story that’s not yours, tell me why I need to read it. ‘Right on,’ or ‘This is naive,’ are click-bait cliches. The short links give you so many characters to describe the story to me — use them wisely! Give me a reason to bookmark the link and read it later. Be your brand, and venture to have an opinion of your own now and again.

So, be honest: how much time does it take you to craft the perfect teaser tweet?

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How Secure Are Your Social Media Accounts?

Meranda Watling — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:29:07 +0000

A hacked Twitter account is nothing new. Unfortunately, on a regular basis I get suspicious direct messages and tweets from friends and followers with links to who knows where. They’ve been hacked. Usually, their friends flag that and it’s quickly cleaned up.

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…

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Breaking News and Social Media: Stop Fighting It

Karen Fratti — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:02:02 +0000

Social media and journalism are back in the ring this week. They’re both pretty strong contenders, but not without their weaknesses. In the immortal words of Paulie Pennino, let’s blow these punch-outs.

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)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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How News Outlets Could Have Reported on the Boston Marathon Bombing

Karen Fratti — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:30:21 +0000

If journalism is the first draft of history, it’s starting to look a lot like a mangled Google doc with too many approved editors this week.

The only thing more ‘disgusting’ — as Jimmy Kimmel so aptly put it in his monologue Monday night — than the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday is the way traditional news outlets have handled the coverage on social media and on their websites.

Since, unfortunately, there are few, verified, newsworthy updates coming out of the bombing itself, the media critic hive mind has been quick to call foul on how the news broke. I find myself repeating some age-old maxims.

1) Regret Your Errors

At this point, we know the New York Post and the New York Times messed up initial counts of deaths and casualties. The Times corrected the information without a note. It makes you wonder how they win Pulitzers and how they plan on convincing the public that their brand is worth fighting for. Yes, corrections in print were always tucked away on the editorial page; you had to be a real stickler and seek them out. continued…

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Boston Marathon Tragedy Exposes Twitter’s Reporting Flaws

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:00:35 +0000

Around 2:50pm EST, as runners were crossing the finish line at the end of the Boston Marathon, a bomb apparently placed in a garbage can exploded. Roughly ten seconds later, a separate bomb hundreds of feet away also went off — both amid spectators. After that moment though, things begin to get hazy.

As Boston Police and media outlets work to piece together the tragic events that happened yesterday, a look back at Twitter uncovers a massive amount of disinformation propagated by both verified and unverified accounts from all over the world.

12 people were killed. The Boston Police Department has a Saudi national as a suspect. Cellphone service had been cut off. There were seven undetonated bombs found in neighboring buildings.

All of these above reports, which occurred within hours of the explosion, have all been proved unverified at best and false at worst. continued…

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Are Hashtags Useful?

Lauren Hockenson — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:26:43 +0000

Of all of the techniques, strategies, flotsam and jetsam to spawn from social media since its meteoric rise in the mid-2000′s, there may be nothing as polarizing as the hashtag. Some users utilize hashtags any chance that they get, others see them as an aesthetic and textual nuisance.

But the real question is: are hashtags useful in any real way?

Today, another social network, Vine, announced the platform-wide adoption of hashtag-focused organization and search. Vine CTO Nick Kroll wrote in a blog post for the company:

“To surface that content, we’re introducing trending hashtags, which show you the fastest-rising hashtags on Vine. These hashtags signify those that have moved up quickly in popularity; they aren’t necessarily the hashtags with the most posts.”

Using hashtags to track trends has been the mode of choice not only for Vine parent company Twitter, but also for Flickr, Path and Instagram. Last month, there was even talk of Facebook taking up the hashtag trend, though the social media giant has remained silent on the topic. On the surface, incorporating a searchable component based on hashtags is a helpful thing: users would be able to discover topics and search for what they want quickly, without having to bother with further context. continued…

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Please Don’t Use Vine: It’s Boring

Karen Fratti — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:42:45 +0000

When Vine was launched in January, I immediately thought it could be a new tool for reporters and wrote about it here. I didn’t have any particular good ideas, but was interested to see how people could use it.

Months later, the journalism-focused blogosphere is finally getting excited about it. But going so far as to say it’s “shaking up the news world” is a bit of a stretch.

Frankly, I’m not buying it for two major reasons:

1) The six second, GIF-like looping of video makes Vines some of the most boring video content out there. What could be done with a good photo is instead exploited and worn out with the app. In fact, “Finite Vine” would be a welcome addition.

2) Audio helps with context and Vine’s capability for voiceovers is great. But after seeing some Vines, I’m glad the default volume status is mute. It makes me want to push for other video channels, like HuffPost Live, to run the same way. I’m on a constant mission to hit the mute button on most videos on news websites before playback starts. It feels like a constant attack.

If Twitter is an incessant feed of things you’ll probably never get around to reading, or really need to know, then Vines just add to that noise. There’s a reason why traditional broadcasting organizations haven’t taken to it. You need more than six seconds and a GIF to tell a story. Even if it’s just 24 seconds more and two GIFs — anything is better than a Vine.

Let’s stop the madness.

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3 Important Takeaways from the NYT/Tesla Battle

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:30:09 +0000

What could make venerated publication and hallowed critical voice the New York Times backpedal ungraciously and admit some shaky practices by their own staff writer? The electric car.

Over the past week, the dust-up between electric car company Tesla and the Times regarding a scathing review that accused the car company of poor planning — both in the car and on the road — has resulted in a pile of open letters and pushback on all sides. Tesla founder and tech influencer Elon Musk took to Twitter to accuse the Times of lying and intentionally setting up the car to fail, while reporter John Broder shot back with his own responses to all of Musk’s critiques on the publication’s Wheels Blog. After days of similar comments from all sides, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan finally published her reporting post-mortem yesterday afternoon. In the lengthy piece, Sullivan admits that while Broder exhibited “good faith” in his desire to review Tesla’s much-hyped Model S, his judgement during the trip was not sound.

It’s a tangled interaction, but one that merits a deep examination into the new world journalists live in — one where companies can respond to damning critiques with their own dissection and gain a lot of exposure doing so. There are plenty of things to learn from this situation as a reporter, editor and critic, but here are just a few quick takeaways that will help you be better in the field. continued…

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Brian Stelter and David Carr at Social Media Week NYC

Karen Fratti — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:30 +0000

Social Media Week has officially kicked off and this morning in New York, Brian Stelter and David Carr, of the New York Times sat down to discuss how they use social media in their reporting.

You may remember the two from the documentary Page One, in which David Carr plays the digital adaptor and Stelter, the digital native as the Times struggles to make paywalls and the online world work for them. They make a good team on the media pages of the Times and on-stage. Between their sense of humor and of gravitas about how to practice journalism in the digital age, they offer a unique perspective.

You can watch the panel discussion here, but there were two major themes.

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How Can Journalists Use Vine?

Karen Fratti — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:18:16 +0000

What can you get in six seconds or less? A whole lot, apparently.

It’s been a week since Vine, Twitter’s new app for creating, curating, and sharing short videos, hit the iOS App Store and I can’t help viewing every one that comes my way.

The chance to create, post and share a short video means big things for journalists in the field. But as of yet, I’ve only seen one of breaking news and it was a very sad, and very fuzzy, video of the dolphin stuck in a New York City canal last week.

Instead, journalists seem most excited about sharing their view of the newsroom and documenting, very, very quickly, the process of putting together the next edition.

And yet, it’s hard to be skeptical about a new way to post video on the go. Remember when we were all skeptical about Twitter in the first place? Or was that just me? It’s since become our daily, morning briefing with our coffee and the rest of the news-breaking world.

There will be more bad Vine videos to come, and if you’re in the field, six seconds is not a lot of time for context. But let’s not give up just yet or just plug the view from our desks.

Can you think of a way you could use Vine to enhance a story? Have you already? Share them with us in the comments or @10,000Words.

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Andy Carvin of NPR Shares Wisdom On Reddit

Lauren Hockenson — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:43:12 +0000

The rapid rise of the online social community Reddit has born out a phenomenon that has captured a large swath of the Internet: the “Ask Me Anything” or AmA. Everyone from Icelandic indie band Sigur Ros to President Barack Obama has hopped onto Reddit to answer user questions about their lives, their dreams and their goals. It’s a growing medium for communities to connect to a heretofore unreachable public figure, and every once in a while it creates a major teaching moment.

That happened today when NPR’s Andy Carvin — a senior strategist and reporter whose work on the Arab Spring, primarily through his Twitter account @acarvin, led the Washington Post to call him a “one-man Twitter news Bureau” — dispensed helpful advice about digital journalism and production on stories that occur thousands of miles away. His hour-long AMA gave great insights into his own reporting style, and the toll of covering the Arab Spring.

Here’s a roundup of some of the highlights.

On Authenticating Video

The most import thing to do is look for context. Is there something visible in the background that can be IDed, like a building or other landmark? If people are speaking, what kind of accents do they have? If there are weapons involved, what kinds are they? Does the timestamp of the video match the weather forecast, or the location of the sun and shadows? Etc, etc. Fortunately, I have a lot of Twitter followers who love this type of detective work. continued…

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The Do’s and Dont’s of a Twitter Interview

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:00:19 +0000

The Twitter interview has become a strange, somewhat mythical beast in digital journalism. Using a 140-characters-or-less platform can seem like a journalist’s heaven or hell, depending on how you like to gather your information, but there’s no doubt that the so-called “twinterview” has become de riugeur for journalists of all kinds.

However, it’s not the end-all-be-all of cutting edge techniques, and you should never settle for a “twinterview” unless it specifically fits for your story’s needs and goals. Here are a few quick tips to recognizing when and why reaching out to contacts and sources through Twitter can be useful, and how it can be a flop for other situations.

Have you conducted an interview over Twitter? Tell us about it in the comments.

DO: When Breaking Journalism Happens

If a major event happens, conducting a series of short interviews via Twitter can be the best way to find out what’s going on from people who are living it — especially if you can’t get there yourself. On Friday, BuzzFeed’s new LA bureau gathered information about a harrowing hostage situation at a Nordstrom Rack in a Westchester Mall and the related lockdown of a nearby movie theater by reaching out to those trapped inside on Twitter.

The result was an overwhelming success. BuzzFeed got an inside glimpse into the situation by those who were in lockdown, and received valuable, real-time information as it happened. A situation like this, where an outlet gains unprecedented access to an emergency, perhaps wouldn’t be executable without Twitter’s openness and quick information transfers. Don’t be afraid to use it when you’re looking for information on emergencies and other breaking news happenings, because it could lead you to the best sources out there. continued…

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Tweeting a Tragedy: 5 Things to Remember When News Breaks

Karen Fratti — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:07:55 +0000

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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