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Fake news has been more present than ever in this election cycle. Find out how it has effect candidates and the public in the next post coming soon!

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Tumblr for social change

Tumblr is full of niches - networks of people united towards a common goal. It is a strong means of social change, because it is meeting point for many different media, a palette of different colors from which people can paint their strongly held views for societal change. Feminist tumblr, for example, uses the very media that can perpetuate misogyny and misguided views on gender roles in order to empower women (a popular one: http://femfreq.tumblr.com/). Tending more towards literary and intellectual references, social activist tumblrs are powerful; at the same time, we should be cautious not to close ourselves into a circle of like-minded people. Populating a tumblr dashboard with posts coming from a single niche might give us tunnel vision on the issues we are passionate about. 

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It’s important to remember that when it comes to sexual harassment, gender stereotypes should not limit the impact of statements made on social media. The #MeToo movement was something that our nation will remember as a lesson of national awareness and action.

We love and support you, Terry.

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wtf

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance

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This is the Central Park Five. 

Five boys none to be called men because none were even of the age of 18 who were wrongly convicted of raping a women and were sentenced to prison, failed by prosecutors who made up stories and lied on obviously falsified testimonies. 

And yet the lawyer who knowingly did this is still working for the Manhattan District Attorneys Office and teaching future lawyers at Columbia School of Law. 

Justice is needed. We do not need Elizabeth Lederer educating our lawyers of the future when she did this and shows no remorse of taking these young mens lives. Call 212-335-9000 . This is the District Attorneys office,  the more they hear the peoples voice the more Same for this is the number for the Columbia School of Law. Please if not for these boys now traumatized men. For. Every. Other. African. American. Kid. Too scared because they know that this is not the first time this has happened with no consequences for the prosecutors…nor will it be the last. Please. One Call. One voicemail. If thats all you have to give then thank you but please… spread this and help. I know we can make a difference

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When it comes to social media, we are reaching the tip of the ice burg when it comes to learning lessons.

A Few Months Into Facebook Live, A Few Lessons Learned

By Claire O’Neill

Live video is nothing new to the web, but it’s become a real thing for news orgs lately. That’s no doubt the result of Facebook’s incentivization — but it’s also because tech has generally made it more available to more of us, and in some ways more preferable than ever.

Take the Olympics. While TV viewership for NBC was down this year from 2012, Variety reports: “Ten percent of NBCU’s ad revenue for Rio came from digital” and “viewers streamed more than 2.71 billion minutes of coverage” – and much of that was live.  

That’s to say: Facebook is by no means the only platform for live-streaming media. But NPR has had the opportunity to experiment heavily there specifically, so we want to share what we’ve tried and learned – in two main parts: Some of our creative/editorial approaches and some of the most salient analytics. We’ll be sharing a secondary post with some technical basics later.

EDITORIAL APPROACHES

Over the course of about 5 months, we’ve produced upwards of 425 live videos. For us, that’s 0 to 60 in no time. We’ve been able to quickly staff up a team of talented visual journalists, test lots of gear and play with various formats and approaches.

We’re all still figuring out what works, and sometimes intuition is wrong. So our philosophy has been: Let’s get weird. Just do it and then decide if it works. You might intuitively think that video of a radio newscast would be really boring, for example. But people have really seemed to enjoy seeing Korva Coleman in the morning! We’ll soon be piloting an evening newscast from NPR West.

We’ve tried lots of stuff that defies category – like playing with a blue screen, staging a worm race, incorporating practical effects like a 3-D printed NPR logo made by the D.C. Public Library, etc. But the majority of our videos fall into three buckets:

1. Building on newsroom strengths:

At NPR, our strengths lie in the talents and knowledge of our reporters; the success of existing shows and brands; and our news-gathering capacity.

The newscast in video form

TV-style streams, e.g. the conventions with PBS

News conversations and interviews, e.g.. video extensions of existing podcast brands, like a Code Switch-hosted discussion of Colin Kaepernick

2. Filing from the field:

We’ve also tried to encourage our reporters to see this as one more tool for delivering news to both their devoted followers and potentially new ones on the web. This is something we’d like to do more frequently, but we routinely run into connectivity issues remotely in the field.

Standups during breaking news, like Ari Shapiro’s dispatch from Baton Rouge on his personal Facebook page

A daily, hosted morning news show, which we call Cereal

Behind-the-scenes tours, like Sam Sanders at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

3. Making the most of the medium:

We’ll never top the exploding watermelon or Clickhole’s brilliant “Let’s Kiss.“ But we have created shows, series and one-offs that exist solely for this medium:

Performances like “Night Owl,” our late-night music series

Slow tv-esque streams: “Mesmerizing things” like jellyfish at the National Aquarium or an art installation in LA

Interactive games like a spin-off show called “Initialisms” with NPR’s Ask Me Another crew

Science experiments … or “eggsperiments”

Field trips like Skunkbear at the Smithsonian

Conversations that revolve around a sense of community or shared experience, like how we mourned the death of Prince 

Thinking ahead…

Because the shelf-life of a live video is short — and also because our edited/produced video generally performs better — we’re experimenting with approaches that allow us to repurpose the content.

Invisibilia podcast premiere with a live performance by shadow puppeteers Manual Cinema, which we repurposed and republished

“Let’s Talk” explainer series, which we want to condense and republish

“Night Owl” performances, which we plan to republish on YouTube

(HT to the village it’s taken, which I’m merely representing in writing this post: Lori Todd, Mito Habe-Evans, Kara Frame, Maia Stern, CJ Riculan, Becky Harlan, Becky Lettenberger, Nick Michael, Colin Marshall, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Nickolai Hammar)

ANALYTICS

Audio: The most stunning realization for us as an audio network is that live video on Facebook is effectively a return to silent film. About 17 percent of our live video views have the sound on. Another way of putting it: This is a highly visual medium, which obviously raises the bar for visual interestingness. We don’t have a surefire solution but we know it’s not talking heads.

Targeting: So far, the most successful videos we’ve produced have been tied to breaking news or a current event — like the national conventions. Could be that Facebook favors that content; could be that our viewers do. The ultimate challenge is getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Will the people who are interested in art and museums be online at the moment we go live with a sneak peek tour? Odds are: No. So one thing we’ve been thinking about is how to maximize the shelf-life and repurpose-ability of the videos we produce.

Interaction: Ultimately, what you really want are shares, comments and “reactions” — i.e. the emojis available to viewers as they watch — because those are indicators of stories that resonate specifically in this medium.

Retention: Generally, to gauge the success of a video, you can ignore the prominent “reach” metric, which is just trying to seduce you with its size. Reach is tantamount to the effect of an LA billboard as commuters speed past it: The video appeared in your feed, but it may have never really registered.

With that in mind, it’s somewhat arbitrary, but we’ve decided that the 30-second view is what counts. About 13 percent of all views for us last 30 seconds or longer. In other words: It’s easy for Facebook to push the video out, but it’s hard to get drivers to stop and look at the billboard — and even harder to keep them parked. We’ve found that these videos are more successful among our existing fans, but are not necessarily expanding that group in a significant way.

Dearth of data: Facebook can be opaque about other key analytics. While we do know that 13 percent of all viewers watch at least 30 seconds, we do NOT know how much of any given video was completed by someone who started at minute 1 vs. minute 14. Which leaves you, as a producer, obsessing over the interestingness of just about every second in the video. We also don’t know how we’re faring vis-a-vis other news orgs.

Success? So what makes a “successful” live video? Hard to say. As our metrics analyst Dan Frohlich put it: Could be some combination of “video conversions” – from impressions to views; could be engagement (shares, likes, etc); could be the end result of how many 30-second views a video got; or some combo. 

(HT to Dan who did all the real work with these numbers.)

TL;DR

We’re only a few months in, but the education has been real. Organizationally, this experiment has gotten more folks in the newsroom thinking seriously about visual journalism – and understanding the challenges of producing it on the fly. As a team we’ve been able to quickly improvise, try new things and drop other things when they’re not working. 

Ultimately, live coverage is one of the many storytelling forms that we want to be comfortable with and prepared to do. In the coming months we plan to take what we’ve learned in this space and apply some of it more broadly to our evolving video strategy, so stay tuned. 

Did I forget something? Am I wrong about something? Do you have burning questions about XLR cables and shotgun mics? You know what to do: @oneillclaire 

Claire O’Neill is a visuals producer/editor, and co-creative director of NPR’s Facebook Live initiative.

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Freedom of expression and opinion gathers hundreds of thousands of followers for social movements for women’s healthcare— and other women’s rights. It is important to allow all ideas to come together because social media is the marketplace of ideas.

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Social media has changed the way people speak with each other. Minor interactions like emojis can convey more emotion than entire sentences. I guess a picture is worth a thousand words. Mind blown right?

🤯🤯🤯

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How has social media impacted modern politics? This is what Keith Rabois, Khosla Ventures Partner, and Steve Huffman, Reddit Co-founder & CEO, said with Bloomberg Technology after the 2016 presidential election.

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According to CBS News, 60% of Americans get their news through social media. Now this is important in understanding the evolution of the social conversation of race, and how social media has been able to amplify the awareness of racial injustice. A prime example of this, is in 2012 when African American teen Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. This lead to an agenda war on social media that was driven by the social conversation of injustice. Modern day coverage of injustice is common on social media as it is the main way to build an audience, and therefore a supporting following of a given cause. Images of police brutality or recordings of racist incinuations is allowing social media to teach race to a universal audience. Now, do all of those people learn or change from said conversations... not always. But, it does happen, and that is why movements like the #BlackLivesMatter movement had such a large impact. It was able to be educational and influential across many social media platforms.

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Global communities are finally able to communicate at a level in which social conversations can be had in a progressive manor. When it comes to politics and social media, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been hubs for political debate. With modern day polarization of political views, it’s often for heated discussions to happen. Sometimes a simple opinion can turn into full blown arguments between Democrats and Republicans. However, social media has been necessary in providing immediacy to political news. Plus, it has been able to expidaite processes. For example, petition signing and publicity. Overall, politics on social media has created a community that is avidly discussing public welfare. While a lot of those conversations might end up a bit aggressive, they are still acts of engagement that shows an active audience.

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“The media’s the most powerful entity on Earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s the power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

Malcom X

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Social media has created platforms and trends that recognize successful women. This is a way that social media has created conversations that challenge gender stereotypes.

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Social media has created an endless audience with a large range of opinions. One of the highly debated social media conversations exist around the rights of transgender individuals. However, while social media has allowed progress in the movement for social respect and recognition for transgender people, it also opened doors of harassment and vulnerability.