Social media news tracking for journalists

I'll be starting a new course next month with the catchy title above - Social media news tracking for journalists - It's gonna be fun. In my opinion, the ability to track information and conversations online is now pretty much one of the essential skills journalists need to get a handle on if they are to quickly navigate the mess known as the internet. Here's the brief, drop me a line if you're interested or go sign up,

This is a practical one day training session aimed at showing journalists how to follow a news story whatever it is, wherever it happens, whenever people are talking about it online. When a big story breaks it often breaks on the internet. A picture here, a blog post there or a video uploaded somewhere else. Knowing how to find this information quickly is one of the main problems facing journalists and editors today. This course teaches you how to 'listen' across a broad range of social media websites whether it be blogs, photos, video, audio, twitter or facebook.

- What is social about social media? How does it differ from traditional forms of media?
- Learning to "listen" across a wide range of sites
- How to follow blogs without following blogs
- Setting up RSS feeds
- Tracking images and videos through keyword searches
- Tapping the collective brain - using social bookmarking and RSS feeds
- The rise of live streaming and how to track it
- Scraping the net - how to monitor and approach sources within social networks
- Licensing - how Creative Commons licensing works
- A web of lies - the importance of verification

I've touched on a lot of these skills on this blog over the years and I synthesized a number of salient points into this piece recently. Paul Bradshaw has added his tuppence and Robin has just made a very good stab at almost automating what isn't quite, and never quite will be, automatable :) Human filters are still needed to intelligently sift through the mess and humans who can communicate (like me :)) are still needed to help people learn how to do this stuff quickly and, hopefully, have fun in the process.