How to: search social media for stories
Great tips and guides to searching Facebook and Twitter and much more.
British Beard and Moustache Championships – the aftermath
A year ago when David Dade asked if I’d set up and look after social media for the first British Beard and Moustache Championships I was thrilled.
It was a few months before I had to do anything (I had nothing to work with in terms of a championships website etc.), but getting married and landing a full-time job filled my hours.
Once we got going it didn’t take long to build up a fan base as my Handlebar Club WAG status means I have the right friends on Facebook (husband pictured on stage below).
I encouraged (bullied) hairy friends to invite their friends etc. so an initial push worked extremely well as our likes increased every day.
Now the championships are over the Facebook page has gone viral. We’re still loading pictures and video and I’m constantly working on a Storify.
On Sunday I saw the Facebook page had 144% interactions. More interactions than fans! (I checked again Monday morning and it’s 384%)
It makes me happy.
It’s great to see new fans joining every minute now and a lot of ‘liking’ on Facebook and a tremendous amount of retweeting.
We started last week with 500 Facebook fans and we’ll break 900 today. We’ve also doubled Twitter followers.
Hundreds of photographs are going into the Flickr group and the YouTube account is a growing entity.
Today (Monday, September 17) the story’s on the BBC website and hit the Australian media. My favourite video so far is on The Age website.
What more could you want… Pinterest probably.
I’ll miss the regular meetings with the organisers, particularly the British Beard Club as I don’t see them very often.
We’ll keep everything going online as it’s a great way to encourage more people to get involved with the two clubs and enter international beard competitions.
Now… who’ll appear on the comedy programme asking for a champion moustache….
KYM Gallery - Propaganda Parody Posters (all the above by Aaron Wood)
Dyson at Large: Court focus at UK’s best-performing weekly - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage
Readers either love or hate court reporting. The majority want to see justice done. Others are upset if friends or family appear in reports. These days it’s not possible to have two reporters devoted to court on a daily basis.
Lessons in storytelling
Useful tips on storytelling from Adam Westbrook via Ken Burns. You need to think when filming a news story. How is this going to look, what footage do I need, etc.
How to write a Twitter bio that'll make you stand out as a journalist
An incredibly useful series of tips from Poynter. Make sure people know who you are and what you’re about. If your bio lacks information very few people will follow you.
Press freedom US style
Interesting piece by Roy Greenslade about the difference between court reporting in the UK and US.
There are limitations on what you can report before a case goes to trail for very good reasons.
Police called to 'illegal rave' and raid parish council cinema
A priceless story from @BrightonArgus today reminds me of a time when the police were called to a birthday party I attended back in my youth.
My friend’s band and his mates’ bands played and we all camped in his family’s large back garden. We were in bed by midnight but the police turned up after calls about an illegal rave. None of us were into rave music. It was all indie guitar rock.
Forcing Hari to link only shows up how much the rest of the news industry doesn’t
A great piece by Martin Belam aka @currybet on Johann Hari’s links in his latest GQ column. Adam Tinworth aka @adders echoed the view that mainstream media is afraid to link. I’ve experienced it in many workplaces (apart from Journalism.co.uk where linking was positively encouraged but then it is a web-focused organisation) because journalists/editors who don’t understand how the web works see links as “taking readers away” rather than giving authority to websites/pages.
