Eagle Market in Globe opened in the 1920s. This was taken in the 1950s. Photo submitted by Diana Carey Hines

• Arizona’s 100 years in business

Arizona turns 100 on Feb. 14 and a team of print and web journalists have been scurrying for months to pull together fun and educational ways to celebrate the event.

This crowd-sourced package of photos will interest business journalists … or anyone interested in business or the Southwest.

The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com turned to their readers to gather photos representing business in Arizona.

From the editors:

“Our requests for vintage business images to help commemorate Arizona’s 100th birthday on Feb. 14 resulted in a deluge of historic photo submissions from throughout the state.”

Betty Beard, who pulled the project together shared details about photos and other memorabilia that came in from residents: Old photos capture Arizona. “I was touched at how many people dug out photos from scrapbooks, closets, drawers and picture frames and took the time to scan and e-mail them,” Beard said. “Unfortunately, we can only offer a sampling of what is out there.”

Arizona became a state on February 14, 1912. It was the last of the 48 contiguous states to be admitted to the union.

Keep posted at @azcentral on Twitter. I hear that from Feb. 14, followers will be in for a historic treat.

Multimedia content has become so integral to breaking news that the Pulitzer Prize breaking news criteria were changed to emphasize real-time reporting after no breaking news prize was awarded in 2011. The Arab Spring and the Occupy movement have further driven home the essential role that social media plays in modern newsgathering and dissemination, and the widespread adoption of smartphones has made immediate, dynamic web content and access to journalists an expectation among news consumers.

As you resolve to make personal changes in 2012, consider these changes in our industry. As resources shrink and media companies are sliced up and re-formed, strong multimedia skills can keep you doing what you love. Here are five New Year’s resolutions to keep your multimedia skills sharp:

1. Be more human online. There’s a persistant attempt from many reporters — many of whom I respect and admire — to try to choke off their own personal information from public view. I think that’s impossible, and it even strikes me as a bit hypocritical since we spend so much time and energy writing about others’ personal information. Your readers know who you are, and as any good reporter knows, information about your family, your job and your life is likely already out there waiting to be found. I have learned by experience and example that being honest about your interests and your life online builds trust and makes you more relevant to readers. Of course no one needs to know when you go to the bathroom or when you eat your daily bowl of oatmeal, but, really, no one wants to follow a robot either. Let go of the tired hyperbolic excuses, and start sharing your experiences. As a journalist, your expected by your employer and your audience to be active online anyway, being authentic makes it a lot less of a chore.

2. Focus on relationships. After you finally decide to open up, it’s time to get to work on social media relationships. Set the technology aside emember that basic, shoeleather reporting concepts still hold true in social media — repeated, personal contact builds good source relationships. If you’re not using Twitter and Facebook effectively, they’re not helping you tell stories. The simplest and best way to strengthen your social media relationships is to engage. Search Twitter and Facebook for your location or keywords related to your beat, and reach out to people who are already involved. Ask questions of specific users, rather than shouting at everyone and no one. When someone reaches out to you, answer promptly. This work has paid off for me and many others who invest in it tenfold. The social media sources tend to be ready at the drop of an @ to share information, and they’re often a lot easier to track down quickly.

3. Use your tools. If you have a smartphone, use it. Heck, even dumbphones come with cameras and text messaging these days. Take a photo. Shoot a short man-on-the-street video. Tweet an interesting quote. With all the technology we carry in our pockets, it’s hard to buy excuses for filing only text when we leave the newsroom to report.

4. Learn at least one new multimedia skill. Whether its basic video editing, HTML and CSS, mapping or database management, make a point to pick up one new line for your résumé. You won’t even have to pay for the knowledge, just check out one of the Reynolds Center’s free workshops or one of the many other free training resources available online.

5. Get involved. Making connections with others and working together usually pushes me further than I would push myself. As mentioned above, the Reynolds Center offers a lot of free or inexpensive and interactive training both online and across the country. If you can afford it, or if your news organization is still assisting with professional development, go to a conference or apply for a training session. If not, ask your local Press Club, SPJ chapter or minority journalist organization if they offer affordable training opportunities, or volunteer to organize one. You can also take advantage of the tech community’s open-source ethos at a Barcamp or the next Social Media Club meeting. Or, drop in on the weekly Wednesday night #wjchat to stay connected to other web journalists. After all, we’re all web journalists now, and most of us could use a little help.

Programming note: This will be my last recurring post for BusinessJournalism.org. Writing about multimedia skills here has been a wonderful experience and has inspired me to take on some new challenges of my own. I’ve taken a new position editing a magazine and developing multimedia content for the University of Miami, where I also plan to attend graduate school. I wish you all a successful and exciting 2012, and if you ever have questions or just want to chat, contact me at RebekahMonson.com or on Twitter, @rebekahmonson.

Here are some of the key changes to keep on your radar:

Profile pages: Twitter has reorganized profile pages to put important user data like lists, followers, videos and images in a more prominent position in the upper left-hand corner of the page. The new positioning places more emphasis on the connections people have through Twitter and makes it easier to dig down into someone’s profile.

Brand pages: Twitter’s new brand pages will allow companies to promote their prominent content, which means business reporters are less likely to miss big announcements on products or campaigns. Twitter is playing a bit of catch-up here, as Facebook has long accommodated brands and Google+ launched brand pages about a month ago. Brands are clamoring for more control over how they present themselves on social media, and Twitter is answering the call. Some big companies including American Express, Best Buy, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kia, JetBlue and Verizon launched their brand pages initially, expect more to follow.

Discover tab: The Discover tab puts several handy search and tracking features in a common place. Under this tab, you can search hashtags to understand trends, track who your followers are following and get recommendations of new people to follow based on topics.

In-line conversations: It’s easier than ever to drop in on conversations on Twitter, because now those conversations, and related photos and videos, are stacked seamlessly into your feed rather than appearing in the sidebar. Once you expand a conversation, it stays expanded in your feed.

Embeddable tweets:  The old screenshot method is is rendered obsolete in the new Twitter, and it’s now much easier to embed full-featured tweets in a blog post or story.

A 10-person Google+ hangout can get pretty busy. Photo: Flicker user Steve Garfield

I think the death knells are a bit early considering the distinct advantages Google+ offers businesses for search-engine optimization, direct search and targeting consumers. Clearly, the search giant does need more users invested in the network.Most users, myself included, are not using Google+ as their primary social media tool, and it likely won’t topple Facebook in the short term. But, the fledgling network’s unique features and their impacts on businesses should interest reporters:

Hangouts. Businesses are already kicking around how to use Google+ Hangouts, the larger-scale video chat tool, for customer service issues, product launches or to communicate with specific consumer groups. Tracking and getting into Hangouts gives reporters a whole new way to mine what’s happening with a brand’s user base and monitor a company’s customer interaction.

+1s. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, wrote an interesting piece for CNN Monday that points out that the value of Google+ is capturing social data from the +1 widget. Even if Google+ never gets as many active users as Facebook, the sample size of active users is still large enough to give valuable statistical insight when Google is tracking +1s as a metric to rank pages, sites and topics. So, +1s are a valuable trend-spotting tool for businesses and reporters.

Collaboration. Google is pitching Google+ as a potentially transformative collaboration tool for business. If businesses (other than Google itself) start relying on Google+ for document collaboration, project-planning and meetings, that’s an interesting story. But, advanced web collaboration eventually could allow reporters more insight into decision-making.

Real identity. Google+ already had its first big brand-jacking incident with a fake Bank of America page, but the speedy shuttering of the page demonstrates again just how serious Google is about real identities. Facebook has been pushing fors too, but users are wary. The upside for reporters is that increased emphasis on real identity should make it easier to find sources who interact with certain businesses.

Those are the findings of a Pew Research study that tracked more than 3,600 tweets sent out by 13 major news organizations over the course of a week.

The study found the feeds are rarely used to share content from outside the news organization’s own site.

And individual reporters are not much more likely to use Twitter as a reporting tool or to share information from a source other than their employer.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied every tweet sent in one week by six newspapers (The Washington Post / @washingtonpost, The New York Times / @nytimes, USA Today / @usatoday, The Wall Street Journal / @wsj, Arizona Republic / @azcentral, The Toledo Blade / @toledonews) five broadcasters (NPR / @nprnews, CNN / @cnn, Fox News / @foxnews, MSNBC / @msnbc, ABC News / @abc), and two websites (Huffington Post / @huffingtonpost, Daily Caller / @DailyCaller), as well as the most-followed individual journalist at each.

TOP FINDINGS INCLUDED:

• On average, the news organizations offered 41 different organizational feeds. The Washington Post, at the top of the list, offered 98, more than twice the average. The Daily Caller, on the other hand, offered a single Twitter feed.
• The outlets in the sample averaged 33 tweets a day on their main organizational Twitter feed. That number ranged from close to 100 a day to fewer than 10.
• On the site’s main news feeds, 93% of the postings linked to a news story on the organization’s own website.
• Just 2% of the tweets on the main Twitter feed were information-gathering or first-hand accounts from readers.
• Only 1% of tweets were “retweets,” reposting content from outside the organization.

Full report: How mainstream media outlets use Twitter

Subsections:

• Who Tweets when and how often
• The News Agenda on Twitter vs. Traditional Platforms
• Sharing and Gathering Information
• Little Use of Retweet Function
• Use of Hashtags
• Individual Reporters’ Use of Twitter
• Methodology
• Topline

The brainchild of David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us, a fellow at the University of Missouri’s Journalism school at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and a Reynolds Center presenter, the carnival is made up of a group of bloggers who write about  journalism and related topics every month on their own blogs.  The posts are then curated on the carnival’s home blog.

” Think of this as a long/slow conversation about a different topic each month,” Cohn writes on the blog.

The first four months of the carnival, which began in January,  were hosted by Cohn.  Since then, we’ve had hosts curate topics including:

• The role of universities;
• Life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques;
• Increasing news sources;
• Carnival of fail;
• Google+; and
• Online video

I’ve contributed most months, and read the carnival every month.  But more importantly, I’ve learned so much from my fellow carnival bloggers, a diverse group of people who are all on the cutting edge of what’s new and different in journalism.

Will Sullivan’s post on life hacks in his Journadism blog in May literally changed how I handle many of my daily work tasks.  The carnival on Google+ came right as I was deciding how I was going to incorporate it into my work life, a process that’s still ongoing.  And it was gratifying to me, an original old-school print journalist, to read that I’m not the only one who is still struggling with the promise – and peril — of online video.

When I first heard about the carnival, I was hesitant.  I wondered what I could add to a conversation that has been ongoing by people more at the cutting edge than me.  But then I thought about my own conversion, from an old-school print reporter who started her career on a typewriter, to a multimedia journalist more than holding her own with the youngsters.

So I not only encourage you to put the Carnival of Journalism on your list of things to read, but join us!  The process is easy.  Join the Carnival of Journalism Google Group.  Look for the email announcing the month’s topic.  Write your post,  put it up on your blog and put links on the carnival website comments section and on the Google group.  I hope you’ll join us!

Newsweek's Tumblr was so successful, the guy who started it left to join .. Tumblr.

I am one of those who is always looking for the latest tools and technologies that will help me do my job as a journalist.  Several of my journalist friends told me about the wonders of Tumblr, a blogging platform that allows users to “post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be,” according to the website.

I took a look at the site, but decided to put Tumblr on the back burner – until this year’s Online News Association convention in Boston.  I had the pleasure of moderating a panel — Who Are You? Social Media and Branding  – and learned I was sitting next to two Tumblr experts: Anthony De Rosa, social media editor for Reuters, and Mark Coatney, the former social media editor at Newsweek and Tumblr’s current media evangelist.  During our presentation, both spoke about how Tumblr had become an integral part of their work.

And later, Coatney partnered with Phoebe Connelly of Yahoo! News to host the unconference session “We’ve Got A Tumblr! Now What?” The room was full people who were using Tumblr blogs in unique and interesting ways, along with folks like me, who wanted to learn more about it.

And did I learn!  I learned how flexible and versatile Tumblr can be, allowing you to post content via computer, smartphone (there’s an iPhone app for that) and email.  You don’t have to get your company’s IT department involved in creation and coding.  You can write as much or as little as you want.  It’s an ideal platform to show off your photos. And it’s perfect for folks who don’t have a lot of time, but still want to have an online presence.  I’ve seen some great ways journalists are using Tumblr, including:

• Flightblogger on the Move – my friend and fellow aviation journalist Jon Ostrower uses his Tumblr as a sidebar to his magnificent FlightGlobal blog;
• CNNMoney Tech – the website’s editors use this Tumblr to give readers a peek inside how they develop their stories, and tell us what’s on the horizon;
• Yahoo’s Down But Not Out – Yahoo did a story looking at the lives of the long-term unemployed.  Presenter Phoebe Connelly says that the series struck a nerve, so this Tumblr keeps the conversation going;
• The National Post’s Starbucks Trenta cup infographic – When Starbucks announced it would begin selling a 31-ounce Trenta cup (more than the average capacity of a human stomach), the editors came up with this cool infographic that went viral; and
• WHYY’s Fresh Air – one of my favorite NPR shows uses Tumblr to preview upcoming shows, post interesting photos, random quotes and links to content including music critic Ken Tucker.

I’m the Program Chair for next year’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, and I created a Tumblr to keep members informed about the process and pumping them up for the event. I encourage you all to see how you can incorporate Tumblr into your own work.

I’m a diehard college football fan, so at this time of year, my Twitter feed is littered with snippets of conversation about teams, players, games, stats and standings. My unhealthy obsession has led me to follow a lot of sports journalists, and in the process I’ve noticed that they often get more traction out of their Twitter accounts than their colleagues in the business section.

Imitation truly can be the greatest form of social media flattery.

Here are some to follow to see how they do it. Muckrack: Sports Journalists on Twitter

If you spend a little time following sports journalists, it’s easy to spot a few techniques that really work for them on Twitter:

STAY CONNECTED: Their Twitter feeds suggest that many sports journalists watch sports all the time. That’s not true, of course, but I think they do a better job of staying connected during odd hours than business journalists. If they’re off-duty, they tweet on other games, injury reports or stories related to their beat. But, engaged reporters of all types spend a lot of off-duty time cultivating relationships with sources, reading stories that relate to their beats, watching relevant movies or T.V. shows, checking out new businesses and generally thinking about work when they’re technically off-duty. Constant curiosity about our work is sort of a journalism job hazard. Share those interests on your Twitter feed as they happen. Twitter followers opt in because they’re curious about the same things we are, and curiosity doesn’t stop at deadline.

OFFER ANALYSIS: Sports journalists have thoughts about every player, every play, every staff member on a team. They’re encouraged to pick winners and losers each week, and their job is to analyze performances.  at every level of a game. I know that we can’t afford to be quite so opinionated on the business side of the newsroom, but raising questions of businesses and analyzing a company’s performance is definitely our duty. Still, many reporters fear putting their reasoned, researched thoughts out into the world on Twitter because 140 characters affords such minimal context. Here’s the secret: Tweet more. If it takes five tweets for clarification, use them. If people ask questions, answer them. Your analysis is valuable to your followers. Like the sports reporter who gets to ask questions of the guy who dropped the ball, you have access to businesses that your followers lack.

PROVIDE LIVE COVERAGE: Many sports journalists get a boost from live coverage, because a lot of their audience watches the game they’re working. But, some of my favorite tweeters are the local high school sports reporters who sing the praises of kids who may never get on T.V. When you get an opportunity to cover something live — a meeting, a conference, a product launch or a big event — don’t pass it up. Giving your audience live coverage gives your Twitter feed immediacy and exclusivity. Not every event is the next Apple launch, but that little local trade show has valuable information for your audience too.

EMBRACE DEBATE: Every reporter expects that readers will disagree with angles and coverage, but Twitter allows them to do so publicly. I’ve noticed that sports journalists are often really good about responding to questions and retweeting their critics, but i often see news and business writers shy away from engaging in this way. Embracing debate rather than ignoring it demonstrates  that you’re listening to your followers and that you respect their opinions, even if you don’t agree with them.

DON’T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY: Of all the journalists I follow, the sports journalists seem quickest with a joke. Having a sense of humor about yourself and your work helps your followers remember that a human being lives behind the avatar. When you take joy in your work, share it with your readers.

Facebook Subscribe demonstrates that Facebook is actually listening to the problems that journalists and other media professionals have had with the network’s structure and jargon. First of all, subscribe solves a lot of the old problems journalists had with “liking” pages and becoming “friends” with public figures. Second, it allows journalists worried about separating their personal and professional lives to share from a single account rather than maintaining a personal page and a fan page — as long as you have fewer than 5,000 friends.  Visit the subscribe page to allow subscriptions on your profile. When you allow subscriptions, be sure to set your notification and comment settings too.

Facebook Timeline is going to change the way your profile is organized, and re-position the network as a personal archive in addition to a social network.  This has big implications for journalists, because it may allow us to organize our shared content both contextually and chronologically and find older content more easily. Timeline  is being rolled out for everyone, but you can go ahead and get it now if you’re impatient. For more on the Facebook changes, check out Vadim Lavrusik’s post on the changes for Nieman Journalism Lab.

Google+ +1 buttons have been improved to allow direct sharing from the web. The +1 button previously shared content to a separate tab on your profile, but Google changed the functionality to allow sharing directly with those in your circles from the +1 button. 

Google+ circle sharing basically brings the functionality of Twitter lists into the Google+ network. You can organize your circles and share them with others. The only catch is that the shared circle won’t dynamically update. So, if you share a circle, and later update its members, the new members won’t show up in the shared circle. Google is attempting to avoid privacy concerns later, but it means that you may need to re-share the circle as it changes.

Anthony DeRosa, editor of social media at Reuters.

If you’re paying attention to business news on social media you must have noticed that Reuters’ presence has been exploding lately.

Here’s a list of Reuters’ Twitter accounts, Facebook, YouTube. As you can see, Twitter is by far the most active spot for Reuters News.

Anthony DeRosa, editor of social media at Reuters, explains how he tracks news and information through social media and how he determines what’s real and what’s note, what’s valid and what’s verifiable.

In this video, he talk about tracking unrest in India through the eyes of those on the ground and explains some of the tools he uses to do that.

Social chaos deciphered through social media

Want to know more? Here’s a look at Reuters’ social media guidelines from the company’s online handbook, which includes a section on reporting from the Internet.

For more about his approach to digging into news and reporting it on social media, here’s an interview with DeRosa about becoming Reuters’ social media editor. | The Big Soup: Anthony De Rosa on becoming Reuters social media editor