“Social media are definitely a time suck,” says Cutler. “They are shiny and fun and they can waste your time.”

But journalists need these tools because they let you be “where your stories are being discussed,” and they “extend the reach of your traditional communication” says Cutler.

Cutler also warns of getting too caught up in your own social networks. He has what he calls the “Joe Francis Rule.”

“Joe Francis is the guy who created the Girls Gone Wild DVDs,” Cutler says. “His productions are not created for young women to enjoy, they are created for the exact opposite audience than those who appear in his films.”

Cutler’s point?

“Don’t produce content just for the small percentage of the audience that participates in your social media circle. Create content for the biggest, broadest audience you can.”

Speaking at the Journalism Interactive conference, Cutler also shared a few of his favorite tools for working with social media:

• Addict-o-matic — allows you to instantly create a page with the latest social media buzz on any topic.
• Muuter – allows you to hide the tweets of people making too much “noise” on Twitter.
• KnowEm — allows you to “own” your name in social media.

So says Laurie Oakes, political editor of Australia’s Nine Network, in a media lecture that’s full of interesting stuff. His comment struck me, in part, because I’d just finished reading a Q-and-A in SPJ’s Quill Magazine with ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his series on “The Wall Street Money Machine.” Eisinger was asked how he overcomes roadblocks when people don’t want to talk to him.

I’m very clear and up front with people, and I lay out what I’m working on very clearly to them. I have an excess of disclosure and explanation of what I’m doing with them to reassure them that I’m serious and careful. And I think that persuades people. I think that they have a bad idea of what journalists are up to, and if you emphasize and then show them that you are extremely careful and you want to be fair and accurate, I think that builds trust with them even if they know that you’ve got evidence of things that don’t make them look good.

Sneaky, Eisinger is not. But is it ever OK for a journalist to be sneaky? It probably depends on what you think that term means. As far as Oakes is concerned, he says he was being sneaky when he asked a question of a source that appeared to be based on hard information but was really just conjecture about a pending appointment.

“When will Gair take up his diplomatic post?” Shocked silence at the other end of the line. Then: “How did you know about that?” Bingo. Sure it was subterfuge, but subterfuge in the public interest.

That doesn’t strike me as underhanded. He’d identified himself as a journalist and was just fishing for information. So if that’s the definition of sneaky, I guess I’m for it. How about you?

Sourced from: NewsLab

For a class reporting project on the fees universities in the Mid-American Conference charge each student to support the school’s athletic budget, Idsvoog’s students began by checking the public records law and preparing an email request for the public records they were seeking. Before the students placed a single call to ask university officials for data, they played “telephone” in class, rehearsing what they would say.

“Prior to this project, I was never vey comfortable calling anyone to ask for data,” said another student, Bethany Vietmeier. “However, during this project, I learned it is very beneficial to plan a phone call before you actually make it.”

What does that get you? Here’s Vietmeier interviewing an associate provost at Ohio University:

Knowing the law helped students recognize when they weren’t getting a straight story, Idsvoog writes. Having a written request prepared before making a call enabled students to sent an email while still on the phone, explaining precisely what records they were seeking.

“It helped me realize I need to ask the right questions the first time,” said student Courtney Thomas. “I also learned you just have to call, call, call back.”

“My goal is to go out and cover a story to make someone care about it,” says Huppert, “make you laugh or shed a tear.”

The award-winning reporter shared five solid pieces of TV storytelling advice at the Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans.

1. Find your focus. Huppert says he always takes time on the front end to ask, “What’s this story about?” His ability to find that focus and to stick with it, helps even potentially mundane pieces, such as an assignment to show how the economy is affecting people, become memorable TV.

“Focus equals the emotion and/or character and/or concept that holds the disconnected pieces together,” says Huppert. “It’s the spine that runs through it.”

2. Try the Christmas tree structure. Huppert likes to reward his viewers for sticking with him. So instead of the inverted pyramid approach, he likes to use the Christrmas tree.

“Each point on the tree is a reveal — I share the surprises I’ve uncovered with the viewer.  Before I write, I outline my surprises and build up to each.”

3. Sentences build to the most important point. Huppert also crafts his sentences carefully; his goal is to put the most important word in the sentence at or near the end. The reason? Your writing will have more impact on the viewer and they’ll have better recall of key points.

4. Write into your stand up.  ”Almost all of my stories have a stand up or live component,” says Huppert.  ”The best thing ever said to me by a photog is:  ’What are you saying BEFORE the stand up?’”  Huppert says that If you write the  lines in and out of the stand up first, the stand up itself will be more focused, shorter and better.

5. Try to get a “handshake shot.” When you meet someone for the first time, it’s not unusual to put our your hand and look them in the eye during a handshake.  Huppert likes to have that “handshake shot” in his stories, where the viewer can look the primary character in the face and get a sense of that person.

Huppert’s stories don’t just happen, they’re a result of his personal challenge to go beyond the standard.

“The time you spend on the front end standing back and thinking really pays off on the back end.”

The winners of this year’s Sigma Delta Chi awardscame from stations as large as KTRK in Houston (market #10) and as small as KTUU in Anchorage (market #150). The winning stories ranged from breaking news coverage to a 30-minute documentary. And the winning journalists have been in the business as few as three years and as many as 28 years or more.

That’s quite a range. But as you read the citations, what’s striking is what the winners have in common.

WVUE’s investigation into a railroad company started with a tip. “The source was vague, but sure that there were problems,” the New Orleans station said. How many times have you failed to follow up on a vague tip? “Listen to the crazies,” a longtime investigative journalist once told me. “They may be right.” It took WVUE staffers months to pore over thousands of pages of public records, “a huge undertaking for any local news outfit,” the judges said. What they found was clear evidence of questionable, if not illegal, activity. The payoff: All 16 members of the railroad’s board were force to resign.

KTUU in Anchorage racked up two SDX awards, for feature reporting and for public service journalism for a three-part series on fetal alcohol syndrome. KING in Seattle also scored twice, for investigative reporting and for public service journalism for uncovering how the largest ferry system in the country was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Here’s just one part of that 20-plus part series, Waste on the Water:

KTRK won for a documentary comparing the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. Reporter Christine Dobbyn pitched the idea, and served as producer, reporter and writer for the program, “in addition to her daily general assignments.”

WRIC in Richmond, Va., was one of the stations honored for breaking news coverage of a gunman who killed members of his own family. Reporter A. J. Lagoe wasn’t just the first to go live from the scene in a small, rural county about an hour away. He also was first to report the shooter’s identity and the man’s apparent motive. How? Thanks to the station’s reporting efforts well before the story broke. “We’ve worked hard…to develop sources and contacts in this community,” the station said. Those sources gave the station insights and exclusive information that made WRIC’s coverage stand out.

Other winners: Central Florida News 13 for breaking news coverage of a gunman at a local hospital, and KARE in Minneapolis for two of reporter Boyd Huppert’s “Land of 10,000 Stories” features. Here’s one of them, the story ofLeRoy and Loren, that was shot in a single day:

So what do all these winners have in common? What’s the secret of their success? I think it’s pretty simple. Hard work and teamwork. Every one of these stories required effort, persistence and determination. Every one of these stories was the result of close collaboration between reporters and photojournalists. Yes, it helps to have a supportive news director. But all the support in the world can’t coax these kinds of stories out of journalists who don’t work hard and work together.

Sourced from: NewsLab

“We are supposed to have three “leadable” stories every day,” says Allison Croghan, who got a reporting job at KSN/KODE in Joplin after graduating from college this past May.

Croghan says she’s always talking to other reporters and photographers about how they get their story ideas to see what she can learn from them.

“One of the photographers is very good about staying after the interviews and chatting with people. When I first started, it was tough for me because I needed all the extra time at the station to write and put the story together, but I quickly learned how valuable those extra few minutes are,” Croghan says. “Staying 20 minutes after an interview can provide me with a couple more great story ideas.”

Croghan also suggests that journalists need to develop a “mindset,” which helps them recognize a good story idea when they hear it.

“For example, when I’m out with friends, I like to listen to what the people are talking about. If people are talking about something, it usually means it’s important to them,” says Croghan.

She says she also writes all her ideas down.

“In case a story falls through, I have a back-up plan,” Croghan says.

That back-up plan is critically important since the transition from classroom to newsroom generally comes with a significant increase in reporting workload.

“We do one package and two separate VO/SOTs. Since we are a duopoly, we have two stations under one roof. I’ll have to do a separate VO/SOT for my package, so it can air on the other station as well,” says Croghan.  ”So, essentially I’m writing four separate stories every day.”

Croghan says she sometimes goes live for the station’s 4 o’clock talk show and then does a live shot during the 6 p.m. newscast.

“I’m going, going, going literally from about 9 a.m. until I go live. Then I have to post my stories to the Web.  I don’t have much downtime, but I like it that way because I’m never bored. Every day is a new adventure! Then I go home, cook dinner, go to sleep and do it all over again.”

From “Classroom to Newsroom” is part of an occasional series we will post about recent graduates making their way in the news business.

If you think your written work has been lifted or if you’re concerned that you might have copied something without attribution, you can use DupliChecker, which searches for blocks of text. [So can your editor or professor!] Copyscape is a useful tool for Web publishers–it searches for copies of entire Web pages online. If you’ve written something that you want to keep from being lifted, you could set up a Google Alert for specific phrases.

Images have always been trickier to track. TinEye is a reverse image search that checks for duplicates online. You can plug in the URL for an image or a page containing an image, or you can upload your own image to see if it’s been used elsewhere. Now, Google has gotten into the act with its new image search function that allows for drag-and-drop.

The Google Search mobile app also allows for image searching as well as voice searches–very cool. Hat tip to Paul Bradshaw for his post about Google image search on his Online Journalism Blog. As he points out, “the service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about [like] the ‘dead’ Osama Bin Laden images that so many news outlets fell for.”

Any tools you’d add to the list?

Sourced from: NewsLab

Jerry Gumbert, CEO of AR&D, a local media strategy firm, says the No. 1 reason why TV news is flagging “has been a failure of news management to sustain focus on a formal beat system.”

News leaders have to realign priorities and reinstitute beat systems — and the kind of enterprise reporting that comes with them — if broadcast journalism is going to survive, he says.

Otherwise, TV newscasts will become increasingly indistinguishable from one another — a phenomenon already underway — as they become outlets for regurgitated or old news, he says.

“The result of this is catastrophic. It’s killing us because it dictates that we can only do superficial or reactive storytelling.”

In the last 15 years, the number of TV newsrooms operating with beat systems has plummeted to just one in 10, he says.

These are strong words from an article published in TVNewsCheck, but it’s an argument that some who study the economic of news have been making for some time.

Call it the “Wall Street Journal” argument, if you will.  Why is the WSJ one of a few newspapers that can put its content behind a pay wall and make it work?  Because the content is so compelling and unique that people are willing to pay a premium for it.

Most other news organizations produce “commodity news,” essentially it is content available from a myriad of outlets — and though journalists would like to think their unique approach and writing style makes a huge difference to the audience, it often doesn’t.

Unfortunately, most TV stations also put the bulk of their efforts into covering this commodity content, and it’s very hard to grow or maintain audience when you’re providing the same information as the other guy.

The challenge, as the article points out, is to continue assigning beats with limited resources.  So, help us out, how can stations do it?

The Washington Post’s Local Editor Vernon Loeb says, “No.”

“Social media are not really optional anymore,” says Loeb. “You can’t do your job without them. Social media are where news often breaks first. They’re a great way to cultivate sources, track events, find experts, and to drive audiences to our journalism. . . . You can’t be a good reporter unless you are involved in the social media realm.”

The Post is now instituting mandatory social media training for all reporters and editors on the Metro staff.

The ombudsman’s column on this issue says journalists’ social media efforts must not occur at the expense of the fundamentals and says this is not all about the chase “for the greatest number of page views, Twitter followers and Facebook friends, instead of the great story.”

What do you think?  Is social media a must?  Can you do your job without it?

But reporters don’t always do a good job of exploring those differences for the audience to tell richer stories.

“If you can get to appreciate ‘otherness,’” says Irby, “embracing conditions of difference can help us move to a place where we can begin our conversation.”

Irby says following an interview, you need should ask yourself three questions:

1. What surprised you?

2. What did you learn?

3. What else do you need to learn?

“Your surprises will invariably surprise others,” Irby says.  ”You always have further questions.  All of us have a capacity to learn more about others.”

And Irby says exploring the diversity of the people we talk with matters — whether we’re talking about disability, sexual orientation or race.

“Portrayals of minorities reflect how the majority society views and treats these issues and people,” says Irby.

Irby suggests to be an ethical journalist, you must educate yourself on as many dimensions of diversity as possible.

“Reporting based on prejudice is inherently inaccurate.”