Firstly hello and thanks for having me. I'm Laura Oliver, I'm the editor of Journalism.co.uk.

For
those of you who aren't familiar with us I just want to take a minute and your pre-coffee break
attention to tell you about what we do.

We're based in Brighton.

We specialise in news and information for the journalism industry. We report on news that affects
working journalists and news companies, offer extensive information on journalism training, events,
and organise our own informal conferences for journalists – news:rewired.

But enough about us. I'm here today to run through what I think are some of the best examples of
journalists, news providers and media groups using social media in their work.

Not wanting to repeat what we've heard from previous speakers, I thought it would be useful to start
with what, for me, are some of the key benefits of using social media as a journalist:

• social media can provide a new network(s) for newsgathering, distribution and promotion of
your work
• better customer service – that's to “the people formerly known as the audience”
• it's a chance for those customers to talk back
• and even maybe to make some money

For me social media provides another way to tell stories and talk to our audience. Things that
journalists and journalism have always done – but at a new multimedia speed. As you're here today
I think it's fair to assume that no one in the audience is burying their heads in the sand and ignoring
the opportunities that social media can provide. But I thought it would be useful to show the
significance of social media channels in more quantifiable terms.

So here's a map, courtesy of a guy in the US called Randall Munroe at xkcd.com – where each
“territory” represents the volume of daily social activity, based on data from the spring and summer
of this year. You have your obvious countries – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – but also large islands
of gaming communities and Skype.

Not only does this show the huge diversity of groups and platforms that fall under our catch-all term
“social media”, it also reminds us that these are distinct communities with their own cultures and
etiquettes. Much like countries, journalists need to understand how their citizens communicate
when they enter.

So for the rest of my time up here I'm going to whizz through some examples and case studies of
news organisations or journalists who I think have used social media particularly effectively. I'll
start with some examples where social media tools have been used to enhance what could be
viewed as traditional reporting or news telling techniques.

First up, it's live reporting. The idea of the liveblog is widely known and tools such as CoveritLive
and Scribbelive are commonly used by journalists and news organisations. You can't and shouldn't
liveblog every story, the same editorial sense that would apply to what priority and allocation of
resources a story should take in other media should still apply.

But there are some great recent examples of journalists who have used their liveblogging skills to
provide original reporting, whilst aggregating all the updates on that story from other sources and
feeding in updates, comments and multimedia from their readers and followers.
The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow did exactly this during his coverage of the UK's 2010 election
campaign. Sparrow wrote up to 14,000 words a day, providing minute-by-minute analysis, pulling
in links to interesting articles, quotes from politicians and experts and generating an average of
100,000 to 150,000 page views a day. Readers were hooked: on election night itself the liveblog
recorded 2 million page views.

QUOTE
I liveblog a lot and I believe the format – minute-by-minute updates, combining news, analysis and
links – allows journalists to report events with more thoroughness and immediacy than if they are
just writing stories (…) If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of
journalism. It’s not perfect, but it’s deeply rewarding – on any day, I was able to publish almost
every snippet that I thought worth sharing, which is not the case for anyone who has to squeeze
material into a newspaper – and it beats sitting on a battlebus.

Live blogging has its weaknesses. You don't have to be David Leigh to spot that if someone is
posting every 10 minutes, they are not going to uncover the next Watergate. But for a breaking story
– eg "bigotgate" – the format is ideal

Twitter of course can be a hugely important tool when it comes to live reporting – but it's just as
important to be aware of who else might be tweeting from an event as it is to provide your own
Twitter updates. Regional newspapers in the US in particular have used Twitter to live report from
court – which of course brings its own set of strengths and weaknesses, such as exclusive access but
also differing rules of legal jurisdictions – but one particular example, simply executed from the
UK is worth sharing.

The Manchester Evening News had been using Twitter and CoverItLive to cover a range of local
authority meetings in its catchment area. But in March, Trafford Council banned the paper from
using Twitter to cover a crucial planning meeting it had hoped to report on. So what did the MEN
do? It looked to its network and pulled in tweets from members of the public who were at the
meeting. They effectively broke the story live, which the MEN could then follow up. Simple and
effective, tuning into a network on a social media channel helped the MEN maintain its live
coverage despite the ban.

Moving on to crowdsourcing – again, not necessarily groundbreaking. It's a plea for information or
a call to send us your snaps by a news organisation. But there's a tendency by some journalists and
news organisations to see crowdsourcing online and via social media as a lazy way to get their
research done for them.

When you see the results from those who execute it well, you can see the potential that
crowdsourcing has to turn your website into something social, to hand over part of your content or
website to your readers.

Example number 1:
National Public Radio or NPR in North America.

NPR created its own website for the inauguration of now President Barack Obama, which, using a
system of geographic tags collated 30,000 Twitter updates, thousands of Flickr images and hundreds
of YouTube videos. I encourage you to check out the site Inauguration Report.

While it's obviously been left for the past year, you can see how NPR weaved input from its
audience into the planning stages of the project right through to its on-the-day coverage. Official
photographs and AP reports line up alongside Flickr images, personal testimonies and eye witness
accounts.

QUOTE
I will remember standing outside on the National Mall with around two million people, my
fingertips frozen as I sent dozens of tweets from my Blackberry, and thinking I wasn't alone in my
attempt at capturing the moment. It was the mobcast I'd been waiting for.

Guardian MPs Expenses

Two more quick examples – this time showing how it's not just about “getting content” and news
reporting, but about bringing the audience into newsgathering, factchecking and investigating
through a social process.

The Guardian may have been beaten to the scoop by the Telegraph when it came to last year's MPs'
expenses scandal, but the title built its own news application to encourage its readers to dig further
into the redacted records as they were made available.

What's so great about this idea is not only the news leads and ideas it presents to the Guardian's
journalists but the ownership it gives readers of those stories. The Guardian has since developed this
idea and added more of a gaming element – for example, rewarding the users that deal with most
documents and are most active. This helps the Guardian keep up momentum on the crowdsourcing
after initial excitement generated by the news story has passed.

Gawker
Business to business titles and others can make great use of crowdsourcing if they realise the
expertise amongst their audience. Sometimes, quite often in fact your readers know more than you
do. US media network Gawker took advantage of this last year when it asked its readers for help
translating an article into Russian. The article, which had originally been published in GQ's
American edition but had reportedly been banned from being read in its Russian edition by the
publisher, because it contained criticisms of Vladimir Putin. In just over 24 hours, Gawker had a
translation of the article, proofread and checked by readers with a knowledge of Russian.
Overcoming press freedom restraints via crowdsourcing.

Ushahidi and Media Wales and BBC London

Crowdsourcing and maps seem to go hand-in-hand for stories tied to a certain area or location.
Local media in the UK have started to make great use of these simple ideas

A quick example – this map from Media Wales' site for Cardiff pulled in 1,500 page views in just
1.5 hours and generated its own hashtag. All for a funny smell hanging over local residents. A great
local news story, which using Twitter was able to quickly establish the extent of the problem and
what better way to show this area than by mapping those tweets.

Crowdsourcing and mapping have been taken further by the site Ushahidi. If you haven't come
across it before, Ushahidi was set up originally to map citizen reports of post-election violence in
Kenya in 2008. The technology has since been adapted to plot other crisis areas. It's open source, so
it's there for news organisations and others to build on and adapt.

Interestingly the team behind it recently launched a straight out of the box version called
Crowdmap, which news organisations and journalists can quickly get to grips with and deploy. The
BBC made great use of its during the recent London tubestrikes mapping their own reports, mixed
with those sent by users. These could be filtered by the type of transport or level of urgency and
gave an instant overview of where the travel hotspots were in London that day from people on the
ground. The BBC also used it as a news source, following up leads and adding whether user reports
had been verified by the team. A follow-up crowdmap by BBC London for the October tube strikes
generated 43,658 page views and 21,372 unique users.

As a spinoff to what is now becoming a fairly established use of social media by journalists, there
are some who have taken crowdsourcing around a story a step further in a way, for me, that
underlines the social element of social media and harks back to the more traditional role of
journalism as serving the public interest.

Take Paul Balcerak, for example: he's a web producer working in local media in the US. While
covering some severe weather conditions earlier this year, he asked whether instead of asking for
material, news organisations should be offering assistance through social media channels. He wrote
this about the idea on his blog in March

QUOTE
I came to a realization yesterday that I had become predictable: Western Washington had a
windstorm and my first thought was, “Oh, I should ask people to send us their photos.” I think just
about every other newsbrand in the region had the same reaction.
But then it struck me: Between the Seattle TV stations and the Times and pi, how many people are
really going to opt for PNWLocalNews instead? That’s not some defeatist attitude talking, it’s just
reality. I work for a smaller newsbrand so I have to think like one; often that means thinking, What
can we do that no one else is doing? So I posted this to Twitter:
It's simple but as Paul says it's a great way of setting your website apart from the social media
crowd. Another great example, included in my delicious links for this presentation, is the
Spokesman Review's Help Your Neighbours map, which it has used during snowstorms –
connecting readers with snowed in driveways with readers with shovels.

As I just mentioned, something that journalists getting to grips with social media often seem to
forget is its social element. While you may be on Twitter as part of your work some of the readers
you're trying to connect with will be using it more personally or socially for example. You need to
take the time to engage with people in the manner expected of that particular social network or
channel.

LinkedIn for example could be very different from contacting someone via Twitter.

There are lots of people who will happily give you a set of rules for journalists and news
organisations using Twitter. A lot of it is common sense and for me a strict set of rules shouldn't be
applied – it's up to you and possibly your news organisation as to how you develop your social
media presence. If you're using Twitter in particular for professional purposes, there's also an
argument for showing some of your personality too. Two great examples I'd urge you to look at:
@channel4news and @radiokate.

Channel4News' official Twitter account is manned by several members of the newsroom staff I'm
sure but it's managed to add some personality to its updates and responds directly to other Twitter
users who ask questions of it. That's polite, social and builds loyalty.

Radio Kate aka Kate Arkless Gray is a good example of an individual journalist who mixes the
personal and professional to get her followers involved in the stories and projects she's working on.
It's not rocket science, but if you look at her Twitter feed you'll see it's a stream of conversations.
Talking to people, getting to know her audience and creating a more immediate version of a
traditional journalist's contact book. She knows that social media by and large should be social and
is not simply a space into which a journalist should silently go and plunder the information they
want.

Bit of a noisy video, but a quick interview with Kate last year sums up her approach for me:

Taking a slightly different approach to the social element of social media, WIRED magazine had a
very interesting experiment earlier this year. The UK edition of the title created a codebreaking
game leaving messages in its pages, on Twitter, in the real world for readers to win an iPad.

It was called the enigma challenge and led competitors through a series of puzzles, got them to
follow a dedicated Twitter account and website, send in photos and videos and successfully blend a
range of online and offline media. Yes, there was a very real incentive for participation, but adding a
gaming element to your social media use presents new ways to actively engage readers, motivate
them and market and promote your brand.

A-Pressen
The marketing and promotional potential of social media, leads me on to my next point: commercial
interests.

Other media groups have felt compelled to bring social media “in-house” - building their own social
networking platforms attached to their sites. There are strengths and weaknesses to this of course –
more information about your readers, but dealing with the maintenance of that network all by
yourself – but if we take a look at Norwegian newspaper group A-Pressen we can see some
commercial benefits. A-Pressen created Origo, a social networking platform built specifically for
the A-Pressen group. According to stats last year, Origo's network grows by 1,000 members every
three days, who generate around 700,000 page views on its newspaper sites. For one local title in
that group, Romerikes Blad, social media contributions are fed back into the print product,
producing 3,000 print pages a year originating in social media.

NewsCloud
NewsCloud, a US start-up, is an interesting case study to look at. It builds Facebook apps, hosts
blogs, reader comments and more for news organisations – it's currently working with some local
media in the US. It's founder a guy called Jeff Reifman firmly believes that news organisations can
also make money from building strong communities of readers on social networks. It's already
serving up relevant ads and sponsored links to those groups and wants to build a business model on
a community space where readers interact with articles, the news organisation and each other. One
to keep an eye on.

Financial Times
Last, but by no means least, the Financial Times' use of social media and its integration of this
within its business model should be noted. The FT has a great history of blogging, turning its expert
journalists and columnists into bloggers and liveblogging the markets.

But what's clever about the FT is it is using the communities it has built to launch spin-off, money-
making products. It's award-winning blog Alphaville for example has led to the Long Room, a
registration-only area, where the FT can serve up advertising and promotions to a targeted audience.
There are plenty more examples of the FT doing this with other elements of its site and a similar
trend can be seen amongst other news organisations launching “members clubs” - a more social
alternative to paywalls perhaps?

The FT has also worked with Foursquare blending news, mobile, geolocation, gaming, you name it
– to offer daypasses to its premium subscription content to people who “check-in” to business
school cafes in the US and UK. It's clever, again targeted and taps into potentially new readers with
a presence in this community that is tightly integrated with the FT's main website.

I'm going to wrap up now as I have been talking for far too long, but I'm happy to answer any
questions. All of the examples I've mentioned and a few other interesting ones are available on
delicious – at the link here.

http://www.delicious.com/lauraatjournalism.co.uk/socmedacademy