Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten published nude pictures of the national hero Fridtjof Nansen. That was too much for Facebook – and references to the photos were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Facsimile of Aftenposten October 15th, 2011

No nudity, please!, asks Facebook. And photos from 1929 of the Norwegian national hero Fridtjof Nansen were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page, which has almost 70.000 fans. In addition the newspaper received a warning that its Facebook page might be removed if new violations of Facebook’s policy were discovered.

Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, which is the company owning Aftenposten.

The clash between Facebook and Aftenposten raises some interesting principal questions, especially to what extent it is fair that Facebook restricts what a media company (or any other company or person for that matter) publishes on its Facebook page.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was a Norwegian national hero, well known both for his Arctic expeditions as well as his work to help refugees after the first world war.

Aftenposten tells the story of how Nansen at the age of 67 fell in love with the 30 year younger journalist Brenda Ueland, an American feminist and journalist.

In a new book letters Nansen wrote to Ueland are published, including nude photos Nansen took of himself and sent to his love hoping that whe would returns photos of herself without clothes.

Aftenposten published two of the photos in its article about the book – and also shared the link to the article to the 70.000 friends on its Facebook page. The article received a number of reactions from readers.

The link to the controversial article was shared on Aftenposten's Facebook page

And then Facebook stepped in.

Within a few hours the link had been removed by Facebook from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Aftenposten also received a message warning that this photo was violating Facebook’s regulations, and that Aftenposten would risk being thrown out of Facebook if more violations were discovered.

“This message is a warning. Further violations may lead to your account being closed. Please read carefully through the declaration of duties and rights, and refrain from publishing offensive content in the future”, Facebook wrote.

Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Hilde Haugsgjerd, argues that Nansen is one of Norway’s biggest national heroes, and that it is known that he had relationships to many women. “Now there is a book on the market with this as the main topic, and we found it in order to cover this editorially”, she says to her own news site.

The photos in question are all from 1929.

So what do you think? Is it OK that Facebook censors this type of content? Or should the social network give media organizations some flexibility to decide for themselves what is proper content to be published under its bran?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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In 2011 it is no longer possible to be a top professional journalist without  mastering social media. Here are five reasons why news organizations need to care about the new trends.

Social media is starting to become an integrated part of the work of many news organizations.  Yet many editors and journalists still struggle to see why they should put a lot of effort into understanding the dynamics of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

• Read also: Social networking tips for mainstream media

I gave a speech this week for the annual conference of the European Alliance of News Agencies in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for the presentation I compiled this list of five key reasons why social media should matter to news companies:

1. Distribute the content

Social media is all about sharing – and sharing drives traffic. As such Facebook and Twitter can be powerful channels for distributing content.

There are two main reasons for that:

• People tend to trust tips from their friends more than others. Stories shared on Facebook and Twitter therefore have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• People spend much more time on social network sites than on other sites. According to Facebook, the site’s 800 million users spend on average 15 hours per month on the site. By making their content available on these sites, media organizations make it easy for people to share their stories.

Source: Comscore

2. Create engagement

Content without engagement has no – or at least low – value.

Good content creates engagement, emotions and reactions. And social media provides excellent tools to create such engagement.

Most news sites will find that content that creates engagement will have a longer average length of the user sessions. People spend more time on the content and they will move on to more of the other content of the site as well.

The big social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube, provide efficient tools to create engagement and they also provide lots of information about who actually engages with your content. And THAT is valuable information most news organizations would struggle to find on their own.

Journalism used to be a one-way process. Editors selected the news and presented the same stories to a large audience, confident that no other could reach the same audience.

This premise has changed. Today everyone can create a mass communication channel. Journalists do no longer have a monopoly of distributing information.

This fact changes journalism. And it changes people’s expecations of the journalists. It also mean that journalism hasbeen redefined. It is no longe a one-way street. Instead modern journalism is a continueous stream of two-way communication.

3. Pick up news fast

When big news events occur there are no better place to keep track during the first hours than in social media.

In fact social media is a great tool for professional journalists to pick up news. And this seems to be done in at least three different ways:

• Big and live news events. In these situations journalists should immediately start monitoring Twitter to pick up any news from eyewitnesses or other sources. News will typically be distributed in social media first – and then in the traditional media.
• When social media becomes part of the news event itself. We see this happen more and more often, for instance in the uprising in Libya or in the terror attack in Norway. How people use social media during the events – and what role this plays – becomes an important element of the story to be told.
• Monitoring social media for particular areas of interest. This is the everyday use of social media in an editorial organization. Most journalists have an area of expertise. They should systematically monitor what is being said about that area – including the messages from important sources – in social media.

The Twitter photo of the airplane that landed in Hudson River in New York became an iconic symbol of news reporting in the age of Twitter

4. Dialogue with readers

Social media forces us to change our way of thinking – from journalism being a “one-way-communication” to looking at our profession as a two-way dialogue.

Social media is all about sharing – and dialogue. Unfortunately many editors don’t seem to realize this. They look at social media primarily as a  place to distribute content – and don’t reflect on the fact that people want them to share and communicate as well.

In fact sharing is the core of social media. And there is no way we can succeed with a social media strategy if we do not start to share

For editors there are many benefits in starting to talk to readers through social media.

Take the Facebook page of Aftenposten – Norway’s largest newspaper - as an example.  It now has 67.000 followers. Aftenposten has been quite skilled in using the Facebook page not only to distribute content, but to ask for the advice from readers in covering specific stories. For the editorial staff this has turned out to be extremely useful.  (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten)

5. Build brand value

This is the more overriding reason: How a news company uses social media influences the brand value of the company.

During the meeting of European news agencies I was asked which business opportunities I saw in social media.

I am not sure that is the right focus. At least business models are not the first we should look for. But doing things right in social media is an efficient tool to build brand value over time.

And high brand value always creates business opportunities.

How you dialogue with your readers in social media can strongly influence the perception of your brand – for better or worse. Your task therefore should be to establish brand missionaries,  people who will do anything to promote your brand among their friends and acquaintances.

Summing up

It is in fact becoming more or less impossible to be a professional journalist today without an active attitude towards social media. Yes, Facebook and media brands are to some extent competitors, at least when it comes to catching people’s attention. Yet, social media and traditional media organizations are in position to collaborate much more than before – to the benefit of both parties.

Here are five don’ts and five dos for how media companies should use social media, as suggested by Media Helping Media.

This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run by David Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

Traditional media’s attitude to social networking is evolving with varying results. Some harness the opportunities offered, while others refer to ‘social media’ with a condescending ‘and finally’ tone that suggests they are out of touch with their audience.

The five don’ts

1: Don’t appear out of touch

Never refer to social networking as a new phenomenon in your copy, bulletins, studio discussions or in a piece-to-camera and live radio spots. A large part of your audience is using Twitter and Facebook and increasingly turning to them and other sites as their primary sources of information. Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility.

• Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility

2: Don’t call it new media or new technology

It’s not new. Using terms such as ‘new media’ makes it sound as though you are ‘old media’ and lagging behind. The term was okay towards the end of the last century, but you should be part of a converged news operation delivering content to whatever platform/device the user turns to in order to access information. If you are, then it is part and parcel of that. If you are not, then you should be.

• If you keep calling it new you will come across as old

3: Don’t leave it to your online team

Or worse still a junior member of staff to manage and monitor. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination strategy. All your journalists should be using tools such as TweetDeck to monitor what people are saying and to discover stories. Take it seriously or you may soon find you are no longer taken seriously.

• Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination

4: Don’t snigger

Never let presenters refer to stories that involve social networking with that ‘and finally’ tone or that condescending, knowing nod and smile, as if it is all a bit of a joke. It could come across as patronising or (even worse) disconnected, distant and judgemental. Get some of your more connected correspondents (and there are loads around) to educate the studio presenters and some of the less connected producers. Those in the field often get it because they are rubbing shoulders with the audience on a daily basis and understand the significance of the changing audience behaviour; they also know, first hand, how your news organisation is being perceived.

• Don’t take pride in adopting a patronising, disconnected, distant and judgemental tone

5: Don’t miss the story

Remember that the number and speed of tweets on an issue is a story in itself, and you can run that story even before you have been able to verify what is being said with the usual two independent sources. Simply reflecting the activity and taking the time to follow a few tweets in order to sample the diversity of perspectives and opinions will enrich your news coverage. If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news.

• If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news

The five dos

1: Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

Remember you can tweet facts, you don’t need long, complex concepts. Tweet about things that your news organisation can confirm have happened as soon as the confirmation is in. You just need the facts in a short sentence. Subject, verb, object – send. The social network audience feeds off facts (and other stuff), and it is taking those facts to another place (their preferred social networks) where they add their own context and analysis by interacting with their friends (rather than sitting in front of a TV or radio or clicking through your webpages or thumbing through your newspaper/magazine pages). Always add a short URL if the story is supported by an article or audio & video online.

• Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

2: Take a gift with you

If you are going to gatecrash the social network party offer something that those who tweet will value. Your best offering is facts from stories where you are ‘digging where others don’t’ or in the category of ‘had it not been for you the world would never have known’. They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites, broadcast networks or newspapers. Originality is the key. Tweet facts that they can’t get elsewhere. Automate your feeds through to Facebook and Twitter to provide a steady stream of content for social networks to feed off.

• They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites

3: Change your tools

Think differently about the way you set up the desktop for your journalists. If they can only surf the net and browse the wires some may limit themselves to that window on the world – and your news offering will reflect that limitation. You need to observer, evaluate and, where appropriate, integrate the social network chatter and make sense of it in a way that informs the public debate and broadens perspectives. Also encourage your journalists to engage in conversations when they find a story, rather than just feed off what is already there.

• You need to integrate the social network chatter into the tools your journalists use

4: Widen your contacts

Start to build up a new contacts file of those hundreds of thousands of (free) stringers who are filing copy (that’s the stuff of headlines) free of charge 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. (Imagine organising a rota for that — the work flow implications are mind blowing, let alone the staff costs). So enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known voices who may no longer have the connection with changing audience behaviour.

• Enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known and overused experts

5: Embrace, hug and welcome back

Find ways of bringing the social network experience back into your news production process, and not just as a token nod and wink, but as a serious reflection of how both you and the audience are changing. Those tweeting may have taken your facts away with them to their preferred social networking space to discuss with their friends, but in doing so, they and their contacts will add their own value to the growing story. Be sure to invite them back, and find ways of sharing that enhanced understanding and feeding it back into the system so the richness of knowledge and experience and the diversity of perspectives is available for all.

• Social networking is a reflection of how the audience is changing – ignore it at your peril

See how others are doing it

Check out the Facebook sites for CNN, BBC News, the Wall Street Journal and other leading news organisations.
Look at how many followers they have. Check the number of times stories are commented on and discussed in the Facebook environment.

And look at all the automated links offering a direct route back to the media organisation. Next, check their presence on Twitter.

Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic; it’s a no brainer.

• Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic.

The ‘broadcast/publish at’ model died years ago. The ‘engage with on our terms’ model is in its death throes. Now it’s about ‘participate in’ and empowerment. Those traditional media organisations that move to this model qucikly may have more chance of surviving.

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Check also out the following resources from Media Helping Media:

• Social media kitbag for journalists
• Top sites for journalists

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This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run byDavid Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

So you got stuck, working for the printed newspaper all these years? And now you realize your future is with digital media? Here is your digital makeover plan!

Many of my journalist colleagues these days find themselves in the same trap: They realize that the future holds limited demand for print journalist experience alone and that the brightest career potential in the business is within digital media.

The only problem is: They have no experience with digital media whatsoever!

What should you do? Is there a digital makeover plan you can follow?

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One thing is for sure: It will require hard work on your part. But if you want to stay in the media business, you better get on with it! And please don’t wait for your employer to fix it for you. Your competence is your own responsibility.

Also I think you can be sure of the following: Career opportunities in the media business will be fewer and fewer every year for people with only print experience. Especially that applies to any kind of management position.

Why is that?

Because most media companies will realize they have a digital competence deficit in their staff. As digital media takes a stronger position in the media houses, top managers realize it will be foolish to hire editors and managers with only print experience. Rather they should look for people who know how digital platforms work.

To put it even more clearly: Your print experience will be in less and less demand over the next years! If you look at it in a perspective of 5 – 10 years, changes will be dramatic. As a print journalist you are indeed naive if you don’t believe that this will affect you professionally in a big way.

• Read also: How print journalists can fall into the typographers’ trap

So you got to do something, don’t you?

Yes, you do! And you better get on with it!

Here is my suggestion for a one-year first-step digital makeover plan for journalists:

Step 1: Get yourself on social networks

If you are not on Facebook yet, you better register now. Understanding social media is essential for digital journalists and there is really no other way to do this than to participate yourself. Therefore your first step will be to get active on some of the most common social networks. As a minimum I suggest  you start using actively Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Also familiarize yourself with YouTube and at least one location based social network, like Foursquare or Gowalla. And if you are really dedicated to the task, you might consider starting your own blog. Really, there is no better way of learning digital media than maintaining an active blog.

Let us not forget an important aspect of this step: Start interacting with your readers! Respond to their comments, ask for tips to stories, use readers’ expertise in your articles, follow all discussions about your own content.

Step 2: Get experience in online journalism

If you work in a media company, start talking to the web people in your organization. The best alternative is to ask if you can work for the web site for a while, gaining useful experience. If that is not possible, show active interest in writing exclusive stories for the web site, including special versions of the print stories that you write. Your main purpose at this point is to gain as much experience as possible and to learn from your online colleagues. Study their writing style and what makes stories work on the web as opposed in the newspaper. Experiment with different headlines and see which ones make readers click. And especially: Take good note of which print stories that do not work on the web site! There will be more of them than you probably thought ahead.

Too many technical terms the online people expect you to know? Check out this digital survival guide for journalists!

Step 3: Learn basic photo editing

In big print organizations specialists often take care of the photo editing. So far, at least.  Hardly any web site editorial organization can afford that luxury. Instead it is expected that all journalists know how to crop and photo shop an image. And I tell you: There are hardly any journalists under the age of 30 that do not know photo shopping today at some level.

The most used software is Photo Shop. You may decide to start with Photo Shop Elements, which is a simpler version.

How to learn it? There are numerous online courses!  A great place to learn is Lynda.com, which has easy-to-follow videos for self-study of any type of software.

Step 4: Start making short video clips

Video is an essential and growing part of the web. As digital journalist you might as well start to learn using video at once. The best starting point is making small video clips, for instance with your iPhone. This can be short clips from the interview you are writing about, like what I have done in this story about the social media strategy of 20minutos.es in Spain.

Using video can be incredibly sophisticated or amazingly simple. At this stage you should start with the simple solutions. You will realize they can still create great value for the reader.

Digital journalists should of course learn more sophisticated video recording and editing as well, but I suggest you start with the shorter and unedited clips and then move on as your confidence grows.

Step 5: Start experimenting with interactive elements, like maps and time lines

Digital journalism opens up for many new story telling techniques, such as sound slides and time lines. Until recently many of these techniques required a lot of technical knowledge to use. Not any more. Today there are lots of sites offering to help you make your story telling more interactive.

Here are three tools you can start playing with:

Time lines:  http://www.dipity.com/ Create exciting time lines to illustrate how the topic of your story has developed over time

Maps: http://www.umapper.com Make maps that users can click on for more information.

Live log: http://www.coveritlive.com A great tool for live events, allowing you to live log and communicate with readers as the events pass.

After finishing your work, all services provide you with a code that you embed into the story. You will probably need some help from an experienced web journalist for this part. But I tell you: Learning how to embed external elements like maps, time lines and Youtube videos gives you unlimited creative possibilities in digital journalism.

A great blog for getting tips on interactive multimedia journalism is 10.0oo Words.

Step 6: Start analyzing traffic data for your site

Almost all news sites will have some analytics system installed. Many use more than one system, depending on the purpose of the analysis. Live logging of traffic is for instance often a separate system.

Ask for access to the analytics of your news site and try to learn the basics of the service, whether it be Google Analytics, Xiti or another system. Try to understand the traffic pattern. Where do users come from? What stories are most popular?

The easiest and most fun software to learn using will typically be the live log, where you can see which stories people click on right now. By following the live log regurlarly you will learn a lot about what actually works and what does not in driving traffic to a web site.

Step 7: Get yourself a smart phone – and use it to its full potential

A significant shift in platforms is taking place – and it will have major influence over the media industry over the next years. It is driven by the growth in smart phones, but also tablets like iPad is pushing the development.

If you don’t have it already, hurry up to get a smart phone. Whether it is an iPhone or an Android-run phone is not that important. What matters is that you get a smart phone with lots of apps, GPS and all other features that are part of a modern phone.

Try to use it to its full potential. It will revolutionize your media consumption, and give you a new perspective of where journalism might be headed.

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My suggestion is that you make this list of 7 steps your plan for this first year of a digital makeover – although not necessarily in the same order.

If you spend time on all these steps – and try to learn as much as possible – you will be much better positioned in a year from now than you are today.

However, let me tell you: It is not enough! There are many more things you need to learn. But it is a starting step, putting you in the right direction.

But do not be fooled: It requires hard work! And you have to do it yourself. Don’t sit around and wait for your employer to come around with a course or two. Only you can be the manager of your own professional future.

And please, please, dear print colleagues: Do not fall into the typographers’ trap!

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Bonus:

After this article was written I was made aware of an excellent guide to become a good multimedia journalist:

Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency

It is written by journalism professor Mindy McAdams at University of Florida.  I really recommend that you read it! It is highly useful and very instructional.  (thanks to Blue Lady Blog for giving me the link)

I gave a speech for 70 managers in Media Norway. But the audience turned out to be more than 4500. Here is how!

This is a simple and personal story of the power of social media. It explains how a presentation for a small group may reach many more people than the ones who actually attended the original presentation.

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On January 25th I gave a presentation for the managers conference of Media Norway (a Schibsted-controlled company owning four major media houses in Norway).  About 70 people listened to my speech of digital media trends in 2011. To be honest I was quite nervous about this presentation, as the audience was composed of top managers in all the Norwegian media companies I work closely with in my work as editor and senior manager at Media Norway Digital.

But in fact this group of highly competent managers within my own media corporation turned out to be only a small proportion of the total audience for my speech.

Here is why!

My audience was 70 people. They were all top media managers in one of the most technologically advanced markets in the world.

After giving the speech a few people asked me for the slides. To make it easy for them, I decided to upload the presentation slides to Slideshare.

That started the viral distribution! The Slideshare team liked it so much that they decided to feature my presentation the front page of their site. Suddenly a lot of people decided it was worth their time to flip through the presentation.

And then people started spreading my presentation in social media. As for myself, I wrote a blog post elaborating the somewhat scetchy details in the presentation. Even that blog post was shared quite a bit.

The conclusion after 10 days?

• 70 managers attended the presentation
• 270 people – almost four times as many people as those who listened to the speech – downloaded the presentation from Slideshare to their own computer
• More than 120 people spread the ideas in social media, primarily on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About 20 of them commented on the presentation, mostly on LinkedIn.
• 3900 people have viewed the presentation on Slideshare.net
• 37 web sites have embedded the presentation
• More than 1000 people have read the blog posting on BetaTales.com
• About 20 people I did not know before have asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have also received many new followers on Twitter.

The conclusion?

The speech I gave for about 70 of my colleagues ended up with an audience of almost 5000 people.

So far, that is. The viral distribution will probably continue.

I have had similar experiences before. Two years ago I taught seven online journalists at Aftenposten about how they could use Twitter as a tool for journalism. The now out-dated presentation – uploaded both in Norwegian and English – since has been viewed by more than 7000 people.

The physical audience was multiplied by 1000 times!

In April last year I was going to give a presentation at the annual conference of Society of News Design Scandinavia. Unfortunately the conference was cancelled at the last minute due to the vulcano ashes from Iceland which interrupted a lot of air traffic in Europe at the time.

I never had the chance to give the presentation, with an expected audience of 50-60 people, but the slides that I had prepared have been viewed by more than 1000 people on Slideshare.

We are talking about a presentation I never gave!

It is quite amazing, isn’t it?

Of course I realize this is not the most stunning example of the power of viral distribution. However, this is my personal experience, which is what inspire me to continue sharing my content. And that is what matters to me. It is also these types of experiences that make me continue blogging on BetaTales.

For me blogging has been a tremendous learning experience. It has taught me a lot about what what works and what doesn’t work in the digital world. In fact BetaTales has become my private lab, where I can try out a number of things without the risks of doing it on a large commercial site.

And I have learned so much about the power of sharing!

What are my conclusions so far?

Here is the essential one:

The most important driver for creating value in content is engagement!

Really, if your content is not able to inspire engagement, it has no or very low value.

That’s my experience at least!

What do your think?

By the way: Here is the presentation that was embedded on Slideshare:

It was time to cut the crap: The Spanish news site 20minutos.es decided to make a sincere effort to increase the quality of readers’ contributions. Here is how.

The Schibsted-owned free newspaper 20 Minutos in Spain also has the third largest news site in the country, 20minutos.es.  Now it has launched a major program to increase readers’ contribution on the site. The program is called Eco and is an innovative self-developed framework for integrating readers’ commments and social media into the news stories.

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I recently visited Madrid and met with deputy editor-in-chief for 20minutos.es, Virginia Perez Alonso. She explained to me the philosophy behind Eco, that was launched on November 26th.

- 20minutos.es has a long tradition collaborating with our readers, especially when you compare us to the biggest news sites in Spain, like El Pais and El Mundo, she said.

Watch a short interview with Virginia Perez Alonso in the video above!

- In fact this is an area where we really wish to make a huge difference. We want to show that we understand our readers.

But as many news sites have experienced, building quality in readers’ participation takes a lot of work. Too much of comments are just crap that create noise rather than making real contributions.

20minutos.es set out to change this. They wanted to increase both the amount and quality of readers’ contributions, thinking this would differentiate the site in a positive way for its bigger competitors.

The answer was called Eco.

What is Eco, then?

It is a platform aggregating all readers’ contributions to a story, whether it is on 20minutos.es itself or in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

The total activity around a story is calculated into a Eco measurement. Stories with the most reader activity will then be given visible symbols on the front page of the news site.

Here is how it works:

On the front page

The number of comments each story has received is clearly marked in connection with the subtitle.

Then, if a story reaches a sufficient “ecco”, a measurement for readers’ activity, a special symbol is placed on the story image, indicating that this is a “hot story”.

It looks like what you see on the left. The eco symbol will take on a stronger color the more reader activity is associated with the story. Over time, the editors hope, readers will get used to the meaning of this symbol and look for the stories creating the most readers’ activity.

What happens, then, when readers click on the story?

In the actual article page a set of symbols appear after the lead paragraph.

It looks like this:

The bar both gives the proprietory “eco value” as well as number of comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.

Below the story are the comments and other contributions from readers:

Notice the tab for corrections. Readers are encouraged to report any factual error they might find in the story – and there even is a tab for the responses from the editorial staff.

An essential part of the eco system is that the most liked comments are displayed on the top. That is one of several measures to encourage readers to provide quality contributions.

- For sure this will not be used by every reader. These functions are for the most important of our readers, explains Virginia Perez Alonso.

They currently receive about 300.000 comments each month and expect this number to increase as readers get used to the new eco system.

A major challenge is to get all the journalists to participate. Each journalists gets his/her own user page in the eco system, but to succeed it is also necessary that they in fact participate actively. Convincing all journalists that this is worthwhile will still takes some time, admits Virginia Perez Alonso.

It is still too early to say how the eco system will work out. Yet I was impressed by the massive effort in making readers’ engagement the differentiator from competing sites. 20minutos.es has spent most of its limited development resources for several months on this project and is betting on this making a significant impact on its success.

I hope they will succeed.

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After all the hype and all the disappointment, a report from Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism digs deeper into the effect of social media on the 2010 campaign.

This article titled “How the internet really affected the election” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Monday 12th July 2010 06.00 UTC

Among the many promises broken during the course of the 2010 UK general election was the contention that this was to be Britain’s first true internet campaign, won and lost Obama-style due to grassroots funding campaigns, intimate video messages and – anathema to the serious political pundits – soundbites on Twitter.

What we got was a sensational election dominated by some very traditional TV debates, while the promises of the web and social media seemed to provide an entertaining but superficial backchannel. But with two months’ breathing space since 6 May, a refreshingly thorough report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism illustrates just how much impact social media had on the election, and particularly how the engagement of younger voters may have influenced the outcome.

Nic Newman, the BBC’s former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. “This was never going to be an internet election,” he says. “Social media is just another layer … it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub.”

Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

When asked how they used social media during the election, 64% said discussing events, joining a group or clicking on links from a friend, while 30% said the TV debate was the biggest factor in swaying their vote – more than TV, newspapers or friends and family.

After decades struggling to engage the youth vote, the Electoral Commission had a major success with aboutmyvote.co.uk, which recorded 1.8m visits, 40% of them from 18-24s. But does the trend for paywalls threaten to cut off a supply of authoritative, informative online news for this group? Though few sites charge for access to general news now, an accelerated trend could mean this would be the only election where wide engagement combined with open sharing of information.

“It is clearly an issue, as social recommendation becomes bigger, that some of that content will be behind paywalls, and this is not just about the election,” Newman says. “But it becomes more significant around election time, and an issue about access and the necessity to get free information.”

The challenge is to engage individuals deeply enough that they will escalate from passive viewer to active participant. Aboutmyvote.co.uk certainly succeeded to some extent, but Photoshop also helped, as illustrated by the reworked campaign posters that littered the web. Labelled “the fifth estate” of grassroots commentary and activism by the report, this trend was made even more accessible by Clifford Singer, who launched mydavidcameron.com to invite anyone to customise the latest Conservative billboards. Singer claimed 3,000 posters were made through the site, and that spreading the images through Twitter and Facebook “enabled us to contest a £500,000 Tory advertising campaign at zero cost”.

Was it a problem that so much of the backchannel commentary, particularly during the debates, was humour? Newman says analysing 1,000 tweets sent during the final debate showed 34% were jokes, with 39% definitely serious. But what matters is the quality of the commentary, not the tone.

“A lot of this was absolutely fantastic. It was like watching the debate with some of the best scriptwriters in the business – the gags came thick and fast,” he says. Politicians’ campaign trail anecdotes were so quickly and thoroughly parodied, he notes, that they were abruptly dumped.

He likens the debate to a Roman forum where everyone could have a say – “cynics and humorists heckling from the back, with activists closer to the debate making more serious interventions”.

Those interventions included the Guardian’s Richard Adams, who tweeted a link to figures on Eurozone debt levels in response to one point in the debate, while The King’s Fund posted a link to its election guide to healthcare policies.

Overall, mainstream media has learned, through experimentation during major news events, how to involve readers and use social media tools; but for politicians, this was the first election where Twitter was taken seriously – more than 600 of them were tweeting.

“Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast,” Newman says. “For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet.”

Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.

“The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively,” he says. “[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Global web users spent on average five and a half hours on social network sites in December. That is an increase in time spent of 82 per cent in one year, according to the latest number from Nielsen.

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It is an amazing growth, as is illustrated by the graphs from Nielsen below.  According to the analysis company social networks is now the most popular online category, followed by gaming and instant messaging.  And most popular is Facebook, with an average time spent of about six hours per month. Two thirds of global social media users visited the site during a month.

This remarkable fast development proves indeed how social networks are becoming platforms for all other kinds of services and content on the web. No company wanting to communicate with people can anymore ignore the power of social media.

I came across this nice and interesting slideshow by Dan Calladine pointing out some of the ongoing trends in media consumption. It is worth flipping through.

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Dan Calladine is Head of Media Futures at Isobar and also writes the blog Digital Examples. The presentation is part of a quarterly series in which Calladine pick up interesting news in media consumption.

• 8 digital media trends to watch in 2010

Many media houses have spent a lot of time regulating how journalists can behave in Twitter and other social media. I think it is quite simple: Basically you only need three rules!

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I am writing this blog post in preparation for a panel debate I will participate in tomorrow discussing whether journalists need social media rules. The debate is arranged by a newly founded Norwegian network for people working with online media.

I have been a journalist and editor for many years, most of the time for Norway’s leading quality newspaper, Aftenposten. At the moment I am digital media strategist, which is not formally an editorial position. Yet I still work closely with the editorial staff and identify myself very much with the role of journalists.

To me the question of regulation for journalists’ use of social media is quite simple – at least in principle. Some editors make Twitter a very big issue. I don’t think it is . In fact I am not sure you need specific rules for Twitter or Facebook at all.

But you need rules for how journalists should behave in public. Twitter, blogging, giving a speech, writing an article, sharing videos on YouTube, etc. It all deals with how you act in the public. And pretty much it can all be covered in the same framework.

For social media I would start with three very basic principles, and then one can elaborate on each of these according to specific issues. Here they are:

1. The media company should be genuinely positive to its staff being active in social media

Journalism is no longer a one-way stream of information. Instead journalists need to be in continuous dialogue with their readers. You cannot do that without being an active user of social media. And by “active” I mean not only listening, but also sharing, the very nucleus of social media. To a large extent participating in social media is becoming a prerequisite in modern journalism. Media companies are wise to encourage it. Be proud that you have competent employees. Applaud their attempts at sharing their enthusiasm with people and expect them to bring impulses and ideas back from the readers to the editorial newsroom.

Media houses have much more to gain from their employees playing an active role in social media than from trying to restrict them. Keep an open mind. Trust your employees. It will pay off.

2. Social media activities must be done in a way which maintains the professional integrity of journalists

This is important. I think journalists can be both private and personal in their social media activities. But they must never forget that they behave in the public space. That means you should never give your readers any chance to discredit your editorial credibility and integrity because of what you write or do in social media.

And of course; whether a journalist indeed maintains her integrity is not determined by the journalist herself, but by how she is perceived by the public.

Integrity is the tricky part for journalists, as it has always been. And maintaining the integrity will of course put some limitations on journalists. For instance it may usually be wise not to express your personal opinions too much  on issues you are covering as a journalist. And it is definitely not so smart to describe your last interviewee as an idiot on Twitter.

This being said, I think the development of social media has made it somewhat more acceptable for journalists to be personal in the public space without their integrity being hurt. The reason of course is that the public space has become so much more crowded. In a world where everybody is sharing and publishing, people are getting much more used to perceiving others from multiple perspectives.   In many ways we are becoming more tolerant to the fact that we all play different roles in life.

Yet credibility and integrity have always been core values for professional journalists, and the emerging social media platforms don’t really change that.

3. Stay loyal to your employer

This is a basic last point. Although social media gives journalists – and other professions – great freedom in expressing themselves, employers should expect them to stay loyal in the public space. Twitter is not the place to discredit your employer and you shouldn’t publish your internal quarrels on your blog. That is being disloyal – and in my opinion also hurting your own credibility as a journalist.

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These are my three principles for journalists and social media. Do you agree? Or would you rather approach it from a completely different direction? Let us know!