Leave it to the users—leveraging audiences to vet content

By Kara Tabor

via SEOPlanter/Flickr

Speak the truth, or get demoted on social media. That's the impetus behind Facebook's newest feature allowing its users to sort the truth from the fake --and no, I'm not referring to whether or not your friends' Instagram snap truly has #nofilter. With the addition of an option to label a post as false information (within the post reporting feature that already gives users the ability to flag content that they may object for any of a variety of reasons), users can now have their say in one of the fundamental questions of the internet: Is this for real?

What the Poynter eyetracking study means for tablet publishers

By Dalton Barker

Poynter recently conducted a study that tracked the eye movement of people reading and navigating through three tablet layouts.

This study came at the heels of another study published in the Sacramento Bee about reading newspapers on tablets versus in print. It showed that people viewing newspapers on tablets account for 7 percent of total Web page views and that 10 percent of tablet users read news on their tablets daily.

So, what does this mean? We already know the shift toward digital is coming and, in many places, is already here. Look at Thursday's headline about Newsweek. Instead, the question becomes, How do online publishers maximize the tablet experience? Poynter's study shows online news can be tailored to individual users, but making sure that happens is one of publishers' biggest tasks.

Offline success in the online age

By Nicole Garner

Image Courtesy of ChocoNancy1 on Flickr

It’s become a common practice for journalists to tweet from the field, find sources through social media and engage with audiences through their online profiles. But what happens when you work for a media outlet that doesn’t have a social media presence?

This summer, I interned at WEIU TV, a news station in Charleston, Illinois, which didn’t jump on the social media bandwagon until after I arrived. The news director hadn’t used any form of social media before and was hesitant to start Twitter and Facebook pages for the station (for reasons unknown).