Measuring with Metrics

With access to so much information on the Internet now, as consumers we should be critical, utilizing information that may be beneficial to our own blogs and businesses alike. Inversely though, as producers of this information, we take on an important new role as well. We’ve been given a new power over media, and Jeff Jarvis believes that if given more control, the public is likely to use it. “Give the people control of media, they will use it…Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.” In a PressThink article, Jay Rosen

Tom Curley of the Associated Press observed this significant shift in control as well. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.” But we have continued to grow and change the media landscape. Rosen explains that “We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.” With the control in the hands of the public instead of media programmers, the audience has shifted – it is “the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable” – something to be applauded in my opinion.

Social shares now play a major role in the process of sharing information online and across different media platforms. Unfortunately, to many social sharing seems superficial and ineffective. In a Forbes article, Gregory Galant details a few of these objections. Some believe, “Social shares are just a popularity contest.” Others think, “People may share a link without reading it, or read without sharing.” In my opinion, social sharing is so much more than that. It gives the public the opportunity to really engage and to engage in new and unique ways. “Engagement isn’t just Twitter, Facebook or social media. It’s really getting to know your audience,” said Kim Bui, associate editor of social media and outreach for KPCC in Los Angeles and cofounder of #wjchat. In this sense, social shares would be an ideal way to measure engagement online, but the problem that I see as well as other critics is that “engagement isn’t just about quantity, it’s also about quality, something that can be even more difficult to gauge,” according to How Journalists Can Measure Engagement. As an alternative, Amanda Zamora, ProPublica’s senior engagement editor, suggests news organizations pay more attention to tone of interactions online rather than social shares themselves. “Engagement to us is very much about how people are participating in what we’re doing,” she said. “Those are all important, but it’s also important to go beyond Facebook and Twitter to look at ways people can participate in a story.”

The Image/Video Takeover

Instagram, Pinterest and Vine have seemingly found there place amongst new forms of journalism. In later 2010, Instagram software engineers Kevin Systrom and Michel Krieger created a new sharing, uploading and viewing experience for users. In The New Economics of Photojournalism: The rise of Instagram, the two explained, “We made it super-simple to share photos, not only with your followers in the Instagram community, but with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr, all with a tap of the switch.” My experience with social media thus far has taught me one thing for certain – immediacy and convenience matters. Companies jumped on Instagram’s opportunities (wisely) quite quickly. Luceo began utilizing Instagram to become a part of the new photojournalism. “Not only does it offer an immediate and interactive way for our fans to be a part of our work as it happens, it also allows us to engage with other visual professionals and receive real-time feedback on work as it is being produced.” Matt Eich, one of Luceo’s founders added that it has become one of the most interactive storytelling and audience engagement platforms. The Rise of Instagram discusses the ways in which Instagram has allowed entities to form deeper connections with audiences; and in my opinion, these connections may be the strongest we have seen yet. As an avid Instagrammer myself, I have been able to see such effects from the other side – as an audience member. And though Instagram, like any other media will probably reach a critical mass at some point, there will only be another form to take its place.

While Instagram does utilize a video component, other forms like Vine and YouTube. In a Nieman Journalism Lab article, Adrienne LaFrance argues that video work has companies as well as political campaign groups utilizing the new avenue. “None of the things we’re doing now even existed four years ago,” The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray explained. Media changes so rapidly that for companies, it’s a matter of time in more than one sense. First, immediacy is important, to both users and viewers, especially in the case of news and politics. Now, “with the click of a button from a smartphone app, [Wall Street] Journal reporters can submit footage to the stream — pending approval from an editor — so that it can be viewed there and subsequently embedded into other stories.” Second, just as Instagram replaced Hipstamatic, there will be a new app to replace the previous sooner likely rather than later, which makes it all the more important to utilize whatever new media we can while we can. To me, exploration is important in this age.

Jesse Draper discussed similar questions regarding the opportunities video is beginning to offer in her article, Will the Next Big Social Network Be All About Video?. Here, she explains that Spreecast, “a kind of like a public Skype video chat combined with interactive social media elements”, may serve as the next video platform. The platform is great for publishers, TV shows and celebrities for fan and audience interaction. In a video posted with the article, founder and CEO Jeff Fluhr illustrates how social video may very well be the next “logical evolution from text- and photo-based social networks like Facebook and Twitter.” And with so many new media platforms emerging, who’s to say it can’t be? But who and what will make users jump on the Spreecast train? Maybe like Instagram, it’s only a matter of time.

Storytelling Via Social and Other Forms of Media

It’s no secret that with social media comes some questions of legitimacy, as with any new information or stories though. In Kira Goldenberg’s The Genuine Article, she and Anthony De Rosa, Reuters’s social media editor, discuss the evolution of the news stories and the effect that such an evolution has had on its format. “…The news story has been Rip van Winkled—its form no longer fits the platforms people are using to read it (or, increasingly often, to not read it).” Goldenberg makes a valid suggestion: a new format, instead of “taking the print format and slapping it in a digital space,” according to the Reuters’s social media editor. Today, with so many news organizations and reporters using social media like Twitter to disseminate breaking news, stories often become entangled in comments, shares, links and memes.

CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis, Reuters and CJR’s Felix Salmon, and NYU’s Jay Rosen held a Twitter chat that inspired a post on Jarvis’s blog. Jarvis explained here that the background paragraph in the traditional news stories’ inverted pyramid no longer serves an effective purpose. Instead, the link has taken its place. “A link to an ongoing resource that is updated when necessary—not every time a related article is written. It is a resource a reader can explore at will, section by section to fill in knowledge, making it more personalized, efficient, and valuable for each reader.” And it’s true. The link serves such an incredible purpose for journalists and news organizations alike, as well as aspiring journalists like ourselves. Jarvis’s blog (Buzzmachine.com) serves as a great platform to discuss online storytelling and its evolution into a new forms.

De Rosa proposes a new story form where there are regular updates in the form of short bursts and newest information would appear at the top and dynamically update, showing when a user has already seen particular content. Goldenberg compares this ideal to a Cir.ca, a new app that will allow users to follow stories and view the latest information. This seems ideal as a template, but in reality…how many users will adapt and download the app? It seems to me that users will continue to rely on other forms of media like Twitter regardless. In From Blog to Narrative: Josh Benton Throws Us a Curve, Roy Peter Clark discusses an evolution where, “we’ve seen in the 20th century the professionalization of journalism…the re-emergence of the amateur eyewitness, who uses everything from cell phone images to instant messaging to real-time blogging to get the word out.” Thus it seems, we should focus on reforming our habits.

Here Storify discusses how we might go about telling stories on social media and how we can begin to form such habits. The storify details ways in which users like Josh Stearns can verify sources on social media (Stearns listed his tips on his blog here.) Another detail the storify considers is Facebook privacy, asking the question, “what is and isn’t OK to curate?” Social media storytelling opens up the Pandora’s Box of licensing and copyright infringements and adds its own set of rules as well, which makes it extremely important for both new and experienced journalists to adhere to such standards. The storify shows that even the most experienced journalists make sure their ducks are in a row before clicking Post. If we can follow such tools and information (information that abounds on the Internet), there is no reason this new form of social media storytelling can not only succeed, but flourish.