Just thought I’d flag up this video from the Media Trust, which gives an overview of Blog Preston.

The site was started by myself in January 2009 as a place for news and information about Preston, after the Preston Citizen (weekly paper) withdrew from the city.

Joseph Stashko is co-editor of the site and gives an insight into what his role involves, how we live blogged the general election, cover stories and much more.

It’s worth a watch to help understand how a community news site goes about operating and how ‘hyperlocal’ is measured by us.

Earlier this year I was at a journalism conference in Perugia and on one of the panels was a chap from the Huffington Post. He described how during the 2008 Presidential campaign they’d had a massive scoop when one of their contributors caught a candidate gaffe on video, it was uploaded and within hours it was leading most international news sites and the talk of the day on Twitter, Facebook and more.

Our panel discussed the implications of this on the media, and I said we’re living in a golden age of social media stupidity. Why? Because at the moment you can find copious amounts of information on people, their activities, and much more – but you can also find it very quickly.

I was reminded of this by Alison Gow’s excellent post on How to (Not) kill Journalism and how the web represents such an opportunity, particularly being able to crowdsource direct with your followers.

Sadly, I was also reminded of it by the university where I did my degree as X Factor reject Frankie Cocozza came to perform at the student night club.

Lots of excited youngsters queued to see Mr Cocozza and one young lady decided to ask for her ass to be signed by the man himself. She found herself on the Daily Mail and quickly saw tweets and Facebook messages about the offending incident, and a Facebook photo album, which was completely public, became a hunting ground for people to leave downright abusive comments about some of the people having their photo taken with Cocozza (Interestingly, the photo Daniel Bentley tweeted, which drew nearly 400 comments about a certain girl, has now been removed.

The comments were, as Dave Lee has previously pointed out in his post about YouTube comments, rude, abusive and wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else (see terms and conditions etc). So why do we unleash and let forth a torrent of “what we really think” online?

To me it is all about education. There’s not many who can say they’ve grown up with social media, for my generation (growing up around the turn of the century) it was MSN, AOL, ICQ and chatrooms when we were teens – oh and email. But these tended to be 1-2-1 chats, usually not able for use afterwards unless someone saved the chat and printed it out.

For the generation after it was MySpace, Faceparty and Bebo. But these weren’t discussed in school, there was no how to, we were being trained in Excel, Word and Access. The curriculum was Microsoft and how to “do things” on computers.

Journalists are nearly always early adopters, we worked out how to do things with mobile phones earlier than most, same with the internet and computers. We might not be the best, but we know how to make technology do what we want it to do in very creative ways. And it is the same with social media, around 2009 there was always the complaint that the only person you’ll find on Twitter is a journalist.

But as the population have mainly taught themselves how to use social media, and used it as something akin to a hobby, they perhaps don’t think too carefully about the real-life implications.

The amount of personal information available on Facebook is stunning, and yet these people might be X-Directory because they don’t want their home phone number being found. A quick search can reveal nearly the exact location you live in, who all your family are, your phone number, numerous photos of you (which are often dated and located), and very quickly a back story can be found on who you are.

Twitter acts as an archive of what you say. They aren’t deleted after a certain time, there are thousands of tweets stretching back, with their conversations available so context can be placed.

Journalists have been quick to the party, the number of “and he said on Twitter” stories has been growing. Especially as more and more people with authority or celeb status take to the service to use it as a communication channel. If it happens on Twitter, it will be on the mainstream media websites within hours and in the papers the next morning, and the magazines within a couple of days. The media amplifies the Facebook and Twitter spats, announcements and stupidity to whole new levels.

Before if you did something stupid, your friends knew it and would (most of the time) never let you forget. Now if you’re filmed naked and running into a window on holiday you are that bloke off the YouTube clip, forever and on your CV.

So, why is this so great for journalists? Because it is real. It’s moments we just wouldn’t get to see otherwise, it’s the angry opinions of someone unleashed directly and it’s an insight into what people really think and do. It’s lifting the lid off life itself, and that’s what shifts page views and sells papers.

Until the right education on social media privacy is given at an early age to the masses, this boom time will continue. I guess it will be anything you tweet may be given as evidence, and as we’ve seen with the Facebook riot inciters – it rightly can be.

Image credit to charlessc

Took a trip over to Portcullis House last night for an event titled ‘Parliament and Online Communities’ (part of Parliament Week) – it brought together a mix of people who run independent local news sites in South London, large online communities and messageboards like Mumsnet and interested government open data types.

The question we had to mull over was essentially how can Parliament engage more with online communities, and both make itself more open and also get good quality information from its select committee inquiries on a whole range of different issues.

Parliament faces a big challenge, as outlined by Matt Instone – its head of online engagement – how does it take the mass of information which is being produced by the institution and make it accessible to the general public, and at the same time make people aware of what Parliament is and what it does. And crucially, how it is different from the government.

He was essentially saying, how can Parliament serve a million and one niches?

How can local media, both hyperlocal and big media, engage with Parliament?

We were given an example of how Parliament had started working with an online community – The Student Room – on one of its select committee inquiries into service provision for young people. Sounds dry when you put it like that, but Jamie O’Connell, marketing director for the student site which attracts 4.5m visitors a month, said they had worked with the outreach team at Parliament to clarify the aims of the inquiry.

He described how the chair of the select committee had recorded a video asking people for their opinions, this had been embedded on the site on a special page on the Student Room with four discussion threads underneath all built around the four key questions they wanted answering – such as ‘are the youth services in your area good enough?’.

The inquiry ran for two months, the video was viewed 3,000 times and they had 80 posts on the threads giving all manner of opinions and some very forthright ones. As they discussed this an idea popped up in my head, if you can do this on the Student Room, surely you could do it on local sites?

There’s sites from Greenwich to Preston which have engaged readerships who would relish the opportunity to input directly into inquiry that can make a difference, on a topic they are interested in. Communities tend to be grouped around geographic area or subject area, so I my call to Parliament is come and talk to local sites – where the audiences are – about doing these kinds of consultations.

Parliament should be easier to filter

The second part of the night saw everyone split off into groups to discuss questions around how Parliament could do online better. The general feeling was that there’s lots of interesting information contained within the Parliament website, but its just a nightmare to find – especially if you’re accessing it for the first time with no idea of how it works.

Our group discussed how the Parliament website should be easy to search via location, topic area or date. It should show how related information is grouped together, and for me I said they needed to open up and allow us  to embed video, audio and documents from Parliament in the content we’re producing. If I’m writing a piece about the BAE Systems job cuts and the debate in Parliament, it would be great if I could time stamp the video of the debate and embed it into the content I’ve created about it.

Likewise with documents. We’ve seen when covering council business in Preston for Blog Preston how readers, well some of then, want more detail. So they want to read the full report, and then comment on it. If we were able to take the full reports and embed on our sites this would be a big step forward – rather than just constantly linking to PDFs which then get moved around and don’t exist anymore.

All of this relies on Parliament opening up its information and becoming more accessible, and it needs to create jargon busters to reduce the barriers to entry.

Widening access, but unfairly?

There was a warning made at the end of the event, and a good one too, about how the push for online engagement could leave offline forgotten. There still needs to be real-world consultation done, because there is still a digital divide. While everywhere you look in London there’s a smartphone, you go to more rural areas and you can barely get broadband. Consultations and information should not become the preserve of the digitally savvy, young, urban elite. It should be opened up to one and all, and that’s something Parliament should keep in mind and be working to achieve.

How do you think Parliament can engage better online? If you’re a local blogger or news site, what information would you like to see provided? Would being able to embed video clips or documents relating to your community be of interest? Would you run a consultation in conjunction with Parliament? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to E01

Notice on the article above, the tragic loss of a 16-year-old aspiring model in Neath. It’s one of the most recommended articles this year on WalesOnline.

What is the recommended button there for? The equivalent of a Facebook like? A chance to show you appreciate the story, the author or the subject?

I’ve spotted a trend on WalesOnline, whenever we report the death of a young person – again, the one below is for a teenage boy drowning in a river in Carmarthenshire – we don’t get comments (very rarely) but we do get a lot of recommendations. Constantly in the most recommended lists, knocking rugby stars and political debates down a peg or two. Facebook is for posting the RIP messages and joining groups expressing your sorrow, sharing that grief with your friends, but local media sites are the way to show the wider world (outside of the Facebook login) that the death of a friend/relative is important to the community.

It seems in the case of the death of young people it’s a way of showing you care. It says to us as editors that you think this story is important, you’re showing us it should be high up the news list and it should be featured.

And I’d say, keep recommending, we are paying attention. What we do need to figure out is a way to turn our comments off (for active court proceedings) but keeping the recommendation option on.

Have you noticed this trend to pay tribute by recommending or liking a story on news sites? Let me know in the comments below

During a panel entitled ‘Netizens of the world unite’, Peter Ludlow – an academic who has written extensively about social media and the likes of Second Life – said the media needed to take a more grown up approach to reporting on Facebook and Twitter.

The panel discussion presented the case where large corporations, such as Google, were quashing the upload of controversial material to websites such as Youtube. An Italian journalist had recorded extracts of a radio station in the North of the country which was aligned to a right-wing movement. He had posted these on Youtube but found he was being done for violation of their terms – and was nearly banned completely from the network. Was it right for Google to restrict his expression and ability to post controversial material?

Good points were made about how these big private companies were setting conditions where users gave everything away to them – copyright, identity, privacy and there was little users could do about it.

One Italian journalist gave the example of how if he has a complaint about his milkman he can go to Trading Standards or the Environmental health and something can be done about it. But with social networks, who regulates? And do we want anyone to regulate?

Ludlow also talked about the need for education on how to use social media and the internet better. But who would do this? Would it be delivered alongside sex education in schools? There were questions about whether the government should step in and ‘break up’ large social networks and create open source alternatives. Ludlow made an excellent point, that if you create an open source version no one would go there as the reason you’re on Facebook is because all your friends are there.

You also have to think, with the challenges facing governments and the cuts in public spending – can they justify getting involved in social networks which a) all their citizens are not on and b) they just might not have the resources to effectively police.

Overall the discussion made me think about our media use of Facebook. We use it to promote our brands, to rip pictures of people and generally to use it as a way of finding stories. But is there a place for a consumer watchdog role for the media? We’ve seen with mobile phone companies, utilities etc we monitor price changes closely and report on people who get ripped off – challenging the likes of EDF and Virgin Media to explain their policies and prices. But how much do we challenge Facebook and will this change once the shine wears off?

It was an interesting debate to get the morning started where we considered some of the ways news organisations used social media in particular to start conversations with their audiences.

Peter Gomez from Il Fatto Quotidiano gave an insight into how he and some friends had started up their Italian news and debate website from nothing. An investigative journalist by trade Gomez now runs a site which averages 4.5million unique visitors a month and their following and traction on Facebook and in the comments would be envied by many sites.

The interesting thing they’ve done is used their online brand to launch a print product – and engage their readership through a paper format as well. A true multimedia start-up? They also started their site by asking for subscriptions and donations from readers, and raised around $6million to kick-start the production of their newspaper. They focus away from the mainstream news and provide an alternative and have clearly captured the ‘Facebook generation’ market – and their journalists have become stars in their own right, with Gomez having nearly 20,000 fans alone on Facebook.

Is this something we’re going to see as a trend across media, not just in the UK but worldwide as media organisations look to create ‘social media stars’ out of their journalists and promote them as much as the product they write for. I know it’s something we’d definitely consider doing at Media Wales.

Gomez also touched upon their use of Facebook to find exclusive stories. Some of this may have been lost in translation, but he described how they’d found a young girl who had been to a ‘bunga bunga party‘ with Gaddafi and Berlusconi, and through her Facebook profile – which was public – gained access to loads of photos of her drinking and doing naughty things. This was in contrast to an interview she’d given to the Italian media about recently converting to Islam, all thanks to Gaddafi according to her.

On a more local, and perhaps more creepy level, I described how we used a site called OpenBook, to search public status updates in the event of a death or emergency and find people who know victims – and contact them asking for information, photos.

The panel also heard from Josh Young, who used to work for the Huffington Post, and he described their ‘Off the bus’ section from the 2008 American elections – and the exclusive they got from Obama’s “red-neck” comments about Conservatives in the States. This story blew up, and was provided by a ‘citizen journalist’. We didn’t get much chance to explore the verification of that story or the editorial processes involved but I can only hope the ‘Welsh Watch‘ we’re running on WalesOnline in conjunction with The Guardian provides a similar scoop!

We got onto some specifics about how you can encourage comments on your site, and here’s a few pointers:

- It doesn’t matter if people are writing mundane comments, at least they are doing it on your site
- Allow the option to recommend or rate stories, not everyone wants to comment
- People will tend to comment on things they know and feel comfortable about, don’t be disheartened if your great piece of investigative work doesn’t get any comments. People might be too afraid to comment.
- Make your site showcase the best comments and show the best ones
- Ensure your journalists are engaging in the comments and involved in the debate

Paola Bonomo, head of online services for Vodafone Italia, brought a different dimension to the debate. She spoke about the ‘My190′ community they were creating, where people logged in to find out their balance, how many extras they’d used etc – but also get the latest on new products. This is the beauty of the web, you can create a community around any topic and Vodafone Italia seem to have the balance right.

Bonomo spoke about how they offered exclusive use of new products to their most committed users, posted videos giving sneak peek of new mobile phones and generally just engaged with people who are for want of a better word ‘mobile phone geeks’. The challenge for UK media is how do we engage with people who are ‘news geeks’ and get them involved in our reporting?

The debate then moved onto crowdsourcing, as no panel on engagement can be complete without said buzzword. I was able to show our example of the South Wales train disruption was a great local example of using our readers to show the disruption caused by a power outage during the morning commute in Wales last month.

We were also questioned about paywalls, and whether these hampered efforts to engage with a community. I think this all depends on what the paywall is there to do – if you want to create an exclusive community which you can sell to advertisers then it’s not such a bad thing. Of course, if you’re trying to be mass market and reach as many people as possible then a paywall is not for you.

Justin Peters, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review online, who was chairing the panel, managed to bring the debate onto potholes. I congratulated Italy on some spectacular potholes and spoke about how we’d used crowdsourcing to get people to send in their pothole sightings and that crowdsourcing worked really well at a local level – especially when you found an issue people cared about or got riled up about.

Two events happening shortly in Cardiff which look interesting and will hopefully ask questions about openess and transparency in both central and local government.

The first is the Senedd 2011 event. It’s a bit vague on what the discussion will actually be on – the general theme of the web and transparency and the Welsh Assembly. The panel has some people with a track record of lobbying and opening up debates on issues, so what they have to say will be interesting.

There’s more details about the event, which is free, on the Vote 2011 website.

Then the Talk About Local Unconference comes to town. An unconference is a cool format where instead of being shoe-horned into a set programme of workshops and seminars, the attendees decide them instead. So, if you’re interested in a certain topic – e.g. making local councils more transparent – you put a post-it up at the start and see if anyone else is interested. If they are, you get a session and people share their knowledge and thoughts.

I’ve been to a Talk About Local Unconference before, and wrote this report – featuring Staffordshire oatcakes – in 2009 about what I learned from it. If you run a hyperlocal, community or blogging site it’s a really useful event to attend and I know it’s given me a lot of ideas and enthusiasm for what we’ve been doing with Blog Preston.

You can find out more about the event in this post I did for yourCardiff and sign up for free on the #tal11 Eventbrite.

I’ll be tweeting from both events, so follow me on Twitter @ed_walker86 and the hashtags #senedd2011 and #tal11 for all the latest.

Image credit to Michael Gwyther-Jones, showing the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay

It was a low-key event but always useful to see and hear what other people are doing at newsrooms across the country.

Below is a slideshow and a few notes from my presentation about some examples of how we’ve used social media to enhance our reporting and newsgathering, not just online but also in our print products at Media Wales.

“There’s been a murder!”

One of our twitter followers (@cardiffblogger) spotted a tweet about a potential murder in Grangetown (a part of Cardiff), and tweeted the tweet at our @yourcardiff account. We picked this up on a Sunday evening and were able to get a late reporter to start inquiries.

We had story up first thing, before BBC and able to include reference to tweet in story. Story then developed, leading the site and we used internal search to find victim’s name ‘James Way’.

We then used OpenBook to search for his name – and found 3 status’ saying ‘RIP’ and able to contact friends through Facebook and source tributes/photos.

Referendum coverage

Had big screen in newsroom showing people’s tweets on #welshreferendum, #yes4wales and #no4wales. Pulled in tweets to our live blog from Senedd covering all the action. Live tweeting results as they came in from the count.

TrendsMap Cardiff

Good way of knowing what’s hot in your area: http://trendsmap.com/local/gb/cardiff

The missing student, we’d missed

Student from Wales goes missing in Bath after a night out, tweeted at us by follower – immediately picked up on, story turned round and we tweeted to say we’re looking into it and the twitter account of the reporter who was working on it. Story generated 1.5k page impressions and also some positive publicity via Facebook group.

This is now an ongoing story, and CCTV has been released of his last movements

Facebook for weekly titles

http://www.facebook.com/rhonddaonline – each of the Celtic weekly titles have their own Facebook fan page. They are updated and used by the teams in the weekly offices to post stories, ask for tid-bits. Really strong communities and as weekly titles this is a good way of getting breaking news out there and asking for opinions for the next edition.

Overcrowding in Cardiff hospital

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/photo.php?fbid=10150107777638002&set=o.302092231119&theater – posted on our Facebook page. We were able to follow up and contact the person who sent them – and work a story about overcrowding in hospitals with our health reporter.

You’ve got the twitter followers, you’re getting the thumbs up on Facebook and your stats are on the way up. But does anyone in the non-virtual community know who you are?

There’s no doubt having a good online presence is important for your hyperlocal site – and by that I mean a well-stocked Twitter feed, and tended Facebook page and all the other bells and whistles. But watch your stats go up when you get offline and make the connections.

Like a good journalist, meeting people face to face is always going to be key. And face time is everything. People want to associate a person with a site, I want to know who the man behind this local website is, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it and I can trust him. If you’re covering a local community, trust is everything.

To do this you need to get offline. Walk the local parks, look at local noticeboards and attend local events. Drink in your local boozer, visit the local shops. If you can do something locally, do it.

One thing I’m most proud of when starting up Blog Preston was our commitment to running local events. I knew there was a growing number of people using Twitter but I wondered if I could get these people out from behind their keyboards and into a room.

We started up ‘Preston Tweetups‘ and ‘Preston Bloggers Meetups‘. These events were crucial in not only driving traffic to the site (you had to register via visiting Blog Preston) but also about relating our site with running successful events about community.

I first had the idea for running a Tweetup after attending a ‘Preston Geekup‘. It was a meet, with beers, for web developers and techies in Preston. It was run by the inspiration who is Gemma Cameron and also gave me a base of people who I could invite, they also formed the early followers of Blog Preston and Twitter and were also able to provide some early guest posts – like this awesome one from David Perkins.

We got a bunch of people together in a local pub, from all different background and ages and we discussed the looming local matter of the Preston Guild. How could we make it better? What could we do in 2012? But most importantly I got to know all the people there by name, so the next time I got an email from them I knew who they were. I’d looked them in the eye, I’d shared a pint with them and a smile. It makes a huge difference.

To this day most of our biggest advocates and fans on Blog Preston are people I’ve met offline, and recently who Jo and Andy who now run the site, have met. If you put in the face time, you’ll see a positive result in terms of your online community and their engagement.

Plus, it doesn’t feel quite so lonely running a local site. You’ll release there’s a big community out there willing to help you succeed and report on your local area, and they’ll help you along the way.

So, put down your keyboard this Sunday, and spend the day exploring your local area and seeing the local landmarks for real rather than just on Flickr slideshows.

Image credit to niallkennedy

This post originally appeared as part of the excellent Hyperlocal Week on Wannabe Hacks. Go and check it out and also let me know what you think about building online/offline communities? What do you do? Do you run events? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below

There’s been a lot of talk about funding journalism and how the web can play a part in this, but the web above all for journalists offers an opportunity to create readers+.

Journalists have always had contacts, those people who we can go to for comment and stories. They might be professional people, police officers, nurses or the local cleaner at the comprehensive who overhears gossip when he’s having a ciggie round the back of the head’s office.

Now, though, through social media and the web we’ve got a pool of intelligent, connected and helpful people at our finger-tips. Here’s how to leverage it:

Searching Twitter for key topics reveals what your area knows

If you’re using Twitter, learn how to search for key topics and phrases. For example, we’ve recently had an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the South Wales Valleys. Searching for ‘legionnaires’ will bring up any mention of it on Twitter and you can see who tweeted it. This means you can keep on top of what other news sources are saying about the outbreak and also watch out for anyone tweeting ‘Shit! My gran’s got legionnaires’!’ or ‘Yay! Work closed tomorrow because of legionnaires!’. Bam. A tweet like that and you might have a way in.

Don’t forget the private word…

Using Twitter’s private message function. Using the legionnaires’ example above, if you reply publicly to that tweet you might not get much of a response. If you follow that person, they might follow you back, then you’ll have a chance to private message them on Twitter. This is an easy way to exchange phone numbers/email address’. Also, check if the person has a blog or website addressed listed on their profile as this might give you a way to get in touch.

Asking for help and case studies

Asking for help via social networks. You’ve been landed with a 800-word feature on a topic you don’t know that much about, you need some experts but you also want some real people. A newspaper full of X spokesperson and stuffy academic Y is not much fun. We like reading what Mr Jones from the local action group has to say. Pop a quick post out on Twitter and Facebook saying you’re looking for help ‘finding women over 30 who drink more than 2 glasses of red wine a week’ – or something like that. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a ‘We’re looking for…’ page on WalesOnline where we list every type of person/expert etc we’re trying to speak to and the reporter dealing with the story. Make sure you get whoever deals with the main media twitter/facebook accounts to syndicate your requests.

Making yourself available

Get your email address on stories (both offline and online). People like email. It’s often more convenient than a phone call, and let’s face it calling a journalist can be a scary thing to do – especially if you catch them on deadline and you’re trying to get a notice out about a village fete.

Contacts should be searchable

Setup a Google Doc with all your contacts. I have a google doc contacts book (as well as a downloaded backup and hard copy print out done every couple of months). Create columns for forename, surname, what they do, what they are good for, the area they relate to, email address, mobile, phone, address, website and twitter account. This then becomes an incredibly powerful database of contacts you can search at a moments notice – without needing to remember the name of the chair of that residents action group you once met at a planning committee. You can search by name, what they do or what area they cover. Once you’ve got a contacts list, it’s worth sending out a quarterly email to those contacts to let them know what stories you’ve been working on and what you will be working on (i.e. what you could use a hand with).

Share the contact love

You can also setup shared contacts lists via Google Docs, so for example in our newsroom we have a shared Cardiff councillors contacts list. This allows all reporters access, is searchable by different fields and can be updated if a reported gets a new or better contact line for councillors.

Facebook will yield super-fans

Finding specialists and super-fans on Facebook. Facebook has groups. These are setup to allow people with similar interests to come together and celebrate the brilliance of, for example, William Shatner. This is searchable via the groups tag in Facebook, and if you look carefully it’ll show you the groups creator. You can then click on this person, view a basic profile and most importantly send them a message. You don’t even need to be a friend to send them a message. It could be your way in to getting in touch with a relevant and useful person.

Bloggers can be local and niche experts

Make a list of bloggers and subscribe to what they do (use an RSS reader to do this, there’s plenty of good ones out there like Google Reader. RSS allows you to read blog posts without having to visit lots of different websites all the time!). Monitor local bloggers, both location-orientated ones and topic-specific ones. If a new restaurant is opening in town, the local food blogger might know about it and be able to offer an extra few lines of comment.

More than meets the eye to online photos

Make use of photos. Flickr is a powerful tool for keeping an eye (literally, a visual eye) on your area. Monitor it for new photos and get your own flickr page. When you’re out and about on stories, take photos (don’t be afraid of using your mobile phone for this) of interesting things and post them to the Flickr account. Connect with local photographers. Subscribe to a feed of your local groups photos (search Flickr for your area) and you’ll be able to see, in your RSS reader, all the local photos being taken. You’ll be amazed at the stories which can come from an interesting Flickr photo. Plus, if picture desk are being pissy, you might be able to ask a Flickr photographer to use one of their photos for a story.

Why have readers+?

Readers+ will help you out. They comment on stories, they re-tweet and share your stories. They might even blog about something you’ve written about and carry on the debate. They will stick up for you. They begin to have a personal attachment to your work and style. They are not government officials, PR people or other people paid to speak to you. They are real people. It also increases their attachment to your media brand and who knows, they might buy the paper and visit the website more as a result.

Image credit to mararie

How have you used social media to find out things? Any other tips on using the web to help with your reporting? Let me know in the comments below