How to make your live tweeting of an event indispensible for readers

Using Twitter to provide live coverage from an event is so popular largely because it’s so simple. You don’t even need a web-enabled phone to do it, so long as the phone you’re texting from is connected to your Twitter account.

However, that means you have a rather one-way conversation – you’re broadcasting, in a way the media always has. But simply using the an app or mobile internet to access Twitter to live tweet from an event doesn’t guarantee a two-way conversation.

Often, newsrooms encourage reporters to live tweet from an event because it’s a simply and effective way to get the updates back into a liveblog powered by the likes of Coveritlive and Scribblelive, or one of the increasingly common purpose-built live-blogging solutions publishers have.

That’s fine as far as it goes – but it’s still missing a trick. We can report live, or we can go a step further and make the audience part of the event we’re covering. As a rule, we can’t feed back what they’re saying to the event – if it’s council meeting, football match, court case and so on – but we can make our coverage the centre of a discussion.

The best way to describe what I’m talking about is to show a great example I followed last week. In Greater Manchester, the local NHS is putting itself through yet another wave of reform, under the banner Healthier Together. Type the phrase into Google and you’ll see similar things going on across the country.

Using Storify as your one-stop social network search engine – and 12 tips on how to do it

Hmmm. Social networks. So much information, but in so many places. For journalists, this is both blessing and curse.

Social network search engines vary in terms of reliability and depth of coverage – especially where keeping an eye on Facebook is factored in.

Until now.

Storify wasn’t built – as far as I’m aware – as a social network search engine, but that’s exactly what it requires to work.

Storify allows users to build stories around things which have been posted on social media. As far as I can tell, it’s designed to curate after the event, but I also think it has legs as a live-blogging tool, but more on that another time.

And for journalists covering a breaking news event, Storify could be the thing you’ve been waiting for – even if you don’t plan to create a Storify. Here are 12 tips for getting the most out of it.

Here’s a picture which speaks just one word – but shows the value of social media search

If a picture can speak a thousands words, then I reckon the first one this picture on the front page of the Manchester Evening News would say is ‘ouch.’

A still from a video posted on YouTube, it shows the moment a suspected thief is hit by a car as he fled from a local Asda.

The MEN carried the story in the following spread (click the image to see an enlarged version):

This story proves two things to me:

1. Stories involving user generated content (which essentially this is) work much better when you don’t make a fuss about how it surfaced. The story is the content, not the fact it’s on Youtube.

2. YouTube stories aren’t old hat – just stories which make a fuss about the fact it was on YouTube (which this doesn’t). That makes YouTube a must-check source for journalists. Two ways of doing this: Either search Youtube every day for the keywords you’d look for, or set up RSS searches like this:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/oldham.rss

Where word Oldham is, replace this for your search term. If you have more than one search term, put a + between the two words. So if you only wanted video involving Oldham and Rochdale, you’d go:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/oldham+rochdale.rss

Of course, this relies on the person uploading actually using the words Oldham or Rochdale in their uploads.

You can create your own personal newswire using Google Reader – click here for a guide - although Reader is increasingly flaky. My favourite alternative, which wipes the floor with Reader, is Spundge – a guide on how to use that is here.
(I’ve added these pages to a collection of great newspaper pages on Pinterest – click here)

Spundge, a tool all journalists should try – and 10 ways to use it

I don’t think – generally – journalists make enough of RSS feeds. RSS readers should be used by every journalist to create their own personal newswire, pulling in information from all over the web based on search words or specific feeds from sites you really should stay on top of, but invariably forget about.

But here’s a surreal problem: Google News RSS feeds invariably don’t work anymore in Google Reader. Which is a bit of a problem – as any personal newswire worth its salt needs to be pulling in from the best news search tool around.

And then there’s social media. You could build Tweetdeck up to search Twitter and other networks, but Facebook search is notoriously flaky, and wouldn’t it just be better to be able to view all your searches in one place?

Today I discovered Spundge. Which does all of that.

Big weather stories: 16 digital tips and tools for when the rain falls/floods rise/gales blast/snow hits

So it rained at my house yesterday. And rained. And rained. And so I found myself back at our house (we were due to be away for the weekend) helping make sure our little village didn’t flood, which, thankfully, it didn’t (just).

It’s at times like this that the local news organisation can re-establish its importance (if it had lost readers over the year) or establish its use (in the case of newer, hyperlocal sites) to the community it serves.

This is designed to be a guide to making sure you get as much as you can out of the digital tools out there to put yourself at the heart of any weather-related story. It’s broken into two parts: Finding information, and presenting information. If you have any additional tools or ideas, please add the in the comments box.

Six of the best Twitter tools for regional journalists

I don’t buy the idea that you can save your job as a reporter by saying you are on Twitter. I do, however, believe that Twitter is a fantastic tool for connecting with people and getting stories – but it’s a mammoth job if you don’t make use of some of the third-party tools out there which can do some of the work for you.

Here, I’ve created a list of six tools all regional journalists should at least play with. All have been chosen because I got them to work on quite small town areas – Chorley in Lancashire this time – rather than only in bigger cities, or around popular hashtags, as many tools do.

If you have any others, please add them at the bottom…

Top 10 most read journalism posts of 2011 on this blog

When I first started this blog, I was determined that it wouldn’t just be my opinion on stuff, or rants about stuff, either. I’m not sure how well I’ve done in achieving that aim – but going through the most read posts of 2011 (I’ve done a separate list of FOI posts here):

1. Is this the most jaw-dropping CCTV still ever?

Do you remember the days when a police call which involved a promise of CCTV was pretty much always guaranteed to end up with a long battle with technology or a trip to the cop shop to pick up a grainy image which had more in common with Magic Eye pictures than it did with 20:20 sharp focus?

Friday’s first edition front page of the Manchester Evening News carries what I think is probably the most striking, and shocking CCTV still I’ve ever seen on a newspaper.

2. 10 Social Network search engines for journalists

Google Realtime, the search engine which was intended to integrate social network updates into Google, has been suspended, the company announced at the weekend.

Whether it returns at all remains to be seen – in my opinion, it’s the sort of tool Google can’t afford to be without.

It was a very useful tool for journalists too, especially as the ‘say what you see’ culture on Twitter exploded, providing excellent first-hand accounts and sources for reporters, especially local ones.

But there are plenty of other social network search engines worth checking out. Here are 10 of the best.

3. Council spending data: 10 tips for journalists looking for stories

Today marks the deadline for councils to start publishing details of all spending over £500. Local government minister Eric Pickles says he expects all councils to be as open as possible. Some, such as Liverpool, have admitted they’ll miss that deadline, and final details of exactly how all councils should produce the information has yet to be issued.

So how should journalists deal with the data? Here are ten points which I hope might help…