Hack Blogspot

How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on  Twitter  have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces. Here at  ReadWriteWeb  we've been leveraging Twitter heavily for some of our most important news writing. While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we've got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the microblogging medium. Josh Catone wrote here in January about  the rise of Twitter as a platform for serious discourse  and discussed the way that a handful of mainstream journalists are using the tool. Charles Cooper did  an informal survey earlier this month  that found a definite majority of journalists old and new to be absent from Twitter.

Bloggers like to think they now control the nation's news agenda--but they don't. 99% of the stories blogs link to are produced by mainstream media, according to the latest study from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism . Pew's findings—based on a year's worth of data analyzing the top stories on millions of blogs and social media pages, Twitter and YouTube—does show how new media websites can influence the overall impact of news stories, and the ways in which new media news storylines differ from the traditional press. For instance: Newspapers and broadcast networks generated more than 99% of the stories linked to by bloggers , and 87% of those stories were news reports rather than Op/Ed pieces. But there were only 13 times when blogs and the mainstream press had the same top story , the most-overlapping of which was "the U.S. economic crisis (five weeks in all)." Others were H1N1, the protests in Iran last June and S...

Got a beef with the USDA? Want to send a message to the U.S. Postal Service? Do you “like” the National Nuclear Security Administration? Now you can let them (and all of your digital friends) know how you feel. The popular social networking site Facebook launched its “Congress on Facebook” page Thursday, which they bill as a one stop shop for members’ official pages. A “Facebook and Government” page connects citizens to the official pages of state, local, and federal agencies. The pages bill themselves as a source for sharing ways that the government can best use Facebook to communicate. More and more lawmakers and government agencies are using the popular site to reach constituents. And as an unintended bonus for journalists, we’ll now be able to disguise our non-work Facebook browsing with the click of a button. Thanks Facebook!

The newspaper business has been absolutely decimated over the past decade as many news organizations adapted slowly to the changes brought forth by the Internet. But one of the men partly responsible for helping to usher in the new era of digital media (and advertising) is hopeful about the future of news. And he actually believes companies can make money off it. Google CEO Eric Schmidt -- speaking at the American Society of News Editors annual meeting in Washington D.C. -- reportedly said that high-quality journalism will prevail. Politico's Jake Sherman has a detailed report on Schmidt's remarks, including the high-tech executive's advice for making money off content on the Web. As has become a common refrain in the news media business, Schmidt also noted that there's more of a business model problem than a news problem facing the industry.

Reuters is in a bit of a bind. To protect its bread-and-butter wire service, it’s telling its journalists not to “scoop the wire” by breaking news stories on Twitter. According to the latest guidelines issued to staff: As with blogging within Reuters News, you should make sure that if you have hard news content that it is broken first via the wire. Don’t scoop the wire. NB this does not apply if you are ‘retweeting’ (re-publishing) someone else’s scoop. “Scooping the wire” must have been a difficult discussion internally. Just a year ago, Dean Wright, the agency’s global editor for ethics and innovation (interesting to see that Reuters has paired ethics and innovation in the same position) wrote in a blog:

I don’t know if you’ve ever asked yourself the question from the title, but we’re about to get an answer. AFP writes that five French journalists have agreed to lock themselves in a farmhouse in France for five days, where they’ll write news based only on what they read on Twitter and Facebook. The rules are: no smartphones, no web surfing. They will be given cellphones that cannot connect to the internet, but from the story it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to verify the news they see on Facebook and Twitter (probably not, as the experiment would make little sense then).

Actress Luna Maya has said that she is not planning to take any steps over her feud with entertainment journalists following an outburst on Twitter where she compared them to prostitutes. In a message posted on Tuesday night, she wrote: “Infotainment are LOWER than PROSTITUTES, MURDERERS!!!!! May your soul burn in hell!!!” Following her post, she has been threatened with boycotts by entertainment television programs and the Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) has reported her to police.