Social media, particularly via the Twitter hashtag #nswfires, is serving as a way for media and emergency services to post updates, but also for users in fire affected areas to document and share information, experiences and photos.

A number of bushfire photos also went viral via social media. For example this shot of exhausted firefighters resting on a road.

https://twitter.com/theage_photo/status/391186566095196160

On YouTube, this helmet camera footage posted by the Blackheath – Mt Victoria Rural Fire Brigade shows the extreme conditions firefighters are facing.

Australia’s public broadcaster, ABC, plays an important role during natural disasters and emergencies such as bushfires, to keep communities accurately informed – particularly through their local radio network.

That’s a huge media development topic to explore on its own, particularly for national media networks in developing countries seeking a model for informing and communicating with audiences during natural disasters.

For now though, what caught onMedia’s eye was the ABC’s use of tools such as Storify and ThingLink to help visualize stories on their live bushfire blog.

The ABC is using the social media storytelling tool Storify to produce galleries of bushfire images shared on social media networks. Storify is also a great social media search tool.

And this ThingLink image below showing the inside of the NSW Bushfire Command Centre is an excellent example of producing simple and effective interactive media. Users can roll over the points to find out more about the function of each section in the command centre. To find out more about using ThingLink you can read our recent Tools and Apps for Journalists blog post.

UPDATE:

Eye in the sky

Helicopters are often used by broadcasters for filming aerial shots, but a YouTube video produced by CiviDrones has used a drone (unmanned aerial vehicle/ UAV) to fly over fire affected areas around the city of Lithgow. The UAV even flew into a damaged building and filmed a fire front. The footage has been widely used by international media and shared on social media.

Author: Guy Degen

Add extra layers of information to images by adding links.

Thinglink lets you embed “tags” – hyperlinks and text – into images. If you have a great photograph or image you can add a link to another photo, or a website, or video clip, or audio clip – literally anything. It’s a very useful tool for creating simple pieces of interactive media to compliment a story or to use as a basic story platform. This tool is always a winner with participants in online journalism workshops. As we roll our mouse over a “tag” revealing a link to another piece of media, there is usually a collective “Aha!” from participants. And if you’re a regular reader of onMedia, you’ve probably noticed that we like to use this tool a lot.

In a much cited example here in Germany, the Berliner Morgenpost used ThingLink very effectively with a photograph of the White House Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. The icons identify who was in the room and provide relevant links.

ThingLink is used by a number of leading media houses in different ways. For example, take a look at how the Washington Post uses ThingLink for interactive frontpages.

How can journalists use ThingLink?

Open up a newspaper or magazine and you’ll often see that print media uses the classic technique of pointing to objects within an image to identify them for readers, or to perhaps offer a brief explanation of their purpose.

With ThingLink you can do the same, and more. Simply press “Create” and upload an image to the site in JPEG or PNG format.

Once an image is uploaded, the ThingLink “Editor” dashboard opens and allows you to add an “icon” to the image for users to roll over or click on. You can simply add text the “Description” box and/or add a hyperlink to more content.

There is also “Search” bar to find relevant links to media hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Amazon and Etsy.

Take a look at the example below we produced for a blog post on mobile journalism equipment.

Earlier this year ThingLink released a free iPhone application making an interesting app for journalists to produce interactive media on the road.

Within your account, ThingLink also provides useful statistics for your image.

What else should journalists know about ThingLink?

Image sizes: ThingLink scales images down to 1024px. The largest file you can upload is 25MB. If you upload an image less than 130x130px then the editor will not open.

And don’t forget, you can also upload GIFs.

Cost: Free. Publishers can opt for an upgrade version.

Sharing: You can embed ThingLink images and there are options to share to blogs and social media networks including: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Edmodo, Google+, Pinterest. This blog post from ThingLink also lets you see how tags from a range of media will display on an image.

ThingLink images also play directly in Twitter and Facebook timelines.

Languages: According to their FAQ’s, ThingLink is available several languages including: English, Finnish, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Hindi.

Author: Guy Degen

There are plenty of Internet tools to help you create a timeline, but one tool that is popular with media organizations is TimelineJS.

What is TimelineJS?

TimelineJS (Java Script) lets you easily link to different multimedia sources. So as well as text, you can include videos from YouTube and Vimeo, audio from SoundCloud, photos from Flickr, Tweets, Googlemaps and Wikipedia entries and more. Scribd is also useful for including text documents.

Other media are regularly added so check with the TimelineJS website to see what else they support.

As a result, TimelineJS makes it easy to visually show events and the interactivity means users can explore further if they want to.

How can journalists use TimelineJS?

Timelines can be used to show the chronology of any event, from the history of the struggle for Apartheid in South Africa to post-election violence in Kenya. To give you an idea of what it is all about, I created a short timeline showing the first West African countries to gain independence.

As you can see in our example, the slides incorporate video, audio, photos, Wikipedia entries and a Tweet.

If you or your media organization follow a story over a period of time, you can also use your own text, photos, audio and video linked together in a timeline.

While there are no limitations on what you can use the tool for, as it says on its website, TimelineJS is best used with short texts and “strong chronological narratives. It doesn’t work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline”.

Several news organizations have used the tool to present information about murder or missing people cases that are otherwise overwhelming in detail. For example, the small Salt Lake Tribune did a great job of putting together an interactive timeline about the disappearance of American women Susan Powell. Compare it with a text version.

The Knight Lab have a list of examples of how journalists and news organizations have been using the tool.

Here are also other examples from TimelineJS (not necessarily journalistic ones).

How can I create a timeline?

It’s very easy to make a timeline with the Google spreadsheet template provided by TimelineJS. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to sign up for the service (you can do this with any email).

You fill in the spreadsheet with your dates, text and links.

IMPORTANT – I originally had some problems getting the dates to work in the spreadsheet. This is because they have changed how the dates are read by the TimelineJS tool. All you need to do is click on the A column, then open the Format menu → Number →Plain Text.

You can see the spreadsheet I used to create the West Africa Independence timeline here.

More details are on the TimelineJS site or watch the tutorial below.

What else should journalists know about TimelineJS?

Cost: The software is free.

Support: There’s an excellent TimelineJS google discussion group where you can get help and support.

Languages: The software is currently available in 41 languages, including French, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Arabic. Click on the ‘More Options’ button in Step 3 to get to the language options.

WordPress: There is a WordPress plugin available.

TimelineJS was developed by Zach Wise, a photojournalist and multimedia producer who is currently an associate professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Wise is also a former staff member of the New York Times multimedia team.

Author: Kate Hairsine

© Martina Zaninelli / International Journalism Festival, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0

The New York Times has long served as a example of a media organization that is successfully combining digital technologies with high-quality journalism. From the Pulitzer prize-winning, multimedia story Snow Fall,  which has generated more than 3.5 million page views, to its paywall subscription model, many are looking to the prestigious institution for answers on how to survive the digital future. But the New York Times is also still experimenting. “We don’t know what is best practice,” says Aron Pilhofer, one of the best digital minds at the news organization.

Pilhofer is head of the social media team, communities team and interactive news team, which employs journalists as well as programmers and data experts (follow Pilhofer on Twitter). He recently has a new team to manage – the newsroom analytics team which aims to better understand how content is consumed. In an interview with DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel, Pilhofer explains his hopes for the new team, the lessons he has learned from past mistakes and the challenges facing future generations of journalists.

While speaking at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, you mentioned a “digital divide in the media”. What did you mean?

I was talking about news organizations. Some have embraced digital truly and fully and some have done so partially or not at all. Unfortunately, the organizations that have not embraced digital or only have done it in superficial ways are maybe the ones that won’t be around much longer.

Why are some media organizations still having problems embracing digital?

Believe me, I wish I knew. It seems so incredibly obvious that this is the path forward. Understanding native digital storytelling in all of its forms is completely lacking in many cases. They lack an understanding of what it means to be a digital news organization. We are still very much attached to our traditional publishing schedules. Even at the New York Times, we publish to our website on what is fundamentally a print news schedule. It’s crazy. We are getting better, but getting away from that mindset is just a small incremental step in the right direction.

To embrace the digital challenge, is it necessary that a new generation of journalists replace the old?

There is going to be a certain amount of people you have to bring in from the outside but outside doesn’t mean necessarily outside your company. It could mean outside the newsroom; it could mean reaching into your technology department, or your analytics department, or the equivalent of an R&D department. But I don’t think you have to replace people. You have to raise the knowledge awareness. You have to put priority on digital. You have to make people in the newsroom realize that this is important. This is number one but you do also have to bring in people from the outside.

You started a newsroom analytics team at the New York Times. What does the team do?

Right now, the New York Times publishes news stories on its homepage, packages them in a certain way, writes headlines in a certain way and promotes these stories in a certain way. And that is done through gut, it’s not done through data. It’s not even “best practice” because we don’t know what is best practice. What we need to do is start being more data-driven in our decision making about how and when we publish stories, how we package stories and how and when we promote stories. But let me be clear about this. We don’t want to turn the New York Times into a Huffington Post. We don’t want to be sitting here and say, “this is the most popular thing, let’s make it the biggest”. What we are talking about is using data as a way to know when a story, particularly a big investigative piece, has the highest likelihood of resonating with the audience we want to reach. The only way to do this is through analytics.

Can you give an example?

“Snow Fall” (a multimedia feature about skiers caught in an avalanche) was a huge hit on social. We launched that story on Twitter and it had about 250,000 uniques before the story even hit the homepage. People said afterward, “Wow, genius, I can’t believe you guys thought to do that”. But it was a mistake. We didn’t intend to do it that way. Without telling anyone, the sports editor (Jason Stallman who headed the Snow Fall production team) just suggested, “Hey, why don’t you guys tweet this out”. We didn’t know about it until we saw it on Twitter. When we saw what was happening, we said, “Holy cow, look at this”. It was unbelievable. In retrospect, if we had thought ahead of time, we should have realized that it was exactly the kind of story that was going to resonate among that crowd. We should have launched it deliberately on social media. The second thing is, it’s a story about relatively young people doing an extreme sport which is very popular now. We should have been able to segment our audience in much the way marketers do and ask, “when are those people most likely to be on the site?” “How can we publish this in a way that the people this is going resonate with will read it.” (Check out DW Akademie’s post about Snow Fall)

Snow Fall is an interactive feature, one of many produced by the New York Times. What exactly does interactivity mean for you?

Interactivity is one element of a bigger buzzword that we use a lot and can’t avoid – engagement. The other part of my team is social media and community. We have defined engagement as actions that readers who have been exposed to a particular piece of content take that they otherwise might not have. It could be anything from a comment to filling out an Oscar ballot, to sharing on social media to engaging with an interactive. Why do we care about such things? Because engagement reflects a certain amount of immersion with the content. It means they have gone deeper than other readers and that’s the goal. You want people to go as deep with your content as possible.

Are there things that have failed in the past that you have learned from?

A couple of years ago, there was a lot of sort “best practice” around social media where news organizations hired professional tweeters to be the voice of the organization or institution. We looked at the numbers and it turned out it wasn’t worth it at all. The dirty little secret of social media is that 90 percent of the referrals – of the links that you see and click on in social – are links shared by people not employed by the New York Times. Ninety percent! The return of investment is close to zero. So that’s not what our social team does – periodically dives in and works accounts, but that’s rare. We do it when it is really important, like during Hurricane Sandy (which hit New York and other parts of the United States in October 2012). But we don’t hire professional tweeters. That is one thing. The other thing is on the interactive side. Social is huge. We used to do a lot of interactives that just kind of sat there. You could play with them but frankly those kind of interactives don’t work as well as interactives where you the user can actually create some sort of an artifact and then share that artifact with the people and say, “hey look at this”. I have a good example. Maybe two years, the graphics desk made an interactive that allowed users to go through a couple of scenarios to balance the federal budget. It has been done over and over again. It was hugely popular because they made it very shareable.