(Everyone calls me Lol / Wikimedia Commons)

Poynter covered a South by Southwest panel of media gurus who discussed how social media has affected the way we write and speak. The panelists included Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider; McKinney’s Gail Marie; Digitaria’s Kristina Eastham; and Sean Carton, director for digital communication commerce and culture at the University of Baltimore.

They said that journalistic use of social media actually encourages writers to proofread because they are being read immediately by a large audience who will point out errors. The social media sphere also offers journalists the chance to become the cream of the crop with their writing: with so many people delegating themselves to a wonky shorthand, a well-constructed sentence will catch the smart reader’s eye.

In addition to advancing our lexicon with terms like “friended” and “liked,” social media reminds us that changes in language don’t necessarily reflect degeneration, but more likely a shift we must embrace and try to preempt. It should make us excited that diction and syntax is so malleable.

And online media has taught us to value short storytelling, which can often be more interesting because it forces the writer to fill the post with meaning. “Shorter is better–if you can do it well,” Gail Marie said at the panel. “It takes some level of skill.”

Credit: Mindy McAdams (macloo/Flickr)

Columbia Journalism Review has coverage of a talk at Columbia Journalism School’s Social Media Weekend, where two editors/producers from ProPublica talked about how their reporters have incorporated social media into their investigative process. Investigative reporters are indeed skittish about giving up their motives before formulating their projects, but ProPublica has no shame about using Facebook groups to gather sources for an ongoing report they’re doing on medical error.

By contacting potential victims of medical error on message boards and inviting them to join their Facebook group, ProPublica’s reporters (including award-winning investigative reporter Marshall Allen) can see how prevalent their issue remains and who to talk with further. They actively monitor and comment on their group to create a lively but controlled environment where no one gets hurt prematurely (doctors don’t get named, etc.).

“This will never replace reporting tools,” said senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, “but it will augment them.”

This isn’t your mom and dad’s Internet anymore. (Credit: LSE Library/Flickr)

Pew released its research on the demographics of social media users for 2012. Jim Romenesko put them together in a pithy breakdown. Two-thirds of adults who use the Internet use Facebook, which was way ahead of all other sites. Sixteen percent are on Twitter, doubled from November 2010. Young people are more likely to use Facebook and Twitter, and women are more likely to use Facebook than men. Pinterest attracts more white people. Instagram has more African-American and Hispanic users than whites. Though Tumblr brings up the rear with only 6 percent of Internet users, it’s much more popular among young people, with 13 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds online signed up.

Firstpost.com took a moment to meditate on Facebook’s ninth birthday, how the social media website has the numbers on its side at this point. Linking to a study by Global Web Index, they show that Facebook is still smoking the online competition in active usage, with Google+ coming in a distant second. As we know, Facebook has evolved quite a bit since its onset (i.e. Timeline, Likes and such).

In January, the website launched Graph Search, which enables users to search Facebook for photos, places, likes and other people’s profiles. Soon to come, too, is a more complex status updating system, which will let users share activities. (In short, it’ll be more customized expression, less in our own words.)  Facebook has stuck around, proving wrong the MySpace model of decline and dominating public discourse. Since Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com on February 4th, 2004, it’s become a common denominator in journalism. No publication goes without having a page.

A supposedly real shot of Hurricane Sandy water. (Wikimedia Commons)

Many viral shots of the first 24 hours of Hurricane Sandy turned out to be fake.  Somehow we missed detecting that one right away.  Citizen journalism yields a lot of incredible stuff, but kinks still exist (only human, right?).  According to the Nieman Lab, the human rights organization Witness is creating an app that hopes to make it easier to nab the fake videos, photos, and audio people share from mobile devices.  The InformaCam app “would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.”

But that’s not enough for you.

If you’re like me, the tools and metrics you use to connect with your audience through the major social media services aren’t enough. We’re greedy consumers, we news publishers, and we want more.

In that spirit, here is my wish list of tools I’d like to see the major social media services provide to news publishers.

On Facebook

I’d love to be able to see, somewhere, a list of everyone who has liked a URL from my site that has been posted to Facebook. Or even just a reliable number of how many people might be on that list. As it stands now, I see different numbers on the “Like” buttons we post on the articles themselves, and on the links posted to my sites’ Facebook pages. And I have no way to track likes of that URL if it is independently posted to FB by people with which I’m not friends or to whom I don’t subscribe. C’mon, Facebook. Let publishers see exactly how many people like their stuff.

I’d also like to know what people are saying around Facebook about the pieces published to my websites. I’ve started using Facebook’s comments application on one of my websites, and like how it cross-posts comments made on my site to commentors’ Facebook walls (increasing the visibility of the post). But how cool would it be if I had the option to allow that app to also display all comments about that URL posted anywhere on Facebook? Or, if I didn’t want to use Facebook’s comments app, if I had the option on my site’s Facebook page to pull in all FB comments about that piece? For pieces that generate hundreds of comments, give the page administrator the option to select the top comments for display on the page. Either way, this tool would encourage greater interaction between publishers and Facebook, and empower publishers to better connect with the audience that’s talking about their work.

Self-appointed privacy police officers, cover your ears now. As a publisher, I would love for Facebook to give me the ability to target ads to people who have liked an article on my domain, but who are not yet fans of my Facebook page. I don’t need to know their names. Just give me that as an option in Facebook’s ad placement tool. People who already have shown that they like my site’s stuff are my strongest leads as I try to solicit more fans on Facebook. Give me, and other publishers, the ability to reach them specifically, instead of hoping that I catch them in one of the other the targeting criteria that Facebook now supports. (If I had this ability, I would be spending additional promotional money with Facebook today.)

On Google

Obviously, I’m awaiting the introduction of publication accounts on Google Plus, which are said to be in testing now. My site’s brand name is more important to my website marketing effort than my personal name is, and I’d like to have a Google Plus account that speaks as the site, rather than as me. Heaven knows most my readers care more about connecting with the site than with me personally, anyway.

But how will that publication account be managed? This gets me into my fondest wish for Google: That it blow up the Google Accounts system and construct something much more like Facebook’s account architecture. Seriously, data management in Google Accounts is a mess, thanks to Google trying to hack together registration accounts from the umpteen different services it has acquired or created over the years.

I’ve written before of the mess that ensued after Google assigned me a YouTube account from another user who was squatting on my trademark. Instead of allowing the other user to close his YouTube account, then transfer the now-available account name to me, Google kept the old user’s demographic information attached to the YouTube account when transferring it under the control of my Google Account. During the switch, Google allowed my Google Account to inherit the demographic information of the other user’s YouTube account, leaving Google to believe that I am now 16. Whoops.

So now I have two Google Accounts, one for that YouTube account, Gmail and AdSense, and another that I use for Google Plus and my original YouTube account. That’s silly. I’d much rather Google recreate its Account system so individual service accounts never overwrite demographic information on the “parent” Google Account. Then, it should allow one Google Account to administer multiple accounts on the same service. Facebook doesn’t limit my Facebook account to administering a single Facebook page. My Google Account shouldn’t be limited to administering a single YouTube account, either.

Publishers often deal with multiple brands, and assign multiple employees or contractors to manage them. I’d like to assign some freelance video editors to help maintain my YouTube channel. But I don’t want to give them a log-in that also accesses my Gmail and AdSense account. Nor do I want to have to create yet another Google Account that I would have to change the password for every time an editor stopped working with me. On a Facebook page, all I’d have to do is revoke the admin access for that editor. I’d like to see the same functionality on Google.

On Twitter

One of Twitter’s strength is its simplicity. So I’m willing to keep my wish list from that service simple, too.

Fix the search function.

If someone types a brand name in the search box, lead the search results with account names which match that brand, rather than a jumble of individual tweets. It’s frustrating to have to go to Google to find Twitter accounts, but that’s a better alternative now than using Twitter’s own search box. Obviously, that move would make it easier for potential followers to find my publication’s feed within Twitter. (Some apps do this better than the Twitter site itself.)

Beyond that, I’d like to see a few changes that would help improve Twitter as a reporting resource. Give me the ability to restrict my searches to my own timeline, my own tweets or the tweets of another individual Twitter user. (Again, without having to turn to third-party tools.) Finally, I’d love a private bookmark feature, so I wouldn’t have to “favorite” a post to retain it for future reference. Many reporters I know use the favorite for this purpose, but making a post as a “favorite” ought to mean just that. And I particularly like the idea of my bookmarks being public, either, as favorites are.

That’s my list. What’s yours?

a) a powerful upgrade that gives users the ability to fine-tune their news feed, seeing only the updates they care about, and finally muting the noise from friends with whom they really aren’t that close.

b) a classic example of developers over-thinking their product, creating an incomprehensible jumble of updates in no apparent order, instead of the simple stream of posts we were used to seeing on the Facebook home page.

The correct answer (IMHO) is, c) both.

Facebook’s changes to its users’ front pages illustrates a classic developers’ dilemma: How do you balance power with simplicity in an application? Facebook’s added plenty of new features in this update, empowering users to take more control of the way news from friends and followed pages is displayed. But in doing so, Facebook’s created default settings that are leaving too many of its users confused, frustrated and angry. (Thursday night Facebook addressed some of those criticisms by adding a link to jump down to the most recent stories, bypassing Facebook’s selection of the “top stories.”)

All this is before the public launch of its new Timeline feature for users’ profile pages, now available to developers and select few other Facebook users.

Count me among the Facebook users initially ticked off by the changes. After confronting the unholy mess of my Facebook feed, I tweeted: “I like Twitter because, unlike FB and G+, it shows me all the updates from those I follow, in simple chronological order. Is that so hard?”

But curiosity (or masochism) kicked in and I decided to poke around the “new” Facebook. I soon discovered that I could alter the “weight” that Facebook gave to posts from each of my friends, choosing to get “All Updates,” “Most Updates” or “Only Important” updates from each friend. I also can opt out of getting various types of updates from those friends, including their comments and likes on other posts.

Unfortunately, the user interface to make these changes stinks. It’s a pain in the rear to have to set your preferences for each friend individually, rather than being able to drag and drop friends into one of the three priority categories. It’d be nice to be able to opt out of certain types of updates for everyone once, too, instead of having to declare you don’t want friends’ game updates individually. (Maybe Facebook allows this, but I couldn’t find where or how to do it, and I spent hours working with this new interface yesterday.)

Of course, when I and millions of other users get around to telling Facebook all this, we’ll have given Facebook an amazing amount of power to refine its social map of world. That makes me feel funny about sharing this even more detailed information about my friendships and relationships. Heaven knows I wouldn’t want Facebook to share with my friends how I’ve – in essence – ranked them. But giving Facebook this information does get me the feed I want, so I did it anyway.

What does this mean for journalists and other publishers online? I should note that Facebook now has given you the ability to allow people to “subscribe” to your updates without you having to befriend them in return. This enables Facebook to become a direct competitor with Twitter, where following never had to be mutual. (You have to opt into allowing subscriptions for this to happen, in case you are one who doesn’t want non-friends seeing your updates.)

Personally, I’m not opting in. I like having one social network that’s just limited to my offline friends and acquaintances, where I can share personal notes about me and my family. If you want to read what I have to say about the industry and other news, follow me on Twitter or Google+.

Currently, subscriptions are available only on personal accounts, and not on publishers’ pages. That’s because pages never required reciprocity. Any Facebook user has had the ability to follow (aka “like”) a page without needing the page to reciprocate. It would be nice, though, to see Facebook achieve some consistency by using the “subscribe” vocabulary when referencing pages, too. And to allow users to opt in or out of specific types of updates from pages, as they now can from personal accounts.

Here’s a warning for publishers, though. With people now able to opt out of “comments and likes” from their friends, that has the potential to dramatically weaken the power of the “Like” button so many of us have installed on our sites, if this option is widely exercised. I also feel worry for those publishers who’ve invested time and effort in building massive Facebook followings, only to have their posts lost on Facebook’s confusing new homepage.

Yet I look hopefully at the changes, too. If you’re not yet using Facebook’s Recommendations Box, give it a glance today. That feature automatically builds links to the most popular stories on your website among Facebook users. I’ve installed it at the bottom of pages on one of my websites in the hopes that it will improve time spent on site by directing readers to an automatically updated list of the most popular (not just most read) stories on the site.

I’m also hopeful that if Facebook cleans up the user interface for its new subscription preferences, it might help the visibility of publishers’ pages on the site. Once I went through the arduous task, Facebook cleared away posts from casual friends, giving more links on my news feed to the people and pages I most want to follow.

I love that, from a user’s perspective. And I love it from a publisher’s perspective, too. Sure, Facebook’s a mess now, but there’s great new power within it. If Facebook can find a way to clean up its current UI mess, it could end up helping publishers by better connecting them with their most interested readers.

It’s a way for these news organizations to extend their reach and build their brand across media.

Well, in France it’s no longer legal for broadcasters to promote their social media pages.

The Daily Mail quotes a spokeswoman for France’s television regulatory agency, Christine Kelly, saying preference shouldn’t be given to the two popular social media sites.

“Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?” she asked, according to Mail Online.

“This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box — other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

Journalists will still be allowed to more generally promote their social media accounts, but not specific sites (insert wink from anchor here).

If the name of a social media service is integral to telling a news story then broadcasters can utter the banded Facebook or Twitter.

The removal of promoting these sites is an interpretation of a 1992 law that sought to limit thinly veiled advertising (the link is in French, so if you’re like me it’s not going to help much. However, if you do read French please let us know your interpretation).

Of course, this isn’t product placement. Using social media is an attempt by these journalists to connect to their audiences and spread news and information.

Maybe I’m just an ethnocentric American who thinks the viewers and listeners can decide if their trusted news source promoting Twitter or Facebook is really some evil plot to undermine competition or just a way to reach people where they are and in a way convenient for them.

If you’re interested in a review of the film, I direct you to Twitterer extraordinaire Roger Ebert’s review. (He quite likes it.) And if you want a detailed look at Zuckerberg, minus screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s creative filter, check out Jose Antonio Vargas’s profile in the New Yorker.

I want to focus on one element of Zuckerberg’s story, one that reportedly fuels some of the drama within Fincher’s film: the accusation that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from other Harvard students.

Hear me on this: In business, ideas are worthless.

That’s right. Worthless. It’s the execution of ideas which gives them value.

Got a great idea for a new website? Know a sure way to improve community news? Have a tool in your mind that could revolutionize the Web?

Great. But, really, you’ve got nothing.

Until you do something to make your idea reality, your ideas are of no worth to anyone, save for your personal entertainment. Hey, it’s fun to daydream about all that wonderful stuff you could do (and buy!) on that future day when your idea is implemented and becomes a hit. But only fools live in daydreams.

In the real world, reward goes to those who implement ideas.

So dream all you want. But never, ever stop with the dream. Apply the skills of an entrepreneur to test that dream – to determine whether it is feasible. Research the market, gather data and explore how you’d make your dream reality.

If you can’t see how your dream could become real after all that work, let it go. Dream up another idea, then test it.

But if you think your idea feasible, then respect it – and yourself – enough to implement it.

Waiting for someone to write you a big check shouldn’t be your first step, either. Hoping for cash to fall from the sky isn’t an execution plan. Learn how to boot-strap your idea to reality. If it’s a viable idea, and you’ve shown that it can draw an audience – the money to scale up will find you eventually.

For the past two years, we’ve helped present the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at USC, and I’m pleased to let you know that we’re planning another camp for 2011. Keep reading OJR and knightdigitalmediacenter.org for details when we will open applications.

Your idea can become reality. But only if you develop the will – and the skills – necessary to make it so.

While the 105 million+ people on Twitter know their tweets are default set to public, they are still a fraction of Facebook‘s 400 million+ users that post T.M.I. they’d only share with their closest 300 friends.

Facebook gives you a false sense of private… but by now you should know better.

The walls around the Facebook garden have crumbled because of the company’s seriously flawed privacy settings.

And while as a user you should be freaked out and proactive about your personal settings (and more conscious of what you are posting!), as a journalist this is presents an incredible, unfiltered opportunity to access your community on a diversity of topics.

Hold your nose and thank youropenbook.org for making it easier to access your the community on Facebook – for better or worse.

You can now quickly query what’s on the mind of the millions of users that are sharing their raw opinions about any topic… sadly, they usually think it’s “private,” often sharing their opinions with their social guard down.

Here’s a quick search on the some newsy topics.

Arlen Specter

Bangkok, Thailand

Illegal immigrants

Even boring old healthcare.

Go to the site and do a search on something related to your beat or community. Who knows how long this tool will actually last (Facebook has sued before).

But while this is still around, look passed the initial shallowness of the tool and look at the possibilities that help you improve your journalism.

Oh, and do yourself a favor and check your privacy settings on Facebook… come to think of it, just check your privacy at the door before you log onto the Web. It’s all public… whether you like it or not.