34 NEWS FOCUS Social Media Tools
Both Newstag and Dalet facilitate the harvesting of content from social media, but how do you verify the integrity it? “This type of social content goes through multiple levels of approval inside a news organisation, so there are sufficient people to do due diligence on the source. We’re not working on making that more systematic yet, but we’re considering blockchain technology. And many of our customers are looking at building partnerships with one another to merge more minds on checking the source.” Dalet also notifies content owners if their material has been added to the story editor by a newsroom or journalist. “You need to acquire user-generated content rights before publishing content or you could face legal action. There’s a chain to make sure you get it right. It’s just compliance stuff, but it’s important.” Newstag does the fact checking itself and makes a point of delivering only news from professionally produced sources. Rislund says: “It’s part of our service to our customers that we’re the only provider that can guarantee such a portfolio of consistently updated, professionally
SOCIAL MEDIA IS A BIG PART OF NEWS, BUT IT SHOULDN’T BE USED AS A SOURCE FOR LEADS
produced news, which is in a guaranteed ad-safe environment.” TOOLS FOR THE TRAINED These tools are helping newsrooms and journalists regain lost audiences and establish a clear presence in the fog of social media. To get properly attuned to the opportunities in social media, journalists learning new skills. “Our tools are designed and built with the journalist in mind,” says Elnecave. "We often collaborate with the journalists in the design process so the tools can be tailored to them. But even so, learning how to use these tools requires a lot of hand-holding “For example, CNNMoney – a financial news organisation in Switzerland – has a team of about 30 people on two sites, and it took four months to fully train them on the tool. It’s a lot of work, and we train 3000 users every year." “We want our customers to succeed – that’s our primary focus – and the more they use the tool, the more successful they will be. We’re currently working on building a learning management system, which is an online training tool that would give some users specific training programmes for a specific use case, but we’re also working on incorporating more generic
programmes that can be used for training new users.” He adds: "As we move forward, our customers expect the user interface (UI) of the tool to be more like that of a consumer app, and that’s our goal. We’re constantly evolving and we’re now preparing a next- generation UI that’s closer to what our customers expect. Right now, it’s most like a Microsoft Office application, so if you know Word or PowerPoint, you will find it intuitive to navigate.” A huge proportion of today’s public discourse takes place on social media, but it’s not a realm known for clear-headed factuality. What are social media’s real values to a news organisation? “Social media is a big part of news, but we believe it should be used as a promotional channel, rather than a source for leads,” says Elnecave. “Tease your audience on social media with a post that then links to your app or digital channel, where the story can be consumed in full. It’s a way to acquire an audience, but it’s not the place your audience should be consuming the news you’re producing, because social media is not made for you to monetise. “Facebook is making money from social media, not you.”
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