Media Transparent » LA Times

Mainstream Media Mistakes on Twitter

Pat Kitano — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:12:33 +0000

FIRST, WHY ARE THERE NO NEWS PRODUCERS ON TWITTER?

Twellow is the best application to find Twitterers grouped by occupation. I perused through the News category – noted a lot of freelancing journalists and some reporters, but no news producers or editors.

Twitter makes it easy for a community to tip the news media

News producers should understand that news sourcing has become social because anybody can now feed them story ideas. Moreover, news producers should FOLLOW others so their potential citizen news sources can DM (direct message) them with story ideas and breaking news that are best transmitted privately. News producers can provide journalistic value by positioning themselves as media hubs in their community.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA HIDES BEHIND THEIR CALL LETTERS AND BROADCASTS ONE WAY

Advice to mainstream media – don’t hide behind your call letters or mastheads on Twitter – use your real reporter and producer names like WUSA9. And don’t arrogantly just use Twitter blatantly as a one-way broadcast media- this is old media think and keeps your brand isolated from your constituency. Following others who you respect as news sources will expand the distribution network you will leverage as a media hub. And those you follow will be appreciative.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA STILL CALLING TWITTER UNRELIABLE NEWS SOURCING

Granted, individual Twitter sources are not trustworthy at face value. What makes citizen journalism credible is the aggregation of individual sources into a collective, accountable voice. This is what makes citizen review sites like Yelp more trustworthy than the Twitter-like pronouncements of a Zagat‘s restaurant review; Yelp’s statistical samples are large enough to prove its results, and Zagats is a black box.

Citizen sources are much closer to breaking news events (as seen in Mumbai and Gaza), and the “reporting” or research / interpretation of the news can be performed by either mainstream media or citizen sources. Dave Winer makes the case that the social media does vet and report news (his diagram above).

It seems obvious that once mainstream media surrenders its position that only they can report news by sending out salaried news crews and cameras, real economies of scale (think free) of news sourcing happens. Mainstream media can then add quality (and value) by filtering interesting stories arising from a magnitude more citizen sources than they have now. Twitter is, in essence, a massive extension to their 800-”hotline”. Now, if the media would only listen.

KUDOS TO MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHO ARE SERIOUSLY EXPERIMENTING WITH TWITTER

Let’s congratulate a few news media companies and individuals that have put together a comprehensive Twitter presence.

Tori Blase, CNN – the only major news producer I see out there

Dave Courvoisier, KLAS TV anchor, Las Vegas – thanks for your sincere offers of help

WUSA9, Washington DC

Patrick O’Brien, WUSA Web Director – Patrick introduced me to the whole WUSA team on Twitter.

Peggy Fox, Anchor

Stephanie Wilson, News Producer

Angie Goff, Traffic Anchor

Lindsey Mastis, Digital Correspondent

Lesli Foster, Consumer Reporter

Kim Martucci, Meteorologist

Sara Walsh, Sports / Skins Uncensored

Andrew Nystrom, LA Times Social media and tech blogger – Andrew seems to be coordinating a massive effort to build media channels by category at the LA Times.

LATimesTweets lists all 59 LA Times Twitter feeds

The New Web 2.5 Opportunity: Create Media Hubs

The Future is LA Times.com, not LA Times the Paper

Slow Death of Traditional News Syndication

The Future is LATimes.com, not LA Times the Paper

Pat Kitano — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:47:26 +0000

Last week, LA Times editor Russ Stanton was quoted telling a forum at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications:

“I think big-city newspapers, the way we have known them, are not long for this world, as they’re now configured.”

Over the weekend, John Jarvis on Huffington Post glommed onto another quote by Stanton:

“(The)Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.”

And after some confirming emails with LA Times management, Jarvis concludes that the Times can conceivably survive on Web revenues alone. If true, during the Tribune Company’s bankruptcy restructuring, Jarvis advises to cut out the costly print production and distribution business and make LA Times a pure online news play. Then,

Expand the journalistic reach of the newpaper into the community by including bloggers and other forms of citizen journalism.
Have each major city newspaper cooperatively act as the local news hub and syndicate its local news nationally to the other newspapers. This would allow newspapers to dispense with national (Washington, New York) correspondents.
News becomes a network of links made by those who do what they do best and link to the rest.

On Twitter, the LATimes, with their social media director @LATimesNystrom, has pursued a more social strategy to interact with other Twitterers, unlike the one-way Twitter broadcast policy used by CNN and the NYTimes. Since most Twitterers are also bloggers, the LA Times positions itself as social media friendly for the future recruitment of bloggers as potential journalistic content sources.

Diaspora of Journalists

Pat Kitano — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:17:02 +0000

On Community Funded Reporting site Spot.US, David Cohn reports from Freelance Camp – “an unconference for freelance professionals of all sorts – artists, coders, writers, designers etc.”

The most pertinent session for me was aptly titled “How the Changing Nature of Information Affects Information Providers.” It was proposed by a local magazine writer who recently lost a column to content produced via “the wires.”

Simply put, the Reporter Diaspora has been exacerbated by three main trends:

The growing supply of citizen journalism and user-generated content is effectively replacing traditional journalistic content.
Newpaper business models based on print advertising slowly lose relevancy as fewer people read print.
Newspapers must cost cut and writers are fired.

Journalists (now known as “information providers”) are positioning themselves to leverage specific expertise that bloggers don’t own – in-depth, quality research and reporting. This is in large part the mission of Spot.US – to fund raise and compensate journalists on projects for the common good.

More recent evidence of the Diaspora:

SFChronicle lets Real Estate Columnist go
Adding up the Newspaper Cutbacks
LA Times drops Print Real Estate Section

LA Times Continues to Integrate Twitter as Broadcast Media

Pat Kitano — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:54:35 +0000

LA Times reports the Obama campaign has confirmed an announcement for VP and plans to distribute his choice by email and text message. Of course, they encourage the public to join their network for updates by submitting their contact information, which will get them on Obama’s drip email marketing list, complete with donation appeals. The LAT steps in to promote their own Twitter feed to get Election 2008 updates:

(Now, this commercial message: If you would rather receive instant notification of Obama’s vice presidential choice via The Ticket — free – along with all new blog items 24 hours a day, you can enroll here:

(For existing Twitterers, go to http://twitter.com/latimestot

(Click Follow. Enroll there for alerts on every new Ticket item AND our instant, breaking-news items whenever and wherever anything is happening in the presidential race. And it’s all free, of course.

(For about-to-be Twitter folks, think of it as text message headlines to any mobile device. Go here to enroll. Click on Join, not surprisingly. RSS feeds also available here.)