Mar 11, 2009
More evidence that social media works
Susan Mernit — another prolific and incisive writer that may not be yet be among the bookmarks of enough journalists — shares a long excerpt of an even more exhaustive White Paper on how she and her team used social media to significantly raise awareness of the most recent Knight News Challenge.
In “Case study, using social media for social good: The Knight News Challenge 2008/09,” Mernit shows, step-by-step, why you weren’t imagining things when you thought that there was an awful lot of publicity about the Challenge this time around.
Click here for the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Nov 2, 2008
Thinking of the journalist as a DJ instead of a curator.
Photo by Thomas Hawk
Jeff Jarvis points to what may be a better analogy for the role of a modern journalist: A nightclub DJ.
Previously, I’d suggested journalists need to become a curator, but I agree that the messier, noisier role of a nightclub spinner is closer to what journalists do as they run toward constant deadlines, and serves as a less fussy example than curator. Elevator speech: changed.
The original article, in French, translates to something like this (thanks to my daughter Anna for helping Google with some of the idioms):
The job of the press is redefined by new technologies and new relationships with readers, listeners and viewers. The new journalist acts as a filter, a “packageur” of information produced by multiple sources and heterogeneous sources (other media, agencies, experts, witnesses, fans).
Information is no longer a product, it became a process, it is no longer an object it is a service and the media become facilitators. (This does not mean that the report or the investigation died, it simply means that this activity, extremely expensive, can no longer be their only activity. Exclusive content is a loss leader, a product for “the reputation…”)
The whole article is here.
Me, elsewhere