Robert Hernandez: October 2010 archive
Tips and tools to innovate with during election night coverage
October 24, 2010
In our world, there is no better story that reflects the power and value of good journalism than an election.Regardless of the medium, election stories can and should be as varied as investigative pieces, people profiles, contextual stories, and, because politicians are so colorful, stories of the weird.
Put these under an umbrella of breaking news and see us do our thing.
The midterm elections are just around the corner and they are more than promising a newsy season. By now many of us have established a general plan for election night coverage.
But to help foster innovation and advancement in journalism, last's week #wjchat, a weekly chat about Web journalism held through Twitter, had its first Elex Exchange where we shared ideas and tools to help with this year's coverage.
Inspired by the chat, here's a list showing how to take advantage of the latest technology to make election coverage more powerful and dynamic:
TWITTER // reporting + distribution
It's a basic tool that should be part of your daily journalism routine, but Twitter is still best tool for covering a real-time news event, especially when covering breaking news or an election.
As written before, Twitter is the tool to help you find sources and trends in real-time. Either by zip code or by topics/keywords, make sure you are using and monitoring Twitter throughout the election. Use a Twitter-client like TweetDeck with predetermine searches that you occasionally check on. More...
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What's in a name? Backstories to some personal brands
October 17, 2010
By now we've all heard that the journalism game has changed and we need to take our careers into our own hands: Get a domain, embrace social media and start managing your brand.But to start, it all begins with one of the most common questions I routinely get. What the heck do I call myself? What's the name of my brand?
For some lucky folks, their name is unique enough that they are able to secure it as their domain, Twitter handle and more. But for the rest of us, we have to be a bit more creative and invent a new digital identity.
Many times these personal brands are inspired from the most odd places. I know someone whose handle was from Spaceball's "gone plaid" scene.
Here is a small, somewhat random, collection of personal brands and their backstories.
Digidave // David Cohn
It was (from) my college freshman dorm roommate.
This was in 2000 and he was much more technically savvy than me. Granted - at the time this just meant he was on AIM all the time and used his computer as an alarm clock.
I, on the other hand, was going through my hippie phase and believed that we needed to break away from computers, man, and just, ya know, free, man.
He kept telling me to embrace the digital-dave. That became Digidave.
The joke name then lay dormant until I became a tech-writer (the irony) and fully had embraced the digital-dave. After I chose it as my handle on Digg in 2004 - it stuck.
writepudding // Liana Aghajanian
"writepudding" is meant to be a play on the delicious treat, "ricepudding." It's rather silly really. When I first started blogging around five years ago, I wanted a name that stood out. I thought to myself, "I really love rice pudding and I obviously love to write," so I just combined the two and came up with writepudding. It sounds more like an inside joke than I'd like it to, but it feels comfortable and it's just stuck with me through the years. More...
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Storify's Burt Herman on the evolution from reporter to entrepreneur
October 10, 2010
For this week's post, I sat down with Burt Herman (@burtherman), entrepreneurial journalist who is the CEO of Storify and founder of Hacks/Hackers.NOTE: We did the Q&A-style interview over a collaborative document and one of my favorite tools: typewith.me. You can see the raw interview and play it back here: http://typewith.me/ep/pad/view/ojrqa01-bherman/latest
Burt, you have an incredible journalistic background and really, in my opinion, you truly represent the new type of tech/entrepreneur journalist we've all heard about. Tell me a little bit about your background at the Associated Press and how you evolved from reporter to entrepreneur.
Thanks, you're too kind :)
Yes, I started off in a fairly typical journalism role -- I went to work for the AP because I wanted to work overseas as a foreign correspondent, and they had the most opportunities to do that. So after graduating, my first journalism job was as a temp hire at AP and things went from there -- a couple years in Detroit and then a post as an editor on the International Desk in New York before I was sent overseas to Berlin. From there, I went to Moscow and then to Uzbekistan to start a new bureau for AP covering the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. My last AP job was a bureau chief in Korea. In between, I covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Asian tsunami, Pakistan and many other stories.
I returned to the US in late 2008 for a Knight fellowship at Stanford, where I had gone as an undergrad. With all the changes in journalism, I wanted to explore the secret sauce of innovation in Silicon Valley and see how that could be applied to journalism. I took classes at the Graduate School of Business, Design School, computer science department and explored how this could be applied to journalism. In the end, I wound up deciding to extend my sabbatical from the AP to have a go at doing a startup on my own, building a company around the future of storytelling and digital publishing from a clean slate.
More...
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Two new social media tools to watch for use in Web journalism
October 4, 2010
Think about it. Two or three years ago most people had never heard of Facebook. Tweets still mainly were owned by birds, not limited to 140 characters. FourSquare was some vague game from elementary school.In general, most people had written off social media as some sort of high school fad.
Well, you should know by now, Web-based social media is not a fad.
If you still doubt this, temporarily remove your head from the sand and go talk to one of the more than half a billion people who spend hours and hours sharing news, photos or running a virtual farm. (For the record, I am not a fan of FarmVille.)
In its constant evolution, though, technology routinely leapfrogs past itself as it innovates and disrupts the status quo.
In other words, you ain't seen nothing yet.
What's next? It's geolocation paired up with augmented reality, in my opinion.
Those creating these new tools typically don't have journalism as a possible application in mind. But I, an admitted tech/journo/mad-scientist geek, can't help but apply the journalism prism to some of the latest tools and technology.
So, in that vein, here are two emerging tools I've came across that I think are worth keeping an eye on. They might not be perfect now, but I encourage you to experiment with these and see if there is a journalistic application here. More...
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