A friendly reminder for video training. Vertical video is bad.

(via boingboing)

THIS is amazing. Great tips on writing shareable headlines, what images and content should be showing up when readers want to share this content.

Really interesting point about the ‘curiousity gap’ — too specific, don’t need to click. Something that still stokes curiosity — the sweet spot. Click through the whole thing. It’s worth it.

It seems like just a couple of months ago, ‘augmented reality’ was nothing but a TED talk. Now that we’ve put out the Augmented Reality Issue (and plan to continue augmented reality features for the forseeable future), I count this as the issue I’m most proud of this year.

You can view the augmented reality by downloading the apps: dmreg.co/LifeInActioniOS or dmreg.co/LifeInActionAndroid and using them on this PDF viewer on your screen.

election night in Iowa, in Instagram, by Juice staff.

It was my turn to help coordinate #wjchat this week, and this post by Craig Kanalley stood out in my mind for real talker topic. I agree with most of the things he says in this post, and the conversation (much Storify-ed here, and full transcript will later be posted here) was fascinating.

The solutions, in my opinion, are really about asking ourselves the right questions: What bubbles are we putting ourselves in if we only look in social media? What communities are we missing? What control do we give social media platforms as we populate links as content on their networks? We want to reach readers, but what are we not building that the social networks have to create these virtual town halls for our communities?

I think this topic, eloquently tackled by Craig, is the next big ongoing question for connected journalists.

One of my favorite sessions from last year’s ONA. Here’s a (belated) re-blog of the Gannett Tumblr of Amy Webb’s session.

gannettona2012:

Women are trending according to Amy Webb @webbmedia She gave a packed talked to a packed session, not only running through her her top ten tech trends, but gave her “secret sauce” to help us analyze for ourselves.

Her top two stood out from the pack, and both of these are key in…

I won’t be there, but vote for my #wjchat crew unconference!

onaunconference:

For the third year in a row, #wjchat, the weekly web journalism Twitter chat, hopes to be part of the ONA conference schedule.

Bring your minds, your questions and your experiences and we’ll host a live #wjchat about whatever you’ve got — questions about tools, philosophizing on the future of journalism, workplace issues or the latest news. 

We’ll cover it all, or as much as we can fit into our time. Head to wjchat.com or follow @wjchat on Twitter to learn more about the weekly web chat.

We’ve done it before, we’ve had fun, and we’d like to do it again!

[Bribery: There may or may not be more temporary tattoos at this unconference.]

Read More

Have you updated your Twitter header? Here’s how to do it.

This smart idea from Kevin Loker is an awesome idea. I’ve been privileged to chat with Kevin about some of these concepts and I think he’s right on:

newschallenge:

1. What is your project? [1 sentence]

OpenMoment sorts news for mobile devices by real-life context, giving readers the content they want based on the “where” and “when” of the moment they pull out their phones.

2. How will your project use mobile tools and approaches? [2 sentences]

…

There are GIFs all up in the news now. But Poynter put together this great post on what journalists need to know about GIFs.

Also here’s a GIF roundup on Hillary Clinton’s sweet dance moves. Couldn’t resist.

If your news org is NOT on Instagram…. This should be reason enough. 80 mil is a big number, y’all.

[Shameless plug alert] We started our Instagram account (@dmJuice) a little more than a year ago for the 2011 80/35 Music Festival. Since then, we’ve found a way to grow it and build it in to our day-to-day workflow. Our photo editor posts at least weekly from an assignment, giving readers a sneak peek at content we’re working on and a different look at an assignment. Then, we use that photo in print.

At this year’s music festival, we found that it was a great way to engage with readers on mobile at the festival and enrich our social media live coverage. Our photos, pushed to Facebook and Twitter, consistently get high feedback.

instagram:

The Instagram Community Hits 80 Million Users

We’re excited to announce that the Instagram community has grown to over 80 million registered users who have shared nearly 4 billion photos! Since we launched Instagram in October 2010, we’ve expanded from one platform to two, bringing Instagram to Android users as well as iOS users. As the community has grown, we’ve seen people sharing photos from all around the world, from South Korea to Bolivia, and even underwater!

We’re humbled by the amazing photos from people’s lives we see every day on Instagram, and thank you for being part of this growing community.

The Instagram Team

Thoughtful look at how mass shootings can be covered to ‘first, do no harm.’ Worth a watch.

theatlantic:

How to Change the Coverage of Mass Shootings

In this clip from Charlie Brooker’s BBC show “Newspipe,” after the Winnenden school shooting in 2009, a forensic psychiatrist lays out guidelines for reporting on massacres without promoting new ones. The bullet points:

If you don’t want to propagate more mass murders:

• Don’t start the story with sirens blaring.
• Don’t have photographs of the killer.
• Don’t make this 24/7 coverage.
• Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.
• [Don’t] make the killer some kind of anti-hero.
• Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.

Read more.

I love reading inspiring things like this:

onaissues:

I’ve Seen the Future, And It’s Bright

Amy Webb, ONA Board member and head of Webbmedia group, provides a great example of how women are prepping other women for careers in tech. 

Webbmedia Group sponsored a Digital Divas dinner in DC on Wednseday, hosted by Bonnie Shaw. Webb writes,

[Shaw] typically brings together 50 women and empowers them to talk about the amazing digital projects they’re working on and to showcase their strengths. It’s a great reminder of just how important women are to the digital ecosystem – as developers, designers, venture capitalists, strategists and executives – especially as tech’s well-documented brogrammer culture continues to proliferate.

Last night, Bonnie matched 25 dazzling professional women like Suzanne Philion (State Dept), Alexis Sampson (World Bank), Haley VanDyck (White House), Katel LeDu (National Geographic), Kate Ahern(Case Foundation), Jenn Gustetic (NASA) and many others with 25 young women from the inaugural class of TechGirls, a State Department exchange program that brings girls from the Middle East and North Africa to the U.S. for a three-week dive into all things geeky.

Read more on the Webbmedia blog about the inspiring young women who participated. 

This guy. Great thoughts on curation, and someone I’ve been lucky to have many conversations about this very subject. PS: HIRE HIM, before someone else does, people with job openings!

kevinloker:

Missing players in the #dfmcuration conversation: time and place 

I’m going to start by talking about a newspaper, perhaps partially because it’s Father’s Day (and Google is referencing it, too), but also because I see it as a helpful guide for our discussion on curation in an increasingly digital world of journalism (#DFMcuration).

Disagree if you like, but printed newspapers do some things really, really well. They’ve also done it for quite some time. Yes, in addition to serving as great hats for children, many of us can recall how practical they were in the pre-internet era: every morning, the content assembled on the pages provided us with an overview of the most relevant information for a person to know, often in the short amount of time it took to finish a fresh cup of coffee, and perhaps a bowl of cereal.

It, hopefully like the coffee, was nice. A simple idea. Newspapers, small-town and national alike, provided a helpful package of info for a certain moment, for a certain location, and once the information was taken in by a person, that person could go on with their day and not worry about checking in with media.

Pause. Don’t hurumph. Checking in with Twitter is also quite nice, and not by any means a bad thing. There are both simple joys and potential triumphs in being able to access information (and news) whenever you want it. It’s nice to know how Kevin Durant’s shooting when I’m busy, and for some, it’s empowering to know a political gaffe the moment it’s said.

But in a need for speed and constantly appearing in newsfeeds, I posit we’re forgetting what rocked about the pre-internet print newspaper: it was curation that appealed to readers based on two important factors, time and place.

When it comes to curation, it’s not just all about adding context to what you sort. It’s also about the context of accessing content.

This is the point where I expect someone in the field to barge in and say, “Kevin, you don’t get it. Everyone is online all the time now. We have to be curating for every moment, shooting for the newsfeed around the clock.” It’s a fair point—if you want to be seen (and clicked-through) amidst someone’s hundreds of followees, you need to be sharing whenever someone scrolls by.

We can’t neglect, however, that most people are not literally on their devices all-day long. If we remove ourselves from our little corner, the realm of journalism (the one that those reading this likely inhabit), or perhaps politics and notably some other fields I just haven’t named, people generally have “newspaper morning”-type moments. The only change is that they look different. Just like how people would read a newspaper in the morning in the days before the internet, there are still times where individuals (idiosyncratically or culturally) habitually check, consume, and now interact with news.

The more positive thing about anytime access is that there are now more of those moments. The negative thing is that we aren’t fully capitalizing on them. 

Let me illustrate. Here are moments I can think of off the top of my head in which I regularly check my phone:

• In line. Any line. Ever.
• On the Metro. (Or likely, on the bus, if I ride one of those, too.)
• When I’m trying to hide from a social situation (admit it, those times happen!)

Take my habits for instance…Why don’t we design our curation around context categories like that? Let’s think of curation, at least for the time being, in terms of times and place like those three above, each of which I think is a situation in which you’d want different content:

Here’s what I mean:

•  When I’m in line, I want something short to either A) distract me, or B) update me on news, or some sort of interest. I don’t want anything too lengthy, but I want something that can occupy me while I wait for my sandwich.
• When I’m on the Metro (or you could substitute eating alone, for professionals in DC who are on a lunch break, for instance), I often want something a bit longer, something I could take time to read through and walk away with something a bit heftier than the content I want to see while in line.
• When I’m trying to hide from a social situation, I often just want something funny. Something that’s a distraction. Maybe something silly Joe Biden said, or something that’s cute and involves puppies.

Since that last bullet flowed into a specific example of content based on context, here are a few examples of what type of content would be good to be curated for each context:

•  In line: The latest breaking news, perhaps, with selections built around my interests.
• Metro/lunch: A feature on a candidate, or maybe a NYTimes opinion piece, depending on my interest.
• Social distraction: Pretty much anything from BuzzFeed.

So far I’ve been outlining situations for content consumption via a mobile device, but I imagine this concept could also be built into a desktop/laptop setting, like an app for Google Chrome or on a website itself. The categories would just be different.

Why I personally like this particular idea of context and content:

• It separates our consumption out, rather than mixing it all in our Twitter stream.
• It’s an attempt to reclaim our media consumption in way that makes sense, because it fits in the right kind of content in the place where we can rightfully consume it.
• It one-ups apps and services like Read it Later (now Pocket), which are admirable, but often mix the mark because we don’t always, in fact, read it later. We consume content, instead, when the context is right. There’s too much choice, otherwise, and we go mad trying to stay on top of it all.

An app could probably curate like this — and I would love to help make that happen — but so should people. If we add in the element of reading context, based on principles of times and place where our readers interact with information, I think we can influence and help how journalists create content. Editorial teams with curators could think about the contexts in which their readers are reaching for certain types of content, and capitalize on those trends by integrating the element into their editorial decisions.

Individual journalists could make whole jobs out of writing content for lunch, and maybe this all could spark a greater appreciation for the diversification of content types, but at the same, a healthy consumption of all of them. We could toss aside the idea that Buzzfeed type content is “tidbit journalism” and of no value, because it is in fact of absolute value when, like a powerful piece in the NYTimes read in full over lunch, it is consumed its proper place.

More importantly, under this model the right type of content is presented in the right place— and just the right type of content alone. How easy is it to always just look at pictures of puppies when you’re presented with that option next to news you should really read in order to be an informed citizen? We want to be informed, but hot damn, we love those freakin’ puppies. We are weak.

Why’d I start with describing a newspaper? Again, it’s basically the same old idea. Pre-internet print newspapers got context and content right. They based everything on time and place. For the technology that existed, it was the right material, the right content-type, the right time. Now all we need, as curators, is an update.

A shout-out to @SarahDayOwen, as I’ve discussed some of this with her. The general ideas shared here build off a conversation we had following this presentation by @mthomps and @robinsloan.

A thoughtful look at the often-complicated relationship between content creators and content curators by Erin Kissane/@kissane Certainly worth a read if you deal with content at all.

This slideshow by Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement and Social Media at Digital First Media, gives good concrete examples of digital-first work. Take a look.

I recently joined the online community of these smart ladies, and I’m blown away by the things they have to share and speak out on in the listserv. This piece is definitely worth a read to get some of the insights on why the group exists.

The second of my ‘roadmap to success in 2012’ series published in the Jan. 11 issue of Juice Magazine. This focused on local makers and how they started their various businesses. I talked to a feathered accessories maker, an eggcrates furniture businessman, and a pottery maker.

Here’s the first in my series, on How to Be a Leader in 2012.

Throughout the Iowa caucuses, I was charged with running our social media, push notifications for our app, text alerts and building this storify.

The Storify went on to be shared on 11 other news sites as well as our own, thanks to sharing through the Gannett network. The Storify was also prominently featured on the Storify roundup on Iowa Caucuses coverage on caucus night.

Total views, as of Wednesday morning, neared 3,486 from all sites.

Pulling this storify together, I realized the importance of lists, including this one from Storyful. Using that list, our own and having a working knowledge of Iowa-relevant people was crucial to cutting through the massive amount of tweets using #iacaucus.

Storify has added Instagram to Storify, but due to issues adding the service (screen resolution, maybe?) I was unable to scroll down to get it saved as a service. So I used Webstagram, signing in with our Instagram account, and did a hashtag search to find photos. (note: this paragraph added after initial post)

I also had the luxury of not having to worry about other site production, as digital editor Julia Thompson and homepage editor Yvonne Beasley were hard at work on the sites and other talented digital staff worked on the inner workings of the sites.

I was an early adopter of Storify (see my profile here), but I’m most proud of this Storify and its mix of multimedia and entertaining social media that I think represented the different color and conversation present throughout the process.

Great post here following the Iowa caucuses coverage.

onaissues:

Decoding the Iowa Caucus Coverage

Brian Stelter, New York Times reporter, pulled together this comprehensive Storify post on the media coverage of the Iowa caucus.