Great stuff J.D. I highly rec­om­mend check­ing out BeatBlogging.org. I used to be involved in it — but haven’t been for almost a year now. But the whole con­cept of it is see­ing how we can use social media tools not just to social­ize — but to improve beat report­ing. There are some GREAT exam­ples in it over the past year.

I work at a Toronto paper called the Globe and Mail, where I’m the online com­mu­ni­ties edi­tor, and we’ve been using Twit­ter a lot to con­nect with read­ers, as well as some other tools — includ­ing a great live-blogging app called Cover It Live, which we’ve used for the fed­eral bud­get, the Obama inau­gu­ra­tion and a recent sub­way shoot­ing in Toronto. We’ve also been exper­i­ment­ing with a wiki called the Pub­lic Pol­icy Wiki (http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com). Happy to talk about any of that in more detail.

JD — nice project. Good luck.

In Phoenix, the good kids at Val­leyPRblog (http://www.valleyprblog.com) have writ­ten about journos and their twit­ter con­nec­tions — worth a read for var­i­ous view­points — Post is here: http://www.valleyprblog.com/pitching/pitching-on-...

Also, they’ve posted up a PHX journos-on-Twitter list here:
http://www.valleyprblog.com/resources/phoenix-med...

Hope that helps!

David, thanks, I’ve been a fan of BeatBlogging.org for a long time so will go back and take a look. Matthew and Dave, thanks for your sug­ges­tions as well.

JD — I like this project a lot! I am doing a work­shop this week­end at the Nevada Inter­ac­tive Media con­fer­ence in Reno on social media apps and atti­tudes for jour­nal­ists. Tell you what — I will share my pre­sen­ta­tion mate­ri­als with you and then send the atten­dees over here to com­ment after­wards, OK?
yours in the vast col­lab­o­ra­tive Interwebs

I think plan­ning for future tools belongs on this list: iden­ti­fy­ing events and loca­tions in your sto­ries so that many feeds can pick them up; best prac­tices for acces­si­bil­ity that pay off in unex­pected ways.

My com­pany, The Loop 21, is doing a lot of things that you’re won­der­ing about. We’re not backed by any big media, we’re a grass­roots company.

I’m the web edi­tor and com­ing from tra­di­tional media (I used to work with McClatchy) it’s refresh­ing to be at a very inno­v­a­tive envi­ron­ment. We do a lot of data visu­al­iza­tion and we have a face­book
page and twit­ter. We’re using face­book to pro­vide a per­sonal look at what we’re doing every day. I also talk to read­ers through Twit­ter. We’re start­ing to throw extra pho­tos on flickr, the pho­tos from events
that we don’t use on the site, as well as insights as to who is run­ning the site.

We do news and com­men­tary, but we have a user gen­er­ated sec­tion of the site that is doing quite well. It’s called Speak Out.

In terms of social media, I pro­mote like I do as a blog­ger: stum­ble, fae­book links, red­dit, yahoo buzz ‚etc. SU and red­dit have worked pretty well for us, but Face­book in par­tic­u­lar is work­ing. We use our indi­vid­ual accounts to pro­mote our sto­ries and events, in addi­tion to the fan page we have.

We’re work­ing with Covenant of Black Amer­ica and oth­ers to pro­vide con­tent. We do a lot of con­tent shar­ing, which helps other small news orgs like us.

I think we’re strug­gling like a lot of media, but I think our atti­tude to try­ing new open source appli­ca­tions is serv­ing us really well. Per­son­ally, I think new media has saved my career after get­ting laid off last year. My skills as a web pro­ducer kept me in a job. I use Twit­ter a lot to talk to other pro­duc­ers and I’m now a mem­ber of ONA. I want to keep learn­ing from oth­ers. I’m pretty much self taught, so every day is a class­room for me.

We were hav­ing prob­lems with the com­ments on this post all day yes­ter­day but it appears that they’ve been solved. Just fyi.

At the Guardian, we’re using social media in a num­ber of ways. Just yes­ter­day, Matt Weaver on our news desk high­lighted the tweets from mem­bers of Con­gress dur­ing and imme­di­ately after British Prime Min­is­ter Gor­don Brown’s address: http://bit.ly/hHBTB

All he had to do is favourite the tweets he thought were inter­est­ing, and they auto­mat­i­cally dis­played on the page. Jemima Kiss, our dig­i­tal con­tent reporter, and Charles Arthur, Bob­bie John­son and Jack Schofield on our tech­nol­ogy team, all twit­ter, using it to pro­mote their own con­tent, flag up inter­est­ing sto­ries to their fol­low­ers and even do twit­ter interviews.

Build­ing on real-time report­ing and aggre­ga­tion that I did dur­ing the US elec­tions using Twit­ter, includ­ing using Twit­pic and Twit­ter to report from the cel­e­bra­tions in Wash­ing­ton on elec­tion night, we now have a fea­ture called Tweet the Peo­ple: http://bit.ly/e4wPr We ask daily ques­tions of our read­ers in the US on our US pol­i­tics blog, Dead­line USA, and also in Twitter.

Our Travel team has started a fea­ture called Twit­trip, where they take travel tips from their Twit­ter fol­low­ers in real-time. Benji Lanyado came up with the idea, and we set him up with the excel­lent Twib­ble Twit­ter client for his phone so he could tweet and upload pics to Twit­pic right off his phone. http://bit.ly/E9nCW

As for Flickr, I used it dur­ing a trip across the US. I used Cre­ative Com­mons licenced pho­tos, but I also posted my pho­tos under Cre­ative Com­mons. It also allowed me to geo-tag the pho­tos and auto­mat­i­cally include loca­tion infor­ma­tion on Flickr. http://bit.ly/QHWzp We also had a very suc­cess­ful Flickr project called Mes­sage to Obama, headed up by our head of com­mu­ni­ties, Meg Pickard. http://bit.ly/14e416 We also used an on demand print­ing ser­vice to make a book out of the contributions.

We also did quite a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment using the video con­ver­sa­tion ser­vice Seesmic to elicit com­ments about the US elec­tions ahead of the New Hamp­shire pri­maries: http://bit.ly/67phZ

That’s just a smat­ter­ing of what we’re doing, but it gives a flavour of some of the ways that we’re part­ner­ing with Guardian readers.

Hey JD, jour­nal­ists are increas­ingly using Twit­ter for new­stips. Here is a story I just posted after read­ing Jimmy Wales Tweet on the sub­ject: http://www.siliconbeat.com/2009/03/05/jason-calac...

Char­lot­teAnne, look­ing for­ward to see­ing the out­put of this. Thanks for sharing!

I’m now pub­lish­ing a com­mu­nity hyper­local in Lake­land, Florida. At LakelandLocal.com we have six pri­mary con­trib­u­tors. Three with news­pa­per expe­ri­ence — though we’re all now in other fields. We’ve also started MetroI4News to cover the I4 cor­ri­dor, but it is a bit new.…

To answer your #journ­chat questions:

(1) We send every arti­cle link out through Twit­ter. I’ve cov­ered a cou­ple events live where read­ers sent questions/concerns through Twitter.

(2) From March 2007 to July 2008, I cre­ated a weekly crime map for Lake­land. I used CommunityWalk.com as it was eas­ier to batch load the data.

I now cre­ate weekly and monthly maps of the hous­ing mar­ket using the same tool.

(3) We pub­lish our Lake­land Min­utes (60 sec­onds of unedited video from var­i­ous Lake­land loca­tions and events) using YouTube and Ustream.

(4) We also use Flickr photo gal­leries to fea­ture the work of our pho­tog­ra­pher, and host the major­ity of our pho­tos on Flickr

(5) I use a Twit­ter account to pub­lish short news reports and notices. I place it on the site with a short piece of code.

(6) We’ve always pub­lished our work using a Cre­ative Com­mons copyright.

(7) I mod #journ2journ and I’m start­ing #all­new­sis­lo­cal for community/citizen jour­nal­ists (hyper­local, blog­gers, etc. What­ever your favorite term…)

Busi­ness­Week is into Twit­ter in a big way (with more to come soon!), with jour­nal­ists, edi­tors and business-side peo­ple like me using Twit­ter exten­sively. Most recently, we’re get­ting the word out and inter­act­ing with the users of BusinessWeek’s social media busi­ness info shar­ing plat­form, Busi­ness Exchange (http://bx.businesweek.com) using Twit­ter (@bwbx).

Here’s a link to a blog post by the EIC of the BusinessWeek.com Web site, John A. Byrne that has more details and lots of links. ‘The Twit­ter­ing Gang at Busi­ness­Week’ http://is.gd/bnNs

JD, here is a link to the slideshare where I posted my pre­sen­ta­tion on Social Media for Jour­nal­ists at the Nevada Inter­ac­tive Media Sum­mit at UNR on March 7.
http://www.slideshare.net/CharlotteAnne/social-me...
There’s no audio on the slideshow, but every page where there is an exam­ple has a link out to the news organization’s site.
I hope this is help­ful and will send a bit more later …
yours,
C-A

I see that graph­icde­signr was track­ing 1,360 U.S. news­pa­per Twit­ter accounts in Feb­ru­ary before giv­ing up the project.

I’m be inter­ested to know the following

1) how many news orga­ni­za­tions use mul­ti­me­dia from oth­ers, either sound or video to enhance a story

2) whether jour­nal­ists really use social media for story ideas or it is still a press kit dom­i­nated world pushed by PR peo­ple to jour­nal­ists I cited this recent study by Cision on jour­nal­ist sources

[…] • I began explor­ing this topic in depth with my post How to use social media in the news­room. If you’d like to add addi­tional exam­ples of how news­pa­pers, TV and radio sta­tions or […]

[…] the past few weeks I’ve begun ply­ing the waters to see who’s begun to take advan­tage of the new social tools now avail­able to all of us, in […]