Online Journalism

Mass friending on social media: its something that almost everyone is guilty of. You, though, could not possibly be guilty of such an offense! How proposterous, right?

Ask yourself the following questions concerning Twitter:

1. When or why did you get your Twitter? Was it for personal entertainment or was it for business purposes that could help your brand growth?

2. Who was your first follower on Twitter? Was it a family member or a friend or was it one of your brand loyalists?

3. Who did you first follow on Twitter? Was it a family member, friend, or celebrity you like or was it a member of your audience or person with similar passions?

If you chose the first answer to any of these questions, you are indeed guilty of said offense.

You don’t want to simply sit on Twitter for your own enjoyment, you will not benefit from it, nor will your followers. What you need to do, according to Patrick Thornton of Beatblogging.org, is “create a quality experience on social media that will get people to interact with you, retweet you, link to you, talk about you, and tell their friends about you.” If you do this, you will have the best chance for organic growth.

It is difficult to separate family and friends from professional social media but in the world of journalism, it is imperative to do so. Just because you have more followers than one of your colleagues does not mean you have a more successful Twitter than them. In his article “Followers (or fans or friends) are not all created equal,” Thornton offers us some advice to help us in the separation.

The following is a list of points that Thornton believes will assist us.

1. “Only follow people that you want to interact with and that would be interested in your organization or project.

2. Look for ways to be interactive. Make your tweets enjoyable for your followers so they look forward to coming to your Twitter.

3. Make sure your content isn’t all about your self. Link to or retweet articles from colleagues that relate to your interests on a larger scale.

4. Follow Thorton’s 10-5 rule: for every 10 posts that involve links to cool articles, photos, etc. or ask people questions, you should have at least five @replies to your followers.

If you strive to abide by these guidelines, you will be able to create an interactive and enjoyable experience for your audience. They will then retweet you and recommend you to their friends, allowing for fan base growth. With the fan base growth, you will have the potential to become extremely successful and truly create a beneficial experience on Twitter. That’s more priceless than proving you can have the most followers, wouldn’t you agree?

“There are stories right under our noses everywhere we go. There’s no need to go to “an event” to find a story. I don’t mean deep analysis, but rather a spark, a nugget, a neat little twist.”

Mindy McAdams, journalism professor and expert on online journalism, explains that “a lot of journalism is merely reports,” in her article “Is your story actually a story.”

Listing the five w’s and the h generates information that we can use to mold our stories, yes. The problem is that journalism novices all too often compile the information into writing, but do not delve deeper into their subject. Mindy McAdams says, “the issue is that when I ask students to go out and find a story, that is fresh, that has something new or provacative or engaging to offer– they come back with a report.”

After reading the article, I began to wonder if I could even truly define or explain what a real story would be. After reading her comment, “I’m thinking of the ability to walk down the street, or go to the shopping mall or the center of campus and spot something in which you can discover something fresh,” I thought I had finally figured it out. If I wanted to write a story, not a report, I could go to a store in the mall and try to find out when the store was founded, what its mission is, and how it is affecting the community.

If I collected all that information, I could write a story that Mindy McAdams is talking about right? Wrong. I would still just be collecting the five W’s and the H. How can a young journalist learn to find the stories that Mindy McAdams speaks of, and how do we even define the differences between stories and reports?

Perhaps McAdams is holding students to too high a standard and her reader Chris Machniak is right, “what we can’t forget with students is it takes longer than a single class or even a bachelor’s degree to really become an expert or professional in news writing or reporting.”

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Course: WORD 261-003 in George W. Johnson Center, Room 311B.

Described as follows: “Covers the intermediate level of Word 2007.”

Microsoft Word 2007 has, for a while, been something I’ve felt pretty competent with. However, I definitely learned a thing or two from this workshop!

In the first lesson, aptly named “Inserting Dates and Symbols,” we learned how to put dates and symbols into our paper.

Then, we went over Quick Parts and how that tool can make things quicker for writers that consistently use titles/pictures in their pieces. Additionally, the Building Blogs Organizer, which helps users sort building blocks by name, gallery, category or type, was pretty interesting.

The third lesson dealt with using AutoFormat in Word 2007. AutoFormat can format a document as the user types — it analyzes the user’s text as they type and then applies the appropriate formatting.

Lesson 4, “Working with Tables,” helped me apply the use of tables into my work, which is a useful way to throw a bunch of information into a clean, organized area of space.

Related to the use of tables, Lesson 5 was probably the most beneficial of all of the lessons. I learned about aligning table text, merging cells within a table and converting a table into text.

Mandy Jenkins spoke to our class about fair usage. A few things I learned

• Fair use allows us to use work without permission but must follow a certain criteria

1. Purpose and character
2. Nature of work
3. Portion used
4. Effect of the use on the potential market

• Copyrights are more protected than trade mark.
• Trademarks renew more frequent than copyrights and can also be lost easier.
• You must always give credit to whomever you borrow from.

Former Virginia senator George Allen joined students participating from the George Mason University Video Studio along with Steve Scully, the political editor for the C-SPAN networks, and students from the University of Denver.

In an open forum Allen answered student questions ranging from sports to foreign policy.

Allen took a hard stance that federal government should limit its attempts to control the states, and went further to state the “federal government exceeds authority.”

With regards to foreign policy his stance was “defense wins and protects our liberty. He also spoke about the crisis in Egypt.

Although he did not provide a plan for Egypt he concluded the four pillars ofa just society include:

• Freedom of religion
• Freedom of expression
• Private ownership of property
• Rule of law

He ended by answering questions about his book entitled “What Washington can Learn from the World of Sports.” In which he explains the similarities bewtwwen politics and athletics.

The Microsoft Word 2007 Intermediate course offered by George Mason University covers a variety of user topics such as:

• inserting dates
• inserting symbols
• adding Quick Parts (allows you to store a heading, title, certain piece of info, etc. and allows you to open it on various blank documents)
• using AutoFormat (formats a document as your type by analyzing your text)
• setting up, navigating and entering text into a table
• inserting a blank line
• hiding/showing gridlines in a table
• converting existing text into a table
• inserting Quick Tables (already-formatted tables for things such as calendars)

For me, the most helpful lesson out of all of the things we touched base on was learning about how to create a table. I have always had trouble getting the tables I make to come out correctly with the right number of rows and columns, however the instructor made it easy to set a table up. All you need to do is go to the “Insert” page, click on the “Table” button, and select the dimensions for your table. By then clicking on the “Design” button, you can create a design for your table and color-code it according to specific categories.

You can even convert your written text to a table automatically by highlighting the text and then clicking on the “Convert Text to Table” button. This is an easy option if you don’t know how many columns or rows you are going to have at the start of your table project.

For more Microsoft Word 2007 help, visit Word’s Help and How-to website or their Training website.

(Johnson Center, Room 311B)

Zotero is a free citation management program that was originally created here at George Mason University in the Center for History and New Media. The program allows you to “collect, organize, cite and share” your resources for various research projects and note taking.

Many college students may find this program useful as it allows you to:

• capture data
• search databases
• cite resources
• share Zotero libraries
• create timelines
• store files
• publish findings
• browse from mobile devices

Since most people do not do research on just one computer, you can create a Zotero username and interface that allows you to access your previous work so that you can sync with it and access it anywhere, even on a global scale.

However, when using a public computer, make sure that you log off after each time you access your Zotero account to prevent other users from uploading to your document library.

There are several different formats you can use when doing citations, for example Chicago Manual of Style, APA, MLA, etc. Every time you export, you can choose which citation style to use for easier exports.

You can also use Zotero to insert a bibliography citation directly into a Word document if you are using a ‘Works Cited’ page.

(Fenwick Library, Room A214)

Summary: With the rise of low-value Web sites who sell links to raise the search rankings of other Web sites, Google changes its algorithm to preserve their reputation as a search engine.

Reputation is everything, and Google is adjusting its search algorithm against sites that sell their links to firms seeking to raise their search ranking, according to a Silicon Valley Mercury News article.

Google’s action comes as a response to outside observers, one of which is Michael Arrington, the founder of the blog Tech Crunch.

Google is not the only search engine company facing this problem, as Microsoft’s corporate vice president of search product development Michael Shum adds “We really need to take search quality very seriously; otherwise, we are all going down the toilet.”

Vanessa Fox of Nine by Blue adds, ” I think the spammers are getting smarter.”

Summary: Search engines are introducing new tools to help users get exactly what they are looking for while offering options that can blacklist sites that users find irrelevant.

Image provided by teamaltman.com

In Vanessa Fox’s article “Paid links don’t pay off” the SEO expert reports:

• Google’s action on JC Penny’s use of black-hat SEO tactics.
• Bing’s increasing market share and its new toolbar.
• Google’s Chrome offering a personalized blacklist for users who want to block specific Web sites from reappearing in their search results.
• Google’s new socialized search results.
• Google’s new data up-loader.