Tweets, Diggs, MoJos: Reporting 2.0 Explained

NOTE: Please respond to each of these articles separately.

Roanoke, Poynter Develop Ethics Guidelines for Journalists Using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter

By Kelly McBride
Poynter Institute
Jan. 19, 2009

As part of our new Virtual Poynter training, I spent an hour last week discussing social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from The Roanoke Times. In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere.

No one argued against using social networks in reporting stories and delivering them to the audience. It seems like everybody's mom, dad and boss has joined Facebook, turning the site and its technology into something almost as common as e-mail and not just for the young and savvy, like Twitter sometimes seems.

In Roanoke, the journalists grouped the pressure points into three categories: How to use Facebook and MySpace as a reporting tool, how to use the sites as a promotional tool and finally, how to balance your personal and professional images.

As a reporting tool, it's easy to argue that Facebook, MySpace and Twitter instantly connect journalists to stories that in the past would have taken days or weeks to surface. Last year, the Orlando Sentinel discovered a Facebook group devoted to the lack of water at the University of Central Florida's brand new football stadium. The group provided immediate access to dozens of sources who'd experienced firsthand the opening game in 95-degree heat.

In Roanoke during the Virginia Tech shootings, the newsroom staff used Facebook and MySpace pages to help chronicle the lives of the slain and injured students. And later, a newsroom reporter discovered that the university president was battling cancer, thanks to the Facebook group "We support Paul Torgersen."

But the journalists in Roanoke quickly pointed out that social networks have their challenges. It's easy to deceive and make things up, so everything must be independently verified. If all your sources came from the Internet, they would skew toward the more affluent and educated. And when you interview people digitally, you miss a lot of good information.

When it comes to promoting your work, we all agreed it was a good method for getting stories out. But when we started to look at the journalists who use it in a provocative and edgy way on a regular basis, such as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz or ESPN's Jemele Hill, we recognized the need for some caution and best practices. Status updates are by their nature short, like a story tease. They should be catchy, even pithy, yet accurate. In the effort to simplify, it's easy to go too far and mislead the audience. Good headline writers and television writers recognize this tension.

Balancing the personal and professional turned out to be the thorniest issue. Many of the journalists in Roanoke aim to keep their Facebook or MySpace pages completely private, used only for connecting with personal friends. For the folks whose names are out there, such as reporters and photographers, that might be a losing battle. Sources tend to find you and friend you. Rejecting them is awkward. Letting them in blurs the boundary between your private life and your work. Either way, the journalists in the workshop agreed that a social network is like your car or your front yard. Because you're a journalist, you have to exercise restraint when it comes to making political statements and revealing your own biases.

Even if you keep your page completely private, you must assume it's public and that people will use it to judge you and your newsroom. So all the guidelines that apply to putting bumper stickers on your car apply to your Facebook page.

Here are the guidelines as we developed them in Roanoke. It's a work in progress. What would you add?

A newsroom guideline for using social networks: As a reporting tool

Social networks are ubiquitous enough that journalists who insist on avoiding them are likely to miss good opportunities and great stories. To that end, we encourage responsible use of such networks to form connections, find story ideas and locate sources.

* Making connections is good. And journalists should ensure they are using a full array of tools for gathering information, including face-to-face interviews and shoe-leather reporting.
* Journalists must compensate for the skew of online reporting. You are likely to find younger, whiter, more affluent sources online. Journalists should constantly strive for diverse representations in their stories.
* Information gathered online should be independently confirmed offline. Interview sources in person or over the phone whenever possible. Verify claims and statements.
* Ensure informed consent. It's easy for sources to misunderstand your intentions. It is your responsibility to tell them who you are, what you are doing and where your work will run.
* Take special consideration with children and other vulnerable people. When contacting children, make sure they connect you with a responsible adult.
* Be transparent with the audience as well as sources. Let them know how you contacted people, in what context you gathered the information and how you verified it (or didn't).

A newsroom guideline for using social networks: To promote work

It is important and valuable to promote our work through social networks. Individual staffers bear most of this burden. But the newsroom as an institution is responsible for some of this work. When promoting your work:

* Be accurate. It's easy to sensationalize or oversimplify.
* Be clear. If you are not a good headline writer, seek some training.
* Always include a link and make sure the link works.
* For ongoing issues or stories, editors are responsible for crafting a quick strategy for promoting and branding our work.
* Editors and online staff should identify work that should be branded and promoted on an institutional basis.

A newsroom guideline for using social networks: Balancing the personal and the professional

Some journalists use social networks as a professional tool. Others use it strictly as a personal endeavor. Still others blend the functions. It is increasingly difficult to keep your social networking page strictly private and personal. To that end, journalists must recognize that everything on their Facebook or MySpace pages has the potential to influence their reputations and by extension the credibility of their newsrooms.

* Don't post information that could embarrass you or your newsroom, even if you believe your page is private.
* Use the tools, such as limited profiles and privacy settings, to restrict access to your most private information.
* Recognize that your actions can be misinterpreted. You may sign up for a group to get story ideas, but people may see you as a fan. State your intentions often, in wall posts and other notifications. When appropriate, tell groups when you are signing up that you are looking for story ideas.
* One strategy might be to sign up for lots of groups. If you become a fan of a political party, become a fan of the other parties as well.
* Manage your friends and their comments. Delete comments and de-friend people who damage your reputation.

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Mobile Journalism on Moving Ground
By Pat Walters
Poynter Institute
Dec. 6, 2006


Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering -- for a story, of course.

It was a pain in the neck.

What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday's Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He's just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything -- from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree -- and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper's Web site.

The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. "If this is the future of journalism," it read, "I better cash in my 401(k)."


There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of the content created by MoJos wouldn't meet the standard definition of news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content is proofed by an editor.

Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover. In some ways, he says, it's good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.

"At times it seems like there's a lack of discrimination in the material," Ahrens says. "It doesn't matter if it's a school lunch menu or a city council meeting."

No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does "some things that really stick a thumb in the eye of journalism orthodoxy," Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is an early edition of an innovative project. In essence, it's a draft.

One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.

What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that's part of the plan -- MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper's Web site.

But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday's New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.

"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?' " Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.

Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up -- and to find entirely new ways to make money.

Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.

Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from "If you don't get it, you don't get it," to "If it's important to you, then it's important to us."

At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.

Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn't made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.