News outlets are always using Twitter as a means to communicate with readers or viewers and users and even start conversations of their own. That aspect of social networking — not just throwing information at people, but engaging them — is a very important tool for journalists. Another way Twitter is being used is as a news tip-off service. Journalists can find bits of information on the site that can be parlayed into stories.

Dr. Bill Silcock, a Cronkite School professor who teaches media ethics and broadcast news courses, said Twitter is “extremely powerful,” but has many implications. The microblogging site, he said, should be treated like a scanner in a newsroom. “Lots of stuff on police scanners tips you off to news stories,” he said, but journalists must further investigate what they heard, or in the case of Twitter, what they read. One of the site’s most powerful features, he said, is its ability to link to Web sites, which offers content users may have never discovered before.
“People that I follow are people that are smarter than me and reading in different places,” Silcock said. Essentially, creating a list of followers who he respects allowed him to build a “research team” — a group of people who can give him information worth checking out. Silcock said he has been on Twitter for about six months and Facebook for about two years. Facebook is more about fun, he said, and Twitter is a better tool for journalists. As one of his colleagues of students said (Silcock couldn’t remember exactly who) Facebook is for the friends you have now, and Twitter is for the friends you hope to have.

Twitter is also more professionally oriented than Facebook. Facebook is a place to share photos, talk about weekend plans and talk to your friends. It started as a social networking site for college students, and I doubt it will ever really lose that association. Facebook is the social network of choice for countless college students, and with such a strong market, it doesn’t make much sense for Facebook to waste energy and resources trying to convert a whole new segment of the population.
Twitter, though, is where the older crowd is going. Users in the 45-54 age bracket make up 36 percent of Twitter. (18-24 year-old users only make up 10 percent of the site’s users.) Mark Briggs, a Web 2.0 blogger and author, said those statistics make sense to him. “[Twitter] is being used in a much more professional capacity than MySpace or Facebook ever was,” he said. Twitter is used largely for professional reasons, and more people with established careers are users, he said.

Briggs speaks in classrooms about new media and said up until a few months ago, few hands would shoot up when he asked the class who used Twitter. “More of them, I think, couldn’t figure out the difference between a status update on Facebook and using Twitter,” he said. But older people recognize that Twitter more about the power of networking and collaborating. The site has an entirely different mindset — one that the media can successfullyutilize to its advantage. Since Twitter users are looking for more than just casual socialization that other social networking sites offer, it makes sense to think of the microblogging site as a handy tool.
Using social networking (whether to interact with the community, find sources or get information) is becoming more prevalent and accepted within the journalism world because the practice is such a part of people’s daily lives, Briggs said.
“Most technology takes a while to become taken for granted, and once it is, you start doing things with it without thinking about it,” he said. Accepting new technology as a credible tool has always been a slow process, he said, citing the initial aversion to using e-mail and even telephone quotes, if you look back far enough. New media tools “happen to be new forms of that,” Briggs said.
Briggs said the use of new technology is just beginning in journalism and for news Web sites. “Web 2.0 traits that have been brought onto mainstream news sites are going to evolve and get a lot better,” he said.
I completely agree with Briggs. Traditional journalists (print journalists, in particular) are often slow to adopt new technology. But as these technologies become a huge part of all our lives, no one — even journalists — will be able to convince themselves that not using those resources is a sound choice.
One place in which Web journalists still seem to be looking for a solution is with online commenting. Commenting sections often turn into forums filled with slander and immaturity instead of the intelligent banter sites hoped for when they turned commenting on. “Most news sites simply turned them on and expected them to be self policed and high quality … and they were pretty much the exact opposite of that,” Briggs said.
Much of that less-than-savory content will filter itself out as people become more enamored with social networking. Because people want to create a positive identity for themselves on the Web, Briggs said, it makes sense that they will want to be a part of insightful conversation. As social networking evolves, he said, screen names will go away and more people will use their real names to build an identity on the Web  — a factor in improving discourse on the Web.
But in the mean time, technology definitely can help. “The more sophisticated your system, the more you can build into it.” One system that seems to be improving online discourse is that in which commenters can build a reputation by the things they post.
“People really have to earn their way up to a position of helping and becoming a full collaborator on a Web site,” he said. This model gives users a reason to respond thoughtfully and intelligently to articles or posts, and also gives the site’s community a way to self-moderate.
One site that uses this is Newsvine, which was founded in 2006 and purchased by MSNBC in 2007. The site’s community is part of what led to the purchase, Briggs said. The site has a Code of Honor, and allows users to rate stories and other comments.

I had an interesting conversation with new media expert and Web 2.0 author Mark Briggs on Tuesday about social networking and the media. Briggs spent eight years working for newspaper Web sites in Washington, and left his last job in October 2008 to pursue Journalism 2.0 and a career in training, consulting and speaking about new media.

Briggs said a point he always tries to make about the current face of journalism is how key it is to be seen as credible, especially in this “new information ecosystem.” Before, all a journalist had to do was drop the name of the news organization they worked for and the credibility was there.

But now, the public’s view of the media is lower than it ever has been. “Journalists need to find ways to restore or enhance or improve their credibility, and social networking  allows [them] to do that,” he said.

Social networks give journalists a venue to participate within the community and collaborate with readers and sources, he said. It gives them a way to build their personal brand or the brand of their news organization.

More of the Briggs interview to come.

The majority of Twitter users worldwide are age 35 or older, and young adults ages (18-24) make up only 10.6 percent of the Twitter population in the U.S., according to an analysis by comScore blogger Sarah Radwanick.

Radwanick analyzed February data and concluding that younger users are not the driving force behind Twitter’s popularity.

“It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving the [Twitter] trend,” Radwanick said on her blog. “More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30percent more likely.”

In a recent blog post, Radawanick said the number of February Twitter users worldwide had grown to 10 million, up 700 percent vs. a year ago, while the number of Tweeters in the US reached four million, up more than 1,000 percent from a year ago.

According to Nielsen Online, Twitter experienced 1,382 percent year-over-year growth in February 2009, with total unique visitors increasing from 475,000 in February 2008 to 7 million last month. Way to go, microblogging.

Read the article here.

What if you could get tomorrow’s newspaper today?

Now you sorta can, by tracking the short messages on Twitter written by the journalists who do the muckraking for major media outlets.

Muck Rack makes it easy to follow one line, real time reporting.

If you are a journalist on Twitter or know of anyone not yet included in Muck Rack, please let us know.

Muck Rack is simple. It’s like a digital Rolodex, streaming journalists’ Twitter

feeds onto one site. Some post snippets of their stories or links to what they’ve been writing about. Others clearly don’t strive to keep a professional Twitter account. But that’s the beauty of it.

Clicking through pages of links and stories isn’t what keeps people coming back. I’m sure it has to be that sense of community that even I felt when I went to the site. It’s nice to feel like you have something in common with someone, even if they are across the world.

Journalists can be added to Muck Rack. All you have to do is fill out a form with the name of the reporter, his or her organization and title and your contact information. Pretty handy. And a pretty cool example of a social network for journalists — not just a place we’re barging into.

In a blog for RTNDA, Chip Mahaney, director of digital content for the E.W. Scripps Company in Cincinnati, offers a few tips on social networking etiquette for journalists.

1. Realize the social-networking world does not revolve around you or your channel or your website. Every user sees the network revolving around himself or herself.
2. Listen before you speak. What are the customs? How do people talk to each other?
3. Call your viewers/customers/fans out by name. Make them feel like they’re a big deal in your presence.
4. Ask your friends and fans lots of questions. What’s on their minds today?
5. Bring something to the table that the community values. It’s generally not a tease for your 11 p.m. news.

Read the original posting here and visit Chip’s Twitter.

Beat Blogging looks at how different forms of social media and Web tools can improve beat reporting. Interesting, insightful posts. Worth a look.

The idea of using social networking sites as venues to find sources has been around for a while — for some journalists since the advent of social networking — but only in recent times has the practice lost the stigma once attached to it. The Web is teeming with sites full of ideas and sources, and there’s really no reason journalists shouldn’t utilize them to their full potential.

In the article, Viera says discussion boards and blogs, among other sources, were almost off-limits to professional journalists and for some traditional journalists, they still are. But why should journalists cut themselves off from valuable sources?
I’m sure the same problems arose when recording devices and computers came into the newsroom. When did the time come when e-mail interviews became acceptable? (Assuming they are.)

Sites like Ning, which is based around the idea of creating unique communities, offer journalists a place to go when they need sources either knowledgeable or just impassioned about a subject. The same goes for message boards and other online communities.

The big question here is, how should journalists go about this? In many, many cases, journalists look out of place on social networking sites, they jump into a(n oftentimes tight-knit) community, asking questions and searching for answers. That can’t be conducive to good journalism.

1. Tool for communication — sources, eye witness, experts
2. Source for stories/articles
3. Production tool (blogging)
4. Publishing channel; way to distribute news

Click to view the full presentation:

The site is divided into lists (Twitter, HowTo, Music, Travel, WordPress, Jobs, Games, Google and Business) and news channels (YouTube, Facebook, Google, Myspace, Video, iPhone, Twitter, Firefox and Blogger ), which makes searching easy.