Kayla Castille | web journalist

As more and more media companies and journalists jump on the social media train, they could be facing a challenge with what to do with those pages when someone moves on. Today’s wired journalist has his or her own blog, networks with sources via Facebook, and poses questions to readers on Twitter. But who owns that content? And those accounts? What happens to them when the journalist moves on to another job?

This question came up last night in the local Charlotte “Tweetup” — a meetup of Twitterers in my area. We were talking about businesses that have made good use of Twitter. Those businesses, media companies included, have a brand to promote and protect. And if Reporter Q at a local newspaper or TV station has set up a Twitter account specifically for work purposes — to post news and interact with readers — what happens to that account when she moves on to another job? Should the station own her “Tweets”? Should the station take control of the account, and continue to benefit from the community she has built there?

The same question could be asked in other platforms like Facebook. Nicholas Kristof (among others) has a fan page on Facebook, and there’s no doubt he and the NY Times have benefited from the community that has sprung up there. If he were to leave the Times (and I’m not suggesting he would or should), what happens to that page?

I have more questions than answers on this topic at the moment, though I do have a few initial ideas:

1. Don’t let the page die. I expect that keeping up with a departing employee’s social media is not high on a news organization’s to-do list. But if journalism is to benefit from social media’s opportunity to promote content and build communities, then maybe it should be. The same should apply if you’ve got a company-wide page maintained by an online staffer — don’t let it fall by the wayside just because someone leaves. Find another social media guru to make use of it.

2. Be honest with readers/users/members. If someone is no longer with the company, but you want to maintain the following they’ve built, then say so. Sure, you’ll lose some people — they may follow the reporter to their next gig. But if they’re following because they want to stay connected to local news and discussion, then you need to provide an alternative place for them to go.

What else? Any examples out there of how a company made use of a social media page despite employee transitions?

My previous town of residence — and my husband’s hometown — is seeing its second big breaking news story in the past few days. This morning, a train carrying hydrochloric acid derailed, forcing the evacuation of roughly 3,000 people in a 1-mile radius.

Of course I turned to my former employer, theadvertiser.com, for the latest information. The site was recently redesigned — it’s the same template for all Gannett sites, but I think it’s very effective. It worked well for coverage of tornados in the area earlier this week; they had tons of photo slideshows and videos, and people used the social networking tool (the rather unfortunately named “Pluck”) to share information.

But this afternoon, I had to go elsewhere to get the thing I wanted most — a map of the evacuation area. KATC.com has not just one, but three maps. Here’s a screen grab of one of them:

I don’t know if The Advertiser was restricted by their content management system, because I know they’re still working out the kinks after the redesign. But even a basic Google Map (the “My Maps” kind that anyone can make) is incredibly helpful to users during breaking news, especially when information is slow to come, or people are restricted from travel. I’ve done some for past breaking stories, but this is a good reminder for how important they can be. 

Incidentally, according to KATC’s map, their own newsroom appears to be in the evacuation zone, so I’m not sure how they’ve been broadcasting all day. Hmmm.

This is the second super-cool and original thing to come out of Fox Chicago in the past two months: AirFox Live. It’s not just streaming video from the chopper; it’s streaming video plus a live Google Map mashup that plots the current GPS coordinates of the chopper in real-time. I haven’t seen much of it in action yet — there’s not much to see when the chopper’s not up. But I’m imagining how awesome it will be on Monday morning during rush hour.

This would be particularly helpful during traffic stories, which appears to be their focus. But I bet it could be cool during breaking news too, especially when it’s hard to tell if that triple-murder is really in your neighborhood, or if that brush fire is getting close to your office. (Via TechCrunch)

The other super-cool thing Fox Chicago is behind has become my latest addiction, LiveNewsCameras.com. They launched the beta version about two months ago, and they say it’s been very successful — they aggregate live video streams from all over the world (and not just Fox affiliates, imagine that!) They’re adding more cameras all the time. I’ve found myself leaving it up during the day and listening for the moderator pointing out interesting feeds. It’s great for keeping on top of what might be of interest to our sites users, but it’s also just plain cool. If you haven’t already, definitely check it out.

As an aside, when people talk about where online journalism innovation is coming from, they often focus on online-only enterprises or a handful of newspaper sites. It’s incredibly refreshing to see something so unique — and so successful — coming from a TV site.

UPDATE: Got an e-mail from Steve Baron, web manager at Fox Chicago and the guy behind both LiveNewsCameras and AirFoxLive. He says, “Both started as fun little side projects and developed into much bigger things.” He also says they’re getting ready to roll out a version 2.0 of LiveNewsCameras:

We’re switching the whole site over to a PHP front-end, and built a CMS with Ruby on Rails for the back end, its really cool and you’ll see it very soon … It should increase the usability of the site greatly and let us do way more things, like have 30 RSS feeds for different types of news events.

Thanks Steve!

I was falling asleep on the couch while watching “Transformers” on HBO when I got two text messages at once — one was from CNN’s breaking news Twitter account, and the other was a WCNC textcaster alert. Both said John Edwards was endorsing Barack Obama. I hopped on the computer to read a quick story, then turned on MSNBC to watch Edwards’ speech.

This is how I get my news. Not exactly earth shattering to most in the Web 2.0 crowd. But just in case there were a few folks out there wondering how a 20-something consumes news product, here it is. I have no particular brand loyalty — I’ll take it from whoever can get it to me quickly and conveniently. And there’s nothing in print that I rely on so completely that I’ll need to read it online tonight or pick up a copy in the morning. Think about that when newspapers have this story on their front page tomorrow. How will it be different? What will it offer that I didn’t get tonight? If the answer is “not much,” then they’ve lost me.

I’ve gotten lots of compliments and questions in the past few days about WCNC’s Twitter coverage of the N.C. primary on Tuesday, and after some necessary post-election rest, I’m finally sitting down to tell the story of how we did it.

Months ago, I set up a Twitter account for @wcnc, mostly because I saw lots of news orgs jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, and I wanted to snatch up our call letters before it was too late. I used TwitterFeed to pull in our local news headlines (which is strangely no longer working — need to investigate) and decided to revisit it later when I had some ideas for how else to use it. Then, about a month ago I really started using Twitter personally. I wanted to see how other people were using it, and get a feel for the ways it was useful to me, before I started using it for journalistic endeavors. I quickly became addicted, and by the time the newsroom started meeting to talk about election coverage, the plan came so easily.

We’re a small web staff (there’s 2 of us at the moment), and for a big event like elections, the to-do list can grow unwieldy pretty fast. You’ve got so much information coming into the newsroom at once that even the fastest web producer has to make tough decisions about what makes the cut and what doesn’t. This seemed like a great way to get everyone updating the site, without us as a filter. Plus, TV stations — really, all media outlets, but especially TV stations — like to reinforce that they’ve got crews all over the place; we’ve got you covered from all angles, etc. And what better way to represent that visually, than with an aggregation of tidbits, each one with a reporter’s face next it? I’d seen the Twitter+friends stream used in a few other places, so I decided to try that approach.

I pitched it to the bosses, met with reporters and started building the page. Each reporter, anchor or producer decided individually how they wanted to update — some liked the idea of texting in their updates, but others opted to use their laptops and post from the web. We talked about focusing on context or behind-the-scenes stuff that you can’t get on the air.

On the morning of the primary, I was a nervous wreck. I was scared to oversell it, in case Twitter crashed or we didn’t get many updates, or whatever. But soon one of our anchors was texting in updates about his polling place, hours before he was due in the office. And a reporter was breaking news about which big sports figures were donating to our mayor’s campaign for governor. And producers were coming to my desk, asking if they could Twitter, too.

It ended up being the third most-viewed page on our site that day, behind the story on Obama’s win and the list of complete election results. I’d call that a success, and the newsroom is still buzzing about it. I’d say the prospects look pretty good for more and different Twitter coverage in the future.

After an 11-week Web design course, before which I had never ever touched Dreamweaver, I think I can comfortably say I’m proficient in the program. I don’t use it at work because we don’t have it — we don’t do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of design or styling, so a fairly old version of the HTML editor HomeSite has always done the trick. But as I’ve taken on new projects and sections, I’ve found myself wishing for the ease of setting up styles in Dreamweaver. I’d be hand-coding an image layout or containers in HomeSite, and longing for DW. (Aside: Yes, I know DW’s not perfect, it sometimes writes sloppy code, etc. But I know enough to be able to clean up after it, most of the time.)

Then today, I read about how the “design technologists” over at NYTimes.com use HomeSite or its ilk to hand-code styles and structure. And now I’m feeling all nostalgic about HomeSite, appreciating that I can write a lot of things out by hand. I’m certainly no design technologist, but I’m glad I was forced to learn it the hard way.

Stuck in my head

It’s been a while since something I read online that really affected me on an emotional level, really got in my head. I’m always scanning RSS feeds and skimming blog posts and following links, so I’m rarely staying in one place long enough for someone’s words to stick with me. But this editorial from Peggy Noonan (don’t turn away yet! It’s amazing no matter what your ideology) reminds me of the power of words. And I was stuck in an airport for half my weekend, so maybe I’m just relating on a more personal level. (Via BriWi’s Daily Nightly blog)

I’ve only been a regular Twitter user for about two weeks now, but I’ve been reading about it, and its applications to journalism, for quite a while. And it wasn’t until I drank the Twitter Kool-aid myself that I started to really get excited about using it in the newsroom. Think of the possibilities for covering a breaking event like severe weather, when the most useful content is brief and in real-time: You could run a feed of updates from reporters that people can follow from their cell phones, and you’re not spending a lot of time updating and re-updating a story or live blog that is dated before you can even hit “publish.”

But the bigger question I’m thinking about, prompted in part by talking about Cleveland.com’s new Twitter Network, is what should a news org’s role be in fostering community in a place like Twitter, and how do you do it? I think Cleveland.com very smartly offers a how-to box on Twitter and details on the concept behind the network:

What does the cleveland.com Twitter do?

We bring all the tweets of cleveland.com twitterers to one place. What’s more, we send out breaking news, sports and weather updates and ask questions of the cleveland.com Twitter community. Participate with the community and share your thoughts through connecting with cleveland.com on Twitter.

But I’m not sure if they’re fostering that participation very well. The half a dozen times I’ve looked at the feed, I’ve seen mostly entries from other news organizations (many of them not from Cleveland at all — NOLA.com?). Sure, it’s cool to aggregate news orgs into one Twitter feed, but I see the true value of a Twitter Network as local (hyperlocal, even). Maybe not many folks in Cleveland are Twittering. Maybe they’re not Twittering about anything interesting. But maybe that’s where Cleveland.com can take a more active role. Get reporters Twittering through personal pages, and follow them. See who in the business or political community is posting. Encourage them to participate at first by simply following you. Participate in conversations with your initial users. Start your own conversations.

These are all suggestions that apply to news organizations’ use of pretty much any other social media. But it’s worth mentioning, because I think in the wave of enthusiasm about what Twitter can do for us, we have to also focus on what we can do for its users — and ours.

Woohoo! First post!

So here it is: My very own WordPress blog. This most certainly isn’t my first blog, but it’s nice to start anew with one I’m hosting myself.

Lots more to come about me, this site, and the kinds of things I want to talk about here. I’ve had dozens of entries zooming through my head about things like Twitter, breaking news coverage, newsroom investment and lots more.

Drop me a comment with any feedback or thoughts you have. I’m still working out some kinks, and I haven’t even begun to style this blog.