JOURNALISTS: Use more than just Facebook and Twitter!

Although Facebook and Twitter are very useful for journalists in giving and getting news, there are TONS of other social media outlets that can be used to a journalist's advantage.  Today in our journalism class we presented various types of social media apps that can be used by journalists for news aggregation, social media aggregation, organization of news, and many more ways.

My partner and I presented about TweetDeck- an app that started out on mobile phones and is now online for computers.  It works by organizing your accounts (business and personal), organizing who you follow (news, reporters, friends etc) and everything is organized and easy-to-read and navigate.  This program is excellent for journalists looking to organize all their followers/who they follow/different accounts they have.

Also, another group presented on how Pinterest could be used for journalists, and I was pleasantly surprised by how useful the site could be for journalists.  I wasn't aware that so many news companies actually had Pinterest accounts.  I have always held back from making an account because 1.  It's another reason for me to procrastinate and 2. I thought it was just for materialistic things like puppies and clothing.  However this is not the case; you can follow boards that offer news and other important things, not just kittens and shoes.

The other social media apps that were presented were pretty cool too.  I just had no idea that there were so many other social media sites that can aid a journalist in finding news but also getting their stories out to the public.  This was a pretty useful project and I'm glad there were some sites that people didn't even know about.  I am excited to try some of these out, especially when I have my internship this summer--I can offer ideas for my newspaper to use these sites now that I know a little bit about them.

How useful is social media for Journalists?

Are you an aspiring journalist? Do you have a Facebook, a Twitter, or a blog? Do you have any other accounts?  If not, it may be in you interest to create a few social media accounts.  Today in the journalism world, getting one's name out in the community is essential to establishing one's brand and then landing a job. Taking advantage of the various social media outlets is therefore essential, and it's proven by the many journalists today who are using these accounts to promote their work.  Successful journalists are getting their name out there by taking full advantage of, for example, Twitter.  They tweet at least daily by offering insight on things they care about while also promoting their work to gain support and recognition.
Social media is crucial to a young aspiring journalist as well as one who is established in their job today.

How Effective is Crowdsourcing for Journalists?

Tim Barmann's visit to class today offered some insight on how new companies are using social media today to attain information.  He showed us how the ProJo uses Google Forms for crowdsourcing to ask people on Twitter, Facebook, etc. how much snowfall they've gotten in their area.  However, at this point, crowdsourcing can't be completely trusted as a source because, as Tim showed us, people will submit ridiculous numbers to the paper which negatively affect the interpretation of the results.  I did find his insight useful in some aspects, but it's hard to trust such a new way of attaining information; it'll be interesting to see where this method goes in the future for journalists. 

Storify: Wire editing on steriods.

First off, it freaked me out that tweets live forever on Storify, so I should probably monitor what I post to the internet better. This page was incredibly helpful, and I learned a huge amount about the various uses for journalists trying out Storify.  I really like the URL feature of Storify because you can pull things from literally anywhere on the web and post them; Storifiy isn't just limited to the social media sites that are listed.
Another good feature is that you can collect items from the web and then just save them to the Storypad to use later.  I wasn't aware of this feature, and I'll definitely start using this when I see an idea that I may want to publish later on. Basically this page was super helpful and I am glad I know about how I can use the site as a journalist.