this and that

Odds, ends and linx:

First, go here for information about Santa Clara University's high school journalism competition. Now edging into its third year.

Go here for the latest Pew Center report on American's increasing hunger for the news -- and how they get.

Finally, go here for a rumination on whether writing for Facebook may someday be a staple of the college curriculum. Silly? Or not so much...

Facebook Journalism

Mashable has a great post today on using Facebook as a reporting tool, something capstone kids discovered a couple years back. Go here for some practical tips from Leah Betancourt on finding story ideas, finding sources, and testing out questions.

You'll also find food for thought on two crucials: ethics and verification. bk

out of the loop

Are journalists being left out of the loop when it comes to PR? That's what Claire Cain Miller suggests in a cover story in Sunday's New York Times business section. Thanks to social media, publicists and pr folks are bypassing reporters altogether, using facebook, twitter and influential blogs to get the word out -- and letting reporters come to them.

Probably a good thing for journalism: leaves the shrinking real estate in newspapers and on newsites -- and the work of their shrinking staffs -- for real news.

On the other hand, as publicity becomes a DIY project, at least for start-ups, does it mean a whole new sector of communication grads will be destined for pink slips? Or a whole new job description that includes words like tweet, friend and digg?

From the story:

In response to dissatisfied clients and huge shifts in the media landscape, a new breed of publicist is emerging, says Brian D. Solis, a P.R. guy who writes a blog called PR 2.0. His firm, FutureWorks, has a broad definition of “writer,” a category that includes those in mainstream media as well as the tens of thousands of bloggers and Twitter users who have developed avid followings by writing about niche topics.

“Mommy bloggers are the new TechCrunch; they’re such an influential crowd,” Mr. Solis says.

Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, Mr. Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.

into the sandbox

Leslie forwards this post from Mashable on "10 ways journalism schools are teaching social media."

Some good ideas for using the tools such as facebook and its clones and twitter to enhance journalism, such as real time reporting, crowdsourcing, and even e-interviewing. Okay, a phone or face-to-face interview is still better. But...

The idea is that, rather than ends in themselves (or, ahem, time sponges), social media can be useful tools. We just have to play with them awhile to figure out their best use. At which point, they may become as transparent as computers themselves.

Reminds me of a story I did on Xerox Park many years ago on a visionary program that brought in artists to work with computer developers on state of the art technology. The geeks wrote the code. The artists played with the apps -- "we're like kids playing in the sandbox with all these toys," said one of the artists -- to help the developers think outside the box. built

Anyway. Check out the full list here. bk

remember adrienne?

She just sent me a link to a show she has been working on, which was reviewed in the NYT.

here's the link to the review.

here's the link to her show.

pardon the lapse. have been consumed with the jesusita fire. I'd link to some news, but the most current update I could get tonight was from reuters INDIA. meanwhile, gotta love that facebook. i guess... bk

more on the twittersphere

Gavin Newsom held a virtual press conference sans press today -- to announce his candidacy for governor of California simultaneously on twitter, facebook and youtube. Notably absent: reporters and/or pesky questions from the rabble.

From the piece on sfgate.com, the online version the SF Chron:

"No candidate has ever used all of these tools at once - and it had to happen with a candidate from the Bay Area. This is the capital of new media," said Newsom's political consultant Eric Jaye, who noted that San Francisco-based Twitter, Palo Alto-based Facebook and San Bruno-based YouTube, now a subsidiary of Google, are all located in the region.

Jaye said the mayor has amassed some 270,000 followers on Twitter - second only to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - as well as 40,000 on Facebook, 150,000 names on his campaign e-mail lists, and reaches thousands of others with his regular blogs on the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, two progressive Web sites.

Which Facebook Friend are YOU?

To add to the never-ending list of "Which (fill in the blank) are YOU?" -- quizzes that tally your likeness to anyone from Sofia on The Golden Girls to Samantha on SATC -- the SF Chron's Peter Hartlaub offers these stereotypes of the nine basic friends you find on Facebook -- and rates their annoyance factor.

Pretty hilarious. If you're on Facebook, you know them all (though none of them are YOU...)

From his piece:

"What I didn't expect was how much the online social networking community would be just like going back to 11th grade. There are fewer people wearing Depeche Mode T-shirts and more people sharing random things about themselves, and my locker combination has been replaced with a password. But the sting of rejection, the sanctimony of the popular kids, dressing up for picture day and even the random chatter in the hallways is pretty much exactly the same.

"Facebook, which started as a networking site for Harvard University students and is now based in Palo Alto, boasts 175 million active users. As of December, hundreds of thousands of new users were joining each day.

"Amazingly, it's possible to break them down into a handful of stereotypes. Here are nine of the most common friend types on Facebook. Each one has been assigned an annoyance factor, on a scale of 0 to 100. Please add your own categories to the SFGate.com version of this story."

life follows capstone

A lot of the discussion in last spring's capstone class revolved around Facebook, mainly because senior Natasha Lindstrom was reporting on the potential of widgets (or applications) to not only wreak havoc with your computer, but -- worst case scenario -- steal your identity. A few days after Natasha turned in her piece, all 4000 words of it, the LA Times broke a story on that very topic.

But we also talked in class -- well, they talked. I ranted -- about the way Facebook can deliver highly targeted audiences to advertisers based on what appears on users' profiles. And again, life follows capstone. In Thursday's Washington Post, staffer Rachel Beckman writes that every time she logged onto her home page, she was bombarded with diet ads.

"Maybe it's my age, my sex or the fact that it knew I was engaged," Beckman writes, "but the site decided I was a gal who needed to drop a few pounds. And it wasn't shy about its tactics."

The old Facebook fear was that prospective employers (not to mention university officials) would have far too much information about what a particular user did on a Saturday night. Now it appears you not only have to worry about losing your identity -- but admen telling you that identity just doesn't measure up.

Natasha, by the way, is currently doing good work as a reporter at the Victorville Daily Press.