{"id":2588,"date":"2009-11-23T10:10:46","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T08:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tokao.com\/?p=2588"},"modified":"2009-11-23T10:10:46","modified_gmt":"2009-11-23T08:10:46","slug":"how-google-wave-is-changing-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/2009\/11\/23\/how-google-wave-is-changing-the-news\/","title":{"rendered":"How Google Wave is Changing the News"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s going on now because of\u00a0Google Wave<\/a>. Although it\u2019s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.<\/p>\n

Google Wave<\/a> <\/span> may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other\u00a0Google<\/span> applications such asGoogle Maps <\/span><\/span> and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.<\/p>\n

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Using Waves to Foster Engagement<\/h2>\n
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\"redeyetweet\"<\/p>\n

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Using Google Wave allows newsrooms to reach out to their audiences and invite their active participation on news stories. In the process, waves become a vehicle to create an engaged local community who can also play a role in the newsroom. That may redefine how news is gathered, reported and presented to its audience, blurring the boundary between newsroom and community bulletin board.<\/p>\n

Chicago Tribune\u2019s RedEye blog<\/a> started its first public wave\u00a0on November 10<\/a>, and since then it has attracted more than 300 blips. Following that success, Stephanie Yiu, RedEye\u2019s web editor, and Scott Kleinberg, senior editor of digital and print, now lead a half-hour public wave session every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lot more live than\u00a0Twitter <\/span><\/span> because it\u2019s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other,\u201d she told me. \u201cIt\u2019s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We\u2019re learning with our readers and moving forward together.\u201d<\/p>\n

RedEye sends out tweets promoting each wave with a link asking Twitter followers (those that have access to Google Wave) to join the conversation. Yiu told me the daily wave is a discussion about RedEye\u2019s cover story. During the last 10 minutes they ask participants for suggestions on how to make the wave better.<\/p>\n

What makes Google Wave so useful is the community building aspect, according to Yiu. \u201cThe great thing is once it ends at 11 o\u2019clock, it keeps on going. They keep on talking,\u201d she said. Yiu is hoping it will be a cool way to get feedback, such as movie reviews, from their readers that that they can also run in the RedEye print product, which is something they\u2019re already doing with Twitter.<\/p>\n

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Using Waves As \u2018Town Squares\u2019<\/h2>\n
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Robert Quigley, social media editor at the\u00a0Austin American-Statesman<\/a>, has started two public waves so far. \u201cPeople are enthusiastic and they want to talk about news. I was surprised how much discussion there was about the news,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

However, said Quigley, the challenge right now is keeping public waves on topic. If they get more than 50 blips discussion grinds to a halt, reported Quigley. He added that in order for Google Wave to work during a news event, there needs to be the ability to moderate and or easily spin something into another wave and link to it in the first wave to keep it on topic. He stressed Google Wave is in its early stages and in preview, but there\u2019s definitely potential with it, so these are issues that could be addressed in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been looking for years for collaboration with the public in a meaningful way and this could be the tool,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Quigley is eager to keep pushing the envelope with Google Wave to see what it possible. He told me, for example, that he wants to try a participant\u2019s suggestion to embed a Google Calendar with links to waves listed within it so users can follow that calendar with the wave schedule. He also hopes to try the map gadget the next time Austin gets hit with an ice storm. He said he would embed a map into a Google Wave and then people could report conditions at their house. Users could edit the map as weather conditions change.<\/p>\n

Google Wave has the potential to become a virtual \u201ctown square,\u201d where otherwise separate gadgets applied to content created by journalists and enhanced by the wave\u2019s users can be used to provide an accurate, detailed description of what\u2019s happening locally.<\/p>\n

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Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool<\/h2>\n
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Chris Taylor, online editor at\u00a0TBO.com<\/a>, is also the online breaking news editor in charge of planning content for his converged newsroom (which includes the Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and TBO.com). Each night he emails a content budget to the deadline team, but he is now also using a daily wave that others in the newsroom can add to, edit, etc. Taylor said there are about 15 people on this wave and he has requested more invites from Google to get more people involved.<\/p>\n

The daily wave accounts for all the content the newsroom knows is coming or is chasing down. There are about 40 stories in a wave and each story gets a paragraph and after each story is a blip. \u201cAnything we can do in a newsroom of this size [to help] the content we produce to keep from falling through the cracks is a plus,\u201d Taylor said.<\/p>\n

When Taylor comes into work in the morning he can immediately get caught up on the status of all items in the newsroom budget by checking the wave. He said reviewing the wave at his desk takes one-tenth the time of having meetings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think using it for this will get people comfortable with wave, which is my ultimate goal,\u201d he said. \u201cAs we get more comfortable with it, we\u2019ll be able to be where our audience is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves<\/h2>\n
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Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a>, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post \u201cHow Google Wave Could Transform Journalism<\/a>\u201d that ran on the newspaper\u2019s web site a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n

Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they\u2019re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of \u201ceating his own dogfood,\u201d so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it\u2019s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,\u201d Nystrom said by email. \u201cPeople quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that they\u2019ll definitely do more of this and that it\u2019s just a matter of identifying which topics would benefit from collaboration.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeally, every post would plug into wave because I love the inline commenting system. But I don\u2019t want to flood the ocean,\u201d according to Milian. \u201cWhen we do another piece on Google Wave, or on something that begs for crowdsourcing, you will definitely see it in Wave.\u201d<\/p>\n

(from mashable<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s going on now because of\u00a0Google Wave. Although it\u2019s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9,89],"class_list":["post-2588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-google","tag-mashable"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}