Five questions for editors about Twitter et al.

Do you have a disaster recovery plan for social media?

Given last week’s announcement by Twitter that it would comply with tweet censoring in certain parts of the world, it might be time for editors and journalists to think what this kind of policy adoption means for them, both now and in the longterm. If you are a journalist who regularly uses social media tools in your work (Facebook, Twitter, Google +), or an editor who encourages their use in your newsroom , here are five basic questions you should know the answer to:

Free advice for the New York Times on Occupy Wall Street.

I am sure the public editor of the New York Times will be thrilled to know that Monday is ‘free advice day’, so he is in luck with the question he posed this week in his column: Occupy Wall Street: How Should It Be Covered Now? . The piece includes some great advice from the men who were asked, and some even more good advice in the comments section, from the wider audience. But, as it’s free advice day I thought it would be wrong to pass up the opportunity.

In a post on Friday I suggested that OWS has some lessons for newsrooms,

Real time, All the time: Why every news organisation has to be live

Twitter does not have many users in Abbottabad in Pakistan, where Facebook is apparently more the social platform of choice. But it has enough to break the first sounds of gunfire in the fight which was to eventually lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. Sohaib Athar, with his @ReallyVirtual Twitter handle, is not the future of news he is the present of news.

How Wikileaks has woken up journalism.

If you follow the latest cache of diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks and reported by the Guardian, The New York Times and others it is impossible not to conclude that this is a pivotal moment for journalism, its teaching and its practice. In a masterly piece on The Guardian’s website, John Naughton writes that :

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

W(h)ither the Times?

When it comes to paywalls around news websites, I sometimes wonder if we are becoming an international fraternity of cargo cultists. The voodoo economics which accompanies the release of digital sales figures for The Times and Sunday Times is developing into its own art. What could this 105,000 digital sales, ‘around half’ of which are subscribers actually MEAN?