About 40 journalists, media executives, and academic researchers from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal met in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, April 22, for the fifth annual Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism, organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
With the recent increase in popularity of mobile technology, the percentage of people getting their news from mobile devices such as iPads, tablets, and e-readers, is also on a steady incline.
With more than one million followers, the Mexican newspaper El Universal has more Twitter followers than any other newspaper from among the top 100 dailies in Latin America, according to a website that ranks newspapers' popularity.
Pinterest, the social media curating site that allows users to "'pin' (bookmark) things you like -- photos, recipes, crafts, design ideas, photography, art, etc., and silo those items into 'boards,'" as MediaShift described it, might just be the next big thing for journalism, as cliché as that sounds. After all, TechCrunch just reported on Tuesday, Feb. 7, that Pinterest gets 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, having hit the 10-million mark faster than any other standalone site ever. And as Poynter pointed out, "it's time for journalists to pay attention to Pinterest."
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, CNN indefinitely suspended commentator Roland Martin for homophobic tweets he sent during the Super Bowl, reported the Washington Post.
The Venezuelan hacker group N33 took over the Twitter accounts of two journalists critical of President Hugo Chávez, reported the weekly magazine Sexto Poder. The group is also responsible for other cyber attacks against opposition members, and is considered a growing threat to freedom of expression in the South American country.
Since it launched in September 2011, thousands of journalists have signed on to use the Facebook "subscribe" feature, which allows users to subscribe to the news feeds of journalists and public figures without having to befriend them. And since November, the average journalist has seen a 320 percent increase in the number of subscribers, Facebook is reporting.
In another example of news organizations jumping the gun as false information spreads like wildfire across Twitter, U.S. media outlets prematurely reported the death of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, driving home the lesson that "social media tools do not need to force news organizations to compromise their standards," according to The New York Times.
Amy Webb didn’t have to look far for an example of how Spark Camp, an "un-conference" she helps organize, pulls disparate people together for an informal exchange of ideas and problem solving. Co-hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americasand the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, Spark Camp attracted an impressive variety of talented people to spend three days in January — in Austin — to ruminate on the crossroads of data and online journalism.
For the third time in the past year, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its social media guidelines, this time to deal with correcting erroneous tweets and deleting tweets, as well as proper procedure for designating a re-tweet, according to a press release from the news agency.
After Canadian Twitter users defied a decades-old ban by tweeting last year's election results before polls had closed throughout the country, the government announced Friday, Jan. 13 -- via Twitter, no less -- the repeal of the section of the Canada Elections Act that prohibits the broadcast or transmission of election results before all ballots have been cast, reported the Huffington Post Canada.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security regularly monitors dozens of websites, including Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks, YouTube, and even the New York Times Lede Blog, Global Voices Online, and the Blog del Narco, in order to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture," reported Reuters on Thursday, Jan. 11.