Urban fantasy writer, journalism student, geek, political junky.
Media
This category includes rants about bad journalism, stuff about my journalism classes, the posts about the Media in general, social media, and other related topics.
I keep checking in on RebelMouse. It’s a cool service with a nifty idea behind it, and I want it to be awesome, but it’s still in the wobbly beta stages.
Basically, RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social and digital media accounts. You sign up with RebelMouse, connect all your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, etc), add any blog feeds you want to add, like your personal blog(s) or Tumblr accounts, and get out of the way. RebelMouse imports your public updates and posts them to your RebelMouse front page, as long as they include photos or video. Otherwise it tucks them in a drafts folder for you to approve manually. The end result is a mobile-optimized, card-style front page with all your social and digital media updates neatly arranged in (theoretically) chronological order. Read more >>
“What if news organizations confronted the reality that nearly all media will be ‘social media’ a decade hence? …What if news organizations acknowledged this — or even got out in front of it, ahead of the curve this time — and organized themselves as platforms for talent?”
The article is basically a teaser for Nicco Mele’s book, which came out April 23. I’ll be snagging the book when I get paid this week, I think.
The article tackles a subject that a lot of people in media have been talking about for awhile now: What’s all this Internet stuff mean for journalism?
I think in the future, newspaper websites are going to look a lot more like Gawker Media or HuffPo than the New York Times, and your reporter’s Twitter and Facebook followings are going to be a lot more important that the following of your branded accounts. In fact, I think newspapers would be doing themselves a service by trading their Facebook and Google+ brand pages in for Facebook groups, Facebook subscription lists of their reporters, public Google+ circles of their reporters, and Google+ communities. A branded Twitter account is still useful for firing out links to your articles and breaking news, but no branded Twitter account should be without a public list of that paper’s journalists for other tweeps to follow.
And now that I’ve mentioned that, I think I’ve got a project to tackle for the Commuter this summer.
I’ve got a couple of interesting journalism articles, a cute dog cartoon, an awesome Doctor Who photo, some tech news, and a few other bits and pieces here. Read more >>
MarketWatch.com: “The Associated Press says its Twitter account has been hacked, as the Twitter feed falsely said that there had been two explosions at the White House.”
The (at)AP twitter account has been hacked. A tweet about an attack at the White House is false. We will advise on acct. status.
Police captured a 19-year-old ethnic Chechen suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings with his older brother after an intense day-long manhunt on Friday that closed down the city and turned a working-class suburb into a virtual armed camp.
One of the more interesting things today was watching Reddit liveblog the entire Boston manhunt, from start to finish. They followed and updated the story from the first moments, late last night, right through to the end. It was phenomenal.
As far as I can tell, their main source of information were the livestreamed Boston police scanners online – of which there were several, varying from a guy who put his old-fashioned Bearcat scanner up on uStream to several sites that scraped the police frequencies and broadcast them as live audio.
Redditors glued themselves to the scanners and transcribed minute-by-minute updates, crowd-sourcing fact checks, aggregating mainstream media updates, and adding photos and information from folks in Boston. You’d be stupid not to wonder if this is the new face of journalism. It’s also worth pointing out that Reddit’s updates were among the most accurate, and surely blew CNN’s sad excuse for reporting out of the water.
Of course, nothing exists on Reddit unless there have been memes about it. Here’s a handful of some of the funnier Boston-related memes filling up the front page at the moment.
Boston was under lockdown during the manhunt. Everyone got off the streets to aid the police in locating the suspects. Some of the creepiest and most powerful visuals were of the empty streets of Boston.
Note: I don’t own any of the images, and I can’t verify their sources. If it’s yours, and you want credit, or don’t want it used, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to fix the issue.
I keep checking in on RebelMouse. It’s a cool service with a nifty idea behind it, and I want it to be awesome, but it’s still in the wobbly beta stages.