Australia’s Financial Review slashes paywall prices

The new regime at Fairfax Media’s Financial Review Group will cut online subscriptions prices by 40% from next Monday for The Australian Financial Review, allow print subscribers full access to online content for free and launch an iPad app early in the new year as part of a major overhaul of the group’s market strategy.

Guardian’s Facebook app generates almost 1m extra page impressions a day

The Guardian’s Facebook app is generating almost a million extra page impressions per day, according to figures released by the news outlet and by Facebook… The news outlet also believes that the app is engaging a younger audience, as over half (56.7 per cent) of the app’s users are 24 and under and 16.7 per cent are 17 and under.

Most Shared Articles on Facebook in 2011

We recently looked at the most shared articles in the US on Facebook over the past year. The stories range from cute to thought provoking and represent the type of news people have been sharing and discovering with friends in 2011.

Kiwis’ most search terms on Google in 2011

In 2011, the fastest rising search by New Zealanders was perhaps unsurprisingly the Rugby World Cup. Second on that list was “Japan earthquake” after people hit Google for more information about one of this year’s most devastating disasters. This year, Sonny Bill Williams trumped Justin Bieber in the most popular searched images, proving biceps and ball skills could overcome Bieber fever.

Igloo pay-TV details released

Sky Television and TVNZ have taken the lid off their new discount pay-television service, Igloo, promising it will offer “pre-pay TV for fun-loving Kiwis”. A website for the service was visible briefly yesterday before taken offline. It said customers would be able to pay in advance for “30-day channel packs” that would let them watch 11 Sky channels. Sky’s sports channels aren’t included, but viewers will be able to pay to see “the best sports live” on a pay-per-view basis.

The road to one million mobile apps

Mobilewalla, a search, discovery and analytics engine that tracks apps in real time, said the count had risen to 989,476 across all four platforms. Apple holds about 60 percent market share, while Android accounts for 32 percent and Blackberry and Windows account for the rest at 4.4 and 3.6 percent. In the last 12 months, Apple apps grew from 338,000 to 589,148, while Android apps went from 115,000 to 319,774.

New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger gave a speech a few days ago at Polis LSE, which Charlie Beckett kindly posted in full. In it, Sulzberger talks about why the NY Times (which recently said it now has 325,000 digital subscribers) is engaging with its readers.

The main Facebook page of The New York Times has more than 1.7 million fans.  Our main Twitter page has more than 3.8 million followers… We have more than 15.8 million followers on Twitter for all New York Times accounts.  And here is an astounding fact – a New York Times story is tweeted every 4 seconds.

He points to three NY Times reporters doing a fine job of using social media in their reporting and relationships with their readers:

Nick Kristof — has huge, real time communities on Facebook and Twitter and he uses them to great effect in his reporting, often from some of the world’s most troubled places.

Chris Chivers – uses Tumblr and Twitter to draw back the veil on his reporting, often posting story snippits on his Tumblr blog before they appear on nytimes.com. He also asks his audience to help crowd-source a question for him, for example about ammunition he’s found in the field in war torn Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq.

and…

Lydia Polgreen – She has used her Facebook page to build a community of readers interested in India, where she has been a Delhi-based correspondent.  Now that she’s moving to South Africa, I can only assume she will do the same there.

And he makes the point that the NY Times audience is one that is well worth tapping into:

There is a reason why we are so committed to social media at The Times and that reason rests with our audience.  We have an incredibly enlightened, intelligent and sophisticated group of users who are highly engaged with our products.  Our efforts in social media are meant to tap in to the knowledge from that readership.  We value what they can share with us and with other users.

For this specific reason, we are currently in the midst of an expansion of our online discussion and community features at NYTimes.com and we are redesigning our comments section later this year.

We’re also in the process of creating a Trusted Commenter program, which will be available to a select group of readers with a history of high-quality comments.  Their submissions will be published on our Opinion pages and across NYTimes.com without prior modification.

Last but not least, the business case:

The business result of all of these efforts is increasing levels of engagement with our site.  This includes more time spent, more stories read, more videos viewed…and more ads viewed.

Rest of the speech is here.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that posting a hyperlink to defamatory material does not constitute publishing the defamation:

In its unanimous decision to dismiss the [Crookes vs Newton] case, the court said a hyperlink, by itself, should never be considered “publication” of the content to which it refers. But that doesn’t mean internet users shouldn’t be careful about how they present links. The court says that if someone presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that repeats the defamatory content, they can be considered publishers and are therefore at risk of being sued for defamation.

The court agreed with the arguments that applying the definition of publisher to someone who hyperlinks could have a chilling effect on internet use.

“The internet cannot, in short, provide access to information without hyperlinks. Limiting their usefulness by subjecting them to the traditional publication rule would have the effect of seriously restricting the flow of information and, as a result, freedom of expression,” Madam Justice Rosalie Abella wrote.

Read more about the case on CBC News here. Judgment is here.

A few links from the past week or so.

The Guardian Launches a New US Homepage

The Guardian revealed a new url for the US – guardiannews.com – marking the start of its digital operation in New York. The new venture – headed up by Janine Gibson, formerly editor of guardian.co.uk – will create a hub for Guardian readers in the US, combining the innovation and energy of a start-up with ground-breaking journalism and the backing of the Guardian brand.

Google Propeller Social News Sharing App to Compete Against Flipboard

Google is creating a social news sharing app for iPad and Android that will compete directly with Flipboard, named 2010 iPad App of the Year by Apple.

What media companies can learn from Walmart

Media companies and content creators may not see themselves as having anything in common with a giant retailing entity, but the reality is that they need to understand the behavior and interests of their users or customers (which they call readers or listeners or viewers) just like Walmart does. Why do people click on certain stories and not others? How long do they spend on a page and where do they go after they leave? That’s the kind of information that tools like Omniture and comScore can provide — but real-time tools like Chartbeat and the new analytical offering from Twitter can add another element that provides even more data about activity and intent.

Hearst To Convert All Sites to HTML5

Hearst Magazines is aiming to improve its digital strategy through the integration of HTML5, the company announced plans early Tuesday to implement the platform on the majority of its websites through out the fourth quarter of 2011 and into 2012, according to Mark Weinberg, vice president of programming and product strategy for Hearst Digital Media.

Facebook to delay IPO until late 2012

Facebook will delay its initial public offering until the end of next year so employees can focus on developing products for the social networking website, the Financial Times has reported.

Philly papers offering subscribers $99 Android tablet

A Philadelphia newspaper publisher is trying to steer more people to its online editions by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with a two-year subscription.

News Corp shareholders lodge complaint against Rupert Murdoch

A prominent group of US banks and investment funds with substantial investments in News Corporation has issued a fresh legal complaint accusing the company of widespread corporate misconduct extending far beyond the phone-hacking excesses of News of the World.

Infographic: Social Gaming by the Numbers

The number of people playing social media games is shocking. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on it every year and that number is expected to top a billion. Social Media Gaming is as Astounding as Social Media Itself. Online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have become unexpectedly successful new additions to the Internet, and their success is partly attributable to the unbelievable success of social gaming.

Johann Hari apologises over plagiarism and hands back Orwell prize

The award-winning Independent columnist Johann Hari has apologised for plagiarising the work of others to improve his interviews and will take unpaid leave of absence from the paper until 2012. Hari also apologised for editing the Wikipedia entries of people he had clashed with, using the pseudonym David Rose, “in ways that were juvenile or malicious”, saying he was “mortified to have done this”. He admitted calling “one of them antisemitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk”.

Bagehot – Unethical journalism: The depressing tale of Johann Hari

Allegations of quote-stealing and factual embellishment by Mr Hari have been swirling for months, at first in the blogosphere and then in the mainstream media. I have not posted about the whole sorry saga to date because—at the end of the day—a hack is only a hack, and the press already spends too much time talking and thinking about itself. But something about the weasel wording of Mr Hari’s apology today sticks in the craw. I have also been depressed to see a chorus of well-known journalists leap to Mr Hari’s defence, arguing that what he did was silly or foolish, but is not really his fault.

Te Waha Nui, the news publication created by journalism students from AUT University, has revamped its online presence in the past couple of weeks and is looking the better for it.

Alex Winkler, a postgrad journalism student who has been working on the website’s redesign, told me by email that one of the aims of the relaunch was to “develop it into a multi-user CMS to manage an average of 100 contributors”.

“The new site will feature much stronger imagery and hopefully a more intuitive navigation, to promote the news we are producing. It will feature stronger video, audio and social media content.”

Nice.

Alex said the redesign would be an ongoing process with more work to come on the technical side along with “working out an online style guide, the general publishing process and social media guidelines”.

The team are open for feedback – about the site and their stories – so have a look around and let them know what you think.

Wintec journalism students, meanwhile, are now publishing news stories on their relatively new website, waikatoindependent.co.nz, and it’s worth a look for Waikato-flavoured stories.

Aoraki Polytech journalism students, who are now based in Dunedin rather than Timaru, are publishing stories about their part of the world on their  Newsline website.

And the old hands at Whitireia journalism school in Wellington are still pumping out stories, galleries and video on newswire.co.nz about Wellington city and surrounds.

It’s great to see more New Zealand journalism students getting published online. Here’s hoping they’re all getting to do the publishing side of it themselves  (using WordPress, for example, cropping and posting images, writing web headlines, selecting categories and keywords, promoting stories on social media and so on) – because we’re starting to see more and more digital jobs advertised.

In the last two weeks I’ve seen job ads for a mobile editor (the first I’ve seen in New Zealand) with Yahoo! News, and a host of jobs for online editors at APN, Fairfax, MediaWorks and TVNZ among others. This week the Ashburton Guardian is advertising for a photographer/videographer and the Waikato Times recently took on a full-time videographer (the very capabale Mike Scott).

A current Media Works ad for an online editor says the successful candidate will need:

• Previous experience in an Online Editorial role would be useful but not essential, but you will need strong writing skills and be able to write quickly
• Some HTML skills, but we don’t expect you to be a Guru
• A solid understanding of Social Media platforms as well as understanding of the depth and importance of SEO to garner organic traffic to a website
• Experience here will set you apart from the rest
• Ability to demonstrate a good design eye and confidence with applications such as Adobe Photoshop
• Ability to do simple video/audio editing

While that’s not a straight journalism job, it’s not a bad list of skills to aim for if you’re an aspiring journalist. My advice? If you’re acquiring these skills at journalism school, great, if not -  just go ahead and start learning them for yourself. There’s no shortage of tutorials online (YouTube, Google) and there’s free software for doing most of this stuff.

Reuben Schwarz, who works for Fairfax Media NZ, recently wrote a good post with suggestions for how to get your first job in online media. His list includes:

4. Promote, promote, promote – Start a blog talking about your chosen niche and interact with the community. Connect with people in the niche on Twitter and promote the hell out of yourself. Comment on other blogs in your chosen field.

5. Be realistic -You won’t be a columnist or feature writer for the New York Times. And you don’t really want to be anyway, it’s not as good as you think. Your best chance nowadays is in niche online publications. They’re the ones most likely to hire outsiders, because to them knowledge of the community and niche is more important than traditional journalism skills.

6. Get good at online marketing – Use your blog to learn about search engine and social media marketing. Knowing how to drive traffic to your work is extremely important online, and it’s a skill few other journalists have.

7. Get a smartphone (or tablet) – If you want to be a news reporter, within a few years most of your audience will be reading/watching/listening to your content on their iPhone or Android (or Windows phone…?). You need to understand how people consume content on these phones.

The rest of Reuben’s post is here. Worth a read.

You can see more journalism jobs in New Zealand here or subcribe by RSS to my weekly journalism jobs roundup here.

UPDATE:

I just noticed this post from Martin Belam ranting about how poorly digital skills are rated by many existing newsroom chiefs and journalists:

I was made [angry] yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.

“The top four most important skills cited by editors were: writing, finding news stories, interviewing and legal knowledge – while at the bottom of the list came social media, web skills and interaction with readers”When I read a sentence like that, I hear the sound of an industry committing suicide.

If you actually dig into the details of the survey, you’ll see it wasn’t that these skills aren’t valued at all, but that were valued less than “time management” amongst other things. Alison Gow blogged eloquently about the message that sends out to existing digital staff in the UK’s newsrooms.

I notice that dompost.co.nz, the Dominion Post website, is running a live chat with Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown tomorrow (Friday August 19) at 12pm.

Good for them, I say. This is exactly the kind of thing news websites can and should do for their readers – bring the Town Hall to people who can’t make it to the Town Hall themselves.

Nice to see more use of live chats generally on New Zealand news websites (I found nzherald.co.nz’s chat with Ian Wishart about his Macsyna King book interesting) along with more and more experimentation with live blogging, embedded social media feeds, Tumblrs, Facebook, interactive maps and so on.

More please:)

Disclosure: I am currently consulting to the Dominion Post and its owner Fairfax Media NZ on newsroom development.

Via Mashable, a graphic showing how people use social networks in various parts of the globe:

In some countries, many of them Asian, most people were focused on content sharing. Others, like the UK and Canada, had more people who put a greater emphasis on sending messages.

New Zealand appears to have fallen of the map, created by Global Web Index and based on research conducted by Trendstream. Oh well.

(Click to see Mashable’s enlarged view)

Some more catch-up reading, this time about search, social and floats.

Bing to become default search option for BlackBerrys

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) is to make Microsoft‘s Bing search engine the default option on its future devices, signalling a win for the software giant while giving the Canadian company a toehold in the mobile maps and search business. The announcement came at RIM’s BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Florida and has won approval from analysts. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Bing would be “deeply integrated at the BlackBerry operating system level” on RIM’s new smartphones”.

Bing leans more on Facebook

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is leaning more heavily on Facebook to make its results more meaningful than Google’s. Starting today, Bing’s search results will vary depending on whether the person making a request is logged into Facebook’s online social network at the same time. This means that a link that Bing’s standard ranking formula would have buried on fourth or fifth page of results might appear on the first page if the information had been recommended by friends within the searcher’s Facebook circle.

Experian Hitwise reports Bing-powered share of searches reaches 30 percent in March 2011

Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of search respectively. The remaining 69 search engines1 in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches.

Blodget: Can We Please Stop Pretending That Microsoft’s Bing Is Doing Well?

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is indeed gaining some share of search queries in the US market (globally, Bing is nowhere). But it is gaining this share at an absolutely mind-boggling cost. Specifically, Microsoft is gaining share for Bing by doing spectacularly expensive distribution deals, deals that don’t even come close to paying for themselves in additional revenue. How much is Microsoft spending to buy market share for Bing? Based on an analysis of Microsoft’s financial statements, Bing is paying about 3X as much for every incremental search query as it generates in revenue from that query.

‘Chinese Facebook’ Renren raises $743m with US flotation

Renren, China‘s answer to Facebook, raised $743m (£448m) with its eagerly awaited flotation on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, as shares in the social network rocketed in early trading. Investors scrambled to bet huge sums on the Chinese social media giant, set at $14 a share for its market debut – about 50% higher than the expected price range posted last week.

Baidu Says It May Build on Search-Engine Pact With Microsoft

Baidu Inc., owner of China’s most- popular search engine, said it may expand its partnership with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) as it steps up plans to offer services outside its home market. Baidu “won’t rule out” further collaboration with Microsoft, with which it has an existing agreement on the Bing search engine in China, Haoyu Shen, senior vice president at the Chinese company, said in an interview in Beijing today. He declined to elaborate. Working with Microsoft may help Baidu speed up its overseas expansion after the Beijing-based company overcame competition from Google Inc. (GOOG) to dominate the industry in China. Baidu is developing products in 12 foreign languages, said Shen, who declined to say when they will be rolled out.

I’m heading away on holiday for a week so I’m leaving you with this guest post from recently graduated Whitireia journalism student Owen Winter, who has talked to some New Zealand journalists about the use of social media in reporting: the pitfalls, benefits, attitudes and what comes next. Owen is looking for a journalism job and you can reach him it owen.winter@newswire.co.nz.

By Owen Winter

>>>Buy stories by Owen Winter on allaboutthestory.com

When disaster hits, journalists still race to get to the scene first – but these days someone is beating them to it.

After devastating earthquakes hit Canterbury and Japan earlier this year, most first accounts didn’t come from trained reporters and camera operators, but from dozens of “ordinary” people posting videos, still pictures and personal stories on You Tube, Twitter and Facebook.

That’s where mainstream media head now, even before the first staff can get out the newsroom door.

In Christchurch, a Press videographer had dramatic footage posted on Stuff within three and a half hours of the February 22 earthquake, but he was well behind amateur footage of the cliff-face collapse that destroyed the Sumner RSA. He even admitted in his video he had been on the street without his camera when the quake struck and had to go back to the office to get it.

Global media giants like CNN carried excellent coverage from amateurs that had been posted on You Tube well before their own people could get anywhere near the vast damage caused by the tsunami.

Social media has given news outlets, especially internet based platforms, the chance to show the voices of citizen journalists on a much wider scale, says Greer McDonald, social media editor for Fairfax NZ’s Stuff website.

She says that for her, the February 22 earthquake was a different experience to the one which hit the region last September. She woke up to that one: “I felt it and I went on Twitter and saw it was a big one. I rang the office and I was in the office within half an hour with five other people. In that example, we had a gallery of 75 images of the quake by 8.30 in the morning (just a few hours after the event) and not one of them was taken by a Fairfax photographer. They were all reader pictures.”

In February, first images of the quake were coming in to Stuff concurrently from readers and Fairfax staff who were already out on other assignments.

“Once [Christchurch] had internet connection, we had a really steady flow through, which is a very different scenario. In September we relied on the Twitter community quite strongly to provide us details, whereas this time we knew the details for ourselves because our own staff were involved. It was a different kind of dynamic that time.”

Fairfax staff had the added stress of knowing their colleagues from the Christchurch Press were in a building that had been significantly damaged by the 6.4 magnitude earthquake.

“We were under the pump from every angle and deeply, deeply concerned about our colleagues, who were very, very much affected by it.”

Greer McDonald later confirmed there had been a death at the building via the Stuff Twitter feed, as well as her personal twitter account.

The New Zealand Herald website based in Auckland also turned to social media in the moments following the earthquake.

Jeremy Rees, online editor for APN, says Twitter is “really good for eye witness accounts after a major event. It provided much of the initial spate of accounts of the earthquake.” He says the major boon social media gives a news outlet is the chance to talk to and hear from people in an unvarnished way.

What impact has the surge in social media had on the news media? Not as much as you might think, according to those who are working in the industry.

Dave Lee – online journalist at the BBC and a judge of media websites in the latest Canon Media Awards – says social media has “gone from being something the geeks did, to something that threw up the odd story, to now being as essential a source as the news wires”.

But he points out the traditional role of the journalist hasn’t changed, something Greer McDonald and Jeremy Rees both emphasise. Dave says social media is simply a “different way of over-hearing things.”

Curiosity, filtering and fact-checking are still important

In New Zealand, Jeremy Rees says learning how to tweet, use Facebook or upload to YouTube are just technical skills and the old skills of sifting information will become more useful – and necessary – as the volume of data increases.

“The old skills are always the best ones for journalists – sorting the wheat from the chaff, being curious, following your nose.” According to Jeremy, curiosity is the key skill for a journalist to possess. “If a person is curious, they can learn social media. If a person knows social media but isn’t curious, they can’t become a journalist.”

Another journalistic staple that will remain important is checking reliability. On social media, there are cases where publishing a comment straight from the Twitter stream is acceptable, such as when using it as an eye witness account, says Jeremy Rees. In such cases, they wouldn’t be checked, but when it’s something that is being proffered as fact it will be checked before being published.

Dave Lee says reliability is an obvious problem for journalists using social media to gather their news. The BBC has a team of people whose entire role is to verify all user-generated content and this team will often call on experts in the field to help.

“My favourite anecdote is how once a video from Iran showing a pro-government march was shown to be false because in the background you could see an old clock. An Iranian BBC journalist pointed out that the video must be over a year old, as the clock’s surrounding is now a different colour.”

Social media is a starting point

Everybody interviewed agreed the key thing to using social media for journalism is that it should only ever be viewed as a starting point. Dave tells the story of spotting a local tweet by someone saying they were starting a campaign. He followed this up in the “real world” by phoning, interviewing and so on. It then became a fully-fledged story that was published on the BBC website.

Greer McDonald views it as a link to somebody who can provide a fuller story: “It’s like collecting someone’s phone number. You don’t text them and ask for a quote – you ring them and you get to know them…it’s all about human connections and human stories.

“It’s actually about sifting out the decent comments from the banal… people frequently used to say ‘Oh, Twitter. It’s just a bunch of geeks on computers and how can you trust who is on the end of the computer?’ And now it’s like, well, there are actually humans on the end of the computer.”

The human angle is one which could cause issues for many journalists, who have to ask themselves where is the line drawn between the “objective” journalist and the person behind the words?

Blur between private and public

Jeremy Rees says there is some blurring of the line between a private and a public person. “Can a journalist give their opinion on something or somebody when they are also trying to objectively report? That’s a very tricky issue for reporters. Until relatively recently, journalists have sought a degree of anonymity, hiding their opinions from being public. Twitter and Facebook make them visible.”

Dave Lee says he has had his “knuckles wrapped” a couple of times because of inappropriate comments appearing on his Twitter stream: “One of which was a joke about a political party in the UK. I can’t show any sort of bias like that.”

Employees at the BBC have adopted two separate accounts to combat this. One staff member, Rory Cellen-Jones, has more than double the followers on his personal Twitter than his work account. Dave: “That tells me readers quite like knowing their correspondents are normal people, who really hold a passion for what they report on. You’ll often find Rory, for instance, talking about tech on a Sunday morning… even though he’s not working on a story. That’s a brilliant way to build a reputation.”

Building a brand

Building a reputation, or a brand, is one of most valuable applications Greer McDonald sees for social media and the role of the journalist. “There is no differentiation when you are a journalist. You are a journalist 24/7, and I say that people should use their personal accounts professionally. What that does is it allows people to realise you are a journalist first and foremost, but that you are human as well.

“Overseas, where once newspapers journalists used to hide behind their typewriters, they’re actually now having to step out and say ‘I’m a newspaper journalist – come to me for stories.’

“That’s really hard for some people, especially older journalists. They don’t believe. They think that everybody reads their byline (name) and that’s how they get their credit. But everybody knows the only people who read bylines are other journalists and parents. No one else cares where the news comes from. I think that’s actually really cool and exciting.

“I enjoy it because it totally changes the whole experience of journalism, because you get so many more contacts and it becomes so much easier because the stories come to you.

“If anyone looked at my Twitter stream they are likely to see me link to news stories, talk to my boyfriend about what we’re going to have for dinner that night, and I will ask a friend if they want to meet up for a drink tomorrow. And then there’d be another news tweet and then a call for people involved in Working for Families who want to speak to the Dom Post.”

She says it’s a mixture, and because of that people have a connection to her because they feel like they know her 24/7 and she’s not just somebody who goes and uses Twitter.

“It’s an online community, you can’t just waltz in and expect to get all the answers and all the great leads and all that kind of stuff from people you aren’t connected with. It’s those human connections you make with people where they do know what I had for breakfast.”

She encourages students who are learning the fundamentals of journalism to take heed of this as early as possible. “There is a need for people to realise (and you get told it all the time) what you put on the internet is there forever.”

Journalism students: take note

While studying, students have to protect their online reputation before they achieve a public profile, particularly because journalists can become a target over credibility. “Journalism students have to realise they have a reputation to protect and the best way to do that is take an active approach to it. Journalism school is the perfect time to do that,” says Greer.

It also works for finding a job, she says: “If you get your name out there already on all of these tools, it puts you way, way, way ahead of other people potentially going for your jobs. It’s absolutely crucial that journalism schools take heed.

Jim Tucker, head of journalism at Whitireia, couldn’t agree more. In 2005, when he was executive director of the NZ Journalists Training Organisation (the body that accredits and monitors journalism schools) he was aware journalism schools around the world were deeply unsure how to meet rapid changes in news media brought on by the internet.

“Everybody was kind of frozen in the headlights,” he says. It was one of the reasons he left the JTO in 2007 to reinvent the ailing Whitireia Journalism School – he could see the opportunity media convergence offered to any school that moved to meet the challenge.

Whitireia invited Dave Lee – then in the final year of a media degree at Lincoln University – over for a couple of months to advise and teach, a move that led to the setting up of NewsWire, the school’s successful news website, a teaching tool that has given the edge Jim was looking for.

He says the experience proved a point: in this area (online journalism/social media) those who grew up in the digital age (Gen Y) are the ones who know how it works. They are now having as big an impact on the news media as the internet itself.

What is the future for the marriage between social media and news outlets?

Greer McDonald – who as part of her job as social media editor for the Stuff website also trains Fairfax staff – hopes her job will become redundant in the future. She thinks in time reporters will see the importance of Twitter and make it one per cent of their working day.

She also says it’s likely we will soon see the emergence of new roles in newsrooms, such as community managers for online sites.

The last 12 months have seen a big change in her view. “If there were any doubters out there I think that they’d be hard pressed to have those same concerns nowadays. Because it’s just not what has happened in New Zealand, but also overseas, with Egypt and various other political things that have all happened and been pushed through faster because of the effect of social media.”

>>> Want to run this piece? Buy the rights at allaboutthestory.com today

>>> Buy stories by Owen Winter on allaboutthestory.com

I liked this thread in Frank Chimero‘s talk at #Webstock last week. He talked about the power of storytelling (and we’re all about that at allaboutthestory.com:) and particularly about how to get people to tell stories about themselves.

Forgive the blur, I grabbed these pics in a hurry.

We come across forms on websites all the time. Registration forms, payment forms and social media profile forms. These forms contain questions. “Good questions get good answers, bad questions get bad answers.”

This kind of question is simply too hard to answer:

“Where do you start?” asked Frank.  How do you summarise your whole existence right there?

On Twitter, that “About me” profile question turns into “Please summarise your entire existence on earth in 140 characters or less.”

So you often get people offering up a list: I’m a father, husband, friend, designer, bartender and snowboarder.

“I think we’re more interesting than this,” says Frank.

And Twitter also has a great example of a good question:

What’s happening? __________________________

With this kind of question, he said, “you capture someone’s Id. Here’s what I’m thinking, doing right now.” Politics, dogs, sandwiches, feelings.

Frank went on to think out loud about what happens if we change the question.

“What if we ask: What did you care about when you were nine? What’s the last thing you changed your mind about?”

That could be much more interesting.

#foodforthought.