More resources
Here are a few places I’d recommend you go for more on social media and news.
✳️ First Draft News has rapidly emerged as the go-to place for everything to do with verification and ethics. It pulls together articles, guides, case studies and online training courses from many of the leading experts in this field, and is a really excellent resource. You can also follow on Medium.
✳️ The EyeWitness Media Hub is focused on research and guidance to journalists using eyewitness reports from social media.
✳️ The NewsWhip blog is an incredibly useful source of best practice examples of news organisations using social media.
✳️ The Facebook group run by the Facebook News Partnership Team is a great way to keep up on the latest from them, together with the Facebook media page, which gives advice on best practice. Update: In January 2017, they launched the Facebook Journalism Project, which includes free online training courses in getting the most of Facebook and Instagram
✳️ Sarah Marshall from The Wall Street Journal has an excellent blog, where she posts updates on new tools and from journalism conferences.
✳️ The Local Fix is a great weekly email of top reads in the field of journalism, with a special (but not exclusive) focus on local reporting.
✳️ Journalism Tools is a incredibly extensive pull together of tools to help journalists, and has recently relaunched with a new website.
✳️ NPR’s Social Media Desk is a Tumblr by the social team there, with useful — and refreshingly frank — info on things they are testing out and lessons learned. NPR also has a great social media section on their training site
✳️ Journalism.co.uk is a fantastic source of news and tips on digital and social media trends as they relate to journalism. They also run the excellent London-based news:rewired conferences.
✳️ MediaShift is another great resource for everything to do with media and technology. digital and social trends. They also run some excellent webinars.
✳️ NiemenLab is another must-read source of news on trends in journalism.
✳️ The Research Clinic is run by the BBC’s Paul Myers, who is full of tips on how to use digital tools for investigations.
✳️ The BBC Academy has a number of videos and blogs on social media and journalism here.
✳️ For some seriously techie tips, Digital Inspiration is a great resource, also on Facebook here.
✳️ For those working for European broadcasters, the EBU runs a digital and social media trends Facebook group, as well as training, and regular conferences.
ONA hold the excellent annual ONA conference looking at the future of digital journalism (the next one is 15–17 September 2016 in Denver), and have a useful newsletter for members.
Poytner runs online training course on social and digital skills
✳️ #Wjchat is a Twitter discussion for digital journalists every Thursday, with a new subject and guest each week
✳️ Reported.ly are the real experts at putting social media journalism into action. They cover international news sourced and reported using social media.
✳️ BBC Trending (where I used to work) is the place to go for analysis of stories trending on social media around the world.
✳️ Global Witness have long been experts at sourcing stories using social media.
✳️ More from the Social Media Reporter ✳️
- How to organise your feeds
- Locating video, images and sources from a specific location, and the ethics of using eyewitness material
- Verification. How to spot fakes and scams
- How to use social media to track people down and for research
- How to find out what’s trending and dig to the bottom of trends
This guide is a starting point. I’d love others to contribute to expand and improve it. Please feel free to leave a note here, or get in touch at cordeliaheb@gmail.com or @cordeliaheb
