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.)

Michelle Cerulli, a second-year MA student, told me this story and I encouraged her to blog about it. The short version is this: While attending a session about article comments, she watched a mild-mannered man use Twitter to quietly excoriate one of the speakers. This man didn’t stand up and confront or question the speaker in person. Instead he used this virtual soapbox to disagree with her — in what Michelle described to me as incredibly rude terms — about the role of comments on online news articles.

What was his beef with NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard? She was saying that online comments tended to be more vitriolic than you hear in “the real world.” His words on Twitter said that Shepard was wrong. But his behavior said that she was dead on. And, according to Michelle, he appeared to be oblivious to the irony.

And while this story so far might seem to some a perfect set-up for a conclusion in which I rail against online comments, that’s not where I’m heading. Online comments are important because it is there that our collective id gets revealed. Many of us reveal in anonymous or pseudonymous comments our fears and hopes n ways that most of us would deny if we were ever confronted with them. Online comments show how us — or at least some non-representative sample of us — experience the world in a way that we alienated from ourselves and the polite company around us.

And that unfiltered id — that alienated experience — is a happy hunting ground for a reporter who hopes to more clearly explain to his readers our increasingly complicated and interconnected world. The problem with comments is not that they are mean. The problem is that there are too few people mining them for hidden hopes and fears and too few people willing to patiently ask probing questions of the crowd.

More and more news organizations are hiring “social media producers.” I hope they’re given the challenge of not just distributing the news to the crowd, but also diving into it and finding individuals who are able to articulate why they’re much more scared, angry or jealous than they are willing to admit in a room full of their peers.

Lunch with a friend last week helped me put some numbers on just how hard it is. I was meeting with him so that he could show me the server he set up and the computational journalism he had been doing since we last had a chance to catch up. At heart, he is a writer and a reporter, yearning during our conversation for the chance to do more long-form narrative text stories. But in his newsroom, he is the resident programmer/journalist and has asked by his editors to hire more people like him.

Here’s what it took for him to become “tech savvy.”
* In high school, he took one computer programming class. He didn’t study or use computer programming at all in college. He wrote and edited stories at the campus paper. After graduation, he was hired in jobs as a researcher or blogger.
* During the last two years, he taught himself how to code. He set up his own Ubuntu server, with PHP and MySQL. He learned some ActionScript, JavaScript and XML. He uses Excel, Visual Basic and screen-scraper.com to report stories and build interactive editorial Web applications.
* He works 60 to 75 hours per week.
* He spends 90 percent of his time working with and learning about computer coding.
* It took him two years to get to this point of technical proficiency.
* That is a total of 5,500 hours.

He was not born with the IT chromosome. He did not wish himself to state of savvy. He has clearly been blessed with an incredible brain that was nurtured in an environment that valued education and intellectual curiosity. But that didn’t get him his job. He got his job because. He. Worked. Hard.

Let’s point out how difficult it is to get 5,500 hours of computer time under your belt.
* College students spend about 15 hours a week in class. Good ones will spend another 25 hours reading and working outside of class. That’s 480 hours a semester, 560 hours a year. At that rate, taking ONLY coding classes, you’ll get to 5,500 hours in just under 10 years. Which makes you this guy. Nobody wants to be that guy, so it’s time to accept that editorial programmers are committed to life-long learning.

* Let’s say you knock out a few coding classes in school — 500 hours worth — enough to get hired by a big news organization as a developer. That leaves you with just 5,000 hours to go. Working a standard 40-hour week, you’ll burn through those in 125 weeks. That’s about 2.5 years, after various and sundry holidays, illnesses and vacations.

* Or, maybe you were a good liberal arts student and didn’t blow any of your tuition on coding classes. But your smarts and broad-based knowledge land you a job at one of a very few news organizations that commit seriously to career development. Google spurs innovation with its famous “20 percent time,” which allows its developers to spend a day a week working on projects that are not part of their job descriptions. So, your boss lets you play with computers for one day a week. You’ve got 5,500 hours to make up. And by the time you’re celebrating your 35 birthday you’ll probably be at the point where you can start developing your own editorial applications.

What the conversation with my friend made me realize is why it irks me so much when people come to me saying that they can’t perform some computing taks because they are “technically illiterate” or “not a computer person.” My friend isn’t a computer person. I’m not a computer person either. But we try. We hack our ways through incredibly frustrating failures by simply doing this. And so can you. If you want.

The School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with funding from the McCormick Foundation, is developing business models and editorial products to help community newspapers transition to the digital age.

We are seeking someone who has experience with Python and the Django Web development framework to install a Django application called OpenBlock on a Web server and write a report that details the technical challenges, specifications and scope required for integrating OpenBlock into newspaper websites hosted by TownNews.com. The report would also propose potential alternatives that would be more efficient than using OpenBlock.

In order to write the report, the person we hire will need to perform these tasks:
1. Install the OpenBlock application on a server, and become familiar with its codebase.

2. Identify technical specifications for transforming data formats given to students by city and county government into geo-coded data formats optimized for use in OpenBlock. (See http://developer.openblockproject.org/wiki/Ideal%20Feed%20Formats) These technical specs might include the technical specs for building a site scraper (See http://developer.openblockproject.org/wiki/ScraperScripts) to retrieve the data, a feed parser or a program to impute the latitude and longitude of data types that are vaguely described in their original format from the government.

3. Identify high-level technical specifications for integrating an OpenBlock installation with the CSS styles, site navigation and URL structure of the news organizations so that users and search engines perceive the TownNews.com content and the OpenBlock content as a single site.

4. Contribute findings back to the OpenBlock project developers wiki at http://developer.openblockproject.org/wiki
We intend to select a candidate by December 1. The project would start immediately upon selection.

Please e-mail your proposals – including a proposed timeline, cost bid, resume, cover-letter and three references — to Christine Shia at shia AT email DOT unc DOT edu. Please include “Proposal – OpenBlock RFP” in your subject line.

Questions about this RFP can be addressed to Assistant Professor Ryan Thornburg at 919-962-4080 or ryan DOT thornburg AT unc DOT edu. Please include: “Query – OpenBlock RFP” in your subject line.

With a tweet early in the morning on Sept. 30, I promised to donate $1 to the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy for everyone who re-tweeted: “I use(d) the First Amendment at #uncjomc. http://ow.ly/2Fymp”

Here’s what happened:
* The experiment only set me back 30 bucks.
* Most re-tweets came within the first hour of my original post.
* I started the day with just under 900 followers on Twitter. Probably the biggest benefit to me was that I saw about a 1-percent increase in followers over the course of the day, which is an unusual increase for me — an infrequent and somewhat lackluster tweeter when I’m on deadline for various projects as I am now.

Thanks to …
@KristenELong
@alyssastep
@caseywelch
@amydobrzynski
@chris_coletta
@MECahoon
@julian_march
@kelly_poe
@EricaPerel
@RobbieCrowell
@whypickl
@amybugno
@kristennicole86
@dltowns
@KellyMcHugh
@jbhester
@staceface711
@JOMCParkLib
@hartzog
@mffawcett
@sarde
@uncstorylab
@highheeledmama
@michelekjones
@derigansilver
@bassman7625
@inongimke
@morgan_ellis
@CallMeMrKent
@danielbyrnes

Standing in the outfield of a giant baseball stadium under the glow of more than 40 video walls and monitors, the lead singer of the rock group U2 aimed his remote up at the screens and flipped from station to station while tens of thousands of concert-goers screamed and cheered. It was the fall of 1992. CNN had just made history with the first live video coverage of a war, and somewhere in a computer lab at the University of Illinois – in a town that could have comfortably fit its entire population in the sports stadium – researchers were about six months away from launching the first graphical Web browser.

The hundreds of channels on cable TV were about to be dwarfed by millions of Web pages. The mass media that was able to send one message to an entire planet all at the same time and had defined a shared American experience for more than a half century was about to be replaced by communication technology that would blend the telephone with the television and the postal service and the printing press to form a decentralized network of news and information that would allow every – or everyone with a computer and Internet access – to talk to everyone else all at the same time.

The online news audience doesn’t spend an average of 35 minutes every day because they need another glowing box. News organizations that aren’t committed to giving their audience something fundamentally different should quit throwing money at their Web site and start re-investing in legacy media.

They didn’t come all the way out here to watch TV. Stop giving them a news product. Let them visit news experience. They’ll pay for that.

Online journalism is fundamentally different from other forms of media. The technology that forms its backbone is different. The time, manner and place that people use it is different. And its capabilities to make stories more relevant and more memorable to your audience are different.

Part of the power of the Internet is its ability to cheaply distribute text, audio and images to millions of people all at the same time. Relative to the cost of setting up your own television station, posting a video to the Internet is incredibly cheap — even when you take in to account the costs of the video camera, the editing software, the computer and the Internet access. And relative to the cost of printing all the newspapers you might need to make your story available to everyone in your town, the cost of reaching each additional reader online is almost nothing.

Those innovations alone give online journalism the potential to revolutionize the world, but they aren’t the most significant differences between the Internet and traditional media like television and newspapers.

As an online journalist, you can take advantage of three techniques that were impossible in older media. These three things make reporting, producing and distributing your stories via the Internet fundamentally different from all other forms of media:

1.    Multimedia. Journalists have more choices about how to combine different storytelling techniques to convey different elements of a single story.
2.    Interactivity. Sources, journalists and members of the audience all take part in the creation of a common story.
3.    On-Demand Delivery. The audience has unprecedented control over the time, place and subject matter of the news they consume.

These are the three pillars of online journalism.

The good news? Each pillar directly supports a traditional news value — prominence, impact, proximity, currency, magnitude, conflict, oddity, emotional impact — and each matches up with the five news elements — who, what, when, where, why and how.

Journalists have the task of picking the right technique for the story, and not using the Twitter or Facebook or Flash or blog hammer to smack every story like a box of undifferentiated nails.

Put together, these pillars create an experience, not just a good or a service. In their book, “The Experience Economy,” Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, write that an experience is engaging. It’s value is realized over time because it is memorable. And it personal — it changes and affects each visitor differently.

So, stop debating whether you should charge people to read your newspaper online. The only sensible thing to do is charge for it or stop putting it online. Then start thinking about how you can take your legacy news product and sell it as part of the news experience you create on the Web. And then you can charge for your Web site. Or not. Heck if I know…

In a world where anyone can publish a blog, professional journalists need to emphasize accuracy and credibility even more. But the reductions in staff at almost all newsrooms in America is putting a squeeze on quality control.

This story from last week’s News & Observer provides an interesting case study. The piece quoted me, but mistakenly said I had worked for USA Today. When I saw the error, I emailed the reporter and used the article’s comments section to quickly post my own correction.

In the last week, though, I never heard back from the reporter. It turns out he was on furlough. He sent an apologetic note once he got back. That said, the fact error remains online.

So, let’s walk through what’s wrong (and right) with this picture:

1. Error gets in the news article. Yes, this is an automatic F in my introductory newswriting classes, but it’s certainly not the end of the world. Many people would wisely artgue that these kinds of pernicous little errors are going to become more common, though, as reporters take on the work of departed colleagues and stories get fewer reads by editors before they go to press.

2. Vigilant sources can use comments to correct errors in the article. This is incredibly empowering and could go a long way to increasing trust in journalism. You often hear sources say they spot errors in reporting but never bother to ask for a correction because they figure the reporters and editors won’t care anyway. For the most part I think that’s the opposite of true. But it also doesn’t matter now — sources have the ability, and even the obligation, to correct errors of fact. To not do so is to complictly accept and tolerate inaccuracy.

3. Someone at the N&O should have been monitoring these comments and alerting the appropriate editors to corrections. The primary reason the comments section on newspaper articles are so low-brow is because the (already thinly spread) staff is not participating in them. Which leads us back to the old sentiment among sources and readers — that newspaper editors just don’t care about what I have to say.

This example highlights the two key components to success in the future of news — high levels of accuracy and engagement. Journalists who don’t pursue both are in danger of becoming quickly irrelevant.

The audio of the talk is after the jump.

[display_podcast]

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.

The Daily Tar Heel is preparing for a massive run on student newspapers tomorrow, and is asking that souvenir seekers take only one free copy.

But this also from the paper: “We ask that our readers be on the lookout for this, as you have in the past, and call our office at 962-1163 or e-mail dth@unc.edu if you believe you are witnessing the theft of the DTH.”

Print value = permanence and when demand exceeds supply (of both content and newsprint).

Online value = Interactivity. I’ll be curious to see whether Twitter is lit up more with reports of newspaper theft or reports on which newsboxes are getting refilled. Also, watch for amateur photo and video from Franklin Street tonight to beat anything done by professional media.

Of course, this is all moot if UNC doesn’t win, so GO HEELS!

(And, yes, this post is pure Google bait.)

More here.