New Journalism How to Use Social Media for Storytelling #SMWReporter #SMW13 #SMWBerlin

This post is one in the #smwreporter series with coverage from Social Media Week Berlin. Thanks to Nokia for covering travel and expenses and for providing a 41 megapixel Nokia Lumia to capture amazing images. Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/6/RC5QuG.

Thanks to Frederik Fischer, CEO of Tame, http://tame.it, for presenting an intriguing program for journalists, PR people and digital storytellers this morning. Here’s a look at the highlights.

New Journalism: How to Use Social Media for Storytelling

Frederik says twitter and Facebook are the extension of a totally new media ecosphere that’s changing by the day. It’s basically impossible to get reach without social media.

Journalism as we knew it has ceased to exist. Today, we need to be focused on the process not the product.

In his presentation, Frederik covered:
storify for curation
storyful for verification
narrative science for writing, you can throw in data and out comes text, works with sports coverage and stock information
demotix provides photos and videos, in 2008 they provided several photos to New times from Iran and
distribution is from every blog and social medium

You don’t have to produce lots of original content anymore, you can curate and contextualize what’s already out there.

The next generation is used to curating and fine-tuning their own info streams for what’s relevant for them.

Today, everyone can be a journalist. News is no longer a scarce product. It’s tough to charge money for something that you can get anywhere for free.

The biggest challenge is the information overflow and breaking through the noise.

In 60 seconds on the web, there are more Facebook status updates than there are search queries from Google.

Twitter is the most interesting at the moment because it’s open and global. Twitter is the mirror of the western web.

To enable you to cut through the noise, they developed tame.it.

Tame analyzes every tweet in your timeline back to seven days.

It shows the top links, top topcis and main accounts being shared. It’s all you need to see the big news items and the stories you want to cover.

Behind every topic, you get the story behind the tweets. When you scroll down, the story basically tells itself.

You can analyze the lists you follow and digest, within 10 minutes, hundreds of thousands ot tweets.

If you follow people that are noisy with no value, you will get crappy results. If you follow interesting people or thought leaders, you will get valuabe results. For example, for stories about Social Media Week, check out #smw13.

A good tool to find emerging information to get an overview of content shared on the web, Tame also gives you an idea of what hashtags to use to be part of the conversation. If you want to reach out to relevant people in your field, the people list gives you an idea of who to follow.

And, you can share a condensed version of your timeline.

Ways to use Tame
as a context search engine for twitter.com
route to explore new stories
keeps you updated with stories you care about
finds opinion leaders and key communicators who can be your new allies – without those allies it’s increasingly difficult to make yourself heard

More Social Media Journalism Storytelling and Measurement Tools

Content alone is worth nothing, it has to be put into context. That’s where pressekompass.net comes in.

At a glance, you can see what aspects of a story have been covered and you know what angles haven’t been covered yet

Once you’ve found great sources, it’s really important to make sure you get the facts right and that you’re not spreading gossip.

Use http://fakers.statuspeople.com to check the number of fake followers. It’s useful to see if an account is trying to fake authority. This tool helps to validate the quality of the account; the number of followers does not guarantee authority.

To find out when a twitter account was established, go to http://twbirthday.com. Be skeptical of young accounts with lots of tweets.

To see the conversations and favorite topics of a twitter account, use http://mentionmap.com. You can also see how they interact with influential accounts.

Distribution in the New Multimedia Format

The new big shot content from the New York Times is formatted in scrollable multimedia stories like Snowfall. Other types of multimedia features include The Guardian’s firestorm coverage, and Zeit Online’s Tour de France coverage.

If you approach journalism in a new way and embed content that’s already out there, you will attract new readers as you present information in a richer format.

Tomato Can Blues is the latest new iteration from the New York Times.

To try this idea out for yourself, check out http://scrollkit.com, a visual content editor. The developer made a Snow Fall replica in about an hour [and was asked to take it down.] The editor allows you to curate content that you want to embed.

To present twitter conversations in an embeddable form, use http:/tweetereview.com.

Instead of putting comments beneath the article, the New York Times puts the comments next to the specific paragraph.

Use as much graphic information as possible throughout the story to keep readers interested and on the page. Highlight specific quotes or passages to encourage readers to follow a path to share content on other platforms.

Be open to criticism and ignore destructive comments.

“It’s somewhere between reporting and collaborative network journalism, and George Plimpton-like oral history, except that i’m doing it in real time in 140 characters.” Andy Carvin, NPR, on curation

For $5 a month, you can subscribe to http://beaconreader.com, a spotify for journalists.

How about you? What tools do you use to curate, distribute and measure stories on social media?