Journalism as a pro-am lifestyle... sometimes with music

A UK university offers an MA in Social Media, asking & answering: "Is the MA in Social Media for me? If you are a media or cultural studies graduate, have experience in the web, PR, or marketing industries, and want an opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research or practice, then: yes."

Picking up threads from my recent Twitter obsession... Coincidentally, blogger MarketingProfs offers: "Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School" http://bit.ly/2lEzsm

And NYTimes.com blogs out its requests for local neighborhood citizen reporters to go to meetings: http://bit.ly/dxrW8

... with a Twitter boost from blogger & J-school prof Jeff Jarvis:
"NYT to public: 'Be the journalists.' The Local assigns the locals. http://bit.ly/11GNEB "

Maybe J-schools need a new slogan: "It's not a career; it's a lifestyle"?

And one you can combine with your other talents -- in this case, not the usual underground press, but something I considered when I lived in Boston.

At the time, I even had a line or two from this song in mind... "newspapermen meet the most interesting people..." along with this picture from one of my favorite LP jackets.

New slogan for banjo heads -- or laptop lids? -- "This machine surrounds unemployment and forces it to surrender."

unTimely product launch?

As a long-time Palm Pilot, Palm Treo and Palm TX user who has resisted getting an iPhone, I think the new Time magazine cover was a very rude thing to do the week of Palm's "Pre" launch.

Something ought to be done...

(OK, so I don't know what PreTwitter will look like.)

Confession: Apple products outnumber Palm products in my house two-to-one. But if a Sprint/Pre will work in Floyd, Va., where my AT&T phone doesn't, I might just switch.

The article, meanwhile, by Steven Berlin Johnson, is worth a read... Says he, "I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, 'Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time.'"

Twitter makes Forbes, tires Times, fills Facebook

This article titled The Twitter Zeitgeist at Forbes.com says "Twitter became a part of popular culture in less time then it takes to write a 140-character status update."

It adds some details to things I've been telling my students in the past few months, but (more importantly) posting this quick link also gives me an opportunity to test whether I've solved the Blogger glitch that was putting big external links at the tops of my posts and keeping me from editing them for the past week. (See test post from yesterday.)

Now the headline above should be a "permalink" to the address of this particular post. I like that, but can't promise to find time to go back and edit all my previous posts into that format. (For older posts, the "permalink" address is linked to the time stamp at the end of each post.)

Meanwhile (Sunday update), I've decided my own Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/bobstep) is a fine place to post links to mainstream-media stories about Twitter, including a flock of them recently in The New York Times, including a Sunday column that suggests early users are tiring of tweets. My three tweets, easy as one, two, three using http://bit.ly

But my best Twitter-related discovery is how to hide the Facebook posts of a Web-ubiquitous friend who mirrors all his Twitter posts as Facebook status updates. I only need to see his stuff in one place, thanks. Coincidentally, the problem and the solution came from bloggers with the same first name. Poetic.

Official University Twitterers Lead Students?

Both the Radford University and Virginia Tech public relations folks are already using Twitter.com, but the majority of my RU students hadn't heard of this rapidly growing social network site before I mentioned it in class.

Is this the first time college PR departments have been ahead of the students at adapting a new technology? Maybe its too similar to the status-update feature on Facebook, which most students seem to be familiar with. Well, if they want to see what the college publicity folks are saying, here are the local feeds:

http://twitter.com/vtnews
http://twitter.com/radfordu

Forget http://twitter.com/runews ? Someone in the .ru domain apparently grabbed it -- all tweets are in Russian

A sports stats outfit is also using college names and logos on its tweets, such as http://twitter.com/RadfordStats

In addition, there is a twitter account for http://twitter.com/RUHighlanders, but nothing had been posted when I looked.

I wonder whether the VT and RU public information offices' interest has something to do with the presence of Roanoke Times (roanoke.com) refugees on the staff at both universities. The newspaper's blogs and editorial pages have had twitter feeds for almost a year. http://twitter.com/roanoketimes

In fact, media organizations and college journalism faculty members were the first people I saw using Twitter, after the Web technology insiders like Dave Winer (http://twitter.com/davewiner), who is "following" 879 feeds on Twitter, has 19,068 "followers" and has posted 12,750 updates to his Twitter feed as of a few minutes ago.

The TV Watch - Media’s Big Names Can’t Resist Twitter - NYTimes.com:

"The Internet has revolutionized society by giving anyone an instant and unfiltered outlet for self-expression. But it has also turned journalism into a year-round, ever-updated “Dear Friends and Family” Christmas newsletter."

Speaking of media and twitter, I noticed the other day that the Charlie Rose Show has had a twitter feed -- but that that it missed posting the news that Charlie was interviewing twitter's Evan Williams. Weird.

Meanwhile in London, The Independent says "February 2009 might well go down as the month when Twitter replaced Facebook as the hottest and coolest company in Silicon Valley."

Unless you read it there (or somewhere else), you read it here first.

So who and what is Twitter good for?

A tech-savvy guest coming to one of my classes assumed college juniors would know all about Twitter. Either my media studies crowd is being shy or Radford students are out of the loop.

I asked who used Twitter in one class of 24; I don't remember anyone raising a hand. Maybe there were a couple of nods, but definitely no enthusiasm. I'll ask my other classes today. (I did -- and found a half-dozen Twitter users in the crowd.)

Perhaps that (media history) class's advertising, broadcast production and journalism majors just aren't interested in something the campus PR folks and student entrepreneurs started using before them? I think they -- the journalism students, at least -- should be more curious.

Anyhow, I've been looking for a good, recent, novice-friendly introduction to Twitter, and Andrew Ratner at the Baltimore Sun has one here: Twists on Twitter, by the people who use it:

"About a year ago, the free micro-blogging service got about 100 mentions in all media in a given week. Maybe a dozen or so of those were in major newspapers and magazines. Last week, by comparison, Twitter was mentioned more than 1,000 times in all media, and more than 200 times in major publications.
Twitter users are overwhelmingly young, but unlike most of the other social networks, Twitter is not dominated by the youngest of young adults, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."

If the old (Dylan, wasn't it?) line about not trusting anyone over 30 holds for this campus generation, maybe that explains it. That Pew survey Ratner mentioned gives 31 as the median age for Twitter users, compared to 26 for Facebook.

I'll admit to using LinkedIn.com, median age: 40.7, but I'm trying to keep up with all the others, too. Hence this blog and my token twitting @bobstep.

Here's a slightly older post on Five ways smart people use twitter, including both news and marketing folks. And another, coincidentally picking the same number: five ways to use twitter for good. Or does twitter have some connection to the number five?