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With all the hullabaloo about Sky News’ new draconian Twitter policy, I am actually more interested in the why rather than the policy as it was reported by The Guardian.

• No retweets of rival journalists or “people on Twitter”.
• Stick to your own beat.
• Don’t tweet about personal or non-professional subjects on their work accounts.

First off, “people on Twitter”? People on Twitter? This reminds me of the old debate we had about quoting bloggers years ago. Yes, a lot of blogs were personal musings, but experts blog about topics including the US Supreme Court, arms control and volcanoes, important

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I’m doing my News Rewired blogging a bit out of order because I’m also doing moderator duty.

Liz Heron, the social media editor for the New York Times, kicked off News Rewired.

She succinctly summed up the goal of the New York Times with social media as:

Engaging users without wavering from our high journalistic standards.

She started by talking about how social media had moved into the mainstream in newsrooms. In 2010, she and her team were focused on evangelising, but in 2011, her team was in demand due to events such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall

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I’m at NewsRewired again doing a bit of live(-ish) blogging about some of the talks that I find interesting.

Everyone wants to be The Economist because it has managed to increase both its print and digital subs over the last few years, and unlike most publishers, it has see its readership and revenue grow through the recession. Speaking at Journalism.co.uk’s NewsRewired conference*, he gave some insights into its success.

In the current environment, for any publication that acts like a filter the noisier the media environment gets the better you do.

Standage also sees The Economist brand this way that

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I’m going to mix apples and oranges here a bit, mixing the US newspaper industry and the British industry. If you think that isn’t fair, then you can click away now.

Some have argued that the decline of newspapers has been down to a loss of trust. A couple of examples of that point of view. James O’Shea, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times said in 2008:

“(the) main problem journalism now faces is the lack of public trust in journalists.”

O’Shea feels that for newspapers to thrive and prosper they “have to figure out how to deliver

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I was just writing a comment on Adam Tinworth’s blog post pointing out that there’s a huge ebook market out there that’s largely lying untapped by news organisations, but it started to get too big so here it is as a blog post.

There are a few challenges that news organisations need to overcome in order to really make the best of the ebook market. The first is around file formats. A friend of mine who does web comics looked at the Kindle, and the problem she came across was that anything with images becomes problematic, not just in terms of

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Richard Gingras, head of news products for Google, was talking about the disruption in the journalism industry at a recent seminar for Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford and made this observation:

Perhaps in journalism it will be like it was in music for a long time: there are a lot of people doing great stuff, but only a handful, the stars, will be able to make a good living out of it. Most will be doing it for a nickel and a dime, out of passion instead of profession.

There is no doubt that newsrooms will be much, much smaller

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Disqus has released an infographic of some analysis they’ve done on their comments to compare pseudonymous, eponymous (real name) and anonymous commenters. They looked at both quantity and quality and found that pseudonymous commenters are better for a community than either eponymous or anonymous commenters. To save you from having to wade through a rather pointless infographic, here are the key facts:

Disqus measured Quality and Quantity:

Quality

• Positive measures
  • Number of times a comment is liked
  • Number of times a comment is replied to
• Negative measures
  • Number of times a comment is flagged
  • Number of times a comment is

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I credit the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane with starting a good debate about fact-checking in journalism, and I like Bernard Keane’s of Australia’s Crikey with a pretty level-headed summary of what Brisbane said:

Brisbane’s point was that op-ed columnists have the freedom to challenge such assertions, and that the Times has been running a sidebar to presidential nomination stories that fact-checks claims by candidates, but such analysis was not currently part of the straight reportage of the Times, and he wanted to know whether it should be.

Fact-checking rather just parroting what politicians say has been on

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Jay Rosen has an interview with Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton, who said in a recent column that the Post might be guilty of innovating too quickly, and as Jay highlights, Pexton says:

I am not a person who thinks the fundamentals of journalism have changed that much, despite social media. Of course it’s more conversational, engaging. And the online world has changed reporting somewhat, but not fundamentally.

I couldn’t disagree more. Certainly, there are reporting formats that haven’t changed much since the rise of digital. However, in saying ‘online’, Pexton is merely thinking of digital as the internet and thinking

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If you’re a newspaper editor, and you want some much needed inspiration, you’ll want to add the blogs of Melanie Sill and John Robinson to RSS feeds or daily reading, and follow both John and Melanie on Twitter. John recently stepped down as the editor of the Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina, and Melanie recently made a similar move, leaving the top job at the Sacramento Bee in California. John wrote an excellent post about rebuilding a newspaper’s relationship with its community last week, and in her most recent post, Melanie looks at newspaper innovation. It comes after the

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