Hordes of interns left behind during the nine-day SXSW technology and music festival are still wandering the streets of Austin, attempting to hand out free sunglasses and stickers to passerby or find a couple of free tacos for their bosses. According to industry sources, most of the interns were left behind when their bosses abruptly realized that they were really fucking hungover and that their flight was leaving 90 minutes — although one executive at a major New York ad agency admitted that they simply hadn’t bothered to buy their interns return flights. “We carefully reviewed our trip budget, and it came down to paying for return flights for the interns or paying for our hotel bar tab,” admitted the executive. “Safe to say, I think we made the right decision. Although where the hell is my mail and coffee?”

The wandering interns have continued to follow the directions given to them on the first day of the festival by their bosses, before they started drinking for “biz-dev purposes” and forgot that the interns existed. “The same kid keeps trying to hand me sunglasses made by some stupid app every time I leave by bar,” complained Dan Franklin, a bartender at Maggie Mae’s. “I felt bad because the kid looked like he was in bad shape and needed a burger or something. But every time I asked him if he wanted to come in, he just responded by asking me to follow his app on Twitter.”

The post Interns Left Behind During SXSW Still Wandering Streets of Austin appeared first on The Faster Times.

Fact-checking and Paul Ryan, BFFs by accident?

News media taking fact checking seriously?

The Paddy Chayefsky classic, Network. Which includes both the immortal “mad as hell” line, but also… “I’m a man without a corporation.”

Okay, there’s been a slow build to a possible rebirth of fact-checking in the news. That had been kept alive quietly by a few news outlets, mostly notably The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and media commentators including Jeff Jarvis, Arianna Huffington, and Jay Rosen in #presspushback.

(Seriously, Stewart’s work, in particular, has been highly professional; note CNN leaves it there and an unedited interview with Chris Wallace.)

Recently, we saw Soledad O’Brien possibly risking her job, check out CNN Actually Fact-Checks A Politician; Hilarity Ensues.

The Paul Ryan speech has now triggered a spasm of fact-checking; perhaps the best summary was recently done by Ari Melber.

What happened?

I’ve been speaking to news publishers, editors, and reporters for years.

They’re concerned that people don’t generally trust news outlets anymore, and want help restoring trustworthiness. (I guess it’s a source of desperation that they ask me.)

They’re doing it quietly, since they’re fighting factions that regard fact-checking and journalistic ethics as quaint relics.

However, they feel that Paul Ryan just went too far at the RNC convention. Check out: Why Paul Ryan thought he could get away with lying: 6 theories.

And Media Shift does a real good job explaining Why Fact-Checking Has Taken Root in This Year’s Election:

Take Paul Ryan’s convention address last week. Ryan offered several misleading statements and a few obvious lies — falsehoods that he had to know were false — although there’s nothing new about politicians lying.

Just look at Ryan’s fellow running mates: Sarah Palin lied about the Bridge to Nowhere in her convention address, for example, while during a nationally televised debate, Dick Cheney falsely said he had never met John Edwards, and Edwards falsely charged that the Bush administration lobbied to cut combat pay. They faced mild corrections and very little collateral damage for those high-profile statements.

This time, however, reporters did not let Ryan off the hook by noncommittally airing criticism (“opponents disagreed with his claims”), or reducing corrections to one of those stand-alone sidebars evaluating distortions (“three Pinocchios for the deficit commission history”).

Instead, several authoritative accounts of Ryan’s address decided that his falsehoods were a key part of the news Ryan made…

So, maybe what’s changed is that surviving serious professional news people are “as mad as hell and not taking it anymore.”

Beside Paul Ryan’s speech, we’ve seen this building among the most professional people in news media, including Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Will McAvoy. (Yes, the latter’s a fictional character, but he’s been a seriously inspirational force.)

It also helps that Poynter Institute, which is all about professional journalism, will be holding a conference about the restoration of journalistic ethics this fall. (Disclaimer: I’m sponsoring it.)

So the deal is that a minority of news people are risking a lot to get serious about their job.

This could be doomed, or a rebirth of news media. They need our help.

If you think it matters, tell me, and do stuff like Sharing and Retweeting the best of fact-checking. Maybe start with the links above?

The post Paul Ryan and the Rise of the Fact-Checker appeared first on The Faster Times.

The survey interviewed 1,001 likely voters nationwide. Interviews were given by land-line and cell phone from January 10 – 12, 2012.

We discovered that likely voters are looking for news they can trust, but are torn about where they can find it. I’m not in the news business and I won’t tell anybody how to do their job, but I am a news consumer and I’d like to know I can trust the news I’m getting.

We asked people about, and explored six media types in the survey: • Cable news stations • Network news • Newspapers • Talk radio • Internet new sites • Blogs and social media

We broke the results down by sex, race, age, and party: • The data set only focused on people who identified as White, Black, or Hispanic. The data we had for other demographics such as Asian and Native American were such a small sample size that all answers for these subgroups are not considered statistically significant. • Age was broken up by 18-35, 36-44, 45-64, and 65+. • Party was broken down by Democrat and Republican.

Some of our findings confirmed our earlier expectations: • “Traditional” news outlets scored highest in terms of perceived credibility compared to newer and less traditional mediums. • Democrats are more likely to give cable news and network news a higher rating. • Republicans have more faith in Talk Radio then Democrats.

As for social media: • Younger people give more credibility to social media vs. older adults, which confirms people’s initial thinking, BUT neither really giving high scores for social media usage to get their news. • Non-traditional media such as Internet news sites, blogs and social media sites scored far down the list as being credible. • College grads are slightly more cynical about social media then non-college grads. • Democrats were a little more positive about social media, but not significantly. • There were some differences in Hispanics vs. Whites and Blacks – Hispanic people tend to be less enamored with news sources, and are going to social media for it.

Most people aren’t getting hard election news from social media. I think tech folks and early adopters are, but not most people, not yet.

And we discovered some cool new stuff: • Cable news stations were the top source of news for 33 percent of respondents. • Newspapers scored the highest in credibility with 22 percent. • Less than one quarter of the population would describe any source of election news as very credible. • Talk radio, often cited as influential on political news, scored only 13 percent as very credible. • 13% of Republican women and 11% of Republican men think that newspapers are very credible, with twice that: 28% of both Democratic women and men think that newspapers are a very credible source for information about voting. • Blacks give more trust to news sources and Whites fall in the middle.

Interest-based efforts hold great promise for helping ensure trustworthiness and boosting public confidence in news reporting. It’s called factchecking, and there are a lot of good people working on it. They’re looking at ways to help the news media hold candidates and other public figures accountable for what they tell the public. It’s hard, and it’s expensive, but it’s really important.

The post Which News Outlets Can You Trust? appeared first on The Faster Times.

I get asked a lot if nonprofits are using social media effectively. After taking a look at the Nonprofit Times list of 100 top nonprofits based on revenue, the craigconnects team decided to look at who was proactively and effectively utilizing social media in August and September of 2011. Do the highest revenue nonprofits use social media the most effectively? How are people responding and interacting? The deal is with social media use on the rise, we decided to check this out and created an infographic to show the results.

A few cool things we figured out:

•92% of the top 50 nonprofits have at least 1 social media presence on their homepage. •The most followers that an organization has on Twitter is 840,653 (PBS)… •…but on the other hand, the organization following the most people is following 200,522 (The American Cancer Society)! •The American Red Cross was the first organization on the list to create a Twitter account. •Food for the Poor is the most talkative organization on Facebook, and has posted 220 posts over the course of 2 months. •The organization with the highest revenue, the YMCA, only posted 19 times to Facebook in 2 months, but has over 24,000 Fans.

Is it really first come, first serve? It took some organizations no time at all to jump on the social media bandwagon, as early as 2007, others were a little bit behind. So the question is, does that impact the number of followers they have? The slogan, quality over quantity seems rather fitting. For example, PBS has the most followers on Twitter but is in the bottom quarter bracket on the list of net income.

So you have friends, and you have followers. But what factors determine how often an organization’s Facebook post will generate a like or a comment? Can money buy engaged friends on social networks? We took a look at the average amount of responses (combined likes and comments) each organization was getting per post, and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital was definitely in the lead, yet ranked 29 on the revenue list.

For the record, we checked out their Twitter Grader score, which provided us with all the possible information we could need about their Twitter account. We discovered how many times they tweeted over the course of 2 months and took look at their Facebook standing: we utilized AllFacebookStats.com to capture the number of Facebook fans the nonprofit had, how many times they had posted over the course of 2 months (August 2011-September 2011), and the likes and comments they had received on their posts over that time period. It was these metrics that led us to determine just how efficiently the top 50 nonprofits utilize social media, and whether income actually has an effect.

The bottom line is that revenue does not increase a nonprofit’s visibility and interactions in the social media world. Some of the most social media savvy organizations are in the bottom quarter bracket in terms of revenue, yet they are clearly active on social media. Social media is about fostering conversations and interactions. These are the keys to keeping up in the fast-paced arena of social networks.

*Note this blog post was updated October 28, 2011 to reflect that the nonprofits listed were ranked by revenue not net income. The data was not changed by this update.

The post Social Media for Nonprofits appeared first on The Faster Times.

I’m a big fan of DonorsChoose.org, helping teachers get the job done. A teacher can post a project there, and anyone can help out by giving a few dollars until the project gets funded. A project could be as simple as getting enough pens and paper to last the school year, which is a real problem in many schools. There’re a lot of underfunded school districts out there, and it’s real unfair for teachers to fund stuff from their own (inadequate) salaries.

Some schools primarily serve the families of active duty troops, so this really sucks.

That’s why I picked up an idea of Stephen Colbert’s wherein I matched funds with people who would also help teachers helping the kids of military families. Here’s some of the results:

I guess that’s a good start, and I should do more…

My general giving page is here!

The post Craig Newmark on DonorsChoose.org appeared first on The Faster Times.

The deal is that they’re looking for an effective engagement tool for public workers to engage expert citizens in stuff that matters.

This would be serious engagement with citizens, where government workers would take all suggestions and comments seriously, and where there would be actual results. The public would vote good stuff up, hopefully dealing with trolls that way.

This effort goes the extra step, getting questions to people in the online communities where they spend their time. Instead of having people visit government sites, people visit Facebook or LinkedIn or maybe an online support group for cancer sufferers.

Consider a government policymaker wants people to invest in the green economy or promote use of solar energy, and so on. Right now there’s no way to find people with expertise in and passion for areas like that. “It’s not just about connecting up to people with 3 PhDs but about making sure that people who care about a given topic know about the chance to participate.”

You can get directly engaged:

To provide feedback by January 7, 2011, please go to http://expertnet.wikispaces.com where you will find a draft description of ExpertNet. (ExpertNet is a working title. You’ll find a page to suggest a better name.)

The post Craig Newmark on How the Obama Administration is Crowdsourcing appeared first on The Faster Times.

UPDATE: check comment on Facebook Email below, new take on creating FB identities. Thanks!

Okay, we don’t know what’ll be announced, but Facebook email could indeed dominate all email.

The deal is that a Facebook identity (profile) pretty much ensures that there’s a real person behind it. It’s possible to fake a Facebook identity, but it’s a fair amount of work, way more expensive than getting a new gmail or hotmail account.

Let’s suppose that Facebook provides an email tool, and gives you options to control what email you’ll actually see.

For example, you might tell Facebook email to only accept email from people with Facebook-verified identities. You might have different levels of email priority, from friends, fans, friends of friends, and so on.

(People might link their outside email addresses with their Facebook profiles, and you might choose to accept those.)

Spammers can create their own Facebook identities to try to work around this, but that’s way more expensive than getting temporary email addresses, and that raises the cost of spamming people.

So, if Facebook email does this, it might provide the most personal, and spam-free email available, and it might be relatively easy to do so. That’s killer.

Comment:

Craig,

Respectfully I think you are off the mark here. You are wrongly downplaying the facility with which one can create fake Facebook accounts (something trivially accomplished with botnets) and the willingness of the bad guys to do so (see the Facebook judgement against Canadian Adam Guerbuez for proof that this has been happening for a long time, and last week’s exposé of Koobface, the Facebook malware published, among other places, in the Globe & Mail :

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/internet/anatomy-of-a-cyber-crime/article1792055/ )

While I agree that what you describe may indeed be the implementation of Facebook mail (we’ll see later today), and I personally think Facebook mail will have a ton of instant uptake, and I happen to know Facebook hired some of the best and brightest minds in the email business to work this project, I don’t know anyone who would disagree with the assertion that the adversary has always kept up and surpassed our abilities to create a spam-free environment. They are as best and bright as we are.

Time will tell, of course.

Yours truly,

Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, North America Inc. http://cauce.org

The post Can Facebook Email Kill Spam? appeared first on The Faster Times.

[My dad died from this.]

If you, or someone you know, smokes, now is a good opportunity to think about quitting. The folks at Legacy have developed www.BecomeAnEx.org to help. No matter what age you are, quitting smoking is one of the most important lifestyle changes a person can make to improve and extend their life. It’s never too late.

www.BecomeAnEX.org gives smokers the resources and methods that have been proven to increase smokers’ chances of quitting successfully. And, it’s all free.

The post November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month appeared first on The Faster Times.

The point of this rally is to counter this stereotype and put a face on the government bureaucracy. This is not about politics – it’s about the millions of government employees who work hard every day to deliver important services to the American public. Full details on signing up and attend rally are here http://www.govloop.com/xn/detail/1154385:Event:993719?xg_source=activity) Recent coverage of the Government Doesn’t Suck rally – http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/10/government_doesnt_suck_march_p.htm

The post Introducing “Goverment Doesn’t Suck” Day appeared first on The Faster Times.

Judge for yourself, it’s linked to by the honest material here.

The judge says “craigslist leaves this field with something less than total victory.” Not total victory, just a little less.

The judge kinda split the baby, but said we acted in good faith. We’ll keep fighting the good fight in California.

The post eBay vs craigslist: “Goliath bloody, David still standing” appeared first on The Faster Times.