A case study in Twitter and verification

Links on Twitter and Mapping

I've been coming across lots of interesting mapping links recently. This has not been entirely accidental. Maybe that might come to something one day, but in the meantime here are a few of the things I've found...

• A news map of Britain based on clicks on bit.ly links over at The Guardian
• If the UK isn't a grand enough scale for you, check out this global newspaper map.
• Geofeedia: Interesting new tool to track social media news content based on location-based searches.
• Map of Wikipedia edits from Europe anyone?
• Or what about a time-lapsed history of Europe map over the last 1,000 years?

Media coverage of Somalia

I was at an event discussing the nature of media coverage from Somalia yesterday. It was a very interesting discussion with contributions from various people with experience of reporting from the country. A round up is available on my Frontline Club blog.

Official Twitter response to attacks in Norway

BBC journalist Stuart Hughes on newsgathering with Twitter and social media

In this video, World Affairs Producer Stuart Hughes talks about his use of social media at the BBC. He was speaking on a course organised by the BBC College of Journalism on 20 April 2012:





I spoke to Stuart Hughes several times while writing my thesis on the impact of blogging on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism.

There are a few things worth picking out here about his changing practices in the newsroom.

Just one to get you started is Stuart's shift away from ENPS towards Hootsuite, a Twitter application.

The Essential News Production System is a piece of software designed by the Associated Press which provides all BBC journalists with news and information from news agency sources and other BBC journalists. First installed in 1996, it is also used to produce TV and radio programmes.

In the video, Stuart points out that he still has ENPS open somewhere on his desktop, but for newsgathering he'll mostly be looking at Hootsuite which allows him to monitor many more sources on Twitter.

Using Hootsuite, Stuart has built different Twitter lists for various news topics and stories so he can keep across developments in each area. Notably, these are not public lists, but are kept private in an attempt to compete with rival news organisations.

If you watch the video, it's also worth looking out for a question halfway through where a member of the audience asks whether Stuart uses Twitter as a "single source", which relates to the BBC's practices over sourcing information.

Twitter coverage of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway

Just flagging up an article I wrote for Index on Censorship for the often unrewarded and hardy followers of this blog.

Among other things, I ask: does it make sense to ban the cameras but not the tweeters from the Breivik trial?

(You know the score by now): to read more click here.

Is blogging journalism? A 'celebration' of ten years of asking the wrong question

Martin Belam is off. Leaving The Guardian for something new. Bon voyage sir!

But before he left, he posted a great blog [included especially for Adam Tinworth] about the confusion surrounding journaling and bloggism. 

Martin was so piqued by a recent tweet from Media Bistro asking: "Are bloggers journalists?" that he was compelled to try to find out the first online reference to the great question of our age:

"The earliest explicit mention of the question I have been able to unearth via Google though is from 11th April 2002. 

"On David F. Gallagher’s blog of pictures of New York City, he posted a link to an article entitled “Are bloggers journalists?” with the URL microcontentnews.com/articles/bloggingjournalism.htm. 

"Sadly microcontentnews.com has disappeared, so I can’t retrieve the actual piece."

In other words, Martin notes, we've just celebrated the 10th anniversary of this particular non-conundrum. 

But enough of this already.

Let's just call a blog a blog. 

I'm off to find an ice cream strawberry.