Photograph: Cartoon Movement/VJMovement/LSE
The London School of Economics is hosting an exhibition of cartoons that address issues of justice and security. The images are provided by the VJM’s Cartoon Movement, a global collaborative platform for editorial cartoons and comics journalism. The exhibition in London runs until 17 February
Is it time for political journalists to change their behavior on Twitter?
A recent New York Times article revealed that politicians are using Twitter to monitor the press, raising the question should political journalists change their behavior on Twitter?
The article, written by Ashley Parker of The New York Times, describes how Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign staff uses Twitter to not only engage with constituents but also to monitor reporters. Michael Falcone of the ABC News summed up well with this tweet, “Romney camp treats Twitter as an “early warning signal” for bad press.”
Parker writes “Mr. Romney’s aides say they can get a sense of where a story is headed before it is published simply by reading reporters’ Twitter messages.” His aides collect tweets sent from the press corps and use them to prep Romney for possible questions at press conferences. The staff also engages with reporters directly, sending “Twitter-inspired lecture[s], ranging from a simple “not cool” to something angrier,” Parker writes.
This could be a game changer for reporters covering the debates and elections. If candidates’ aides are monitoring their movements on Twitter this closely (perhaps using Muck Rack Pro), reporters could be giving their hand away to campaign staffs without even knowing it. With many reporters just getting used to covering debates and political campaigns on Twitter, however, it could be hard for them to adopt even newer tweeting practices.
What do you think? Should journalists be cognizant of the fact that campaign staffs are monitoring their tweets and alter their behavior or proceed as normal?
“I think it is the future of print.”
David Skok: Aggregation is deep in journalism’s DNA » Nieman Journalism Lab
“The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.”
David Rohde, in the Reuters Magazine article “The Drone Wars.”
Read the rest of the article | Download Reuters Magazine [PDF]
(via reuters)“Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.”
(via markcoatney)
"The Washington Post is joining several other media organizations, including the Guardian and NPR, to encourage a one-day crowdsourcing solution for those left searching for answers: #altwiki. That’s basically it. Ask a question on Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki, and we’ll ask our readers to help provide an answer."
It’s like you can literally see people in a control room scrambling to pull out some feed wires the moment he starts criticizing foreign policy on live tv.. - via
Viral video of the night: CNN pulls the plug on a soldier making an unauthorized comment on foreign policy/ Iran/ Israel. Way to go CNN.
For the record: It’s entirely unclear from this video whether CNN intentionally cut the feed as the soldier was talking, or if there was a legitimate technical glitch that caused them to lose the connection. Let’s not jump to any conclusions one way or the other just yet. Also, it’s a little presumptuous to call something the “viral video of the night” before it’s had the chance to go viral.
I doubt very much that CNN would intentionally pull the plug on a U.S. soldier making a comment like that. It would appear that a satellite feed was temporarily disrupted or some other technical glitch. Active duty soldiers speaking out against administration foreign policy? That’s the very definition of news.
Want to grow a social network to 300 million users? Get journalists to use it, write about it.
MIT researchers have published some fascinating data on how Twitter grew during its first few years of existence. According to the research, Twitter’s “U.S. growth relied primarily on media attention, geographic proximity of users”.
The story gets particularly interesting when the researchers realized that media attention wasn’t simply a reflection of Twitter’s growth, but a cause of it:
González and Toole said their model of Twitter contagion didn’t fit Cha’s data until they added media influence, based on the number of news stories appearing weekly in Google News searches, data they acquired using Google Insights for Search, which provides historical search-engine data.
This jives with our experience building on Twitter’s API. In late 2008 we founded the Shorty Awards to honor the top content creators on Twitter (now it covers all social media platforms). The Shorty Awards became a trending topic on Twitter within 24 hours of launch, but Twitter itself wasn’t all that big at the time — only 1/3rd the size of Wordpress.com according to Compete. However, since journalists were relying on Twitter to find sources and communicate with each other, they noticed the Shorty Awards, which were quickly covered in the New York Times, BBC and Wall Street Journal without even sending out a press release.
After seeing how many journalists were using Twitter at the Shorty Awards we were inspired to create Muck Rack in 2009 to bring you, as we put it, “Tomorrow’s newspaper, today” — since you could follow second-by-second how journalists at each paper were using Twitter to do their job. We recently followed this with Muck Rack Pro to help journalists communicate with each other, PR people and sources over social media.
If you’re trying to build the next global communications platform, you might want to try to get journalists to use it to do their jobs. Perhaps this is why Google+ and Facebook are both aggressively courting journalists.
Journalists can get listed on Muck Rack and use Muck Rack Pro for free. PR professionals and those seeking to find journalists can try Muck Rack Pro here or request a free demo from our team.
Huge fan of Muck Rack. Their daily newsletter is one of the most informative and useful things I read every single day.
“Adair [PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair] goes on for a while, but I don’t think he puts back many of the eggshell fragments. The issue, as everyone else sees it: “PolitiFact should verify actual facts, because God knows politicians make a lot of stuff up on the fly.” The issue as Adair sees it: “Shut up, critics of PolitiFact.”
“Politifact responds to factual criticisms of its work with ad hominem whining. Sad.”
Trust me, an infamous serial liar says
Stephen Glass, the whiz-kid magazine writer exposed 13 years ago as a serial fabricator, is telling what may be his most compelling story yet — his own. He swears he’s not making it up, and he’s asking California’s highest court to believe him and give him a chance.
Read more —> CNN
The Year in News
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released its top stories of 2011.
The biggest story of the year, however, was the economy. As the recovery weakened and Washington engaged in partisan warfare over the debt ceiling, news about the state of the economy jumped to the same level of attention it had received in 2009 when newly elected president Barack Obama passed his controversial stimulus package in response to the “Great Recession.” For all of 2011, the economy made up 20% of the space studied in newspapers and online and time on television and radio news, an increase of more than 40% from 14% of the newshole studied in 2010.
Click through to see what other stories, as well as their reported frequency, made the top stories of the year.
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Hollywood had its worst box office weekend in a decade, but don’t despair. Lots of great screenplays just haven’t been filmed yet.
Love this use of photo sets to show magazine-style layout.
