News becoming more social as publications turn to apps & hubs

Target audience: Journalists, online news staffs, Web publishers, news consumers, nonprofits, foundations, businesses, educators.

Earlier this month I gave a presentation for the New England Press and Newspaper Association‘s winter conference on how social media is impacting journalism and the newspaper industry. I appeared on a panel with Boston Globe reporter Milton Valencia and “Crowdsourcing”d author Jeff Howe. Milton spoke enthusiastically about why Twitter matters to journalists, and Jeff explained the virtuous cycle of reporting and online community that makes reporting better. During the presentation, I identified four areas impacted by social media: the changing definition of an authoritative news source, the concept of news participators, how news is shared, and the changing news cycle.

Authority = trust

In the age of social, a newspaper and its journalists must earn authority; who is an authority is now decided by news consumers. For decades, even centuries, there’s been a “paper of record” that has been considered the authority on what is news. No longer. According to the Pew report Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, 30 percent of Internet users get news from a combination of friends, journalists, or news organizations that they follow on social networking sites. Moreover, half of social network users who also consume news online get their news daily from people they follow within social networks.

Social network friends = news authorities. Along with traditional news sources.

In an attempt to take advantage of this trend, both The Washington Post and the UK’s Guardian, among others, have developed Facebook “social reader” apps. For example, one could use the Washington Post Social Reader’s Timeline app to share what you’re reading with your Facebook friends. What is incredible is that both The Washington Post and the Guardian already have 5 million app users.

Reutershas a different take on putting social network authority to work. Reutersrecently launched Social Pulse, a social media hub that presents what is popular now with Reuters readers. What’s interesting about Social Pulse is that it integrates both a sentiment analysis tool and its own “Klout 50″ (the 50 “most social” CEOs) into Social Pulse. I would also be remiss not to write that Mashable launched its own social network news sharing community, Mashable Follow, a while ago. News organizations understand that online friends are the new news authorities, and they want to be in the center of it all with social reader apps, private social communities, and methods of influencing reader recommendations.

News creators, curators & participants

With the rise of social media follows the rise of news participants: people who have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated the news through social media. According to the same Pew report on participatory news culture, 37 percent of Internet users are news participants. News participants are likely to be considered news authorities within their own social networks. News participants are also deeply engaged news consumers who drive traffic back to news websites. During our conference session, Milton Valencia added that many reporters, himself included, use Twitter to engage news participants in confirming reports, soliciting information, and conversation.

The Guardian has launched an experiment in opening up the news development process to the public, called Open News. The Guardian says: “Help the Guardian shape the news by talking to our editors and reporters about upcoming stories as we work on them.” The newspaper posts a daily editorial calendar online, asks for news input, and has a dedicated Twitter hashtag (#opennews) for talking about stories they’re researching. In preparing for this workshop, I found a number of papers with blogs, many with Twitter accounts, but none with participation opportunities like the Guardian‘s. Is this a likely future trend?

Social news sharing

How news is shared is also shaping the news industry. About 50 percent of adults who get news online receive that news through email or posts on social networking sites. After readers consume news online, the second most popular action to do is to share the news online (see slide deck above). Again, this supports the conceit of news sharers as news authorities, since those who share news socially may be considered by friends to be trusted news sources.

It’s important for news organizations and journalists to be part of online communities where news is shared, participate in online conversations, and share news themselves. Since 23 percent of the social networking users who get news online say they specifically get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow in the social networking space, the industry appears to be moving in this direction.

Social media and the news cycle

The Holmes Report wrote an insightful essay on how social media changes the news cycle during crisis reporting (hat tip to Mari Tikanen for the link).

The breaking news and context stages of the news cycle are shortening, and the analysis and archival stages are lengthening. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs are contributing to the shorter breaking news cycle and adding context to the stories. Google search, wikis, video, blogging, and Flickr contribute to the staying power of the analysis and archival stages of the news cycle.

What social news apps or readers do you use? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post originally appeared at Community Organizer 2.0.

Resources

• Social sharing and the news (Journalism.org)

• Social media and the crisis curve (Holmes Report)

• How mainstream media outlets use Twitter (Pew Research)

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A brief guide for citizen journalists and bloggers

Target audience: Journalists, bloggers, nonprofits, cause organizations, NGOs, general public.

Guest post by Mitch Ratcliffe
RatcliffeBlog

There is much that bloggers can learn from journalists, who have learned how to cause the most trouble possible without landing in jail over the course of centuries. I highly recommend you pick up a copy of The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law ($13 at Amazon.com, which is the essential text for many journalists.

In addition, here’s a good source for students and other beginners.

If you want to go deep and learn a lot, read this piece from the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Journalists’ Handbook.

It’s worth understanding this stuff even if you don’t want to be a journalist, because anyone can be sued for libel, slander or defamation.

The first thing to understand about all subjects relating to journalists’ privileges is that they are different everywhere. There is no international standard set of laws, though journalistic professional societies have pressed for these kinds of uniform expectations. Most of what I’ll lay out here relates to the United States, where the press enjoy the most liberal protections available. In Canada, for example, there is no presumption that a journalist can protect their source. In much of Europe, the subjects of photographs retain far greater control of pictures through their moral rights (PDF), or “droit moral,” which provides both the photographer and the subject protection from the unauthorized reuse of the image in whole or in part — juxtaposing the image of a person into an advertisement, for instance, which is common in digital media is prohibited without their permission.

Elements of defamation

Defamation, slander and libel are the same thing, essentially, but each is defined based on the way a false statement about a person is conveyed. According to ExpertLaw.com’s entry on Defamation, Libel and Slander Law, the general principle behind all three must include the following elements:

1. A false and defamatory statement concerning another;
2. The unprivileged publication of the statement to a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);
3. If the defamatory matter is of public concern, fault amounting at least to negligence on the part of the publisher; and
4. Damage to the plaintiff.

In the context of defamation law, a statement is “published” when it is made to the third party. That term does not mean that the statement has to be in print.

Damages are typically to the reputation of the plaintiff, but depending upon the laws of the jurisdiction it may be enough to establish mental anguish.

Most jurisdictions also recognize “per se” defamation, where the allegations are presumed to cause damage to the plaintiff. Typically, the following may consititute defamation per se:

• Attacks on a person’s professional character or standing;

• Allegations that an unmarried person is unchaste;

• Allegations that a person is infected with a sexually transmitted disease;

• Allegations that the person has committed a crime of moral turpitude.

Libel is committed when a statement that meets the standard above is published in a document, whether a newspaper, magazine, book or Web site. Bloggers need to keep this firmly in mind when writing about someone, especially someone who is not a public figure (we’ll get to that in a moment).

A slander is a spoken defamation, whether that act of speech is public and one-time or recorded and redistributed. Slander also includes defamation by gesture, which could include making a gesture that suggests professional incompetence or mental illness. Slander carries the additional burden for a plaintiff of having to prove that they suffered actual loss due to the false statement.

If you are webcasting, podcasting, producing digital video or otherwise using the Internet to convey information that may be construed to be slanderous, this is the branch of defamation law about which you need to be aware. RTNDA, the Association of Electronic Journalists, offers a deep resource on the use of many different kinds of information in a broadcast that deals with a variety of liabilities and ethical questions radio and television journalists face.

In all cases, the truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel, slander or defamation (except in totalitarian countries or those not under the rule of law, where a judge can rule arbitrarily in favor of a powerful person). If you are going to call someone “a crook” or “a philanderer,” for example, be sure that you can prove they are a criminal or that they are stepping out on their spouse or carrying on multiple affairs simultaneously. Be ready for challenges to your proof, so don’t take for granted that one item of proof is sufficient.

But the truth is a relative thing, because public figures are the subject of varied opinions which the writer or producer is largely convinced. Public figures have to prove that the writer or speaker willfully ignored the truth or acted with flagrant disregard to the truth. And that is hard to prove. In the case of Dan Rather’s broadcast accusing President Bush of having avoided his National Guard service based on documents it failed to vet completely, the fact that it involved a source’s documents insulated CBS from charges of slander and libel (since they both broadcast and published articles on the cbs.com Web site).

Fox News has mastered the practice of deflecting an accusation by attribution, as in the phrase “people say…” or “according to sources” before leveling an untrue or highly opinionated statement. This is not a defense against libel or slander if the criteria described above are met. The burden for a journalist would then fall to the question of whether a source really made the accusation. And this is where the issue of confidentiality comes in.

Confidentiality

The confidentiality of sources involves protections that are somewhat mythical. In many jurisdictions, including the United States, there is no guarantee that a journalist can protect her sources. It’s not in the U.S. Constitution, but has been interpreted to be a journalist’s privilege in a number of state and federal cases. Shield laws have been passed in many cities and states, but these do not protect someone publishing on the Web, who may be indicted in another jurisdiction that has no such laws.

Confidentiality is grossly abused these days, in my humble opinion. It is used by government and corporate officials who should be on the record when they launch test balloons, make attacks on opponents and much else. It is also just plain lazy on many journalists’ part, because they should use a background statement to delve into the truth in order to get the facts on the record. But in the race to make a scoop — and, unfortunately, many journalists just think being first, rather than being complete and accurate, is paramount — solid sourcing often goes out the window.

Sources can sue you for libel or slander, as well, if they dispute what words you put in their mouths. This is why a journalist’s notes are so terribly important. In one case, a journalist whose source disputed a phrase lost the case because the words were in his notebook but not in quotes. A journalist learns to annotate carefully because of these kinds of realities.

Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post made a historically important and correct decision to protect the identity of a senior Nixon Administration official who guided them in their reporting of Watergate: Deep Throat. In May 2005, a former top FBI official named Mark Felt went public in Vanity Fair and acknowledged he was Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein and their editors never revealed their source.

If the source has something to lose and can demonstrate it is materially important to them, then confidentiality may be necessary. If confidentiality is a convenience for the source, you’re better off doing more footwork yourself.

Attribution

This brings us to the issue of attribution and knowing when and why to go from being on the record with a source. Always begin a conversation by identifying yourself as a journalist (or a blogger writing “on the record”), if you want to enjoy any of the protections normally accorded to a journalist; begin and stay on the record until it becomes necessary to go off the record.

After “on the record,” which means you can write or broadcast anything said in the conversation, comes terms such as “on background,” “off the record” and their many hues. In a background conversation, you can write down what is being said but cannot attribute it directly to the source — they become generally identifiable to the reader as “a source in the Defense Department” or “a senior manager at Example Corp.” Remember that background information still needs to be confirmed elsewhere, so don’t be afraid to take the conversation back on the record to try to get the information in an attributed quote; background conversations are a matter of convenience for the source and are increasingly given by news organizations only with a compelling reason.

We’re talking here about how you handle relationships with people. We all know that there are times and circumstances that demand we protect confidentiality. Sometimes a source is giving you information that will get the person who really needs to be on the record to speak, because you come to them with information that, once they know you have it, they have to address on the record. This has worked for me with corporations, two White House administrations and a variety of other situations. What I want to emphasize is that a background quote or an off-the-record or confidential source does not make a publishable story in all but the most extreme cases. Can you prevent a catastrophe with an off-the-record quote? Publish! If it’s a matter of getting a scoop, do more legwork.

That’s it in a nutshell, the beginning of a lifetime of exploration and growing subtlety if you want to jump into the journalist’s role in society.

Related

• See other Socialbrite articles on law and citizen media

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