The flat answer is that while I’ve heard anecdotes I do not know, but I’m looking for an excuse to conduct some rigorous research into that question. In the meanwhile, here’s how I would think about whether to tweet or not. As in all things, professional judgment is required:

1. Is the information of immediate use to the audience, especially their safety? (Being useful is not the same as being immediately interesting, although that can also be something to consider.)
2. Is the tweet a discrete and complete piece of information? Tweets don’t have to tell both sides of the story, but they must be able to stand on their own without further context or explanation. They must have the relevant “who, what, when, where,” but probably not all of those. They almost never have “how” or “why”. (Although that’s just a guess. Another topic that is worthy of research.) Completed actions are probably the most likely pieces of information to be discrete and complete. And assertions by prominent people — “Newt Gingrich just said…” , for example — can certainly be tweeted in some cases, but they require more careful consideration:
   • Avoid tweeting anonymous assertions.
   • Is the assertion from the source about himself or herself? Or is about another person, or something the source purports to have seen?
   • Is the assertion opinion or is it asserted as fact? Assertions of fact require special care.
   • If a fact, how quickly are you likely to be able to confirm to the information with another independent source? Or, if an assertion, how quickly do you expect the other side to respond?
   • How well do you know and trust the source? Have they been truthful in the past? Are they in a position to know?
   • If the assertion turns out to be false, how much damage will be done to the audience? (Your reputation is always damaged if you report incorrect information.)
3. What is the competitive environment? If you don’t tweet it, is your audience likely to hear the news from a friend or another professional reporter or from the source directly? If you do tweet it, will it tip off competitors or sources and give them the chance to tell the story in an way that may be incomplete or inaccurate before you can get around to writing your own comprehensive article?

When journalists do tweet discrete facts before a full story is fleshed out, they can sometimes do it in ways that add context and whet appetites:

• Add context — and raise readers’ awareness of missing context — by describing why the fact caught your eye, and what else you plan to report.
• Invite questions about “tidbits.” Twitter is better if it is a conversation and not a lecture. Questions from readers via Twitter before an article is complete can help make your story more relevant.
• If a topic has a particularly high level of reader engagement, post that you’ll be offline to write, edit and fact-check your complete story.
• Tell your followers when and where they can get the complete story: “Film at 11.” (And, of course, deliver on every promise you make.)

http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/services/browseinside/widget.aspx?hc.guid=8234244d-0b0f-42ff-bc37-de194c126e61

• If you’d like to learn how to use OpenBlock, you need to know Django …
• If you want to work with Django, you’re going to need to understand how to edit files with nano or some other text editor, and you’ll need to know PostgreSQL, and you’ll need to know some Python …
• If you want to use Python in any meaningful way, you’re going to need to install some Python packages, or modules …
• If you want to install Python packages, you have to know how Python works on your computer’s operating system (Mac, Windows, and Unix)  …
• If you want to know how Python works on your system, you have to be comfortable using the command line of Windows or Unix. You need to be able to list directory contents, change directories, read and change file permissions, manage Linux users, download and decompress files using gunzip and tar commands.
• … and you’ll need to know HTML and CSS

The paradox of teaching these things to students is that as the user interfaces of Web applications and computers get easier, and their use becomes more ubiquitous the proportion of students with the hacker ethic they need to approach projects like this is reduced. That’s not a dig on students. The better something works out of the box the less the need to tear them apart, fix them, improve them. It’s like me and my car. Wheels turn. Radio works. Doors open. I couldn’t care less how the gears actually shift or how the “snow” traction works.

But I hope we’re not just training college students to be users of technology. College journalism students need an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s not just about teaching the technology. It’s about cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit, a way of skeptical knowing, and a hacker ethic.

Some people — most prominently Megan McArdle at The Atlantic — thought it just didn’t sound right.

The problem is that you can’t prove he didn’t say it. A couple of people have tried, and have come up with a good partial explanation. But disproving something you can’t see is nearly impossible. This is a great example of a problem often faced by reporters — a problem that’s becoming even more vexing with the development of social media. As it turns out, people say a lot of stuff that just isn’t true.

A quick Google search of the quote turns up more than 10,000 results — almost all from Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot or WordPress posts written since the death of Osama bin Laden. But as I try to teach my journalism students, popularity does not equal accuracy. Ten bad sources aren’t as useful as one good source. Google says that some date as far back as Feb. 1, 2001, but that may be a default date on the Tumblr micro-blogging platform. In any case, date-based search on Google is useless for this effort. (Similar searches on Bing and Technorati were also not effective.)

My favorite explanation, by tech writer Frederic Lardinois, points most of the quote to King’s 1963 book Strength to Love. He found that the one-sentence quote used on Twitter could also be found as part of a longer quote on other social media sites. Most of that quote — but not the first sentence — is directly from Strength to Love. But that first sentence remains a black swan. I can’t prove that King didn’t say it. But I can’t prove that he did. And I can’t figure out where or when in the contemporary digital folklore that the quote originated.  As a recently popular book points out, just because you’ve never seen a black swan doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Europeans had only seen white swans. Until a black one showed up in Australia in 1697.

Taken as an isolated incident he harm from this misquote is pretty abstract. At worst it becomes George Washington’s cherry tree — a story that everyone hears, that has its accuracy questioned, but that cannot be disproved. It muddies our understanding of history and it contributes to a changing narrative that we tell about ourselves, our history and our heroes.

The problem in the era of social media is that these misquotes are rampant and pernicious. Fabricating the words of political nemeses has become an acceptable and common tactic. Check out the archive of fact-checking that Snopes.com has done on fake quotes attributed to a variety of political lightening rods from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton. There is a library of fake quotes and fake legislation that gets distributed via e-mail and social networks. They’re complete fiction. It’s bad enough that political leaders — from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton — make up stuff all the time and assert it as truth. But it’s as if we’ve suddenly corrupted the value of the First Amendment by acting as if the answer to bad speech is not less speech but more bad speech. Lies are no longer combated by the often difficult-to-ascertain truth, but by more easy-to-fabricate lies.

It’s possible that the person — and it was one person — who decided to “upgrade” the actual King quote with an additional line was unconsciously mashing up King with another speaker. There’s plenty of historical precedent for that practice. Or perhaps she just incorrectly remembered the real quote and didn’t look it up in the book before she posted it to her blog. That happens all the time. I swear my wife told me to get chicken at the store yesterday. She swears she wanted me to get fish.

This happens all the time, and double-checking things that we “know” is probably the hardest habit for my reporting students to acquire. Good reporters — like good scientists — don’t care so much about what you know as they do about how you know what you know. We want to see it. I teach my students that “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and I play for them a bit of Marvin Gaye — “believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear.”

The real problem for our nation is the intentional lies that are spread — and spread in a very smart way that adds to the malice of the act. My favorite is the YouTube video that shows Obama talking about “my Muslim faith.” Here’s the clip…. and here’s the whole clip. The 12-second clip — both totally accurate and totally incomplete — has been viewed nearly a million times. The full clip has been seen nearly two million times. But how many looked for the second after watching the first?

With the advent of democratic media distribution anyone can report what they see and hear. But who will look at the world around them and wonder what is unseen? And who will take the time not just to doubt, but to check it out?

Some of the students are younger than Mosaic, and throughout their lives, their access to information technology has outpaced their understanding of it.

The answer to the question of “What is news?” for many of them is “Whatever my friends share on Facebook.” And that means popularity — and for many of them it’s popularity among a narrow subset of people who look, act and see the world similarly — trumps all the traditional news values of impact, proximity, prominence, timeliness, emotional appeal, oddity and conflict.

But rather than try to replace one with the other, I’m trying a technique that I hope will use their familiarity with social media to get them to think more about their audience. Try the following and let me know how it works for you, too.

1. Have the students organize their Facebook friends into various lists, using traditional news values. So, for example, students might organize their friends by geography, share experiences, relationship status, number of friends they have, frequency of posting, or a combination of those. Instructions for Creating a Facebook List

2. Throughout the semester, your students are already required to read the news. But this technique also asks them to share the stories they read with their friends on Facebook. Instructions for Sharing a Link on Facebook

3. The key is that they can’t share a link with ALL their friends. They have to pick no more than two lists with which they share each story. This gets the students thinking about how different audience value different information. Or how different audiences value the same information, but for different reasons. Instructions for Sharing Links With Specific Lists

4. Finally, with each link that a student posts she is required to “Say something about this link …” It doesn’t count if the annotation is merely a re-phrasing of the facts in the story. And it doesn’t count if the student merely writes about why she likes the story. The annotation must answer the question “So What?” for that particular list. The goal here is get students to change their belief that writing is about self-expression into a journalistic mindset in which writing is selfless expression.

Journalists have to give audiences what they want and need, and often must go to great lengths to explain to them why they need it. This isn’t paternalism. This is a service, and it’s the same one that attorneys and physicians and financial advisers provide. The choice remains in the customer’s hands. But we — as journalists — have a professional obligation to provide the best advice on the most relevant information possible.

Grading: You have two choices for grading this assignment. One option is to get a Facebook account and require that all of your students friend you and put you on every list they’ve created for the class. That way you’ll be able to see what they’re doing and use your own rubric to score their efforts. The other option is to have the students write a weekly reflection about their experiences sharing stories with their friends. What did they share with whom? How did they describe it? What didn’t they share? Why not? What responses did they get from their friends?

(For the sake of ease, you may consider creating a mock version of this assignment in which students simply write Word documents using imaginary friends, imaginary lists, imaginary stories or use an imaginary social network. But do not do that. It smacks of being phoney. And students — and journalists — hate phonies.

I’m writing for college students a book about online journalism. The book connects the traditional elements and values of journalism with new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences. It will start with a discussion of online news values and elements and the unique characteristics of the online news audience. Then it’ll take readers through the gamut of digital media skills and tools, and wrap up with a section that talks about how to make sensible use of the tools to create journalism that’s more engaging and relevant.

But… what should I call it? Please vote below and then leave any comments here.

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• Download The Failure Form as a PDF

It’s called the Failure Form because the questions it poses requires your staff to articulate the value of a project even if it fails miserably. It could just as easily be called a risk mitigation assessment tool, because good experiments ensure that even if everything goes wrong, the organization will at least be able to glean some value from the experience.

It also mitigates risk in another way. When we seek “innovation,” the pitches are ambitious and often overpromise and underdeliver. Innovative projects are going to be SO awesome! Sometimes SOOOO awesome that they are technically infeasible.

The final way it mitigates risk is by defining an end point to the project. Like line items in the federal appropriations, newsroom projects are often easier to start than they are to kill. Experiments have a definite end, which means that the failure will be limited to the shortest period of time needed to acquire some meaningful data.

Of course, the results of the experiment need to be shared with the rest of the newsroom. Unless you have an ongoing partnership with a research university, my suggestion is to use editing positions to create a team of people to assess the experiments and publish the results. Better yet, every news organization would have some sandbox for experimentation, where failures wouldn’t hurt the core brand.

So, which projects should a newsroom fund? The ones that are completed the quickest, cost the least and teach the most.

So, without further ado, the “Failure Form“:

1. What specific questions about the content, style, production, delivery, use or consumption of news will your project attempt to answer?
2. Describe your project. What will you do in an attempt to answer the questions you described above?
3. After the end of your project, what new information will we have about the future of news?
4. At the end of your project, what two things will you compare in order to determine the answer to your question?
5. What changes might other journalists consider making based on the discoveries you will make during your grant?
6. How long will it take to conduct your experiment?
7. What resources will you need? If this project is funded, what tasks will you stop doing during the course of the experiment?

Related Posts:

• Innovation Isn’t Enough
• J-Schools: Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure
  

You can read my notes about their work at http://www.ncdropout.org/node/415
or visit the site’s homepage at http://www.ncdropout.org.

Among the pieces I’ve enjoyed the most are the online journalism tutorials that the students themselves created based on their own experiences hashing through their first efforts and multimedia, interactive, on-demand news story telling. You can see their tutorials here.

The audio of the talk is after the jump.

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In a lot of ways, magazines are better positioned than newspapers to make the transition to the Web:

• A site’s homepage has more in common with a magazine cover than a newspaper’s front page.
• Lists and numbers work well both in magazines and the Web
• The best magazines are niche publications that serve a loyal audience. Same for Web sites.
• Magazines have a (recently abandoned) tradition for great photography and visual journalism. Same for the Web.
• The best magazines have writers with distinct voices and perspectives. Same for the Web.

On the other hand, the Web tends to favor a few things that are absolutely the weakest elements of magazine journalism.

• Breaking news.
• Very short articles.

For magazines to make a successful transition to online, they need to play to their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses in the new medium. Here’s some thoughts on how to do that.

I think there are basically four simple tactics that can be used by most every magazine as they develop an online strategy:

1. Assign someone the task of gathering and publishing “breaking views” to the Web site. Most magazines have no advantage in trying to compete with wire services, newspapers and television about posting basic who-what-when-where stories. But they should be prepared to provide quick thoughts and perspective about the whys and the hows of events that are relevant to their audience — with the key word being relevant. The person who does this job is the site’s “anchor” — host a daily text-based conversation between readers and the newsroom about events of the day. The challenge: Finding someone who can do brief, quick, high quality explanatory journalism.
2. Create a way for readers to interact with each other. Whether you let readers interact with each other on their site or whether you leverage external social networking tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, magazine editors need to satisfy their readers’ desire to connect with each other. Many magazines are affinity publications that people read so they can keep up with — and become — a certain type of person. The best magazines online will define themselves as host of a big cocktail party and/or convention with their readers. The challenge: Make sure that one single person is responsible for cultivating this network of readers … and that the same person has the authority to make decisions about how best to do so.
3. Build tools that help readers get something done. Many magazines are read not as much for entertainment or affinity, but because readers want help getting something done — looking better, feeling better, spending money better, making more money. Magazines should have a running list of jobs they can help their readers do and should have someone on staff who can conceptualize those tools as well as talk to multimedia designers and developers to make the concept a reality. The challenge: Remembering that the audience and their tasks are more important than cool technology … and finding someone who knows how to manage a project.
4. Do excellent visual journalism. Photo galleries, videos, interactive graphics, animations…whatever. Give readers something with which they will want to spend time. This is the magazine’s antidote to the fast-past news snacking that happens online. The challenge: Getting writers to never abandon all anecdotal leads in favor of actually showing them. And training journalists to think about telling stories in multiple media.

Some of the stories the students brought in for me to discuss help illustrate some different techniques that magazine writers can use to adapt their storytelling to the Web.

This story about spring cleaning your dorm room was written for a print publication on campus, Kaleidoscope. It’s a good example of a piece that works almost as well in print as it does online. Here’s why:

• It makes extensive use of bullet points. The online audience doesn’t read, it scans. Typically people quickly scan down a Web page, their eyes fixed on the left side. Bullet points — as a well as subheads — give the reader’s eyes something to catch.
• It’s relatively short and on a narrow topic. In addition to writing for people who scan we also want to write for engines that search. Many people begin their news and information consumption online with a visit to a search engine such as Google. Search engines tend to favor pages that are densely packed with keywords. Keywords are the terms — typically nouns — that people enter in to a search engine. The higher the ratio of keywords to total text, the more likely a person is to come across your story.
• It’s evergreen. This piece is pegged to the idea of “spring cleaning” and it was publishing in 2009. But dorm rooms need organization in August and September and January and lots of other months as well. And they don’t need cleaning in 2009, but will likely still be a total mess in 2010 and 2020. That means that all those people who begin their reading with a visit to Google will continue to find this site. Unlike the content of newspapers, which often becomes stale within 24 hours, the content of magazines has the possibility to remain relevant long after the original news peg is gone. By writing with an evergreen angle, magazine writers can practice “sustainable journalism” and take advantage of “the long tail.”

The second story we discussed was a great example of the untapped possibilities of nonlinear writing as a technique for long-form journalism. The story was about three athletes — two at UNC and one at Duke — who had gone to the Olympics in Beijing. I find that students typically go through this process when writing stories like this:

1. Write anecdotal lead. Check.
2. Write a little twist or hook or reveal. Check.
3. Give the reader some essential facts that they need to put the rest of the story in context. Check.
4. Stare at computer screen for about 20 minutes, wondering what to do next.

This story is tough to write because it has three main characters. And it’s even tougher because none of the three characters are widely known to readers. The writer has to make introductions and make the reader care and then connect all the stories in some way.

This is where nonlinear writing comes in handy.

In linear writing — meaning that the reader has only one way to navigate the story, by starting at the top and working down through the end — writers have to come up with transitions that connect story lines and often have to move readers back and forth through time without jarring the reader too much. And when transitions don’t work, we often fall back on subheads.

In nonlinear writing, we can use HTML links in place of transitions. Links, well, link story elements together.

The process of constructing a nonlinear story I think is one that can help even writers who decide to tell the story by using the traditional linear technique. Here’s what we did for this story:

• Make a list of all the primary subjects of the story and draw them as circles on a piece of paper. We came up with six — each of the three athletes, Duke University, UNC and the Olympics.
• Determine whether and how each element is connected to each of the other elements. For this story, the Olympics were connected to the three athletes; the two UNC athletes were connected to UNC; the Duke athlete was connected to Duke University. But the athletes were not connected directly to each other — for example, they didn’t play the same sport — and the two universities weren’t connected — for example, they never played each other in the story.

At this point in linear story construction the writer would have to determine the order in which to present the connections. In nonlinear storytelling, readers will determine the order in which they explore the connections. So rather than writing one long story with transitions and subheads, you write six small stories that link to each other and provide perhaps some overlap with each other.

For some writers I can imagine this could be a liberating experience. For most, though, I suspect it will be difficult to leave behind their ownership of the story and humbly turn it over to their readers.

One last thing on this point — I really don’t have any good examples of professional writers putting this successfully in to practice. It remains a theory that I really have yet to prove. The only model I have is a nonlinear re-write I tried to do of an AP story about last year’s salmonella outbreak in peanut butter.

Another story brought in by the students was a good example of the need for writers to think about adding audio and visuals to their story. The story about a vintage clothing store started with a lead that was intended to help the reader visualize the scene inside the store. But I wanted to REALLY see the store. And hear the music. A multimedia story would have used video to show how the shoppers experienced the store’s physical space and would have let the readers hear the music and conversations there. The key word to this kind of journalism is “experience.” Storytellers need to always be thinking about the best way for their audience to experience and engage the story — even if they can’t work a video camera and even if they know nothing about codecs and digital editing.

Speaking of engaging the audience, the last student sample was a bit tougher to translate in to an online style but I think it was the story with the best opportunity to engage readers. It was essentially a news piece about new ticket distribution policies for concerts at UNC.

I wonder if — with encouragement and cultivation by the story’s reporter or editor — this could have been an opportunity to create a wiki in which readers could collaborate to create, debate and revise a ticket distribution policy of their own.

The wiki idea came to me only after I paused briefly on the idea of having readers comment on the article and discuss. But that would just quickly degenerate in to complaining and argument. I wonder if by giving readers an actual “deliverable” on which they could collaborate, the debate would be more positive and focused on finding a solution. Again… not sure.

And that leads nicely to the final message I had for students — don’t fear the unknown. The most successful future magazine editors will be the ones that fail fast and fail cheap. They won’t be the most facile with Web publishing tools, but they’ll be able to come up with audacious ideas and have enough technical vocabulary to collaborate with designers and programmers.

I think that’s pretty terrifying to graduating journalism students who can’t find a job. In an industry that is increasingly unstable, one bad idea can put you back on the streets. On the other hand, 1,000 bad ideas probably pave the path the executive editor’s office.

Here’s an introduction, with audio to come in a future version. (If you can’t wait for the audio – give me a call or shoot me an email.)