Public Relations & Social Media Insight

When big news breaks, a common impulse is to turn to CNN, but the network suffers from self-inflicted damage.

...So what is the real damage of a midweek stumble in a very complicated story? When the story was breaking on Friday, CNN had its biggest nonelection rating in 10 years. People at CNN said that they got significant blowback from sources, but Mr. Zucker seemed fine with the overall effort, issuing a hero-gram to the staff on Friday, before the final chapter unfolded.

“All of you, across every division of CNN Worldwide, have done exceptional work,” the memo read. “And when we made a mistake, we moved quickly to acknowledge it and correct it.”

That’s one way to spin it. I talked to several competitors who did not commit the same error, and one spoke for many when he said: “It was bad enough — really, really bad — so that they made all of us look terrible. Nobody comes away a winner from something like this.”

If legacy media were falling short, the new order did not look all that promising either. A crowd-sourced witch hunt took place on Reddit, identifying innocents as suspects, and Twitter was alive with both misinformation and outrage at the mistakes. (There were many curiously triumphal posts about the death of old media in Twitter feeds that were full of links to that same old media.)...

Natural disasters, airline crashes — and yes, terrorist bombs — undercut the normalcy of everyday life by bringing death’s whammy to an unexpected place at an unforeseen time. In the hours and days following such catastrophes, journalists work to restore normalcy to the panicked population by explaining how and why the bad thing happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

Reporters have been normalizing the abnormal for so long that they’ve created well-worn catastrophe templates to convey their stories. Yesterday, while covering the Boston Marathon bombing, journalists leaned hard again on those templates. First came the sputtering dispatches over radio and television about the calamity. Next up were the on-the-scene broadcast reports, frequently marred by confusion and contradiction, as the press held out hope for survivors but prepared audiences for the worst. Video of the catastrophe was converted by the cable news networks into a perpetual loop, giving the talking heads a wallpaper background to talk over (and giving new viewers just tuning in something graphic to watch)....

... News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business.

The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have....

A little more than a year ago, BuzzFeed made the leap into the realm of serious journalism. It hired some known journalists and a lot more hungry young writers, expanded its verticals, and announced a plan to create serious content to go alongside the site’s trademark clever lists. Now, with BuzzFeed creating a home for its long reads, building a business vertical and trying to figure out how to expand into breaking and international news, it’s a good time to assess....

The Online Journalism Review(OJR) has always been a valuable resource for insight into the transition from traditional into digital journalism.

It’s ironic their website relaunch suffers some of the same challenges as traditional media moving to digital....

...I like the new look and several of the new features. What’s baffling is the lack of social media best practices for this “online” journalism review.

What’s missing?...

Schiffrin and Fagan quantify weaknesses in coverage of the stimulus...

Does the mainstream press do a good job covering major economic stories, like, say the stimulus back in the 9th century 2009? I doubt that, too, but Anya Schiffrin and Ryan Fagan provide a more authoritative answer: No. Or at least it was passive in the extreme, excessively reliant on government sources, fixated on the politics over the substance, and, yes, biased, but not perhaps in the way you’d expect. And they have numbers to back up these claims made, to be sure, in academese.

(A bit of disclosure: I read an early draft of the paper and made some comments on it.) They categorized 718 stories (this is exhausting work, believe me) and coded them according to what kinds of sources (Wall Street, academic, government) the stories quoted; whether the stories discussed substance or just the politics, and whether the articles conveyed a bias one way or another, among other things....

... You may have heard of Matthew Keys. He’s a journalist who was indicted by the Department of Justice (DoJ) for allegedly “giving hackers access to the servers of his former employer, the Tribune Company. Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times, which the Anonymous hacker subsequently defaced.”

Keys was also, until recently, the social media editor for Reuters. After being let go today, he shared the news organization’s Twitter guidelines – and they demonstrate the dangers of combining personal and professional tweets online. In a blog post, Keys shares reasons why Reuters was mad at him (and fired him) and that list includes the following:

"Reuters said it had a problem with the perceived relationship between my Twitter account and their news organization. A Reuters manager said it was troublesome that several people associated my work on Twitter with the company, pointing to my Twitter bio that said I was a Reuters journalist. Reuters’ Twitter Guidelines, which you can read here, states that Reuters journalists are always expected to identify themselves as such"....

Guardian digital development editor Joanna Geary answers some questions about GuardianWitness....

...First up: this was built in two months. The sponsorship pot from EE gave them a budget and time to get the job done, but not necessarily have everything they wanted at launch. She says it's a complete, working system that can be built upon. I suggest the phrase "minimum viable product" to Jo but she suggests that it's a full product - one that will be built on.

Do they have aspirations for more integration with social media? Yes, they do. And it's something they're looking at as the system develops. The key part of the development which is invisible to us right now is that the Guardian Witness system is deeply integrated with the Guardian's CMS. Once the content has passed through verification, it's available to the journalists, and they can insert it into a story or liveblog just by inserting an URL, which creates an embedded version of the contribution that links back to the contributor's profile.

"The really exciting thing is not what you see now, but what you see when Witness is included in a story," she says. It's a tool to facilitate genuine collaborative working between the journalist and external witnesses. Jo says they'll collaborate with people on the ground, or with expert knowledge, in any way they can - and already do, via phone and other traditional methods. This adds another tool for doing that....

... Since I began covering journalist arrests and press suppression in real-time via social media I have developed a healthy obsession with verification. As the tools we use to report online continue to shift, we need verification to keep up.

A great example of this is how Instagram filters or Vine jump-clips might hinder efforts to verify images and video from breaking news. Below is my directory of links and resources for verifying social media content – it is a work in progress. I have been collecting these links for awhile, but a recent study profiled over at Poynter inspired me to post my list here.

The study showed little consistency in how journalists approach assessing the accuracy of social media content. The links below are presented in no particular order, but are organized into three categories: How-To Guides, Case-Studies, Discussions and Studies. A note on scope: The resources below are specifically and purposefully limited to verifying social media and user generated content. General reporting accuracy is not covered in depth here....