I just contributed my first guest post to the Twitter Journalism blog. It’s run by Craig Kanalley, who created Breaking Tweets and now works for The Huffington Post.
In my post, I write about a recent “kerfuffle” of sorts between CNN’s Ed Henry and Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton — a kerfuffle that unfolded on Twitter.
Enjoy!
I started a new project today — here’s a sampler!
News innovation is a somewhat ambiguous phrase. Most often, I interpret it to mean something to do with journalism 2.0 — someone’s bright idea about how to play with journalism on Web sites. It’s the future. It’s my future.
That’s why I am starting this blog today — to share my ideas about news innovation, to discuss some cool ideas that other people are doing and to start some good conversations about the future of this craft that many say is in trouble.
Read the rest of this entry at Journalism of Tomorrow »
Wow, it’s been a while! By my count — and everyone else’s — I have not posted in this space since July. Now, nearly halfway through December and I have completed my fall semester of junior year.
The semester went well — I took mostly classes for my major met a lot of cool people and got rehired as an intern at The Washington Post. This time, I work in the news video department, and we’re in the process of moving from Arlington, Va., to the storied Post building on 15th Street in downtown D.C.
I’ve done lots of work on Web sites lately — hopefully that will actually pay off some day. I’m sure it will — since they say it’s good to be ambidextrous in this new media environment. I was very popular amongst my classmates in a HTML/CSS class I took this past semester.
I’ll be back at The Post next semester — and I hope to share some great new stories along the way. I’m super excited to be working more closely with Post journalists this time around. We used to be separated by the Potomac River, but no more. We “merge” with the paper on Jan. 1 — but that’s a bit of a misnomer since the Web site was always part of The Washington Post Co., just a separate division.
Things at The Eagle have been going well too. The semester definitely ended better there than it started. Working on the Web site has been a test of everyone’s patience, but slowly and surely it’s getting done. I would have liked to see development proceed a faster pace, but I do feel that we’ve come a long way, and that the overall user experience is much improved. I hope to work more on this site in the coming weeks.
So watch this space for more frequent posting — my little pet project over the break is to clean up the site’s design a bit. This is probably the most personal of the posts you’ll see here too!
Later!
A few days ago, I wrote a story about a chemical spill for The Journal News. As someone was delivering chlorine to a pool, a valve on the delivery truck started leaking, causing the chlorine to eventually seep into a brook. Fish were killed too, and a park had to be evacuated.
But what brook was it?
As one of my sources said, it’s the “Narashan Brook.”
“Don’t ask me to spell that for you,” he added.
Immediately, I searched Google and looked through my paper’s stylebook to no luck. I then realized that the copy desk probably won’t know how to spell it, either.
After all, relatively minor geographic features like a small, meandering brook are not household names.
I then decided to look it up on a topographic map, which can be downloaded as PDFs for free.
In a search that didn’t even take me five minutes, I came across the correct spelling: Nauraushaun.
I highly recommend all journalists like me try to “cq” the spelling of an obscure geographic feature against a topographic map — because it’d be hard to find the spelling otherwise!
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal tweeted an item about Bernard Madoff and his wife Ruth. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.
The WSJ uses Twitterfeed, a very popular way to automatically aggregate RSS feeds over Twitter. The problem lies right there in the automation: the service will cut off Tweets in order to fit a link in and, of course, to make 140 characters.
This is what the tweet looked like:
Twitterfeed chopped off what was most likely supposed to say assets and turned it into another word.
Poynter’s Amy Gahran had a write-up of the incident:
A much better strategy is to manually write or edit your tweets to make sure they’ll fit on Twitter. You only have 140 characters total to work with, including spaces and links, after all.
Gahran is right here. A large news organization like the WSJ should probably use more caution and stop using Twitterfeed.
Newspapers who turn off the feed and actually place a human behind the tweets also are more popular.
Look at what happened when the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent turned off their Twitterfeed:
On May 1, when I found it, the Independent had 12 followers; its audience has steadily increased since then. On Sept. 1, it had 95 followers. Today it has 196 followers.
And a word of advice from the Independent’s Web editor, Stephanie Romanski:
I would completely and without reservation recommend that papers shut off the Twitterfeed and find someone who can tweet headlines by hand, and TALK to the readers.
I started my internship as a reporter in the Rockland County, N.Y., bureau of The Journal News last week. While the ride to work is a bit more than I expected, the experience has been awesome so far.
In one week, I have already gotten two stories published; a third one should be in tomorrow’s paper!
I love writing these stories! Here are the clips:
I hope to have more links soon!
Ethan Klapper is a journalism student at American University in Washington who has worked for numerous print and online publications.