Francesco Zaffarano, senior social media editor for The Daily Telegraph, tweeted a link to his Google Doc that keeps track of the journalists and news outlets that are experimenting with TikTok. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n2a8dSLE6ZG5Eql_Bt9ayPi14WkZ3-IsviEmlI1f11Q/edit
Category: Social Stream
With the rise of social platforms and an uptick in threatening comments, the newsroom is taking reader engagement in a different direction.
We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.❧
The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.
Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:33PM
In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by:
Liking us on Facebook
Following us on Twitter
Following us on Instagram
Chatting with us on Reddit
Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters ❧
It seems like they’ve chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?
Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community’s responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected? How can the paper better help to shape the community without it?
I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:42PM
It would be cool if they considered adding syndication links to their original articles so that when they crosspost them to social media, at least their readers could choose to follow those links and comment there in a relatively continuous thread. This would at least help to aggregate the conversation for them and their community while still off-loading the moderation burden from their staff, which surely is part of their calculus. It looks like their site is built on Drupal. I would suspect that–but I’m not sure if–swentel’s IndieWeb Drupal module has syndication links functionality built into it.
Rather than engaging their community, it almost feels to me like they’re giving up and are allowing a tragedy of their commons when there may be some better experimental answers that just aren’t being tried out.
The worst part of this for me though is that they’ve given up on the power of owning and controlling their own platform. In the recent history of journalism, this seems to be the quickest way of becoming irrelevant and dying out.
The News Co/Lab works to advance media literacy through journalism, education and technology. We’re based at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
We experiment with new ways to increase public understanding of how news works. Rather than duplicate existing projects, we promote them and seek to expand their efforts. We collaborate with many partners.
Conferences present an opportunity for journalists, developers, product managers, and others who work in the news space to connect with one another, learn new skills, and exchange ideas. We’ve collected a list of 21 journalism conferences scheduled throughout 2020. If you’re looking for spaces to meet new people or take your career to the next …
Journalists provide quality information. Librarians help people find quality information. Both fields are rooted in promoting civic engagement. Both are contextual experts in the communities they serve. And both are working to reinvent themselves in the digital world.
It just makes sense that news outlets and libraries collaborate. That’s something we at the News Co/Lab have believed from the beginning, and it’s something we’ve seen work very well in our partnerships ❧
Perhaps this is a good incubator for the idea Greg McVerry and I have been contemplating in which these institutions help to provide some of the help and infrastructure for the future of IndieWeb.
Annotated January 08, 2020 at 04:12PM
I also note that this article was syndicated to this site from this original: https://newscollab.org/2019/06/19/6-newsroom-library-partnerships-to-check-out/
A beautiful, lightweight and customisable cross platform app built for Micro.blog
Vincent Ritter (vincentritter.com)Last Friday I put in Gluon for review to the App Store. It went into review 30 minutes later. It was pretty great. I woke up Saturday morning with a message saying that Gluon was rejected. Fair enough… it happens. However, the points they raised were strange to me.
The saddest part of this Apple review process seems to be the double standards that they seem to be holding many apps to.
Art: Rob Levy https://www.reddit.com/user/ITB_Rob_5/
Quick trip from 2:46 to 3:02 pm for some fruits and veg.
I found Captain Jack hiding just inside the front door.
John D. Cook (johndcook.com)One of the shortcomings of the Poisson distribution is that its variance exactly equals its mean. It is common in practice for the variance of count data to be larger than the mean, so it’s natural to look for a distribution like the Poisson but with larger variance. We start with a Poisson random variable X with mean λ, but then we make λ itself random and suppose that λ comes from a gamma(α, β) distribution. Then the marginal distribution on X is a negative binomial distribution with parameters r = α and p = 1/(β + 1).
The previous post said that the negative binomial is useful because it has more variance than the Poisson. The derivation above explains why the negative binomial should have more variance than the Poisson.
A bit chilly out this afternoon, but nice and crisp.
Guidance on planning classroom instruction.
NPR has got some great materials for teaching/learning podcasting techniques.
New ad technology for Spotify-exclusive podcasts is coming
This is exactly the sort of silo-ization of our data and attention we’ve come to expect from big tech. My friend Kim Hansen, in particular, saw this coming several years ago and was very worried about it.
Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content officer ❧
Former President of the UPN and the CW and under Les Moonves at Viacom/CBS.
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 12:35PM
Joanne McNeil (Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism 2020 )One reason we might see a resurgence of blogs is the novelty. Tell someone you’re starting a new newsletter and they might complain about how many newsletters (or podcasts) they already subscribe to. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.
I almost want to call her to task, but Joanne has got her own website that looks like it’s part of tilde.club including an under construction image at the bottom of the page! How cool is that?!
I do find myself wishing that she kept her own writing in a blog so I could subscribe to her longer form work there. She’s also got a fantastic sounding book on the history of the internet from the perspective of the user called Lurking that’s coming out in February!
Her piece doesn’t tacitly tie back to journalism as directly as many in this series generally do, but I feel like she’s suggesting that by getting back to the roots of the old (non-corporately owned and controlled) web, journalism has a better chance to recover. Much like her, I also think there is a beginning of a blogging renaissance that is brewing on the interwebz. It’s quite interesting to see people noticing and writing about it in contexts like the Nieman Lab’s annual predictions.
I’m not sure that I agree with her assertions about context collapse. Some of the most sophisticated information consumers are aware of it, but I don’t think that Harry or Mary Beercan are aware of the general concept.
Highlights and Annotations
But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow. ❧
It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected. ❧
She doesn’t have the technical terminology many use, but she’s describing the IndieWeb community pretty well here.