What do you do when you're about to hit your stride in your career--and you realize your bosses hate what they're doing? Last week I heard from two groups of people committed to making a change in the way journalism works. Thanks to their efforts, theSkimm has become a ubiquitous way for Millennial women to start their days and City Bureau is now a civic journalism lab putting the tools of journalism in the hands of those whose stories are frequently silenced. As one of the panelists talking about City Bureau said, success is just not quitting. And it seems like these news organizations are definitely on the pathway to success. theSkimmCarly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg remember the day they quit their dream jobs. They were 25-year-old news junkies who had worked their way up through internships when they realized that their bosses were quitting their jobs (if not losing them) out of disenchantment with the industry. If that's what they were supposed to be striving toward, they wanted none of it. So on July 18, 2011--the "scariest day of our lives"--Zakin and Weisberg left NBC News and used the $3,000 in combined savings and the credit card debt they would accumulate together to launch a new way of delivering news to women their age. Through daily emails full of information written like your best friend would tell you, the pair built a community of Skimm'bassadors and loyal readers. Now, just over five years later, they have used the Skimm to create a campaign registering more than 108,000 new voters, have raised more than $16 million in fundraising, and premiered a second product (Skimm Ahead, to complement the events often featured in the daily email). Lessons learned:
City BureauRather than taking the news and putting it in other people's hands like theSkimm, City Bureau has led the Chicago community journalism scene with the mission of putting the news back in the community from sourcing to social media.
It's a fledging organization working hand in hand with South Side Weekly, originally a student publication out of the University of Chicago now converted into a nonprofit highlighting the wins and woes of the lesser-known half of the city, and the Invisible Institute, a "journalistic production company" spearheaded by housing and police reporter Jamie Kalven. City Bureau holds trainings for citizens about everything from Freedom of Information Act requests to recording at public meetings and pays stipends to writers of all levels through its reporting program. But mere months ago, the journalists behind it were frustrated with the way traditional media covered all spaces of the city. They--Darryl Holliday of DNAInfo and the Chicago Sun-Times, Harry Backlund of the South Side Weekly, Andrea Hart from nonprofits helping high school journalists, and Bettina Chang, editor at Chicago magazine--wanted to bring the tools of investigation and journalistic action to residents of the city's South and West Sides. These have culminated in a weekly Public Newsroom, reporter trainings and stipends, and a wide network of support. But City Bureau's work has only just begun. Lessons learned:
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After an election cycle largely defined by Twitter moments, it's hard to imagine where campaigns on social media could go from here.
In a paper from a 2013 fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Twitter's major role in this year's race was only hypothetical. Former CNN reporter and now head of news for Snapchat Peter Hamby delved into the way that intra-campaign conversations on Twitter shaped the communications of the 2012 presidential race. He believed that the value of being a "boy on the bus," or a traditional presidential campaign reporter following the candidate's daily happenings by traveling with the campaign, was steadily decreasing in favor of the easy-to-follow buzz generated by Twitter. In fact, Hamby argued that "Twitter is the central news source for the Washington-based political news establishment." But what particularly stood out to me was this tidbit toward the end: But according to {NBC News Political Director] Chuck Todd, it's all but certain that some candidates in 2016 will find a way to harness the social media beast and run with it.
Welp.
Let's take a quick peek at a "hypothetical" candidate, shall we?
Which makes you wonder - what comes next? (After draining the swamp, apparently.)
Will Twitter, despite its recent troubles, still be the leader for live postings and campaign news in 2020? Or will the next big thing be a newcomer like Hamby's Snapchat, virtual reality along the campaign through Facebook, or a nascent technology that hasn't even emerged yet? Maybe it will be Tinder for candidates, but with Snapchat's stickers and filters. Any candidate running for a top office from now on has to have a mastery of some form of social media, and it'll have to be organic. Watching Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her core followers of female Baby Boomers try to figure out how to Tweet and Snap has been painfully awkward. You can't ask people to make memes for you - that's like Jeb Bush asking people to clap, and no one wants to go down that road again. In the homestretch of the 2016 election, the number of ways you can get news is growing almost as quickly as Donald Trump’s tweets. But the newest kids on the block are chatbots, software that can help users order from Taco Bell, set up an appointment on your calendar, or get daily updates about the presidential election polls broken down by state. Many are housed within Facebook’s standalone Messenger app and website already. This helps news organizations and brands alike reach readers and consumers like you in places where you already spend your time. Just in time for Election Day, news organizations are using these chatbots to share not just articles and videos with their audience – content produced by traditional media – but also snippets of information itself. Branching out but staying in In April, the New York Times Magazine’s technology reporter examined Facebook’s foray into chatbots and how that aligns with its mission. “These bots will simply help Facebook and others rope users in as long as possible, like fishermen trawling the open seas with gaping nets,” Jenna Wortham wrote. “Everything from Facebook Live, its new real-time streaming product, to Internet.org, the nonprofit it oversees that seeks to provide Internet access to the developing world, has been accused of harboring the same goal: keeping users on Facebook’s turf.” Now, the New York Times’s politics section has launched a chatbot of its own, considered an elections news service. Every morning the bot contacts the user through Facebook’s Messenger app or website with information about the forecast of the 2016 presidential election outcome. It’s delivered in a precise-looking graph of a plotted line for each candidate showing the changes in the data by month. It doesn’t provide information to substantiate that graph right away, however. But the bot gives you three options to click on from there: “What's new?”, “About our forecast”, and “Thanks.” Selecting “About our forecast” will have the chatbot send a few sentences of context and a link, bringing users back to the Times’s website. This particular bot is patient and limited with what the user can get from it at a time. Each evening, bot subscribers receive a message from the Times’s political correspondent with information about the important issue of the day for the campaigns. It’s evident that the bot designers prioritize the type of news shared rather than a high frequency of information. A future with chatbots The New York Times is not the only news organization experimenting with bots. Newer and nimbler outlets such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice have already been developing their own bots, and the Washington Post also has a bot in the works. “It won’t maintain your calendar or help you with tracking packages or things like that. It’s got to do what people would expect the Washington Post to do for them,” said the Post’s director of product Joey Marburger. As chatbots become the latest part of the news arsenal, national and local news organizations alike are trying to find out how to use them to their advantage. The Columbia Journalism Review even published a guide to chatbots to help publishers embrace the change and the new possibilities that come with it. “In developing editorial strategies for some of these wide-ranging messaging platforms, news organizations are not just helping to future-proof themselves,” the guide states. “They are also venturing into online spaces that could enable them to reach hundreds of millions of (often young) people with whom they have never engaged before.” And that's definitely something to chat about.
Sure, you can go to a debate watch party. But what better watch party than the ones happening on your social media channels, with gifs and filters galore?
Here's a breakdown of how Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat allowed users to cover the last debate of the 2016 presidential election.
To see play-by-play reactions of professional journalists and commentators, it was easy to watch essentially a livestream of remarks on my Twitter feed. Twitter had partnered with Buzzfeed to provide a broadcast of the debate itself, and for past debates and even the convention I had watched the video there. But I was more interested in seeing individuals' reactions rather than a full video of the debate last night.
However, it was difficult to find Tweets that were a) from people that I didn't already follow and b) that were actually substantial. My Twitter homepage had buzzy remarks and instant quote replays from the journalists I follow, and the #debatenight hashtag took me to either a feed of second connections on Twitter (Tweets from people who are followed by people I follow) or a general "Top Tweets" feed of literally anyone. It wasn't the most satisfying experience - though I did get to see this gem from Merriam-Webster.
Some of my Facebook friends were posting instant reactions to what was said, but because of Facebook's algorithm, that made it clunky to follow along on an instantaneous basis. The app had an alert for the debate but it was still set as an announcement more than a half hour after the event had started.
There were gobs of livestreams from news organizations throughout my News Feed. Some were more creative than others: CNN International had a livestream of a group in Japan watching the debate for a different perspective, and Stephen Colbert's Late Show arranged for a quartet to accompany the debate on their own Facebook Live video. Both of those I found thanks to my own Facebook friends sharing them. But I also wanted to see what people were saying and thinking beyond my own bubble. Because I was using the app on my phone, I couldn't see the Trending News bar that shows up on your Facebook when using a laptop. This morning, the Trending News algorithm told me that "US Presidential Debate" was buzzing with 25,000 people - though it wasn't the trendiest news topic. If you clicked on it, you would see a fact-checking article from AOL (who knew AOL was trending anymore?) followed by livestreams from the night before and "Top Posts" from the Washington Post, CNN International, and Donald Trump's channel himself. It seemed as though Facebook wanted the news organizations to provide the live content rather than aggregating it itself, like Twitter was trying to do. This kept many of us in our bubbles - unless you sought out livestreams to watch and commented to interact with different people, like this user below. Snapchat
Snapchat was quiet last night, but the real treasure trove came after the debate.
Some of the people and organizations I follow on Snapchat were posting on their stories about the debate. Most of the individuals just used the filters to enhance Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's voices (when you hear the same stump lines again and again, it's more entertaining to hear them at a higher pitch). But then this morning I watched the curated Campus Watch Party and the US Presidential Debate Stories. This was as close as I'd get, it seemed, to finding different takes on the debate beyond the people I already follow. These stories allowed me to see people's reactions from Brigham Young University to Rutgers on the Campus Watch Party story. The main story took viewers behind the scenes at the debate with cameos from Snapchat's Head of News Peter Hamby, house DJ Steve Aoki, former NFL player Emmett Smith, reporters from CNN and the Hill (among others), and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who gained entry to the debate hall.
The main debate story also included footage from the event itself with comment cards on the screen fact-checking the candidates' claims by Politifact. For people who didn't have the interest or time to watch the debate or their social media feeds yesterday when it was actually happening, this provided a recap of the moments people talked about and a review of the facts discussed as well. Plus, though the Campus Watch Party story showed many Snapchatters aghast at Donald Trump's "bigly" language, it also included Hillary Clinton toilet paper.
It's easy to forget that there are real people on both sides of this election that aren't Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Social media can bring us together but also drive us apart, and these Snapchat stories can help viewers connect with people on all sides of the spectrum. I just wish I didn't have to go hunting it for during the debate. Do you remember the day your first article was ever published?
As Facebook so kindly reminded me, that day was today for me exactly three years ago. "First collegiate byline! Looking forward to many more to come :)" I enthusiastically posted on my Facebook profile, sharing the link to my story. It wasn't a ground-breaking post—just an event brief about a local celebrity—but it was still mine. Since then, I've had bylines published in countless publications as a staff writer, editor, intern, and freelancer. Each article added to my experience as both a writer and a reader and encouraged me to find a way to meet in the middle. From the journalist side, I pursue the truth and deliver it to my audiences in the best way possible to reach them. On the reader end, I've devoured the news that made me feel engaged with the information. Through the symbiotic relationship, that information moves from being my byline to being our shared public knowledge to understand and care about. And that brings me to today. In this resource, I plan to explore the questions that we all, media and non-media alike, have about the future of news and our audiences and what that means for the jobs we have and the responsibilities we bear. Think about it: where will the journalism world be in the next three years? What does the way that news is reported and shared mean for democracy and government? How can people know what sort of news and publications to trust? How will we communicate with our audiences going forward, with many members of the younger generations knowing more about Instagram Stories than the name of their hometown newspaper? Who's responsible for ensuring that the information people need and the ways they like to get it meet in the middle? We, the Media. |
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