I came, I saw, I coded.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting today set the media world into its tragic-breaking-news frenzy. This one was a bit different than the handful of others I’ve experienced, though, in that it was so highly political and politicized. At the end of the day (and beginning of the next one), I’ve sat down to take stock of what I learned as a journalist today. A lot of these are very obvious “duh factors,” as my family is wont to call them, but I think they’re worth sharing.

Unfortunately, Storify doesn’t seem to want to let me embed multiple scripts* in one page. Here is the first of my three points, “Think Before You Tweet.” Or you can jump to my other points, about the danger of implying causation with correlation and the visual takeaway of Sarah Palin’s crosshair map.

*I’m not entirely sure, at nearly 2 a.m., why I broke them into separate blocks at all. It seemed logical at the time…

Two: Be aware of implications of correlations

Three: Use evocative images carefully in design

Yesterday, Mashable posted a brief about pictures of the Baja California earthquake on Twitter. The point, as they put it, was that “social media can make personal experiences universal” and that Twitter makes it possible to instantaneously share news as it’s happening.

So if Twitter makes it possible to share news so quickly, why doesn’t anyone DO anything with these sorts of tweets?

While CNN was quick to pick up tweets about the quake, what I haven’t seen is a map of them. Using Twitter’s geolocation function, it should be fairly simple to mash up Twitter’s API with Google Maps, showing where people were tweeting from. Twitpics of the damage, such as those shown on Mashable, would be much more meaningful this way because viewers could actually place where the photos were coming from.

My gut feeling is that things like this don’t happen because newsrooms aren’t set up for them. Much like a paper has stock photos and a station has archive video, news organizations should have mashup templates set up and ready to go for situations like the quake. A preexisting Twitter/Google Maps mashup would have made it a snap for a reporter — even one that’s not a master code monkey — to pull together a presentable interactive diagram of who was tweeting what where. That alone would answer three of the basic journalistic questions in a 21st century sort of way.

Is she scooping you on her blog? Could be.
Does that make her a journalist?
Creative Commons photo by Michael Melrose.

Last night, a representative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation posted this tweet: “What makes a journalist a journalist is whether she is gathering news, not the method or medium she uses to publish.” The message was part of the weekly Web Journalists Chat (found under #wjchat on Twitter), which discusses issues related to digital journalism.

The tweet reminded me of a debate that I’ve grown tired of listening to: Who’s a journalist? Are bloggers journalists? What about people who just happen to be on the scene and take photos?

I often hear my ethics professor, former Washington Post editor Len Downie Jr., sidestep the whole bloody mess by using the phrase “someone who committed an act of journalism.” It’s a beautiful solution because the journalism is what should matter. Fighting over whether Matt Drudge is a journalist or if the National Enquirer should be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize doesn’t really matter.

But in the wake of the tweet, I’d like to do something radical. I’d like to throw a dart into the game of definitions.

Journalist, n. A person who is likely to commit acts of journalism.

My definition differs only slightly from Merriam Webster’s first entry: jour·nal·ist: a person engaged in journalism.

The difference, however slight, is what matters. Sure, bloggers (and TMZ and your grandmother) can be — and have been — “engaged in journalism.” I maintain that unless they do it regularly, they aren’t journalists. A saying about stopped clocks being right comes to mind.

But maybe your granny regularly posts photos of petunia show winners, then moves into asking questions about their gardening techniques and sharing those with the readers she’s suddenly attracted. Then, I’d maintain she’s probably the best journalist ever to cover the local flower show beat. She’s become likely to commit acts of journalism. (If you’re smart, you’ll invite her to contribute to the hyperlocal community news page you just set up.)

So it is with programmers, too. If, as a programmer, you’re a code monkey that facilitates other people’s stories, I wouldn’t call you a journalist. If, however, you’re a code monkey who goes looking for databases to pull stories out of, I’d argue that you’ve become a pro-jo. Your actions mean you’re out looking for trouble — and looking for trouble is a sure sign of the pursuit of journalism.

An example of Outside.in’s API being utilized by an NBC affiliate in Ohio.
This shows on a map where stories originated.
Screengrab from Citizen Publishing.

Outside.in, the hyperlocal site that pulls news, blogs and other content for just about any given address, is doing what all papers should be doing. It’s made itself a platform.

Last year, Outside.in came out with an API that allowed developers to use the site’s hyperlocal news content in pretty much any way conceivable. As an example of what could be done with the API, Outside.in developers created near.ly, which allows users to get hyperlocal news delivered as direct messages via Twitter.

Why aren’t local papers taking advantage of this idea? Outside.in has a partnership site for news outlets that want to display hyperlocal results. A recent piece from Citizen Publishing makes it sound like Outside.in is really pushing for newspapers to start creating neighborhood pages with local content powered, of course, by the API. But that aggregated local news could just be the beginning of a community page. The page could also display local pictures using Flickr’s API, local restaurants and businesses with Yelp’s API, and local Twitter updates with Twitter’s API (while Outside.in pulls from Twitter, it seems messy to have tweets displayed with blog posts and news articles). And that’s just the automatically generated content, which by itself is not enough to create an engaging community portal. To do that, it needs to let the user take control of manipulating the data: It needs to become a platform. It needs to offer ways to connect with other users, to connect with reporters, and to share what they know. Citizen journalism should be encouraged, but the reality that most people don’t actually care about being citizen journalists should also be considered. In my admittedly limited experience, most people just want to be taken seriously when they do participate. I don’t think reporter-audience engagement can be overrated. Neither can the value of “soft” information like the Yelp rating of a nearby local dive you’ve been meaning to check out.

All of that combined can start making your audience take notice.

It starts with hyperlocal news.

That said, my personal feeling is that Outside.in’s API’s functionality is somewhat hindered by old-journalism thinking. Just because something is happening in someone’s general area does not mean that the news will be of interest. (Though obviously enough people are finding it interesting to keep Outside.in afloat.) For stories, the API does utilize titles. I haven’t figured out precisely how, but it seems there would be a way to limit your results by keyword, thus producing stories about a specific subject — as long as the keyword occurred in a headline.

In other words, hyperlocal news is a great place to start, but it’s not enough.

Come to think of it, that’s true of programming, too.

While this has nothing to do with programming, per se, I thought it appropriate to digress from my blog’s topic long enough to point out this resource. In the spirit of my last post, here are some tips for searching Twitter more effectively. (I ran across this this morning on Twitter, of course, thanks to a retweet from ASU professor Leslie-Jean Thornton, or @ljthornton.)

This article is written for advertising folks, but most of these functions could come in handy for journalists, too. Most of these tips make use of either Google’s handy shortcuts or Twitter’s advanced search. Using search shortcuts can save you time when you’re looking for information buried in any site, not just Twitter.

One note: I found their explanation of using the asterisk in search terms rather confusing, so let me clarify for anyone who’s in the same boat I am. Searching for “programmer journalist” (including quotes) gives you sites where the word “programmer” occurs right before the word “journalist.” But say you wanted to look for sites where those words are separated. You could use the asterisk to search for “programmer * journalist” and get returns in which someone might have the text “being a programmer and a journalist.”

Twitter’s become an integral part of the Web-savvy journalist’s artillery. The Virginia Tech shootings saw the first real emersion of social media as a reporting tool, showcasing both the problems and proper place of the technology. Most recently, the emphasis has been on using social media to connect to others not only for gathering information, but also for branding yourself as a journalist.

But the potential for using social media for journalism is far greater than it first appears. Wondering how you can use Twitter to do more than just tweet? Take a look at a few of these simple tools that make use of Twitter’s API.

• A World of Photos: Mashup of Twitter geotagged photos and Google’s Panoramio. See what pictures people are tweeting from locations around the globe. This is a better app in theory than in practice, since it seems like most of the non-Panoramio photos are coming from Eastern Europe. I wasn’t able to find another map that displayed pictures graphically on a map like this, but there’s definitely potential for such an application. Something like this could come in very handy if you want to see what people are paying attention to and telling their friends about, or if breaking news happens and you can’t get a photog there in time.
• TweepSearch(beta): Search profiles for keywords. You can even search a given Twitter user’s followers’ profiles for a keyword. Add the city or state, and it will narrow by location.
• Backchannel: Search for hashtags that have been published in the past. Doesn’t seem to go back farther than about a week, but could still be handy for covering events.
• UMapper: Create a map of real-time tweets in a given location, about a given topic or hashtag. A bit more complex that the previous click-and-go applications, UMapper requires you to build your own map. It’s something that could provide good supplementary visuals online. There’s just one caveat to be aware of when using geotagged tweets.

What Twitter features or mashups do you use?