WebNewser

A pair of social media stories made news this week, and they raise questions about how TV news outlets should–and do–handle social media.

First was CNN contributor Roland Martin and his ill-advised Super Bowl tweets, which ended up getting him suspended from the channel.

Then Sky News and BBC News in the U.K. released social media policies that forbid reporters from breaking news on Twitter, and in the case of Sky, actually forbid reporters from tweeting about anything other than their beats and from retweeting anyone that didn’t work at Sky. Mind you, the rules applied to personal Twitter accounts, not just official Sky News accounts.

We reached out to the three cable news channels to see what their social media policies were.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

As ABC News explores the idea of a 24-hour cable news channel, its digital arm, which includes the 24-hour ABC News Now, just hit a milestone.

For the first time ever, for the month of January, ABC News Digital streamed more than 100 million videos. The game-changer for ABCNews.com has been the partnership with Yahoo! — which puts ABC News in direct competition with CNN.com, which claims to be the #1 broadcast news website. (CNN averaged 101 million monthly video streams in 2011.)

January marks ABC News Digital’s most trafficked month in history with more than 414 million page views to various ABC News sites as well as ABC News stories on Yahoo! News. The online site for “Good Morning America” tripled its monthly traffic and has grown +25% each month since it became part of the Yahoo! domain in October.

We’ve reported on the Huffington Post’s plans to start an online video news network, and on Thursday the site held a launch event for the HuffPost Streaming Network. Founding editor Roy Sekoff talked to Social Times detailing the plans for 12 hours a day, five days a week of live coverage. “There’s something about doing it live that gives you a sizzle that you don’t get from taping a show,” Sekoff said. As for the content itself:

The segments will be planned and produced, but will not be confined to particular time slots, and there will be a cache of videos for viewers to watch any time if they miss the live stream. To make the experience more like the Internet, the network will allow viewers to browse between music videos and breaking news as they please, and will also transcribe the programs in real time to make them searchable by keyword.  (Closed captioning will depend on which devices the content is viewed.) Read more

Former NBC “Dateline” anchor Stone Phillips is returning to the world of TV news, only this time his reports will be online.

Phillips, who left “Dateline” and NBC nearly five years ago, has launched a website, StonePhillipsReports.com, and has posted his first investigative piece for the site, “Hard Hits, Hard Numbers,” a look at head injuries in youth football.

“This is a big week, this is Super Bowl week, a lot of people are thinking about football,” Phillips tells TVNewser. “There are 2,000 NFL players, there are 3.5 million players ages 6-13. When you think about the number of people playing the game, and where we need to be focused in terms of safety and exposure to risk, certainly more work needs to be done here.”

For Phillips, the story is also a deeply personal one.

“I played football, I started playing when I was 12,” Phillips says. “During my years both in high school and college football I had two concussions, so this has always been on my radar screen.”

The anchor funded the project himself, calling on his wife Debra, who he says was “the associate producer, the still photographer and the accountant, all rolled into one” and former colleagues like Rich White (camera operator) and Steve Cheng (producer) to help.

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“TheGrio’s 100” list was unveiled on “Today” this morning. The list, organized by NBC’s TheGrio.com, honors Black History Month, which begins tomorrow, by spotlighting 100 individuals from various fields that are “the next generation of African-American history makers and industry leaders.”

There are two MSNBCers featured: Melissa Harris-Perry, who will host a weekend show on MSNBC beginning next month, Yvette Miley, the vice president and executive editor of the network. T.J. Holmes, who left CNN for BET in December, also made the list.

People on “TheGrio’s 100″ will be profiled across all NBC News platforms this month, including “Nightly News,” “Today” and all MSNBC programming.

NBC’s theGrio.com will unveil “TheGrio’s 100” list Tuesday on the “Today” show. The list, announced on the eve of Black History Month, will highlight “the next generation of African-American history makers and industry leaders who are making a difference in the lives of all Americans.” List-makers come from the fields of business, education, sports, science, media, politics, health, the arts and more.

> Related: How to Pitch: The Grio.

Alex is down in sunny Miami Beach this week covering the 2012 NATPE conference of TV programmers, producers and executives. He attended a panel this morning — written up on FishbowlNY — with John Miller, News Corp.’s chief digital officer who is bullish on web video. “I think we are just entering into the real video age now,” Miller told the crowd. The company’s Wall Street Journal, is going all-in on video. In October, The Journal launched WSJ Live, an app for Internet-connected TVs and the iPad, that brings up to four hours of daily live TV from the Journal newsroom.

The Wall Street Journal Project is very highly regarded at News Corp., someone close to the matter says. During business hours, the WSJ has a CNBC-style lineup of business programs, streamed on WSJ.com. The key for the WSJ project is expanding its distribution beyond the newspaper’s website. Our source says that the company has CNBC in its sites, trying to create the next generation of business network, without many of the high costs associated with launching a new TV network.

ABC News’s partnership with Yahoo! has resulted in several new web shows launching this week.

Two of the shows are extensions of long-running blogs from George Stephanopoulos and Jake Tapper. “George’s Bottom Line” was the first of the new show to debut today (after the jump). And tomorrow, look for “Political Punch With Jake Tapper,” ABC’s Senior White White Correspondent.

The shows, branded as the “Power Players, will be a mix news, opinion and political insider goodness, each running about two minutes. Tapper tells TVNewser his goal is “to bring the audience behind the White House curtain to get an insider look at what it’s really like off-stage and away from the official camera view — both of the White House and the White House press corps,” adding, “We also want to have some fun with it.”

Another new show called “Spinners and Winners with Jonathan Karl” is hosted by ABC’s senior political correspondent who covers Capitol Hill and the 2012 race for the White House.

“Politically Foul With John Berman” is hosted by the sports/politics junkie Berman who “will look at campaign news through the eyes of the ultimate referee, calling fouls and giving penalties.”

ABCNews.com’s long running “Top Line”, which was daily until a few months ago, returns to a once-a-week schedule hosted by ABC News Political Director Amy Walter, ABC News Washington Editor Rick Klein, and Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian.

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CBS News executive Susan Zirinsky joined the network in 1972 — when there were three networks and one screen. Fast forward 40 years and Zirinsky, who now holds the title of executive producer of special projects for both CBS News and CBS Entertainment, has become one of the savviest social media executives around.

In an interview with our sister blog SocialTimes, Zirinsky, who oversees “48 Hours Mystery,” says she didn’t embrace social media for the ratings it might provide her TV show: “I’m doing social media because I want us to be part of the world’s discussion about law and justice,” she says.

“We’ve landed at the beach in Normandy, everybody’s dead and I’m taking over the island,” says Zirinsky. “So [social media] is now not an option if you’re on my staff. This is part of your job.”

Zirinsky got her start in social media doing Web companion pieces for the CBS nuclear war drama “Jericho.” Unable to use any of the actors or clips from the show, Zirinsky grabbed all the secretaries in the office and shot interviews based on “Jericho’s” story line and themes. After 22 episodes, the “webumentary” took off. “The series on the Web got more attention than the TV series,” Zirinsky remembers.

“You’d have to be an ostrich, if you’re in the media business, to not sense the ground opening and the social revolution bubbling up,” says Zirinsky.

It’s worth the read, here.

“It’s truly a news organization that acts its age: a petulant 5-year-old concerned with only trivial matters,” says David Gregory roasting Politico on its 5th birthday. Politico.com launched Jan. 23, 2007, the day of that year’s State of the Union address. Early this morning, the site put up this video with well-wishes from tvnewsers including Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric, Dan Rather, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Diane Sawyer, Candy Crowley, Norah O’Donnell, Luke Russert, Greta Van Susteren, Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Jonathan Karl, Andrea Mitchell, Erin Burnett, Alex Wagner, Al Sharpton, and Dylan Ratigan.