“Facebook asked me to pass this on to you. They require it of all visitors to their facilities. It only applies to things that you might accidentally stumble upon while you are there and covers nothing discussed during our news conference. Please either bring a signed copy or be ready to sign upon arrival.”

Journalists were a little upset needless to say, giving that their journalistic freedom was being, for lack of a better term, stolen. Journalists then got a little pep in their step as two hours later another e-mail was sent to agencies from Sarah Lane, the AG’s Director of New Media, stating.

“I’m writing on behalf of Dan Sytman. You may disregard the nondisclosure agreement that we sent earlier.”

So you may be curious as to what the agreement may have said. Well, partly it entailed:

“You may become aware of non-public information related to Facebook and its products, services, programs, features, data, techniques, technology, code, ideas, inventions, research, testing, methods, procedures, know-how, trade secrets, business and financial information and other activities through disclosure, observation or otherwise in the course of your visit … All Facebook Confidential Information remains the property of Facebook. You agree not to disclose any Facebook Confidential Information to any third party, and to take all reasonable precautions to prevent its unauthorized dissemination …”

The full agreement can be seen below.

If you were a journalist or if you are a journalist, how does this information make you feel? Do you feel it’s right, whether it’s legal or not, to ask journalists and media to pretty much forget what they see? We want to know what you think, leave us comments below.

You like Google+ because of the ability to create circles and separate out the elements of your life? Facebook saw that and emulated it quickly with Lists.

You like Twitter because people can follow you without there having to be a “relationship” there”? Fine. Facebook launched Subscriptions.

And, it is Subscriptions that has become very attractive to journalists. Facebook has announced that thousands of journalists now use the subscription feature to promote their writing.

Rather than create a Facebook “Page” (not the same as a Profile), journalists can now keep their regular profiles but allow people to subscribe to their feeds. All the pictures and other Timeline info remains between you and your Facebook friends (or those you specify in security settings). Items you wish your subscribers to see can go out to an unlimited number of people.

Which is one of the big differences between accepting friends vs subscribers on Facebook. You are limited to 5,000 friends on Facebook But, there is no limit to subscribers.

There are still advantages to creating a Page on Facebook. There are customizations and tabs that Profiles don’t get. Anyone can “Like” your Page and get the same info as a subscriber would. And, you can assign multiple admins to a Page.

The differences in terminology about Pages vs Profiles, and who lis allowed to do what under Facebook’s Terms of Service, can get twisty. Facebook has several help pages to walk you through it all.

One about Subscribing in general.

One about Pages.

Subscribing vs Pages.

Subscribing for Journalists.

While anyone can use the Subscription feature, Facebook is taking its Subscribing for Journalists seriously. They have dedicated a whole program to just that demographic. In the past, journalists have been very keen on Twitter for releasing things. Facebook hopes to chip away at that market with its Subscription feature.

I don’t know that a stock image bank reflects society’s opinions on bloggers and journalism, but I found the search results amusing, and thought it would be fun to share.

If you search “blog,” “blogging,” or “blogger” you get these results:

That’s it. Really. That’s literally every result that comes up.

For “journalist,” there are seven pages of photos. I’m not going to include them all, but here is a sampling:

So, what are the takeaways here?

Bloggers are basically teenage girls with computers. Journalists don’t use computers. They use typewriters, paper, or appear on TV.

I guess the line between blogger and journalist isn’t so gray after all.

Last year, the AP Stylebook added a bunch of new social media guidelines to their rules for journalists. Among those guidelines was a change from “web site” to “website,” hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend, and follow to be used as verbs.

They also added social media terms “trending,” “retweet” and “unfriend” to the Stylebook. The latter settling the debate once and for all that “unfriend” is more acceptable than “defriend.”

In March, the AP added some notable tech terms to their online edition of the Stylebook. They decided to officially go with “email” as opposed to “e-mail” and they took the spaces out of “cellphone” and “smartphone,” making them one word entities on their own.

In the newly revised 2011 print edition, the AP has added some more social media / tech terms to the Stylebook. Among them – geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. I’ve been guilty of hyphenating geo-location in the past, so I’m now glad to have one less character to deal with. They announced these changes via Twitter last night:

As I said before, tech word additions aren’t the focus of the fully revised Stylebook. The focus is food. FYI, the AP added words such as locavore as the preferred term for a person who strives to eat locally and “blind bake” to describe the action of baking a pie crust before filling it. They also added “huitlacoche,” a fungus also known as “corn smut” that grows on corn and is considered a delicacy in Mexico. Mmmmm…corn smut.

But the addition of these new terms continues the integration of our fourth estate with the wonderful word of social media.

[Image Courtesy]

More WebProNews Videos

You can put out press releases and just sit there and hope your stories get picked up and/or read by customers, but it helps if you optimize them for those who are most likely to be interested.

Nida Haque, Marketing Manager of PRWeb spoke with WebProNews recently about press release optimization. "Do your keyword research," she says. "Don’t use words that are just on your website. Do the searching before it and see what people are searching for."

"Be a little creative," she adds. "See what’s happening in the season." She cites Black Friday as an example. A lot of people are searching for Black Friday deals ahead of Thanksgiving, which presents opportunities to take advantage of that from within press releases, because press releases can be pretty powerful for search. 

Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group told us, "It used to be with public relations that we were reaching out to the journalists with a press release and trying to get the journalist to do the story, and now with the optimization and the online opportunities with press releases we can actually reach our targets direct by optimizing our press releases and releasing them on the search engines, and then using social media to even get more exposure." 

She also shared some thoughts on the added value press releases can get from Twitter. "You can use Twitter…as part of your PR program, as part of your news feed, so Twitter is like basically…we all know it’s 140 characters so it’s like putting out little nuggets of news via Twitter, so if you take your press release and kind of chop it up into four or five different sound bytes, and then put those out…over the Twitter news feed each day…" 

Of course press releases aren’t just about search and social media traffic. You want press. You want journalists and bloggers to pick up stories and really get them spread around. Well there are ways to get them to pay attention more. First, obviously, you need an interesting product or announcement, but it also helps if you give the blogger/journlist something else to latch onto. A lot of details help, but so do visuals. 

"48% are more attracted to video news releases or image news releases than just your standard kind of text-only news releases, so that will definitely help a lot," says Haque, who notes that using multimedia in press releases also increases the time spent on page by an average of 30 seconds when it comes to customers viewing the release themselves. 

Lee Odden of TopRank marketing had some good advice on getting releases in front of journalists in another interview with WebProNews earlier this year. He says to look at what it is you can do as a marketer to make it easier for the journalist to do their job. Optimize your content for what a journalist is looking for. 

Original Article:Twitter has a post up on its Media blog today talking about the use of tweets in articles. Basically, the company appears to be completely in favor of journalists and bloggers inserting tweets to articles (even pasting them in as images).

However, the company also claims to have a better way to do it, and that way will be revealed tomorrow. Twitter says a pasted-in image of a tweet is "a bit of a hack," adding, "We have a simple alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow."

One can only assume, as suggested here, that Twitter will indeed launch an embed feature (not unlike YouTube) to insert tweets with a snippet of code. It’s possible that Twitter could have something else in mind. Not all of the company’s ideas are entirely conventional, but that would make sense, would it not?

It would certainly make things easier for those of us who do like to cite Twitterers in articles. Twitter has been well established as a channel for breaking news, and where important figures may offer bits of news, wisdom, or other generally interesting nuggets of text. Making it as easy as possible to quote them is in the best interest for all involved.

In fact, Twitter talks about how its solution would ensure quotes are accurate. Nothing wrong with that.

"Across the board you can see a change in journalists’ behavior," said Sarah Skerik, VP of distribution services at PR Newswire.

"Journalists are doing more with less. They seem to be acting more aggressively about finding their stories, digging a bit deeper for story angles."

Journalists are using social networks to help find story ideas, with 24 percent reporting they consider sites like Facebook and Twitter an important way to connect with experts, an increase from 13 percent in 2009. In addition, 46 percent of journalists say they sometimes or always use blogs for research; 33 percent report using social networks in their research, compared to 24 percent in 2009.

The popularity of social media has impacted how media professionals are interacting with the PR industry. Overall, 43 percent of journalists have been pitched through social networks, compared to 31 percent in 2009.

"Coverage oftentimes comes from building a relationship with a journalist, and it’s becoming more frequent in the industry to establish those relationships through
social media," says Amy Prenner, founder of the LA-based Prenner Group.

Overall, 59 percent of traditional journalists are the author of a blog, either personal or professional, and 31 percent are writing a blog for their traditional outlet, an increase from 28 percent in 2009.

"Heavier workloads, shorter deadlines, and increased competition are causing journalists to seek out new sources of information to help them get their jobs done, including social networks," said Erica Iacono, executive editor of PRWeek.

The Central Court, the North’s highest court, held the trial of the two U.S. journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, from Thursday to Monday and convicted them of "committing hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry," the North’s official news agency, KCNA reported.

Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were arrested by North Korean soldiers patrolling the border between China and North Korea on March 17.

"We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release," Ian C. Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said in statement. "We once again urge North Korea to grant the immediate release of the two American citizen journalists on humanitarian grounds."

Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, were on reporting assignment for San Francisco- based Current TV, a media company co-founded by former vice president Al Gore. The pair was researching a story about North Korean refugees fleeing the country in hopes of finding food in China.

The sentenced cannot be appealed and analysts say the journalists are being used as pawns by North Korea.

Reporters Without Borders expressed shock over the sentence. "The sentence of twelve years is a terrible shock for all those who have repeatedly proclaiming the innocence of Laura Ling and Lee Euna. The verdict is even beyond what we feared. It is urgent that the Pyongyang authorities to return to this decision and allow the two to find their American family, "the organization said.

 Journalists charge there is little evidence that new technology is bringing in enough revenue to save jobs and support the news business.

 "I have been blogging for years," said Tony Messenger, a state capital bureau correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I have yet to have a discussion in my newsroom about why we’re blogging and to tie that somehow into the newspaper’s business model."

 Elaine Sciolino, the Paris correspondent for the New York Times, said she has a deadline to post on the Web by noon, produce video for the Web, write a story for the International Herald-Tribune, and still write a story for the next day’s Times.

 "You don’t have a choice," she said. "If you want to be a journalist today, you just have to work harder and more efficiently. You aim for perfection until your deadline, and then you aim for doneness. You just gut it out."

 Sciolino says the real danger for journalism is so many American news organizations are cutting back on foreign correspondents and international coverage. "The decline in American newspapers is a major national security threat," she said.

 Jennifer Reeves, a student at the Missouri School of Journalism who is studying new media, said many news organizations are embracing new technology because it is cool, not because it delivers a better product.

 "A lot of newsrooms need to take a breath and see if the markets need it and find a way to use it logically," she said.

 Elizabeth Merrill, who previously worked for the Kansas City Star and now writes for ESPN.com, said ESPN is trying to offer all of the sports news that a major newspaper does. Merrill said that newspapers can offer the kind of in-depth local coverage that national news organizations lack.

 "There are going to be newspaper writers with institutional knowledge who are going to give people things that a national entity can’t," she said. "I would like to think that they can co-exist."

You’ve seen ‘em: bold, double-underlined words that make small pop-ups erupt all over the screen.  They apparently manage to make money, or at least generate traffic – “Project Runway” is a recent example of something that benefited as a result of their use.  Still, in-text ads aren’t exactly welcome in most newsrooms.

“Many journalists believe that selling the words in a story blurs the line between editorial and ad content,” reports BusinessWeek.  “Some worry it creates an incentive to insert ad-linked words or order up certain types of stories.”

And those (serious) concerns aside, in-text ads are simply annoying; while I try to consider outside sources’ originality, credibility, and readability, I may compromise on any or all of those issues to avoid directing readers to a piece containing in-text ads.

Some sort of grand call to action would probably be pointless.  Nonetheless, these are issues that everyone should consider when encountering or employing in-text ads.