Continue reading »]]> Last weekend, I asked a question on twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and here, in preparation for a presentation to journalists on using social media. For the record, the question and the answers I received are gatered below. The answers are not always in agreement, and some of tem flatly contradict each other, but according to The Wsdom of Crowds, aggregating information from groups can provide answers which average towards the truth.

I’m conducting a quick survey. What advice would you give to newbies (in particular, journalists) dipping their toe in the social media pool for the first time? Should they blog, open a twitter account, or would Facebook be a better option? Is G+ a ghost town, or an exciting new development? Is LinkedIn worth it, or a haven for Make Money Fast spam?

What Does G+ Think?

Eileen O’Duffy

LinkedIn is great for building a network of contacts. I don’t use it for anything else as I find the updates are flooded with (usually boring) automated Twitter feeds. G+ is not a ghost town. It is the most engaging exciting interesting network to date. There are always conversations, debates and discussions going on. It’s important to find and follow the right people. I’m lucky to have found a fantastic group.

Micheal Walsh

I’ll plus one on what +Eileen O’Duffy says about G+ .

In my opinion, LinkedIn is your on-line CV only, facebook is friends & family (holiday snaps and boozy party nights) while G+ is developing into a quality forum for sharing and discussing.

Mike Spillane

similar to what’s been previously said. LinkedIn for job seeking/ expanding business network, facebook for sharing with people who I only know in person. Twitter, might be the best for a newbies, easy to start with and you can quickly strike a conversation up. As for G+, some of the best content and conversation is to be had on this. I’m particularly interested in cycling and cyclists really seem to have taken G+ to heart.

David Molloy

Twitter. It’s tricky to set up a network you like, but at this point it’s likely many of their peers are on it and the mechanic is almost identical to SMS, so it’s easy to grasp.

I think +Micheal Walsh has the right end of the stick with the way people mentally divide networks into ‘fun’, ‘work’ and ‘quality’. In my humble opinion, Twitter and G+ fall both fall into the latter category, because of their ability to build highly customised networks with strangers and to search.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, should be the last one a new social user should tackle. It’s not fun, it’s not intuitive, and it’s not really social. It’s social media’s ‘conference’ setting.

What Does Facebook Think?

Teresa McTigue

Linked In seems only worth it in certain career fields, but journalism may be one of those fields.

Laura Coates

Public twitter for joining in the ‘conversation’; private Facebook for your mates and those drunken nights out; blog if you really have something interesting to say about an area you’re passionate about, be it politics, steam trains or stamp collecting.

Gerard Cunningham

Laura, do you really think anything on Facebook is private?

Laura Coates

Mmm not if you’re really looking for it. But maybe casual professional acquaintances shouldn’t have immediate access to photos of you dancing on a table at 3am. If they go on a dedicated mission to find them, you’ve got other issues there!!

Una-Minh Caomhanach

Twitter definitely a must for journalists. Start interacting with others and sharing your thoughts, build up connections and still offering others your personality along the way.

Facebook, not really, more for friends instead of building up useful connections for journalism. G+, definitely a ghost town at the moment. LinkedIn never helped me really except that it holds my CV details and recommendations.

Donnacha DeLong

Definitely Twitter for professional promotion and engaging (you need to promote yourself first to collect enough followers to engage with). And I’d suggest playing around with Twitter journalism – reporting on events or talks.

Linkedin to network with professionals – lots of major journalism groups there (including the growing NUJ group). Facebook’s losing its sheen for professional stuff – I’d say keep it personal and lock down your privacy settings.

Adam Maguire

Twitter a must for conversing, finding/sharing stories & generally being in “the loop”; blog great for long-form thoughts that twitter won’t allow, expanding on ideas, as a portfolio etc,

FB not much of a journalism tool IMO – I keep mine relatively personal rather than professional, linkedin worth having a presence on but very low value IMO, G+ is currently useless.

Conor McHugh

Certainly worth having an account in all of these sites – and teach yourself, in the first instance how to use them and get as much as possible out of them. So many journalists, who really should know better, refuse to engage in them. Truth is, that’s where the news is.

Mark Coughlan

Re investigations; LinkedIn is the best one. Re work contacts; Twitter. It’s good for developing a personal brand. FB largely useless.

LinkedIn takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, but a lot people are on it that aren’t on other sites and they’re on it in their professional capacity so it’s not seen as so intrusive to try contact them there (whereas on FB it could be considered an attempt to invade privacy).

A lot of people have mobile numbers on their LinkedIn too, if you’re investigating something and need to get to someone to talk off record without going through an office or PR consultant it can be invaluable.

Twitter is useful as its so public, it makes you more contactable. FB is only really useful for examining who knows, or might know, who.

Adam Maguire

That’s a fair point from Mark about LinkedIn – I was trying to find contact details for a load of Irish business people recently and it helped many times… even just finding out what company/companies they’re involved with through LinkedIn helped me narrow down my search elsewhere.

Continue reading »]]> I’m conducting a quick survey in advance of a presentation I’ve been talking into giving to Dublin Freelance NUJ members tomorrow on using social media.

Naturally, no presentation on social media is complete without reference to crowdsourcing, so this post is an attempt at garnering the Wisdom Of Te Crowd. What advice would you give to newcomers (in particular, freelance journalists) dipping their toes in the social media pool for the first time?

Should they blog, open a twitter account, or would Facebook be a better option? Is Google Plus a ghost town, or an exciting new development? Is LinkedIn worth it, or a haven for Make Money Fast spam? Or is social media simply an unproductive timesink?

Should posts and updates be limited to news (with occasional forays into identifying and contacting source) or should the also contain personal information? Should a journalist express personal opinions, or confine all their online communications to the strictly professional. Can a medium based on “conversation” ever be compatible with the professional obligations for balance, impartiality or neutrality? Are those Reithian concepts even valid any more, or part of an outdated “dead three thinking” mentality?

Answers on a postcard (or in comments below).

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Continue reading »]]> Last night, I asked a politician a question. And because I was on twitter, as was the politician, I asked it on twitter. The politician answered me, but was also annoyed that I’d jumped to conclusions by posting to twitter. I argued I was just asking a question, not making a statement, but 24 hours later I can see his point.

Today, I also asked a politician a question using twitter. Mindful of what had happened last night, I sent him a Direct Message. And he in turn answered by Direct Message. So far so good.

Then I started second-guessing myself. A DM is regarded as a private message. It’s a one on one exchange, not one to many. In journalistic terms, did that mean it was the equivalent of an off the record briefing, rather than an on the record quote?

As it turns out, it was an on the record quote this time. But I’m not certain everybody would take the same approach. And I’m probably not the only person who’s had the same thought. Then I thought of all those journalists second-guessing themselves, all those hours waiting for clarification.

New technology disrupts in more was than one.

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Continue reading »]]> I was asked to speak last night at “Crisis in Journalism”, an NUJ event for students. My brief was to give a perspective on life as a freelance journalist. RTÉ’s Colm O’Mongain spoke about broadcasting, Noirin Hegarty spoke about print and online, and Barry McCall gave an overview of the industry in Ireland.

Usually I’m the pessimist at these things, but I was a little chirpier than usual last night. I also rambled a bit, but one of the things that occurred to me is that the panel didn’t really have too much of a clue about the future. No one in journalism saw twitter’s potential five years ago, and people embedded inside journalism aren’t really best placed to spot the trends that will shape the future. We did things like speculate on whether newspapers will still exist in ten years, which kind of misses the point.

So I told the students to take anything we said with a grain of salt. We are stuck in our ways. They don’t have the preconceptions we have.

I’m a dinosaur. If you’re a student, keep an open mind about the future. You’re one of those nimble rodents who will survive the meteor.

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Continue reading »]]> I sent in this article to several newspapers last week, but none published it. So I’m publishing it here for the record.

A sample examination test for trainee primary teachers taking religion as a subject includes questions which require the student to agree that ‘atheist humanism produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed.’

Another question requires students to mark as false the statement: ‘Hinduism is a positive force for change in society’.

The questions are part of an online sample examination in Moral Theology in Hibernia College, a private college accredited by the department of education and science.

The college’s H Dip in Arts in Primary Education is professionally accredited by the Teaching Council of Ireland, the professional body for teaching in Ireland, set up on a statutory basis in 2006.

“The questions as posted on boards.ie are some of the sample exam questions issued by the College,” said programme director Dr Siobhán Cahillane-McGovern.

“The multiple choice exam forms a part of the overall assessment for Religion. A written exam which accounts for 60% of the total marks, allows for further discussion and development on any topics examined.”

“The questions and course content posted online form part of a much broader course covering the relationship between various religions and politics, the relationship between justice and religion and the development of catholic social teaching, and are intended as a starting point for further debate, discussion and exploration.”

“Students are always encouraged and expected to engage with course tutors in the online course forums, live online tutorials and onsite workshops to further explore and discuss the various topics on the programme.”

A student at the college, identified as “number10a”, posted the questions to the boards.ie online discussion forum on Saturday.

The student described the questions as “shocking”

“I am actually in shock,” the student wrote. “How can something that is so subjective and open to opinion be included in an exam in a modern college?

The course notes are a disgraceful libel on atheists based on a misunderstanding of atheism,” said Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland.

“They should never have been used as the basis of training teachers of children, and they should be immediately removed and apologised for. We are raising the issue with the Department of Education and with various human rights monitoring bodies with regard to freedom of conscience.”

“It is shocking to teach teachers of children that most atheists are not bothered by the atrocities caused by totalitarian dictatorships, and it is factually wrong to blame the atrocities on atheism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he was doing the Lord’s work in standing guard against the Jews. Mussolini gave the Catholic Church its pretend State in the Vatican in return for the Church supporting his Fascist State.”

A spokesperson said the department of education and science had no comment to make.

Continue reading »]]> I want facts. And that means that often, some of my most productive reading is on blogs.

Bloggers (unpaid, writing in their spare time, dismissed as hobbyists by “proper” journalists) produce the goods often enough to keep me coming back. Whether its Tony Humphreys‘ views on autism, a questionable advertising claim, or alleged social welfare fraud, the bloggers got there first, taking on the stories in the “mainstream” narrative.

Whenever twitter introduces me to a new fact-checking blog, I bookmark and add it to the list.

I’ve pitched variations on a fact-checking column several times (Simon McGarr suggested calling it Reality Check) with limited success. I’ve sold a few stories checking specific claims, but it remains a dream.

Today, I was chatting with Colin McGovern. We thought it might be a good idea to bring some of the fact-checking bloggers together.

Group blogging overcomes one of the problems with blogging. A single blogger fact-checking stories in her spare time can generate maybe one or two updates a week. Several bloggers working together can produce regular updates.

And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of raw material out there.

So would you be interested in joining Reality Check? Let us know.

PS: Since I’ve had a couple of inquiries, I should add that if you’d rather not have your name pubhlised below for all to see, I will happily accept any expressions of interest privately in email also: gerard@faduda.net

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Continue reading »]]> Yesterday, I asked the twitter machine for examples of Valentine’s Day themed press releases, just to see what the public relations industry was up to. The results are laid out below.

A postal campaign by SPARK, sending letters containing matchsticks to welfare minister Joan Burton, who “ignited the spark” in single parents across Ireland. They will also protest with a Valentine’s Day card at Leinster house. A second (gay rights) protest will highlight the March for Marriage.

A 10K Fun Run in Bundoran to improve heart health. Organised in conjunction with the Irish Heart Foundation. Hearts and Valentines, see?

A survey which says restaurant bookings are up. And given the economic news, it even mentions how restaurants are hiring extra staff for the occasion. Sponsored by a “leading restaurant website”.

A survey which says men are impressed by women who drive big cars. Sponsored by a car insurer.

A survey which warns that Valentine’s Day email scams are on the rise as cybercriminals do their best to hack your computer. Sponsored by an antivirus software company.

A survey says Irishmen are ugly. Sponsored by a website for “beautiful people.”

Guess which ones will be reported straightfaced as “Scientists have demonstrated…”

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