At the Editors Weblog, they've concluded that 8,868 tweets per second is a tad too many. That's the rate at which news of Beyonce's pregnancy spread through the Twittersphere. For journalists, of course, there's always a risk that too mamy updates will cause your followers to tune out. Katherine Travers offers some advice on how to avoid that, including: "It's a smart move to section out Twitter feeds. Not all information will appeal to your readers."
Miscellaneous
David Wahlberg lived through a reporter's nightmare and is ready to talk about it. The Wisconsin State Journal reporter filed a story on a new treatment for brain aneurysms. Then the phone rang. The medical examiner informed Wahlberg that the patient featured in his story's lede had died six days earlier. He wrote about the experience — and what he should have done differently — for the Association of Health Care Journalists web site.
The Scholarly Kitchen website discusses a new British government report that recommends routine public disclosure of the raw data underlying scientific publications.
While writing her father's obituary, Virginia newspaper reporter Elizabeth Simpson, got to wondering about the common phrase, "died peacefully in his sleep." She worried: "Did he die peacefully? Could he have awakened in terror the moment before? Would someone call me and challenge this brazen claim of peace?" She got answers from a medical examiner, an emergency room doctor, and her colleagues in the Association of Health Care Journalists.
Assembled by Brandon Keim, the choices include a book on “the use and abuse of science in film history,” “a mind-blowing tour of the depth and breadth of wisdom in human cultures,” a book that will “make you think, ‘Why the hell am I here on Earth, which has no future?’” and “how error can creep into our daily observations and why that matters.”
Now for a few things that Rep. Weiner probably should have read before using his Twitter account. From USA Today, 5 Facebook privacy settings to check now. From Psychology Today, Six Weiner Lessons for Using Social Media. And from PRWeb, 7 Golden Rules for Facebook and Twitter Security. Finally, five more social media meltdowns that recently made news.
Kurt Vonnegut channeling Shakespeare. The consequences of nausea during a spacewalk. In search of the world's most frightening personality disorders. Books about these subjects landed on the summer reading lists of NPR's Michael Schaub, Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Wisconsin's Deborah Blum, and Greg Laden on ScienceBlogs.
Twitter's growing popularity for breaking news brings that reaction from Facebook as the competing social-media giants vie for attention. Facebook emphasizes its longer posts (430 characters instead of 140) and the amount of time its users spend on the site. But it has weaknesses too, according to the Editors Weblog site. Plus, why Facebook's new facial recognition technology is just plain creepy.
An Editors Weblog post reflects on coverage of Sarah Palin's "death panels" remark and the rise of fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com, which won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Why do reporters work to establish the truth on one hand and help sustain lies like "death panels" on the other? Federica Cherubini suggests journalists need to revise their notions of objectivity to compensate.
To know Jack Horkheimer, it helped to be a devotee of late-night public television or Miami planetariums. NASW student member Tim Oleson remembers Horkheimer, who died last summer, and who hosted his show Star Gazer (formerly Star Hustler) with a style combining "elements of Bill Nye, Bob Ross, and Fred Rogers," Oleson wrote.