Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

When did you first start integrating PolicyMic with Facebook and Twitter, and why?

Well, the company was founded in 2011 and as soon as it started they already had Facebook and Twitter. I initially worked doing SEO, basically whatever is trending on Google. So my experience with PolicyMic initially was driving organic traffic to the site from Google. Even at that point, 2011, there was still a separation between Google and facebook. We wrote articles and posted them on the blog and we posted them on Facebook and we posted them on Twitter. Now, I think that is totally integrated. Even when you think about which topics to write about, you have to already think how is it going to be tweeted, how is it going to shared on Facebook, what are the key works that work – basically how you present, or how you curate, that content on Facebook and Twitter. So going back to my old path there. Probably last year, 2012, probably in November, I switched to doing just Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and twitter are main social networks. Facebook is much larger. We have typically 50-60 percent of traffic comes from Google. We have 7 million visits a month. So we are growing. We are still not the Huffington Post, which is like 15 million or something. So we get a little bit more than two thirds from Google and then social traffic is the rest, like 30 plus percent is Facebook, and Twitter is much smaller than that. So of our social pie, Facebook is probably two thirds, and then one third is Twitter. When there is a news event or people are tweeting a lot, or one of our articles goes viral on Twitter, we get much more traffic form Twitter that week or month, but still Facebook is the main thing for now. And we do have Pinterest and Tumblr and Goggle+, but the traffic we drive from there is not that significant at all. For us it is more like a presence at this point.

Do you see an increase of the people that are referred from social media?

Yes, definitely. For the last year social traffic has grown. It has been slowly but steady.

What about traffic from Google?

It is growing too. As we get older we get a better ranking on Google, our stories get ranked better, so we will keep getting more traffic, hopefully, from Google.

What about direct?

That started out really, really small, and now it is getting larger.

So it is really just direct, Google and Facebook that drive traffic to your news site?

Yes, and then Twitter and Facebook are different. Like I said before, we used to post a blog and then post a story and then post it on Facebook. Now we are actually creating content specifically for Facebook. We are just like any other company or organization that has adjusted their social media efforts over time. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work tomorrow. It is very unstable like that. But I want to close with Twitter and Facebook saying that the content people share on Facebook is more targeted to emotions. Or if you are the first to break a news story, it is just going to go crazy. One example is the Boston bombing. Someone tweeted a photo on Twitter right away and posted it on Facebook and it got shared like crazy. And then Facebook gives you the alternative that if you post a photo you can actually edit the blur, so you can just break a story on Facebook and then you can just link it to your post and it keeps going viral. So that is one way of getting Facebook traffic.

So you don’t post an article on your news site and then share it with a headline and a link on Facebook?

That is what we used to do. And think that is fine. But now we are trying the exploit the breaking news aspect of Facebook. So if, let’s say, they pass gay marriage, right. If you are one of the first pages to break it, it is going to go viral. But if you in a week from now post a story saying, ‘this is the legislation, this is what it means, and this is how it is going to work, and you post that on Facebook, it is not going to go anywhere because people have already heard about it all week. You also won’t get a lot of traffic posting a story that is not breaking but is kind of like a divisive story – women’s rights, gay marriage, abortion, religion – it’s a no no! You do get engagement from comments. (On Facebook you have different ways of measuring your impact, and it is going to depend on your strategy and whatever you are looking for. You can have likes, you can have shares, you can have comments.) But from these political, divisive issues you don’t get a lot of likes. You get a lot of comments and they are very toxic. By toxic I mean, you have to monitor it, making sure it is not something crazy, outrageous that you have to hide or delete. It is really not worth, going that way – for us right now, for our sort of objective company. For other ultra liberal or ultra conservative news companies that have really passionate followings, they of course are going to get all that traffic. But for us right now, that is not what we are doing.

So where do you see any kind of business opportunities emerge on these platforms for a news company?

Hm, I don’t work in the sales department. But we use Twitter to get more engagement and create more awareness of our brand. Our brand is becoming more well-know because of Twitter where we get tweeted and retweeted by professional polits or TV personalities, and huge traffic from that. So in that sense, it helps our brand. And then you have the chance to connect and network with other media. Yesterday, we had a mention in the New York Times, in one of the columns. So we got to interact on Twitter with the writer, Charles Blow, so in that sense that was a way to create awareness about our news brand. Absolutely!

What about loyalty? Do you think people that interact on Facebook and Twitter tend to be engaged with your site, or be more loyal readers?

Well, I found out that Facebook is probably a better place to create loyalty than Twitter – just because Twitter is very fast and the feeds come by the second. But you do get, I guess… The way we started our brand is sort of like crowd sourced knowledge or opinion for and by millennials, so in the same way our social presence is very crowd sourced in the sense that I’m in charge of PolicyMic’s Twitter feed, but let’s say some story get published, then more than just me tweeting this story on behalf of PolicyMic, I would rather have the same writer who wrote the story, tweet it from his or her personal social media account so you can see the face of the writer, and then his or her following gets that crowd sourced feeling. So there is loyalty in the sense that there is going to Twitter users that are interested in women’s right so every time our women’s right, writers post something or tweet something there is going to be that engagement; they are going to retweet it or they are going to reply, and there is going to a conversation based on that article and whatever hashtag about what people are for, or against. Like for example, they think Monsanto is awful or they love Monsanto, or whatever it is. You have people constantly engaging in the news.

And do you see that benefitting the financial viability of your website?

Well, again Twitter is a smaller piece of our social traffic pie, but that is an interesting question. We have some writers prefer to … at the bottom of their article they say follow me on Twitter or get in on the conversation on Twitter. Some people feel that it is going to take away comments from the actual comment section on our site, and other people on the contrary people believe that is going to compound the whole thing. I think more the latter. I do believe that the more interaction outside our site is good as long as you constantly have your social presence connected to your site, constantly trying to refer people back to your site, and vice versa – to your Twitter feed and your Facebook page.

So what do you do on your site to connect your Facebook page and Twitter feed to it?

Well, right now we our redesigning our page. So we are going to have much more social buttons all over the place. We don’t have as many right now. Also we encourage our writers to a) under their Twitter bio say, ‘I write for Policy Mic’, so you can click at it and get directly back to our site, and b) on our site we have writers saying at the button of their article, ‘follow me on Twitter’ or ‘these are the topics that I’m interested in on Twitter’, so basically trying to bounce that traffic back and fourth. That is the goal.

Do you see that happening right now?

Yes, social traffic is definitely increasing from Twitter. But it is also a matter of working along side the writers, sort of like coaching them on Twitter as well. Not a lot of people are on Twitter and if they are they don’t tweet as often. So we constantly give our writers tips on how to get better at Twitter. To me, it is supposed to leverage your audiences. And the way I see our Twitter and Facebook feeds right know, is almost like another section of our site. So we have politics, we have feminism, we have international and then I see Facebook and Twitter as just some sections that we create content for and get traffic back from.

So the type content that sits well with people on social media sites is more like breaking news, you said?

Yes, for Twitter it is breaking news, and also social groups the users belong to and identify with. So if you grew up an immigrant, or you are a European, or gay, or fighting for women’s rights, anything, African-Americans, Latinos. If it is things that people feel strongly about they are going to take action. That is what social media is about, triggering action. It is not about people looking at their feed thinking whatever. But it is about getting them to reply or retweet.

So you send out something on social media sites to creation action?

Absolutely. That should be the goal.

Does every journalist from PolicyMic dedicate a specific amount of time to Facebook and Twitter?

We post 100 articles per day right now, so every time an article comes out … well, we publish one hundred and … you know, on Twitter you can tweet everything, it doesn’t matter. But on Facebook, we have to space it out. Otherwise people would see it as spam. So you don’t get to post everything that you want on Facebook.

Why is that different?

I think it is because there are much more tweets, there are like million of tweets. On Facebook people post whatever on their personal pages, but for a brand you could risk being annoying or polarizing. It is a reason for people to just unfollow.

But that doesn’t happen on Twitter?

I don’t think so. On Facebook you may have like 500 or 700 friends, on Twitter people have 20,000 so the turn around is much faster. The thing with social media is, you know, we all use social media more of less, so when you send out news you have to put yourself in the user’s shoes, thinking what annoys you, what would you like, what would you tweet and retweet. So I guess, you have less Facebook friends and you may think that the first article about IRS or Obama is great, but the when the second one comes, you think what is next, I’m over it. So for that reason we don’t get to post as many articles on Facebook. So instead we post a story and then we also post an infographic or some image from a company or a peer research, so we don’t get perceived as too pushy or self-promoting or self-serving – that annoys people, and they will just unfollow you. So for that reason you cant really push everything on Facebook. And that is what I fight with editors and writers about every day. They are like, ‘post my article, post my article’. Also, Facebook is very performance based, so if you want to keep it free your posts have to perform. So you post something and it gets all these likes, then the next post is going to have a large audience. But if you post something that doesn’t get a lot of reaction, your next post is going to get just a couple of likes, just forget it. It is just going to reduce your audience. I know you can pay for it by getting people to promote your posts, but we are not on that phase yet. At some point we will start doing it. But for us right now it is just about making our content perform well, so we can get as much traffic as possible. The same as we did, and keep doing, with Google.

So was it the individual journalist or you that share the news on social media?

Both. But in my ideal world, the journalists are very engaged on social media and have a large following, so they can always post their own articles. Again, it comes back to leverage, you know. It is much better if we have a community where people engage, than having only one or two person engage. It is an exponential-effect. That is what social media and viral reality is about. It is basically exponential, you know, two times four, and then six and then eight. So that would be ideal.

How many hours a day do you think the average journalists from PolicyMic spend on Facebook and Twitter right now?

Hm, I will say, uh … uh, probably three to four hours a day on average. Again, we are sort of changing into an integrated, simultaneous culture, where you have a tap open on your site, a tap open on Twitter, a tap open on Facebook, etc. because you are constantly getting ideas from Facebook as well as breaking news from Twitter that is feeding into your news feed. So it is not anymore about writing one article and then posting it, it is more like … do you know, those tweet-curated sites? One of them is called TweetSheet. It is basically a blog that, instead of writing about some news story, mine Twitter for the power users and the actual sources tweeting about it in real time, and then they lay out all the tweets. That is how they tell the whole story. I think that is where media is going. So that is where PolicyMic should be going, I think. So it really has to be simultaneous. With Twitter being so instantaneous and so fast, if you disconnect for a couple of hours to write a story, you have things happening and changing in the meantime with your story. So it is just going be faster and more real-time. It kind of sucks because you have pros and cons. You may have to comprise with accuracy and so on. You saw it with the Boston bombing where CNN and the big ones were on fire.

Do you have any benchmarks for success with your strategies on Facebook and Twitter?

Well, our strategy is to drive as much traffic as possible. We have ads of course, but we also have investors, venture capitals, so they are going to be looking at the numbers and the reach – social and Google. So for us, it is about driving as much high-quality traffic in our demographic, which is millennialls. In the past, we were doing stuff with pop culture and driving all this traffic from celebrities. And it was great. We had a lot of traffic. But it is not necessarily one hundred percent in tune with our mission and with our demographic.

So you are looking mostly at volume metrics?

Yes definitely. But also … I guess another business opportunity would be to partner with other similar news news sites and personalities, or even larger sites like the New York Times. Just to keep that engagement with them and hopefully get them to mention our brand on their much larger sites so we can bring even more traffic and also even more people to write for our site, which will in turn help our brand. We have posts from Paul Franc, the former congress man from Massachusetts, Paul Ryan, the senator that is probably going to be the presidential candidate, Clare Macasgo, etc. It has been great because, for instance Senator Clare Macasgo wrote about sexual assaults in the military, so we gained not only specific traffic concerned with that particular issue, and internal engagement on Twitter and Facebook, but also … we were one of the first sites to report on that news story, and it became a big issue in the mainstream media, so that was a gain for us in terms of traffic and brand wise – having our name associated with a United State senator. It gives us a lot of credibility.

So in that way social media helps you attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess. Because if you want to sell a product to millennialls, and you see that the United State senator is writing on our page, it probably has more credibility than more amateurish college blogs – not that there is something wrong with these blogs and all companies have different targets, like … but I guess in that sense, I mean, I haven’t seen the actual metrics on how social media has helped bring in more brands, but if browse on our site you are going to see big brands advertise on a regular basis. So I think it has made a positive business opportunity.

Do you think social engagement metrics will help attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess from an advertiser’s point of view you want to see the numbers on their traffic, but also their Facebook and Twitter feeds. You want so see how many fans, followers and likes they have, and if people interact on every single post. I’m not in advertising but we do advertising ideas in a way, so I would say the more social engagement you have, the better for attracting advertisers and also business opportunity partnerships. Right now, we have a potential partnership in the works with one of the big media companies, so in way they have been able to find us because of tweets or Facebook posts they saw somewhere, a share and then they tracked back to the site. So absolutely!

To answer your question about if it is worthwhile to engage in these social networks, I would say as long as it is free and easy to use, absolutely. Beside free and easy to use, the advantage is that you can pretty much mole that into your mission statement or your brand identity. And Twitter is just like … I can’t tell people enough how amazing Twitter is. I started on Twitter in 08, and people didn’t get it and it annoyed me a little bit. But I would say stick with it, get into it because not only do you get these business opportunities, it’s basically like you have a real time focus group in your pocket, in your Twitter app. Anything you want to know about anything basically you can see there. You see what kind of opinions people have in real time. It is probably not terribly scientific as a pole, but still it is very useful.

So Twitter is more about feeling what is out there, getting to know your audience, whereas Facebook from a business perspective is a generator of traffic?

Yes, well, Twitter is also about breaking news like the Boston marathon. So you keep tweeting about it and if you do it the right way, you get a lot of mentions and retweets and favorites, which is going to rank your tweets up. So people who are searching for some news story will see your tweets first. So it is all about keeping your ranking up there, just like on Google. Twitter is the same. And yes, you basically want to keep an engaged and hopefully large audience.

But since Twitter is not as much a generator of traffic, it is still worthwhile for a news company to integrate with from a business perspective?

Yes, for us it is not that large, but there are other news sites that get all there traffic from Twitter because they have a different strategy and different missions and different approaches. I don’t know if you know Buzzfeed – it is a viral blog. Almost 100 percent of there traffic is from Facebook as opposed to Google. So it depends on how you approach it. But even if you don’t generate traffic from Twitter, you create a lot of brand awareness, or…

Yes, but you kind of need the traffic to create brand awareness as well. If you don’t get a lot of traffic, they won’t be aware. But if people retweet your content, your brand will get around on Twitter, right?

Yes, absolutely! But you better realize that there are a lot of people that get their news from their Twitter feeds, who don’t necessarily go to your site. So I guess in that sense you definitely need to be out there. Ideally, you have a lot of engagement and brand presence. But people are going to be searching. They are going to search “New York Times Facebook” because they want to go to that particular company Facebook page or Twitter page. I don’t know exactly how many, but I don’t see a lot of people doing that, so I would say that it is probably decreasing that you go to a browser and then directly to nytimes.com as opposed to going to a news aggregator, like FlipBoard or Twitter or Facebook. Some times they even break the news first on Twitter, like the AP [Associated Press] for instance they break it there seconds before they break it on the actual site, so getting in the mix of Twitter totally makes sense.

Do you see any disadvantages of integrating with Facebook and Twitter? Any risks that you may be taking?

Uh, well, I would say, you risk being inaccurate in the name of being fast and being first, which is not going to change. We are a for-profit company, we are running a business, so we need the traffic, we need to make the calls everyday, we are going to try to break the news first. There is going to be some risks, like, you have to say this information may not be confirmed yet, or if the New York Times said or the CNN said it, you say it. So I guess the disadvantage for your brand is that if you are trying to be a respected news organization. But I guess that is the risk that you have to learn how to manage, because people are going to be tweeting, and as much as the users are going to complain, they are going to be the first to search for breaking news on Twitter. They want to be the first to get the information to tell their friends or coworkers. You don’t want to be the last guy knowing that Michael Jackson died. You want to be the first one, so people can say “holly shit”. So yes, that would be a downside.

Do you think there is a risk in linking out your news items on social media or to other news aggregators? Perhaps, readers won’t come back to your site.

Yes, that is something you also have to work on. I worked on mobile advertising before and we had these conversions. People actually pay per-click in that business. So you actually want that traffic coming back to your site, and not only do you want them to come back to your site, you want them to perform an action, whether it is buying something or, in our case, share the news story. So you definitely want that, and that is tricky. But I don’t think it is different from traditional advertising, where you have to track how many people come to your products, and how do you do that? I guess that is also another risk internally. It depends on how you measure your success.

How do you do that?

Like I said before, ideally it is about driving traffic to our site. Secondary, it is about increasing our social media footprint. So even if a hundred percent of people from that tweet or that post don’t come to our site, if their friends see on their profiles that someone liked a PolicyMic article that is still a win for us, because maybe that person will be like, “oh that looks interesting.” The bottom line is driving traffic into a site. And if you are selling products, you better have people auditing that product. That is the bottom line.

So are you actually taking a bigger risk not being on these platforms?

Absolutely! As long as it stays free and easy to use. They have huge audiences that you can reach. I mean, how could you not want to reach that? Any downside that it could have, the benefits totally outweigh. Going back to your question if it is worthwhile for a news company to spend human capital or money on Facebook and Twitter, it is going to depend on your strategy, but you definitely should have a social media presence. Right now, on Pinterest and Tumblr we do have a smaller audience and we post, and every here and there a post go viral and we get traffic from that, but we don’t have people dedicated completely to these platforms. Maybe if we hire someone else, someone who can dedicate more time to Pinterest or Tumblr that would be great. But you have to allocate your resources depending on what your priorities are. So if you have one guy doing social media and if you see that you get much more traffic and conversions from Facebook than on Twitter, by all means invest more time and effort on Facebook, but do not neglect the other ones. And as you get more resources you can basically allocate them better. But I guess the bottom line is, how could you not be on social media, whether you are a NGO or a vitamin shop. You know, Jamba Juice they have all these promos and stuff that creates huge engagement. And they are not charging you for that on Facebook or Twitter. They could charge you for that. Facebook encourages you to use promoted posts, and yes if you have the budget and you want to promote posts by all means. The reason why Yahoo bought Tumblr is because they are now doing promoted posts, so they are going to start charging people who want to reach specific demographics. You know, it makes sense.

• Day 1 – Audience Development.    Day 1 focused on the two main techniques needed to build audience online search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media optimization and social media marketing.  Special emphasis was placed on the use of Facebook and Twitter given the related importance of social media to Indonesian online users.

• Day 2 – Revenue Development. Day 2 focused on revenue development, in particular display advertising trends and standards, pricing approaches and the importance and structure of online media kits and rate cards.  The day ended with a discussion of the structure and role of advertising networks and the most important advertising networks available in Southeast Asia.

The seminar was designed to lay a foundation for audience and revenue development for KBR68H’s new online portal.

Location: Jakarta, Indonesia

Dates: 30 April – 1 May 2013

Attending:  Sales, Marketing and News Managers from PortalKBR.com

Major news organisations including Reuters, Al Jazeera, CBS, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press have all made headlines in the past year after hackers took over their Twitter accounts. The attacks are always embarrassing and can negatively impact the reputation of your news organisation, but the attacks can also cause panic and real damage, as we saw recently.

The fake tweet posted to the AP Twitter account said:

Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.

Literally, within a minute after the fake tweet was posted, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 150 points. Bloomberg reported that the attack wiped out $136 bn of market value from the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. Within three minutes of the tweet being posted, AP journalists were posting on their own accounts that the tweet was a hoax and that the news organisation had been hacked.

While major international English and Arabic news organisations have been targets, the same tactics are being used by politically motivated hackers everywhere. In the lead up to the general election in Malaysia, the Twitter accounts of the independent news website Malaysiakini were hacked and taken control of by a group calling itself Sarkas-Siber. (For transparency, Media Development Investment Fund, which publishes Knowledge Bridge, has provided debt and equity financing and strategic advice to Malaysiakini.)

Twitter warned news organistions that the attacks will continue, and that journalists and news groups will “continue to be high value targets to hackers”. The microblogging platform is working on tightening security on its platform, but as it does, it offered up a number of recommendations for news groups to keep their accounts secure.

Victims of ‘spear phishing’

Like most hacks, most of these attacks against the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press weren’t technically sophisticated. Contrary to the movie stereotype of elite hackers defeating advanced computer security, the attacks didn’t rely on technical wizardry but rather on social engineering, which is just a fancy computer security term for scamming users out of username and password information. All three news organisations were targeted and successfully compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses western news organisations of spreading “lies and slander about Syria“.

All three news organisations say that they were the target of phishing attacks. Most people know phishing from the suspicious emails that appear from scammers trying to trick you out of your credit card and bank details. These attacks, often known as spear phishing due to their targeted nature, are much more targeted, more personalised and much harder to spot as frauds than the standard email fraud schemes. James Ball, the data editor at the Guardian, wrote on Twitter:

The guys doing the Guardian phishing attack I mentioned yesterday (it’s SEA) are really very good: sustained, changing, mails today.

He mentioned earlier that the emails were specifically targeting Guardian journalists. As one of the commenters says on a Naked Security blog post discussing the attack, “spoofing” an email – faking the sender’s email address – is trivial for most hackers. Both the AP and the BBC reported phishing attacks around the time that their Twitter accounts were compromised. According to the USA Today newspaper, the BBC warned staff about the suspicious emails:

The BBC’s email to staff said the “phishing” emails contained what appeared to be links to The Guardian newspaper or Human Rights Watch online and bring users to a fake webmail portal.

Twitter scrambles to respond

Twitter made a number of recommendations to news organisations to help them protect themselves. Some of the the tips are sensible online security such as changing passwords on a regular basis and having strong passwords. Twitter suggested that the passwords should be 20 characters long and a mix of characters and numbers or random words. Most security experts advise against using words that appear the dictionary, although a mix of random words would be more difficult to crack.

Other advice that Twitter offered news groups is impractical. They suggested that news organisations should have a dedicated computer to post to Twitter that they didn’t use to access email or the web.

Twitter did reach out to news organisations asking that they work more closely with the company. Twitter wrote in a memo to news groups:

Help us protect you. We’re working to make sure we have the most updated information on our partners’ accounts.

The advice is not just coming from Twitter but is also being given to Twitter to step up its own security. Specifically, a number of security experts have encouraged the company to adopt two-step authentication, something that Google rolled out after high-profile hacking attacks that were revealed in 2010. Two-step authentication often requires a user to register a mobile phone so that codes can be sent as a second step to log into an account on a new computer or device. Facebook, Google and Yahoo! all use the added security feature.

Protecting yourself against spear phishing

However, the best line of defence begins by educating all editors, managers and staff on security best practices. Hackers and phishers are always developing new ways to trick you into compromising your own security, and as Twitter says, journalists are now targets not only for politically motivated hacktivists but also by unfriendly governments.

We’ve all become more aware of scammers trying to trick us out of our credit card or bank details. We all know to take care when opening attachments or clicking on links in emails from people we don’t know. But it is important to understand the new and evolving techniques that spear phishers use to trick you into giving up your usernames, passwords and other important details. As the experts at Norton Security say:

The spear phisher thrives on familiarity. He knows your name, your email address, and at least a little about you.

As journalists we live in public, and it will be all that much easier for hackers to build up a profile to target us. Moreover, as Norton notes, spear phishers are stalking you on social networks. Think of all of the information that you post on social networks and how easy it would be for an attacker to dupe you into believing that they are a friend. Norton asks:

How safe you and your information remain depends in part on you being careful. Take a look at your online presence. How much information is out there about you that could be pieced together to scam you? Your name? Email address? Friends’ names? Their email addresses?

Norton recommends that if you receive an email from a friend asking you for a password or other sensitive information that you call them up to verify the email is from them.

As journalists, we’re trained to be sceptical, and it’s important to use that skill to bolster your electronic security. Be wary of emails purportedly from friends or organisations you know asking for or directing you to sites asking you for business sensitive information. That moment of caution could prevent your Twitter account from being compromised, your contacts from being stolen or your news organisation’s office network from being breached.

When that many tweets are flowing by, it’s very hard to make sense of it all. Fortunately, there are a number of ways a journalist can manage Twitter as well as advanced search techniques to help them find the updates, photos and videos that they want.

Twitter search: The basics

When you first search something on Twitter, it will show you tweets, updates, that relate to your search.

1. Twitter first shows you “Top” tweets, tweets from people or accounts with a larger number of followers or tweets that have been retweeted often. You can also filter your search to people you follow or see all tweets.

2. If you look to the left of the updates that relate to your search, you will see accounts that relate to your search under the heading of people as well as images under the heading Top Photos and videos under the heading Top Videos.

When your search returns updates from prominent people, if you see a check mark in a blue rippled circle, this means that Twitter has verified the account. For instance, this is the official account of Malaysian member of parliament Anwar Ibrahim. That doesn’t mean that updates from prominent people without the check aren’t verified, but it does give you some confidence with well-known figures that you have an official account.

Twitter search: Advanced options

Similar to Google and other search engines, there are a number of advanced search options and some options unique to Twitter. Clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand reveals a drop-down menu with three options:

1. Save search
2. Advanced search
3. Embed this search

Before looking at the advanced options, we’ll look at the other two options. Saving searches can be helpful not only in keeping searches that you commonly do but also in applications that help you monitor Twitter and other social media services, such as Twitter’s Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Saved searches allow you to have a column featuring the results of that search.

For instance in Tweetdeck, below, you can add columns allowing you to monitor your favourites, your searches, replies to you or hashtags all at the same time. On the Twitter website, you can access all of this information, but you cannot have multiple columns with this information. Tweetdeck and other social media dashboard applications are commonly used by journalists monitoring social media.

To add a column to Tweetdeck:

1. Click on the plus symbol inside a button.
2. That will bring up a window with all of the options for columns you can add including columns of your saved searches, Twitter lists, direct messages or replies. You can also add a column with your Facebook news feed.

Tweetdeck and other tools are a very useful way for journalists to monitor social media, and we’ll cover these tools in future guides.

Now, looking back at the other search options in Twitter. You can embed the results of the search in another site using one of Twitter’s widgets. Note, the results of the search can be set to update as new results arrive. Search is only one widget that you can create. We will also cover the widgets in Twitter at another time.

Finally, we return to the advanced search options. The options are broken down into three different sections: Words, people and places.

1. Words

This section will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used the advanced search options common to major search engines including Google or Yandex. You can search by any or all words or an exact phrase. If you add keywords to “None of these words”, it will exclude words from your search. If you are seeing results unrelated to what you are searching for and have a common search term, you can exclude that term to deliver more relevant results.

You can also search by a hashtag, a keyword preceded by the # symbol that is used by Twitter users to organise updates around an event or topic.

One very useful element for international journalists is the ability to search by language. While not comprehensive, the search by language option allows you to search by all of the languages most popular on Twitter including Russian, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia, to name a few. One major language it does not include is Chinese.

2. People

You can also filter your search based on accounts, so you can filter you search from a certain account or accounts or that mention an account.

3. Places

The final option allows you to filter your search by a place. This can be especially useful if you want updates only from accounts near an event rather than people mentioning an event, such as during a disaster or bombing. Twitter uses information from where Twitter users say they are in their profiles or location added by phones with GPS or other location technology. Many Twitter users never change the location in their profile so the location would imprecise and possibly inaccurate. Try to contact the user to verify the location.

If you see a map pin, similar to the pins used on Google maps in a Twitter update, the location was added by a smartphone or added by an image that had location embedded in it. You can be more confident with the accuracy of the location of updates with these pins, and the location will be more precise.

Twitter: More advanced options

There are even more options that are only available by adding text options to your search. These options can be very powerful, but they are only available on a special search page that is not easily found on Twitter’s site. Here is their search option guide, available from the “operators” link on the search page.

Many of these operators are simply text versions of the advanced search options. For instance, putting two or more keywords in quotes, e.g. “Zambia elections”, will look only for that exact phrase. This will return the same results as the exact phrase option in the advanced search. Adding a ‘-‘ in front of a word will exclude that word from the search, which is like the ‘None of these words’ option in the advanced search.

However, there are options that are only available using these text operators. For instance, if you use the options, since:2010-12-27 or until:2010-12-27, it will only show updates since 27 December 2010 or until 27 December 2010. There is no other way to filter by date using Twitter search except by using these operators.

Another option only available using these operators is the ability to filter by a more precise location. For instance, you can search for updates posted 5km from the centre of Jakarta with the following search, “near:Jakarta within:5km”.

You can also filter your search for specific types of media. You can filter updates that include links, photos or videos by adding the filter option. For instance, you can add filter:images to the previous search to find all updates with images 5km from the centre of Jakarta.

These search operators will have to be written in English, but you can use other languages as search terms.

With these search tools, you can quickly find the updates you want and that are relevant to the stories you are covering. You can tame the flood of updates and find what you want quickly and on deadline.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan looked at “507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 months” and took into consideration “(behavioural), content, and network data” to answer the question of what drives growth in Twitter followers.

The study, which is available in PDF form, found:

• “Message content significantly impacts follower growth.” If you’re negative, your follower numbers will go down, but “expressing positive sentiment” helps grow your number of followers.
• One finding supports the common advice that you should fill out your profile completely.
• Good writing helps, and the study found that readability will help increase your following as well. “When deciding whether or not to follow a virtual stranger, we found Twitter users seek out well-written over poorly written content,” CJ Hutto from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the study told New Scientist.
• In good news for news organisations, “informational content attracts new followers”.

That’s what you should do to increase followers, but the study also found some practices to avoid unless you want to send your follower numbers plummeting.

• Be careful that the tweets don’t stray into simple promotion of your news organisation. The study drew a contrast between “Informers, those who share informational content” and “Meformers, those who share content about themselves”. The report found “Meformers were reported to have almost three times fewer followers than Informers.”
• Don’t clutter your tweets with multiple hashtags. Hashtags can be useful to combine tweets about a single event or ongoing story, such as an election campaign. However, one hashtag will do instead of three.
• The study also found that “broadcast communications” rather than directed communications have a negative impact on your follower count too. It’s important to put this finding in context for news organisations, which often use their primary accounts to share their content very much in a broadcast manner. These accounts often have a lot of followers. One key finding from BBC research is that editorial choice, even for their main BBC-branded accounts, is important. Simply using your Twitter or other social networking accounts to broadcast all of your stories isn’t the most effective use of social media.

However, for individual journalists, it is clear from internal research at MSN network and the BBC that for journalists’ accounts, they have much higher levels of engagement and interaction and also have a stronger and larger network. This interaction – comments, questions and responses – is what the study means by directed communication. Individual journalists need to remember to act as individuals rather than headline services for their own content.

Of course, Twitter use does vary across cultures. What strategies have you tried that have helped you gain the following you have? Were there any techniques that you used that you believe cost you followers? What differences have you found in how Twitter or other social networks are used in your culture? Share your tips in the comments.

How do I get more followers or fans? How do I encourage readers to share my stories?

At MDIF’s Media Forum 2012, I spoke with Srdan Kosovic, the online editor of Montenegro’s Vijesti, on how they found success.

“It was the trickiest question when we started, how to get new followers, how to get more likes,” he told us, but he cautioned, “You have to be careful with that. It’s all about what you want to do with those followers.”

It is not just about increasing page views and traffic but to include the audience in “the whole process of creating news”, he added.

Protests drive new social media strategy

The development of this strategy was sparked by protests in the country in January 2012. They were the largest protests in decades, he said, and they quickly realised that people wanted to be a part of sharing accurate, verified information.

Vijesti sent its own journalists, and like journalists elsewhere, they realised that using Twitter and Facebook and their mobile phones, they could report on the protests as they happened. They created a hashtag, a keyword preceded by the # symbol, on Twitter to gather the reports. It was based on a slogan used during the protest.

The reporting and the hashtag helped increase their following on Twitter. They encouraged people to send them pictures and information using the hashtag, and they promised to verify the reports that were sent to them.

“We said help us to do the best to cover the protests for the people who can’t come to the protests or watch them on TV,” he said. They didn’t ask people at the protests to help Vijesti but to help each other.

“The result was immense,” he said. “We got many new followers, many new connections between our followers and Vijesti’s portal.”

Vijesti benefitted by breaking new ground amongst Montenegrin news organisations in using social media in this way and to highlight the public’s use of social media in their coverage.

Listening to their new followers

One key lesson that many journalists quickly learn with social media is that it is not just about broadcasting your views and sharing your stories but also about getting feedback from your audience.

Of course, Vijesti does share their stories using social media, but Kosovic says that they do not share every story.

“We share those that we think are funny to be shared or retweeted but also important matters for the community so we can get more angles for the story and investigate deeper so that we can have an impact,” he said.

After the increase in fans and followers, Vijesti realised that they now had a way to directly contact members of their audience. The Twitter community in Montenegro is a relatively small and tight-knit group, which makes managing this engagement relatively easy.

They try to find out what expectations their followers have and why they decided to follow Vijesti, he said.

“We always reply to tweets. We always comment on interesting comments on Facebook. We even get direct messages (on Twitter) that aren’t related to Vijesti,” he added.

While this high level of engagement is showing obvious results for Vijesti, it might not be possible in countries with higher levels of social media use. For larger news organisations or simply news organisations that operate in very social media saturated countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, it is probably more realistic that you have a community manager who helps manage the engagement and alert journalists to story ideas or comments they should respond to.

Kosovic knows that if their success at growing their social media following continues that they will need more resources, but for the moment, it is manageable. “We don’t want to go viral just to promote our brand. Of course, that is a part of it, but it is not only that. It is a process of meeting the expectation regarding trust and providing the right information at the right time.”

Offline community supports online engagement

Another way that Vijesti has worked to engage their social media fans is by attending Twitter parties. The idea actually came from the Montenegrin Twitter community, and they come together to watch a football match or television show and tweet about the event using a hashtag.

Kosovic said he and other people with the portal team went to the party to put a face to a Twitter name. It has deepened the relationship that started online, and now Vijesti’s Twitter followers know the people tweeting for the portal. “We get to meet them face to face. If I have a problem, I can now address you,” he said. “An institution always has a mask, and we try to remove the mask.”

The tweets will clearly be marked as “SPONSORED TWEETS” and, to comply with Twitter commercial guidelines, Samsung won’t be allowed to directly post the updates to AP’s 1.5m followers but must allow AP to post the updates themselves. To help ensure that the sponsored social media content meets AP’s editorial standards, the cooperative has developed “internal guidelines in recent months so that it may build new business models in the new media landscape without compromising its newsroom values and principles,” according to a press release.

In the press release, Lou Ferrara, AP managing editor overseeing social media, said:

We are thrilled to be taking this next step in social media. As an industry, we must be looking for new ways to develop revenues while providing good experiences for advertisers and consumers. At the same time, advertisers and audiences expect AP to do that without compromising its core mission of breaking news.

Balancing commercial imperatives and editorial values

Other online companies such as aggregator MediaGazer and India’s Firstpost often ask readers to support their sponsors via tweets, but the AP-Samsung deal goes further.

This isn’t the first time that Samsung has worked with a media company to sponsor tweets. In 2011, online magazine Slate, owned by the Washington Post, posted sponsored tweets promoting a Samsung laptop.

The tweets are very clearly marked as sponsored, but as the first responses to this tweet shows, not all users are happy with the sponsored tweets with one user saying, “Should I unfollow now, or later?” Adweek highlighted even stronger response from some of AP’s followers, with one follower imploring the news service to “have some journalism ethics and stop with the sponsored tweets nonsense please”.

SPONSORED TWEET: Catch up with Samsung on what happened today at CES 2013 and what’s on tap for tomorrow at bit.ly/XIVFTi #SamsungCES

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 8, 2013

But Cory Bergman, the general manager for the Twitter headline service Breaking News, asked critics what the difference was between commercials on television and a sponsored tweet.

Apart from the possibility of upsetting followers, the novel use of Twitter for commercial purposes raised ethical questions about mingling editorial and commercial content. The Financial Times said that the AP was juggling “impartial news and Samsung-sponsored” tweets.

Adweek quoted Todd Defren, CEO of PR firm Shift Communications, who said:

This is further evidence of the blurring lines between earned and paid media. The news outlets are crimped for cash, so they’re considering unorthodox revenue approaches. Meanwhile, brands are desperate for attention in a saturated media environment so they’ll pay a premium to gain audience share from a proven property. I’m not opposed to experimentation, but transparency is key.

As for transparency, Bergman responded on Twitter in a discussion about one of the sponsored tweets by saying that “product placement isn’t usually disclosed so openly”.

One key element in making sure that these deals don’t threaten editorial standards and independence is to follow AP’s lead and have a clear policy for such deals. This is one of seven recommendations that Jasper Jackson recently made in an article for The Media Briefing looking at how to safely balance commercial and editorial demands. He also recommends that staff cannot have commercial relationships with the companies that they cover. Jackson’s recommendations come from Howard Rauch, the American Society of Business press Editors’ ethics committee, and Tony Hallett, former CBS Interactive business publishing director and now the director at Collective Content, a content marketing agency.

The AP also followed another of Jackson’s recommendation by clearly flagging sponsored content.

With digital driving ever increasing levels of media competition, Jackson said that editors and publishers need to set and enforce clear guidelines to sales teams to make sure that sales teams comply with the commercial code.

But did it make money?

We don’t know how much money AP netted from the deal, with Reuters reporting that the news cooperative did not release financial details about the sponsorship. However, the AP’s Ferrara told the FT that the deal was “profitable and a good opportunity for us”.

Some questions were also raised as to whether the deal fell foul of Twitter’s terms and conditions, but a Twitter spokesperson told Reuters as long as the tweets are sent individually and manually, rather than by an automated service, the tie-up complies with Twitter’s terms for third-party agreements.

However, as Twitter is trying to increase its own revenue, it could always change these terms in the future, as Twitter has already made several changes to limit third-party services using its platform. paidContent’s Mathew Ingram asked how long Twitter would allow companies to sell their own ads. If campaigns like this are successful, then Ingram says that Twitter will have to changes its terms to protect its own advertising programme or strike revenue-sharing deals with companies that want to replicate the AP-Samsung deal.

Mugamu explained the idea behind #263Chat to ATV News:

263Chat is something that I came up with in September, and I thought about it earlier on in the year and the biggest issue was just finding a time in the day that suited most Zimbabweans.

The idea behind it all is just to help change the Zimbabwean narrative. We complain a lot that we don’t have local content, our stories are not being told. Let people get involved and share their stories around various social and national issues. Yesterday we spoke about bullying, last week we spoke about indigenisation, the week before we spoke about women. So it’s different issues that touch different facets of society.

And the chats are getting very popular indeed, reports TechZim:

Some discussions, like the one on indigenisation last week, can have well over 600 tweets and retweets easily making the hashtag trend locally on Twitter. Mugamu says mention of #263Chat by some local radio presenters has also helped make #263Chat a dialog platform that the community looks forward.

Twitter can be difficult to search so Mugamu uses his blog to summarise the discussion and saves key Tweets using Storify, a service that allows for the easy collection of social media updates from a range of sources, including Facebook, YouTube and photo-sharing site Flickr, as well as Twitter.
But why use Twitter? With a 140 character limit, Twitter doesn’t give participants much room to fully express themselves. But what Twitter does provide is the ability for participants to share no more information about themselves than they want to, leaving them free to be more honest in their opinions. Mugamu told ATV News:

Unlike Facebook, where I might be your Facebook friend, I know your real name, I know personal information about you, on Twitter you can be anonymous. … You share your story, you tell us what you think, and it’s great because you tell us what you really think. As opposed to Facebook, where you’re afraid of admitting which party you’re going to vote for, or what you really think about certain issues.

The conversation can get heated, Mugamu says, and when it does he steps in to try to calm people down and steer the conversation back on topic. But, he says, the discussions are apolitical, addressing everyday issues and trying to find solutions. Mugamu believes that dialogue is the key to addressing the problems that Zimbabwe faces:

As a nation we need to have a number of conversations at different levels. The politicians need to sit down talk to other politicians, they need to talk to us. Community leaders need to talk about what’s going on in the community, the community itself needs to be heard. What’s troubling us? I run a business in an area where litter is a problem, water supply is a problem. And we talk about all these issues at home, at the pub, on the bus. So continue having the conversations at home, but why not have the conversation with people you don’t know and maybe that way you can come up with other solutions.

In #263Chat, Mugamu has hit upon a very simple but yet very powerful format for engaging his community, and it’s an idea that can be easily replicated in any country or any language. This hashtag discussion was started by an interested and engaged member of the public, but it could just as easily have been started by journalist. All you need is a regular time slot, a passionate moderator and a place to archive the conversations.

Here is the interview with Mugamu by ATV News:

There were thousands of local people monitoring the election, in addition to the 3700 foreign observers sent to ensure that the election was free and fair. Ordinary Ukrainians were also posting reports via social media networks, email and their mobile phones.

By learning how to monitor these updates, knowing key social media sources and being aware of new methods of monitoring elections that have become common not only in Ukraine but around the world, you can help use your journalists’ time most effectively.

Monitoring events via Twitter lists 

While the micro-blogging platform Twitter is not used as widely as social networks like vKontatke in Ukraine, it was still a valuable means of communication for people monitoring the elections and also a valuable source of information for journalists.

There are two key ways to follow events on Twitter. Before an event, it is useful to create a list of Twitter accounts that are covering that event. Just like with a traditional source, this gives you a chance to develop a sense of the quality of information from each source and a sense of the point of view for that account. Is the Tweeter relatively neutral, or do they support the government or opposition parties? Is the account connected to official efforts to observe the election?

For instance, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which sent observers to the election, has a Twitter account. It mostly posts links to press releases and job openings, but it’s still worth adding official accounts to a list when you are following election updates.

Creating lists on Twitter allows you to easily focus on updates from a select group of accounts that you have been able to develop sourcing information about. You don’t have to separately follow the accounts that you have added to a List, so you can keep the number of accounts that you follow on a general basis manageable.

To create a list and add Twitter accounts to it, you can follow this guide that Twitter has provided.

To create a new list, click on the gear logo between the search box and the update button.

Clicking on the link will take you to the profile page for your account showing you the list options. It will either show the lists you have already created if you have any, or give you the option to create your first new list. Here you can see the lists that I have created. In the upper right hand corner, there is a button marked “Create list” which will allow you to create a new list.

When you click on the button to create a list, you will be asked to give your list a name, and you can also give it a brief description. Adding a description will make it easier to find your list by search. You will also see that you have the option to make your list public or private. You might want to keep your list private if you feel that the list is sensitive in some way, such as it might tip off an official that you are following their updates. However, if the list isn’t sensitive, then consider keeping it public. Why? Just as you can follow individual accounts on Twitter, you can also follow lists. This is useful for newsrooms because you can create a list once and then allow all of your journalists to follow it.

To add users to your list, you can do a search for the topic you’re interested in. For instance, if you search #ukrainevotes filter:verified, this will return accounts using one of the common hashtags, which we will discuss in a minute, and that have been verified. Twitter verifies accounts of celebrities, political leaders and other well-known figures. That doesn’t mean that the information being posted has been verified but only that Twitter has verified that the account belongs to the person or group listed in the short biography or description of the account. Verified accounts have a small blue check mark next to the account name.

To add the account to your list, click on the gear next to the follow button. This will show you the option to add or remove this account to a list. This will bring up a list of all of your lists. Simply click on the box in front of the account name to check or uncheck, add or remove, that account from your list.

The value of lists is that, unlike Twitter searches where you may or may not know much about the accounts shown in the search, you have been able to do some basic research on these accounts and made an editorial choice to add them to the list. This will also give you much more focused results than a general search.

Monitoring events via Twitter hashtags

Another useful way to follow an event on Twitter is via the hashtag. As often happens with elections and other major events, Ukrainian Twitter users adopted hashtags,  keywords preceded by the hash symbol #, to organise all of their updates about the elections. The two most common hashtags were #вибори2012 and #UkraineVotes, according to Kyiv Post. Journalists covering elections will want to identify the most common hashtags and monitor these for reports of voting issues. Clicking on a hashtag on Twitter will automatically launch a search that will allow you to quickly and easily see all of the updates with that tag.

There is no centralised way that Twitter hashtags are determined, although if you have created a list, most likely it will be clear from the accounts that you have chosen what the most common hashtag is related to your event. Individuals are free to create hashtags, simply by adding them to their tweets.

There are sites that track hashtags, such as Hashtags.org, and of course, you will often see popular hashtags in the Trends section in Twitter which is currently on the left hand side of the main page you see when you log into Twitter.com. Twitter has introduced its tailored trends service, which shows you trends not only based on your location but also based on who you follow. If you don’t want to use tailored trends, you can also select to focus by one of 35 countries where Twitter is used the most. In the case of the elections in Ukraine, it isn’t one of the 35 countries Twitter allows you monitor for trending topics so you’ll have to use other methods. Tailored trends should show you the most used hashtags where you are, and related to your event. If it doesn’t, do a general search, in this case Ukraine elections, to find the most commonly used hashtags. You can also filter your search by location by adding advanced search options to the keywords you’re looking for. For instance, by adding near:Kiev within:25km to your search, you will filter the results by only looking for updates that have been posted within 25 km of Kiev. The location is either determined by the location in a user’s profile or by the location they added using a smartphone.

Monitor other sites monitoring the event

Of course, Twitter is just one social media service, and it isn’t used widely everywhere. The Ukrainian elections also demonstrate other ways of efficiently and effectively monitoring social media.

With the rise of social media editors at many major news organisations, it is not difficult to find news coverage that highlights social media in North America, the UK and many areas in Western Europe. However, there are a number of sites that have long focused on covering major news events, and even highlighting stories that fly below the radar of many news organisations. One of the oldest of such sites is Global Voices.

With respect to the Ukrainian elections, Global Voices pointed out a blog post by a British writer who is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, on a site called Odessablogger. He pointed out that people were auctioning off their votes to the highest bidder on the social network vKontakte.

Global Voices also highlighted no fewer than four crowd-sourced election-monitoring sites that were developed to monitor the elections.

Maidan.org.ua, described by Global Voices as an online citizen activism hub and which refers to itself as the “pulse of non-violent civic resistance of Ukraine” according to the Kyiv Post, used the crowdsourced reporting platform Ushahidi to collect reports from across the country. The group attempted to verify the reports it received before posting them online. Reports of irregularities included the stopgap closure of some polling stations in Odessa because of issues with the ballot marking pens. Maidan claimed that “magic markers” with disappearing ink were being used at the stations, the KyivPost reported. Maidan also created a project for “election commission members and ordinary voters to submit electronic photographs of the final voting protocols,” Tetyana Bohdanova said in her post on Global Voices.

Civic network OPORA used a hybrid approach with their election monitoring site. They collected reports from 3,800 professional observers and posted violations on their map. They also took reports from the public and posted them on the site after they had been verified.

The projects weren’t just taken on by civic organisations. Internews-Ukraine launched ElectUA, which the group said used “smart crowdsourcing”, which meant that like other groups, they verified reports before posting them online. “The project has grown from the previously successful Twitter-broadcasts of the 2009 and 2010 elections that contributed significantly to the promotion of crowdsourcing technology and Twitter in Ukraine,” said Bohdanova.

With such intense domestic and international attention on the election, Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior also created its own crowdsourced election map to record reports of election violations using Ushahidi.

Many news organisations are embracing crowdsourcing techniques to help report major stories, but one thing to consider in contentious elections like the one in Ukraine is that such sites often become targets for online attacks. Global Voices reported that the three non-government election monitoring sites in Ukraine all suffered DDOS, distributed denial of service, attacks. The sites were flooded with requests from attackers so that they were unavailable at times to be able to accept election reports.

While news organisations would not want to run these reports without ensuring that they meet their own editorial standards, such projects can help editors focus the efforts of editorial staff and might uncover interesting leads to follow up. Monitoring social media and crowdsourcing projects like the election maps can help you use your editorial resources most efficiently to cover major events.