Newsbrief

Do you have separate Twitter identities for your personal and professional activities?  If you have just one Twitter ID, roughly what proportion of your tweets each day are related to your beat, and what proportion are personal/fun/quirky? 

My account is @craigsilverman. I decided to maintain one account for myself and for my various activities. (As its own company, OpenFile obviously needs to have a variety of its own accounts.) As a longtime freelance journalist, I’m acutely aware of the need for personal branding. So I wanted to make my main Twitter presence something that’s linked to me as a person and journalist, rather than something connected to an entity. Projects and gigs come and go, but I’m constant. 

I would say 80 to 90 percent of my tweets are directly related to my work in journalism. I link to our stories on PBS MediaShift and MediaShift Idea Lab, our work on OpenFile, content on RegretTheError, and I also do my best to share the great media reporting and journalism-related commentary and news I consume during the day. 

These days, my personal tweets often relate to the fact that my wife and I are expecting our first child. I also tweet about the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, local Montreal news, and have exchanges with friends and contacts. I’m conscious about not getting too personal too often; at the same time, I think it’s important to not be a soulless journalism reporting and commentary presence. The account is me, and that needs to be reflected in my tweets.

 

Does your news organization - or the outlet you write for most often - have a social media policy or any kind of formal guidelines about what you can and can’t do on Twitter? 

My two main gigs right now are PBS MediaShift and OpenFile and I’ve never been given any formal guidelines. (Same goes for CJR and the Toronto Star, where I write weekly columns.) At OpenFile, I help manage our social media presence, so I’d probably be the one to create a policy. At this point I’d say our unwritten social media policy is: be human, participate and add value, and don’t be stupid or offensive.

MuckRack is a great site and email newsletter that tracks what journalists are saying and covering on Twitter. They asked me some questions about how I use Twitter, and the ways in which we integrate it at OpenFile.

CJR columnist Craig Silverman wrote on Friday about a very persistent—and highly problematic—error that many major news organizations have made in their writing about the latest WikiLeaks release of U.S. State Department cables ...

In a new Columbia Journalism Review podcast, Silverman elaborates on which major outlets we’re still waiting for to make a correction, how they should go about it, and—most importantly—what this error can teach us about the importance of precision of language. Listen to the episode below, and be sure to check out the CJR podcast homepage on iTunes, where you can listen and subscribe for free.

Columbia Journalism Review recently launched a new weekly podcast, and I was invited to be the guest for yesterday's episode. I spoke about my most recent CJR column, which looked at a mistake media outlets keep making in their reporting about WikiLeaks. Hit the link above to give a listen.

2011: iPad, data et hyperlocal

Soumis par Anne Caroline Desplanques - jeudi, 30 décembre, 2010

Convergence, déontologie, éthique et Twitter ont été les mots marquants de notre couverture de l'actualité médiatique en 2010. Quels seront ceux qui marqueront la prochaine année? Pour le savoir, nous avons consulté la boule de cristal du journaliste et analyste médias Craig Silverman.

À l'emploi du PBS MediaShift et de Idea Lab, il est aussi derrière le réseau hyperlocal OpenFile qui s'installera à Montréal dans les prochains mois. Pour 2011, il mise notamment sur les termes iPad, journalisme de données et hyperlocal.

I was recently interviewed by ProjectJ.ca, a French-language website published by the Canadian Journalism Foundation. They asked me to offer some predictions for what 2011 will hold for journalism, and the above link shares what I came up with. Here's the Google Translate version.

In the book you talk about the example of Homer Bigart in challenging the authoritative version of events from the authorities in Vietnam. With that example comes a fundamental question: How do you determine authority? Or what are the new means of determining authority now, for both journalists and for the average person?

The conventional press has historically always been too reliant on authority, on taking peoples’ word for things just because they were officials, and being a conduit for those powerful voices. As the press evolved in the latter part of the twentieth century, becoming more investigative and more interpretative, it pushed against that somewhat. Technology undermined or inhibited that move by the 1980s, when cable began; that was a medium that ceded more power back to authorities because if you’re moving very quickly and you’re passing things along as quickly as can, you have less time to probe and investigate. Well, that’s accelerated now through digital technology. Everyone is now in the breaking news business and they have to actively push against that.

The ability to question, to be skeptical, now logically includes using the audience as a skeptical sounding board for the press. But it also means the audience themselves need to keep an open mind and not say, ‘Well I like this guy, I like President Obama, and therefore I believe him’ …

It’s incumbent on all of us to say, ‘Okay I like you—now show me the evidence behind what you are saying.”

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, I would hope that we all recognize that the people we like and the people we dislike in public life are capable of spin and shading the truth and exploiting statistics, and engaging in argument rather than explanation of things.

One thing you offered in the book was the origin of the phrase, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I thought it was one of these things people just repeated without ever knowing its source. But you folks identify the source as being a news organization in Chicago.

Yeah, the Chicago News Service, which was a place where a variety of prominent folks trained. One of the things that’s interesting is that kind of classic and very formalized apprenticeship system has broken down. CNS was, in the mid-twentieth-century, a place where kids could get entry level jobs and be taught by the iconic scary city news editor who would terrify them into learning the discipline of verification, not that anybody used such polysyllabic words to describe it …

I really enjoyed my recent conversation with Tom Rosenstiel, the co-author of Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload. We spoke about accuracy, filtering for truth, and the death of the traditional journalism apprenticeship, among other things.

We in the press talk a great game about correcting our errors, but in the end do a piss-poor job backing it up. (An academic study of corrections found that only two per cent of verified factual errors were corrected by newspapers. Perhaps piss-poor is too generous…)

Here are some of the notable findings of the MediaBugs survey:

• “We found that of the websites of 35 leading daily newspapers we examined, 25 provide no link to a corrections page or archive of current and past corrections on their websites’ home pages and article pages.”

• “Only about half, 17 of the 35, provide a corrections policy of any kind …”

• “Sixty percent of the newspaper sites (21 of 35) do provide an explicit channel (email, phone, or Web form) for the public to report an error to the newsroom.” The MediaBugs report noted that, “this information isn’t prominent or easy to find.”

• “MSNBC, CNBC and ESPN all provide more thorough corrections content. CNN has an email form for reporting errors, but no corrections page or policy.” As for Fox News? “We found no corrections content at all on its website.”

• “Our survey of the websites of a dozen leading news and culture magazines yielded mostly dismal results. Of the 12 websites examined, only one (Wired) provided a corrections link on its pages. None of the 12 provided a corrections policy.”

Combine that with the recent Columbia Journalism Review report that revealed magazines tend to ditch fact checking, embrace error scrubbing, and practice very light copy editing (if at all) when it comes to online content. (I previously summarized the report’s accuracy-related findings.)

The overall picture is a depressing one: news organizations at the local and national level are not putting thought, action, or commitment into online corrections or error reporting. The medium is advancing without one of the essential elements of journalism.

My latest column for Columbia Journalism Review looks at the latest data about the online correction practices of news organizations. The news is not good...

“We’re sorry for claiming Captain Kirk was in command of Captain Picard’s starship,” reads the headline on a rather remarkable apology issued this week by News.com.au, the Australian news portal owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Look just below the headline and you’re treated to a grainy image of the venerable Captain Jean Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise flipping the bird. (Unintentionally, mind you). Yes, there’s something special about this apology. It also includes a shout-out to a commenter named Your Mum’s Lunch, the admission “that Patrick Stewart is a handsome man,” and the sincere expression that “Any damage to the Star Trek brand incurred by the use of the term ‘hyperspace’ is regretful.”

Read the link above to enjoy my Q&A with the author of the apology

“I think we felt like we have a policy, we have a corrections czar, we know what we’re doing, and it’s all pretty transparent and therefore we’re in a different category,” Plotz said. “But in fact were making these same after-the-fact changes [as Politico] that were invisible to readers, which were effectively corrections.”

That's a quote from Slate editor David Plotz. I interviewed him for my latest Columbia Journalism Review, which looks at how and why they updated their corrections policy. (Hint: it was because of this.)

GRAHAM MASON, the journalist who has died aged 59, was in the 1980s the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses, the pub in Soho where, in the half century after the Second World War, a tragicomedy was played out nightly by its regulars.

And that, ladies and gents, is how you start a goddamn obit.