(Full disclosure: SocialMedia.org CEO Andy Sernovitz regularly contributes to this blog and serves as the editor at large for SmartBrief on Social Media.)

Some aspects of USA TODAY’s approach to social media, according to Kessler:

• Direct traffic to the company site. In today’s world, maintaining a social media presence is imperative, but having a popular Facebook page doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue. The key is to link back to the home site whenever possible.
• Vet information carefully. Reporters should be careful not to spread unverified rumors through social media posts. Kessler said she tells journalists not to tweet anything they wouldn’t feel comfortable having printed in the paper. Journalists at USA TODAY apply the same fact-checking strategies they use in their everyday reporting when it comes to tweets and other forms of social media, she added.
• Maintain editorial detachment. Like with the print product, it’s important to keep the editorial and marketing departments separate to maintain journalistic integrity.

View the video after the jump.

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SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social-media practices and issues.

Last week’s poll question: What’s your opinion of social journalism?

• I love how I get breaking news a lot faster now, and I am able to contribute to it 37.68%
• Journalists are relying too much on the online opinion of social networkers, bloggers, etc 24.64%
• Social journalism will never replace professional journalism and traditional news-gathering techniques 23.19%
• I have not paid much attention to it because I still mostly turn to traditional media 14.49%

In early 2008, I did a social media and search engine optimization training session for a group of newspaper journalists. I will never forget their disapproving comments about the social Web or the distressed look on their faces. They certainly did not view it as a life saver. They saw it as a time drain that was going to cause dire changes to the way they reported their stories.

Fast forward three years and the social Web has dramatically altered the way journalists do their jobs. No matter what the subject is, you’ll find reporters using social tools to convey breaking news in real-time. Social journalists are also using social tools to clarify online content, check facts and earn readers’ trust.

Integrating with social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is now a must for journalists looking to stay relevant. Like the majority of Smartbrief respondents, I love getting breaking news in real-time and especially benefit from being able to comment on and share it with my online community.

Nevertheless, a part of me still doesn’t think social journalism will ever replace traditional news gathering for the following reasons:

• Privacy & copyright issues. It is very difficult to control these issues with social journalism since it is heavily based on who gets in first.
• “Curating” vs. “reporting” content. Social journalism often consists of more content curation than reporting, so this may hinder the depth of the information being reported. Also, many readers online don’t know the difference between content curation and content reporting.
• Inaccurate information. Sometimes, we don’t know if the news is coming from trusted sources or if we’re being taken in by a wild rumor.
• Lack of social media training. Many journalists have not gone through any kind of social media training to be able to leverage these platforms properly.

What are your thoughts on the future of social journalism? Do you think it will replace traditional journalism?

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Even as local newspapers scale back their efforts and shed staff, media companies as disparate as AOL and Allbritton Communications are ramping up hyperlocal media moves to cover school boards, community meetings, neighborhood politics, high school sports as well as local dining, entertainment and commerce. Industry watchers see local content as providing an essential media link between local business and the consumers they are trying to reach.  We talked to industry consultant and hyperlocal media specialist Mel Taylor about the burgeoning trend.

What’s the thinking behind the national rollout of a hyperlocal network like AOL’s Patch?

Patch first and foremost looks on the surface to be an initiative from AOL  to — for lack of a better word — replace the local newspaper, to become the local news and information source. It looks like that’s what their game plan is — to play the role of community news and information source. Their primary goal, which is easily lost on many observers, is to go after local advertising dollars. That’s exactly the same business model as Groupon. That’s the same model as Google Places. Gannett has an offering. Tribune does it too.

Tribune launched 435 Digital, a subsidiary that offers local businesses search engine marketing, social reputation management and online video production. They’re smart to do that because lots of businesses are buying that kind of stuff. Patch is using news and information as a means to an end — that end is to go after the large amount of local advertising dollars that are sitting on the sidelines in most markets.

What does AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post mean for Patch and AOL’s local efforts in general?

It will play a pretty major role in Patch. The reason why AOL thought purchasing the Huffington Post was a good idea was because [AOL Chairman] Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington have similar ideas on how to deal with content efficiently and effectively, using all the tools of the Web. The Huffington Post has superior technology they developed — and they have been very successful in using social technology to drive tons of page views and unique users through commenting and sharing. That is something you will probably see being instituted across all the Patch sites. It’s not just a content play — it’s also a technology play.

Overall, we’re coming to a time of consolidation, with the best premium independent properties being acquired. With Huffington Post, they’re already profitable. They’re proof that you can be profitable with a mixture of technology, aggregation and proprietary journalism.

Are there advantages to being digital-only or being national? What can local companies and legacy media companies bring to bear?

There is a benefit from being a giant national company — you can share resources. Being digital-only — there’s a benefit to that. You don’t have to worry about your printing press, your delivery trucks, getting ink. But newspapers, traditional media, while they have legacy hard costs such as buildings, trucks and printing presses, one huge advantage they have is their ability to tap into their brand equity in the market. They’ve been in the market for a long period of time. They have large sales forces and relationships with community and businesses. These are all things that outside pure-play companies wish they had. Newspapers have so many great assets, but it is a challenge for them to grow their digital businesses and not throw their legacy businesses out the window.

So it sounds like right now is an exciting time to be working in hyperlocal media.

It’s awesome. It’s scary. Everybody is much more open to discussing the opportunities, whereas a year or two ago, there was an overconfidence or some dismissiveness. But that’s a thing of the past. The year 2011 has brought a more serious understanding of the digital landscape. It is rare for me to find any newspaper or TV station or radio station that blows off these competitors.

Mel Taylor will be a featured discussion leader at the American Press Institute seminar, “The Battle for Community: Crowded, Competitive and Hyperlocal,” taking place in Reston, Va., March 7 to March 8. Click here for more information and to register.

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The Web has made it possible for consumers to keep up with news in real time, but the sheer volume of information from a variety of sources can feel overwhelming. Do social tools help that situation or hurt it?

Social media is as old as language, and it can help or hurt, depending on how it’s used. SmartBrief’s products, professionally edited for vertical and horizontal communities of interest, are good examples of social media used well, to focus readers on timely, important and reliable information without wasting their time on gossip, unchecked assertions, and political or ideological biases. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to play a part in expanding the scope of those offerings.

Content and content aggregation are often depicted as being inescapably at odds. What’s your take on the relationship between content producers and content aggregation? Is it changing?

You’re right; that’s a common perception. I know because I’ve been a content producer for 38 years. However, I think that view is a simplistic one. The quality of content remains, and I hope will always remain, paramount, but the means of distribution began to change when writing was invented — a development that Plato bemoaned, incidentally — and they’ve never stopped changing. Perhaps the most appealing part of moving to SmartBrief for me is the chance to play a role, one that I think is very important, in marrying the traditional virtues of journalism, with independence at the forefront, to the new possibilities of technology and the new realities of the 21st century. If we can’t do that, if timeliness and Web hits trump quality, then I think we’re all going to be in trouble.

Media critics often bemoan the 24-hour news cycle and the Web’s bottomless appetite for information — but of course, these things aren’t going away. How do you see reporters and editors addressing questions of content and scale online? What needs to happen for responsible journalism to flourish in an environment that always demands more?

More of what? Jack Fuller, the former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, addresses some of this in his new book, “What Is Happening to News?” and he found some research that suggests that when people are bombarded by information and data, many of them begin to rely more heavily on emotion rather than reason to sort through it. If I stop, look and listen, I think I see some evidence of that on the Internet, the TV, the radio and elsewhere in this country and around the world. So the answer, which again puts SmartBrief at the forefront, isn’t just more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. It’s better and smarter. In fact, we may find out that what the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said is truer than he ever could have realized: Less is more, if it’s better.

What assumptions about the Web do news organizations have to confront if they’re going to thrive?

That all information is created equal, that popularity is a measure of quality, that faster is better and that more is better. I guess I’m old-fashioned, but I’d rather have one piece of good information that I can use to make a decision than 100 unfiltered bits and pieces of gossip, rumor, speculation, theory, advocacy and sensationalism.

Image credit: The McClatchy Co.

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Today’s guest post was written by Kaukab Jhumra Smith.

Sreenath Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, has worn so many tech-reporting hats that he’s widely considered a guru in new-media education. Sree, as he’s commonly known, was named one of the top 25 media people to follow on Twitter by AdAge. Sree stopped by Washington, D.C., last week for a day of nearly back-to-back workshops on advanced social-media techniques for journalists.

“Social media is the biggest advance in the Internet for journalists since the debut of the public Web in 1996,” Sree said to the 50-odd people crowded into the Foreign Press Center for his fourth stop of the day. “Take all the good stuff you know — how to tell a story, how to report, contacts, connections, hustle — and then take social media and amplify your message.”

Don’t worry if you feel you can’t keep up with its rapid changes, Sree said: Social media is still in its infancy, kind of where television was in 1950. The key lies in finding the right tools to bring order to its chaos.

“Find the things that work for you instead of worrying about what everyone else is talking about,” Sree said. “Too much noise in social media? Find that funnel!”

Here are Sree’s top ways for journalists to use sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:

• Find new sources, ideas, topics and trends. Search for sources among LinkedIn’s professional profiles or follow your beat on Twitter using MuckRack.com.
• Connect with new and existing audiences. “Plural,” Sree emphasized. “Everything has multiple audiences.” Repeat your tweets at different times of the day and repurpose content between Facebook and Twitter to maximize your reach.
• Bring attention to your work. The scarcest resource of the 21st century, “after water and food and all of that,” will be human attention, Sree said, quoting Les Hinton, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The way to reach the BAW demographic — people Bored At Work — is to make your posts and tweets as informative, relevant and fun as possible, he advised. Include a link with every tweet, and don’t reference yourself more than one tweet out of five, he added.
• Create and enhance your online brand. Aim to be among the sites a person visits once or twice a day.

Sree also recommended using the following sites to help bring order to your social-media chaos, particularly on Twitter, so you can focus on achieving your goals:

• Bit.ly provides permanent, shortened links for long urls. Users who sign up for accounts can accumulate metrics for everyone who clicks through.
• Mashable.com aggregates news about social media, so you can stay on top of the latest developments.
• MuckRack.com brings together Twitter feeds by journalists and lets you slice them by publication, topic or beat.
• HootSuite lets you manage multiple social-media accounts, including allowing you to postdate tweets so you can customize optimum posting times for your various audiences.
• Twiangulate helps you identify common followers of two or more Twitter accounts, letting you pinpoint important sources or trends.

For a complete, ever-changing list of useful sites, check out Sree’s social-media tips.

Image credit, mmaxer, via Shutterstock

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Just as importantly, leagues and agents are savvy about stewarding brands and finding new ways to commoditize teams and individual players. They are so much so that athletes — especially if they are not premier players — are increasingly using social networks to build businesses for themselves, much in the same way that we’re all experimenting with personal branding through these channels.

In some ways, professional sports are uniquely suited to social media. Developments in the sporting world happen fast, and Twitter and YouTube are ideal tools for keeping up with franchise-changing trades, career-ending injuries and season-making plays as they happen. Few experiences are more social than going to a Super Bowl party or packing into a stadium with a community of like-minded fans. And if you can’t be there in person, cheering and smack-talking via Facebook are the next best thing.

Certain athletes and organizations have forged the path for social media for pro sports. @The _Real_Shaq jumps to mind, with his more than 2.8 million followers on Twitter, as of this writing.  The National Hockey League is the organizational standout, having formed a social-media department nine months ago with the goals of decreasing the distance between the teams and the fans, and syndicating fan passion for the game.  It takes an active role in educating the franchises how to use social-networking tools, most notably Twitter (for which I’m personally thankful every hockey night in and out of Pittsburgh.)

Being a massive fan myself, one of my favorite events at Social Media Week was Unleashing Social Media on the Sports World, Gary Vaynerchuk’s moderated discussion at the new New York Times building. Aside from being the mind behind Wine Library TV, with about 850,000 followers on Twitter, his consulting firm VaynerMedia advises the NHL, the New York Jets and the New Jersey Nets. Vaynerchuk’s not just another “J-E-T-S Jets-Jets-Jets” fan.

Refreshingly, almost the entire session was a Q-and-A with the audience.  And given the killer panelists, there were way more questions than time for answers.  Here’s a synopsis of a few of the best exchanges.

Has there ever been a better time to be a sports fan?

No way. “Teams no longer control the message,” declared Jim Bankoff, who’s SBNation site hosts more than 200 fan-led communities where fans do the programming. It’s fascinating how powerful the fan voice is, both individually and in the collective, he said. “We know already that their expectations are exploding and will impact commerce in a big way,” Vaynerchuk added.

How can sports embrace social media if teams and leagues are trying to muzzle what athletes can say?

People, in general, are afraid of unknowns, Vaynerchuk said. One team owner came to VaynerMedia demanding a list of 33 things they could say on Twitter, and Vaynerchuk says he walked out. But things are changing. “Culture is shifting and it’s really smart to ride a wave instead of jumping against it,” he noted. “36 months from today, sports teams will get rid of that rule,” since all publicity is good publicity. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having rules, but make them as soft as possible so you can get the biggest return,” he said.

What if athletes say or do something stupid or portray themselves (or their teams) negatively?

“Our forgiveness level is very high,” said Matthew Cerrone of MetsBlog. The real question is how to explain the negative, and the only way to deal with it is by owning it, he said. “You may as well jump into the mix and help shape the news as best you can,” he suggested. “How do you play in an era of transparency? You play with authenticity,” Vaynerchuk added.

How are sports writers using social media? Do athletes tweeting undermine your reporting?

“No,” answered Tyler Kepner, who has covered the New York Yankees for The New York Times, “because the athlete’s view is just one person’s perspective.” Journalists provide the all-important context, and there will always be a need for that, he argued. “Personally, I use it to listen to what fans are saying, but don’t talk back,” he said.

Why has the NHL been so progressive when it comes to social media?

Like many of us, Michael DiLorenzo, NHL director of social media marketing and strategy, started dabbling in social media to build defensibility for himself. He says he soon realized that these channels might provide a level playing field for the NHL to build brand equity.  “We doesn’t have the luxury of complacency.  We need to be entrepreneurial to get market share,” he said.  Some franchises have taken quickly to social networking. It hasn’t been simple, though, because self-promotion is not in most hockey players’ DNA, he added.  And many of us fans love them for that.

Image credit, jgareri, via iStock

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Singleton is not the first frustrated publisher to try to re-bottle the Web genie. The Web is an open-architecture system. If you want your content on the Web, it’s generally the case that such content will reside on a Web page with an address that can be linked to. There are other ways to post content, but few AP member newspapers are using them. The AP itself has a deal with Google to post AP stories on Google News. If the AP doesn’t want aggregators to link to its stories, it has a funny way of expressing it.

But Singleton’s frustration is understandable. As a group, bloggers possess a dim understanding and/or regard for the existing rules of the road when it comes to what constitutes copyright infringement and plagiarism.  Why should a blogger toiling for free (or almost free) worry about cutting and pasting a few paragraphs of an AP story into his or her blog post. And why not right-click a thumbnail of a picture to illustrate that blog post?

Because to do so without permission may be a copyright violation. As has happened with music, the ease with which online tools permit the capturing and republishing of content serves to mask the reality that content under copyright is protected from unauthorized republication — except under certain circumstances, many of which are contained in what’s called the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law.

The term “fair use” is generally used by bloggers to mean, “fair to me.” But the government has other ideas. While it’s permissible to quote from a work under copyright for purposes of “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research,” there are other defining characteristics of what can be called a “fair use”.

For bloggers, the two tests to watch out for are:

1. The “amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”
2. The “effect of the use upon the potential market for or value the copyrighted work.”

So, can a political blogger republish an entire opinion column from the Washington Post in the context of a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary? Not according to the above definition. Can a news blogger republish 400 words of a 500-word AP story, and append his or her own commentary? It would appear not. Yet these are ordinary, everyday blogging techniques.

If it’s the AP’s intent to hit a few unlucky bloggers with recording-industry style lawsuits (and this may very well be what they end up trying) there are steps you can take to make sure you don’t have to lawyer up.

• Use the word “republish” instead of “copy-and-paste” when mulling whether or not to include something in a blog post — it will make your thinking a little clearer.
• Don’t republish any picture without permission, unless there is an explicit Creative Commons license.
• If you quote half or more of a source article, you may no longer be “quoting” — you may be republishing.

The copyright office has its own advice — which I can share without fear because it is in the public domain. “The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission. When it is impracticable to obtain permission, use of copyrighted material should be avoided unless the doctrine of ‘fair use’ would clearly apply to the situation.”

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