Module

Module 5 – Social media and science journalism

Social media can be relevant at all stages of journalism: research, production, and publicity. For science journalists, social media help connect journalists directly to science news-makers and relevant experts, provide a way of finding large-scale responses to science stories, and building an audience among interested science news readers.

This module covers:

  • Mindset and tools for using social media
  • Practices for using social media
  • Science social media feeds
  • Social media tools
  • Social media publicity
  • Social media and journalism in Australia
  • What’s next for social technologies and science journalism??

Mindset and tools for using social media

Dr John Harrison interviews Dr Sean Rintel (@seanrintel), Lecturer in Strategic Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at The University of Queensland, about the mindset and tools when using social media for science journalism.

Watch this video, which runs for 15 minutes:

You can also read a transcript of the video.

Sean Rintel’s tips are:

  • Think about user-generated content: being able to get hold of it, and to search through it, filter it, search for trends and analyse it. That creates new ways to curate and maintain sources, break stories, find new angles on stories or research stories in depth.
  • There are many tools that allow combinations of research, production and publicity based on the fact that user-generated is not limited to that space. The so-called ‘web-2.0’ Internet consists of streams of information out there with structures (meta-data such as author, title, format) that allow them to be aggregated, filtered and searched.
  • The best reflexive practitioners will voraciously keep up with what the new tools are and experiment with those tools.
  • Rather than thinking about stories as one entity, think about tools that allow you to extend or provide additional breadth or depth to stories. This provides a way of explaining material that is too complex for the main story (e.g. the development of ideas, scientific terms and processes) but is also a draw to the story and the science journalist as producer.
  • Rather than thinking about stories as produced for one outlet, science journalists need to understand the way multiple publicity sources (e.g. Twitter vs RSS feeds) change the perception and share-ability of their stories in multiple reading applications (such as news aggregation websites and mobile news applications).

Practices for using social media

Dr John Harrison interviews Liz Minchin (@lizminchin), Walkley award-winning journalist and author, about the practicalities of using social media for science journalism.

Watch this video, which runs for 14 minutes:

Liz Minchin is currently the Queensland editor for The Conversation, prior to which she worked at The Age newspaper for a decade, most recently as news editor of The Saturday Age. She has also worked as a media trainer, and co-written a book on bigger-picture solutions to climate change, Screw Light Bulbs. You can also read a transcript of the video.

Liz Michin’s tips are:

  • Social media represents new opportunities for drawing attention to science stories.
  • Publicity from Twitter, in particular, has a large amplification effect. Having someone tweet your story to a person with a large Twitter following can lead to exponential readership gains.
  • Tools such as Storify allow both journalists and non-journalists to pull together rich collections of social media, as individuals or as collaborators. This allows more possibilities for engagement.
  • Social media can be used to find cases or people to illustrate a story that draw on far more resources than a journalist might have on hand locally.
  • The first rule of social media is that it’s not all about you. Limit ‘breakfast’ posts and ‘I just published’ posts. Rather, you want to be posting interesting stories in and out of your specialist field, so that the number of followers grows organically and when you do write a story, your followers post or retweet it. Rather than a traditional broadcast model of pushing stuff out at people, the people I think use social media best use more of a referral model.
  • Twitter may a better professional medium than Facebook. While Facebook posts can get attention, it may be best to keep Facebook personal and separate, leaving Twitter for a more public audience. Twitter is good for breaking news but, perhaps as or more importantly, it allows direct access to an expert person in a very different part of the world, as a source of inspiration, as a direct story source and as a possible candidate to refer your story to their followers.

Science social media feeds

Journalists routinely conduct research online to generate leads and find information for stories. For science journalists, this information can come from a variety of primary sources, including universities, leading science journals, individual scientists or international science organisations; or secondary sources, such as the science sections of newspapers or science magazines and blogs.

Individually visiting the websites of all of these sources can be labour-intensive and time-consuming, however, which is why a smarter approach is to use Twitter or a Twitter aggregation tool or an RSS feed reader to automatically collect and read all of the news and information that these sources generate—in one place.

Twitter

Twitter is a social network microblogging service. Users to send and receive “tweets”, text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets but unregistered users can only read them. For a good introduction to Twitter see this Twitter 101: What is Twitter Really About? page.

Twitter Clients

Associated Twitter Services/Apps

Services/Apps

RSS News Reader Services/Apps

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary (ore Really Simple Syndication), a web standard for broadcasting frequently updated information such as news headlines, blog posts etc. An RSS item (as one of many in a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarised text (and sometimes an image) and metadata such as the author’s name, site name, and publication date and time. For an easy introduction, see the video RSS in plain English.

Services/Apps

Developing an ongoing understanding of social technologies

Science journalists of all kinds (not just technology journalists) need to be on top of new developments in social media technologies, as these will provide the tools by which you can find and research stories. The following list of technology site RSS feeds and Twitter accounts represents a reasonable starter set of feeds for social technology news. You can search and add any of these to any RSS news reader or Twitter client (below), and you should also look for more feeds that are relevant to you.

Technology

Technology and Journalism

Primary social media sources for science journalism

Primary sources are most likely to be the first to generate the science-related news: universities and individual scientists conducting scientific research, major (high-ranking) scientific journals publishing it, and the major international scientific organisations funding or promoting it. We have provided some links to individual sources and lists. Lists of Twitter accounts and RSS feeds (and services which provide them) change rapidly, so they need some ongoing maintenance. It is also important to make good choices about which list to follow.

Media sources for science journalism

While monitoring media sources such as the science sections of major newspapers, major science magazines and science blogs may not help you break the news, monitoring them can give you leads to develop more in-depth, investigative pieces, or spin-offs.

Social media tools

Social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and other online sources of user content can be rich resources for journalists to track the importance of stories and to find sources of expertise to drive new stories. However, journalists can only make sense of this staggering volume of data through the use of tools to analyse and and present it. Fortunately, a range of analysis tools have been developed in recent years, and many are free to access and use online. For example, Storify is a tool that allows for the curation of a range of social media resources and assembly into a story format.

The reports below have been compiled by journalism students at The University of Queensland. The list is not exhaustive but they represent a reasonable sample of what is available for research, production, and publicity. Each report gives an overview of the tool’s purpose, basic instructions for its use and details about its functionality and limitations. The reports are on a course blog external to this site, so the formatting will be different to this site. Reports will be shown in a new tab/window.

Research tools

Muck Rack Muck Rack is an online tool that curates the Twitter feeds of journalists and publications to facilitate the monitoring of current news trends. In live time, it tracks these professionals, extracts their Twitter material and organizes it on a multi-use interface. In addition to its targeted journalist and news directories, it enables media professionals to create and customise a publicly accessible social profile, allowing them, too, to be tracked. Special feature: Lists and profile for tracking; Multiple social media.
Bottlenose Bottlenose is a dashboard that filters social media content according to the user’s preferences. It makes the content easy to access and navigate, particularly between trends that relate to specific topics, people etc. The popularity and relationships between issues can be accessed at the tip of a finger and thus inform the journalist of the trending topics and hashtags. Special feature: Sonar showing links between trends across multiple social media.
Trendsmap Trendsmap is a social-media tool that maps Twitter trends from across the world in real-time, combining Twitter Trends, Google Maps and What the Trend . 21st Century media professionals can use Twitter as a way to engage with and report on particular communities worldwide. In this way, media professionals can see what is being said and by whom as news breaks, allowing them to pitch their stories in correspondence with public reaction, as well as determining what hashtags to include in order to project their contributions to the widest possible audience. Special features: Linking Twitter trends and locations.
Topsy Topsy is a real time search engine that utilises data from Twitter to find the most talked about information. By combining both trend data and sentiment analysis, Topsy can determine the most credible sources of information on any given topic, and can also be used as a trend comparison tool.  Topsy also has a full archive of all past tweets. Special feature: Trend comparison; Historical research.
Tweet archivist Tweet archivist is a tool that follows low trending topics over a long period of time as opposed to a high trending topic over a short period. It allows you to search a subject and it will generate an archive of tweets on that subject and it is up to the user if they want to share it publicly or privately. This is a highly effective tool for the 21st century media professional in theory for so many different reasons, mainly the fact that a certain ‘trend’ can be searched and it’s presented in a fashion that can be used as a viable source for things like presenting graphs and statistics. Special feature: Historical overview of tweets.
TweetReach TweetReach is a social analytics tool online that measures Twitter campaigns, providing detailed metrics regarding the number of people who see a tweet, and who those people are. This tool essentially provides 21C media professionals with the ability to gauge how far Tweets travel. Special feature: Analytics.
Hootsuite Hootsuite is an online dashboard that allows users to manage their accounts for many social networking tools at once. Its main functions include streaming and scheduling communications, and analyzing their impact. Special feature: Multiple social media posting and tracking. Multiple users for one account.
News360 News360 is a personalized newsreader web application (also an app), which uses semantic analysis to derive content from multiple news outlets,  sources from Twitter, Facebook, RSS and other feeds to deliver news according to users interest in an organized and aggregate form. Special feature: Comparing the same story from multiple outlets.
Twilert Twilert is an online Twitter-based tool that enables users to receive regular email updates of Tweets containing mentions of a specific brand, product or keyword. The tool aids 21st Century media professionals in researching a particular breaking news story by monitoring and gathering Tweets of relevance to a particular search term. This Twitter-based tool is unique in that, while many tools act as monitoring and notification systems, Twilert enables users to configure search and alert options to suit their needs, such as the frequency of alerts and the location to be monitored for Tweets. Special feature: customisable email alerts about tweets on a particular topic.

 Production tools

Storify
 Storify is a website that allows users to tell a story by embedding material from social media platforms together into one narrative stream. The tool allows 21st Century media professionals to bring the best elements of a story as conveyed by the social media world, as they actually appear in their native format and with attributions, into one story, or one Storify. Can also be used as an aggregating research tool. Combines research and production into one tool. Special feature: Native format of social media materials, links back and attributions to original authors.See also these 2013 examples of Storify used to create science journalism stories:
Twitpic Twitpic is a photo sharing service that allows Twitter users to post photos from a variety of platforms. This includes one’s phone, Twitpic’s application programming interface (API) or through the site itself. Special feature: Photo posting to Twitter.
Timeline JS TimelineJS is a web tool that allows the 21st century media professional to curate media from different sources to create an interactive timeline. Currently, it can support content from Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia and SoundCloud. TimelineJS is a useful tool that offers a way to present information in a chronological order that is both interactive and visually appealing. It is a great presentation tool for media professionals that can help with the task of gaining and holding onto the attention of an audience. Special feature: Timeline.

 Publicity tools

Hootsuite Hootsuite is an online dashboard that allows users to manage their accounts for many social networking tools at once. Its main functions include streaming and scheduling communications, and analyzing their impact. Special feature: Multiple social media posting and tracking. Multiple users for one account.
Muck Rack Muck Rack is an online tool that curates the Twitter feeds of journalists and publications to facilitate the monitoring of current news trends. In live time, it tracks these professionals, extracts their Twitter material and organizes it on a multi-use interface. In addition to its targeted journalist and news directories, it enables media professionals to create and customise a publicly accessible social profile, allowing them, too, to be tracked. Special feature: Lists and profile for tracking.
Bottlenose Bottlenose is a dashboard that filters social media content according to the user’s preferences. It makes the content easy to access and navigate, particularly between trends that relate to specific topics, people etc. The popularity and relationships between issues can be accessed at the tip of a finger and thus inform the journalist of the trending topics and hashtags. Special feature: Sonar showing links between trends.
Trendsmap Trendsmap is a social-media tool that maps Twitter trends from across the world in real-time, combining Twitter Trends, Google Maps and What the Trend . 21st Century media professionals can use Twitter as a way to engage with and report on particular communities worldwide. In this way, media professionals can see what is being said and by whom as news breaks, allowing them to pitch their stories in correspondence with public reaction, as well as determining what hashtags to include in order to project their contributions to the widest possible audience. Special features: Linking trends and locations.

Social media publicity 

As a journalist, your social media presence can have a significant impact—positive or negative—on your profile. The following articles give advice on how journalists can best take advantage of social media to promote themselves and their work.

Articles

People to follow for social media publicity tips

Social media and journalism in Australia

All Australian journalists should be aware of the following resources.

What’s next for social technologies and science journalism?

As well as data journalism and the linked field of data visualisation, the next big thing linking social technologies to science journalism is likely to be gamification of science and news. This is the concept of promoting engagement using the mechanics and fun of games and gameful design for serious purposes. There are two broad ways in which this matters to science journalism.

  • The first way in which gamification will matter to science journalism is for science itself. Scientists are increasingly crowd-sourcing difficult tasks by using games to get help from citizens. An example of this is the Foldit protein folding puzzle game, in which citizens solve puzzles for scientists, sometimes far faster than the scientists themselves (see the many articles). Games are also useful teaching tools for science concepts. Of course there are directly educational games, but some of the more broadly appealing games at Games for Change teach about scientific issues without making a direct educational appeal.
  • The second way in which gamification will matter to science journalism is to make the journalism itself more interesting by providing an interactive experience of news issues or to encourage ongoing engagement with news consumption. See this video of Ian Bogost discussing serious games, as well as his book “Newsgames: Journalism at Play“, and the sites Game The News.

Exercises

  1. Take any one of the research tools and use it to research a short news story. Write a short reflection on what worked and did not work.
  2. Take any one of the production tools and, using an existing science or medical news story, produce an accompanying resource intended to deepens a consumer’s understanding of the range of social media responses (Storify) or the genesis and development of ideas (Timeline JS).
  3. Use the list of science social media feeds to list likely feeds useful for breaking or deepening  news stories. Explain why you chose this list.

Check out all the exercises for this module.

 

Scijourno is a collaborative project

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The University of Western Australia also contributed to the academic advisory group.

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