There’s more to Twitter than just crafting a good Tweet, using the right hashtag and including links.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

These days, when we need ready answers to pressing questions, faster certainly is better. And in our mobile-media world, faster is also essential.

That’s why the question-and-answer website Quora may have added horsepower to the information race with the introduction this week of Online Now, a feature that puts likely experts and admitted novices together with just a click.

Online Now appears as a gray note by the names of frequent knowledge contributors who are online at that moment, allowing the inquisitive to post pressing questions by clicking a blue “Free to Ask” button that moves those questions higher in priority than general queries.

Details of the exchange appear only in Quora’s Ask to Answer section, which constitutes a list of contributors the site believes is best suited to answer particular questions. The Online Now feature can be tweaked to indicate who is the answerer or questioner, or can be turned off, in the user settings.

“This is especially fun if you are in the mood to answer certain topics,” explained Joel Lewenstein, a designer at Quora, in a blog post on the subject. “Maybe you saw a movie or a sporting event, fell in love with a new restaurant, or just finished a book. When you feel like answering questions about a specific topic that you know, Online Now will send people your way.”

Demand for faster responses on Quora has grown since the site released mobile app versions starting last year with the iPhone, said Marc Bodnick, a member of Quora’s business team, in an interview with PCMag.com. He says mobile use makes up about 25 percent of all Quora traffic.

David Sheets is a freelance editor, Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dksheets@gmail.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Courtesy FDNY

This article in the Valley Independent Sentinel is an example of how multimedia elements (and citizen journalism) helped take a simple local story and add context and emotion.

The Valley Independent Sentinel is an online-only hyper local news site in Connecticut. (Full disclosure: I helped launch the site in 2009.)

The news site has done a great job keeping ahead of the social media and multimedia trends in journalism — and forcing competitors in the area to get on board.

This week, editor Eugene Driscoll was faced with a fairly common story for local newspapers: A group of students collected donations for people affected by Hurricane Sandy in Rockaway, Queens.

It’s easy for local reporters to decide these stories are monotonous, and react by banging out some standard, boring 8-inch story about the donation drive.

But Eugene Driscoll took another approach, using Storify and citizen journalists to help add context to the story.

Driscoll created a Storify that detailed the damage in Rockaway, and the school’s efforts to get support via social media. One of the tweets is posted below.

I grew up in Rockaway, Queens and my parents are still there, they lost everything. Field trip to help, pay it forward? Anyone interested?

— Derby High School (@DerbyRedRaider) November 3, 2012

And he embedded a video produced by a friend of a Rockaway resident that shows exactly what was going on there after the storm. The creator of the video is not a journalist, but what he did here was a form of journalism.

He combined these aspects with the standard 8-inch story about the donation drive. The result was a much more compelling piece.

How have you used multimedia, social media and citizen contributions to bolster commonplace reporting? Share links to some examples in the comments section.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

Note: This post appeared in the September/October issue of Quill. 

Pinterest might have a reputation as a social network for sharing recipes and fashion tips, but news organizations across the country are embracing Pinterest in innovating ways.

In case you’re not acquainted, Pinterest is an image-based social network where users post links and photos onto different topic boards. The posts show up as a stream of images, like photos pinned to a bulletin board.

Each user can create and pin to dozens of different topic boards, to share different types of content. Like with Twitter, you can follow other people – or individual boards – on Pinterest, to see what items they are pinning.

The simplicity and visual appeal give posters a different approach to attract interest for their content.

Several newspapers are using Pinterest for fashion, food and other features items. The New York Times, for example, started its Pinterest page in June with boards on shoes, food and fashion.

But the visual power of the social network can extend well beyond fluff stories, as the following examples show.

Front Pages: Several news organizations have boards that highlight their front page each day. The pins link back to the newspapers’ websites.

Quotes: Lack a photo? You can do like the Wall Street Journal and the Mercury News: grab wacky pull quotes from a story to draw a reader in. Pins link directly to the article.

User-Submitted Content News organizations have created boards for everything from prom pictures to engagement announcements, to share their readers’ content with a broader audience.

Staff Bios: Many news organizations are posting photos of staff members, with contact info and links to their content on the news site.

Illustrations: The Wall Street Journal has a board of its “hedcuts,” those dot-ink portraits that have become a signature illustration in each day’s newspaper. The illustrations are impressive on their own. But a sea of the illustrations on a Pinterest board is a fascinating back door to interesting stories you might have missed in print, or online.

Different twist on political candidates: The Washington Post has boards for biographical information about presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, for a different approach to profiles about the candidates, complete with childhood and wedding photos.

Outside content: The Guardian of London has a board called “On Our Radar,” in which the news organization links to news stories it finds from other sources.

Profiles: The Des Moines Register has a board called “Interesting People” that links to news stories, blog posts and other features about people in Des Moines.

Special projects: Digital First Media newspapers have a Pinterest board for their special reporting project on homecoming veterans.

Community Guides: From The Morning Journal’s guide to Ohio golf courses, to the Denver Post’s Favorite Colorado Places board, newspapers are using the visual ability of Pinterest to offer a public service to readers.

The key, as with any social network, is engaging your audience. Invite readers to contribute their own content to boards, as the Atlanta Journal Constitution does.

And make sure you aren’t spamming your readers with feeds of only your content. Keep the pins interesting – and don’t be afraid to share content that isn’t from your news site.

Want to learn more, or find other newspapers who are using Pinterest? Follow Joanne Phillips on Pinterest or Twitter. She’s tracking new newspapers that join in and has a great board with more than 150 different news Pinterest sites.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

Steve Buttry, who has the impressive if murky title of “Digital Transformation Editor” for Digital First Media, the entity that now operates the combined newspaper and television properties of the Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group, spends a lot of his time speaking not only to working journalists but to journalism students. He preaches the gospel of digital media as not only the future, but the present reality of the news business.

I happen to agree, and was glad to meet the man at an all-day Digital Media Workshop at the University of Colorado, sponsored by the Digital News Test Kitchen, a cutting-edge media think-tank. Buttry, who’s based in northern Virginia, spent the workshop sharing his views on the importance of embracing the evolving tools and technologies of news, and also giving hands-on tips that journalists can employ to tell stories for the new age.

He had lots of examples of newspapers doing innovative work and trying new ideas, like using a board on one Journal Register paper’s Pinterest page to show the local police’s Most Wanted mugshots (arrests increased). He also offered do’s and don’ts for other social media and digital tools.

In true digital-first fashion, there was a flurry of tweets during the workshop posted by attendees (lord knows when Buttry found the time to re-tweet some of them while he was still presenting), and Buttry posted on his blog about the workshop within a few hours. The post includes helpful links to all the examples of great multimedia and cutting-edge work that he used during his talk, and they’re worth checking out for anyone interested in the best that digital journalism has to offer.

His blog post includes a link to a Storify timeline, a compilation of tweets and photos uploaded live as the workshop progressed, curated by a journalism student, Rob Denton. Denton signed up for Storify when Buttry mentioned it, and created the timeline during the workshop. That’s how easy it can be to try out and learn some of the cool new tools that are available for journalists to use.

On his blog, Buttry also uses a service called Slideshare to upload all the slides from his presentation – a wealth of intelligence available for anyone to learn from. Slideshare is a social network to distribute PowerPoint presentations, and a perfect way to share expertise (assuming that your PowerPoint presentation isn’t a snoozer, and Buttry’s aren’t).

During the Q&A session, I asked if there was an epiphany in his career, which began in traditional newspapers that led him to embrace online media. “It’s really more a process than an epiphany,” he said.

He noted that he went into journalism in part because he knew he’d learn something new every day, and embracing new tools and platforms hasn’t been so different. He did remember that in 1984, he was in charge of a Des Moines Register initiative to raise community engagement by “crowdsourcing” news into a “Hometown” section. The idea didn’t fly with traditional journalists, but he was impressed with the power of the people who contributed.

He also remembered an early introduction to the Web as a research tool through a “Computer Assisted Reporting” (that’s what they used to call online, database-driven journalism stuff back in the day) project for the Omaha World Herald as the closest thing he had to an epiphany.

My epiphany was when I was entertainment editor at the Colorado Springs Gazette in 1994 (we were one of the first five American newspapers to have a website), and I got an email from a reader. He was thanking me for the paper’s arts coverage because he was a local scientist stuck in Antarctica for the winter, and our website allowed him to keep up with the rich local arts scene.

The knowledge that someone halfway around the globe could instantly read what I was publishing online changed my whole concept of news media. I realized that family and friends in Japan could now instantly follow what I was doing, and read my articles. Today that doesn’t seem too shocking, since we could Skype around the world for free and video-chat on Google Hangout, or read live tweets and watch live streamed video from anywhere in the world — or even outer space.

But back then, I have to admit, the idea blew my mind. That’s when I knew the Internet would be the future of news media, and that I had to find my place in it during the dawn of this evolution. I haven’t regretted the decision once.

If you had an epiphany about online media, send it along to gilasakawa@gmail.com — I’d love to hear your stories.

A version of this post was submitted for SPJ’s Quill magazine.

It’s good to see that SPJ is embracing the new tools of digital media. Tumblr is an easy-to-use “microblog” that allows you to post quick links to content on the Web, or video, or photos, and share them with just a couple of clicks.

And followers (users “follow” Tumblrs) can easily share content to their networks — it’s a very socialized form of blogging.

Personally, I find Tumblr sometimes irritating because a lot of people use the platform to post stuff (like photos) with no captions, explanations, or plain ol’ context. But I use Tumblr myself, and now the SPJ, under the aegis of current prez John Ensslin, has launched a Tumblr where all the committee chairs can post content on the go.

Check out the Society of Professional Journalists’ Tumblr!

Here’s a pretty interesting, nuts-and-bolts piece from Poynter by Melissa Abbey that describes how she used social media at the Democratic National Convention.

Here’s an excerpt about how she used social media to find an angle and then covered a protest:

Tweets are great for illustrating how an event unfolded. Half an hour before my shift ended Monday night, a colleague turned to me and asked, “Hey, did you see that tweet about a protest happening?” I hadn’t, but it didn’t take long to find it. Within a couple of minutes, I’d found a link to a Ustream account from which 23-year-old Nathan Grant (@Occupy Eye) was broadcasting the march.

By that time, several tweets had appeared relating to the late-night protest. There was a live video of protesters in black marching arm in arm. Something was happening.

We told the writers nearby. While they tried to reach sources over the phone, I compiled tweets in Storify and prepared a new post in Blogger. Within two to three minutes of the first tweets announcing the protesters had returned to their campsite, we published a blog post (with the Storify) highlighting tweets that showed how the protest unfolded.

The piece also offers a lot of helpful food for thought, because Abbey divides it into a section on how social media helped tell the story, and then how social media could be the story.

If you’ve noticed some nudging and elbowing lately in cyberspace, it may be due to the crowded social networking field making room for yet another potential player.

That player is called GlowTrend, and though it looks and feels like Facebook, founder Michael Wellman Jr. promises much more.

“I wanted a social site that would bring everything that’s good in other social media sites into one place and still be able to work with the other places,” Wellman said in a news release Tuesday. “That’s why we let you connect to GlowTrend through the other major social media sites.”

Yes, GlowTrend intends to be all things to all comers, Besides incorporating thumbs-up “likes,” friend suggestions, an instant messenger, company pages, and an interactive event calendar, a la Facebook, GlowTrend also intends to serve as an iTunes-type music storefront, where musicians can upload and sell their own works, a Google Plus-inspired video chat interface, and a Craigslist-kind-of classifieds section that ostensibly would help the site generate income, among other features.

Meanwhile, a mobile app is in development, Wellman says.

The site used to be called “MyFaceZone” until Wellman decided to put more distance between his site’s identity and that of his chief rival. Though the official launch came Tuesday, GlowTrend has been gaining fans since the domain name went live in June.

And despite the official launch, a few kinks remain. Wellman’s own GlowTrend page contained more troubleshooting announcements than social interactions. (The site’s servers nestle near Wichita, Kan.)

“Sorry for the delay everyone for the photo issue,” the Wasilla, Alaska, native wrote regarding a days-long glitch in uploading profile photos. “We are trying to get resolved. You can still import (other) photos.”

GlowTrend’s privacy policy promises little better than other social sites, saying no personal information will be sold, though allowing that member content will be seen as “aggregated demographic information” worth sharing with “business partners, trusted affiliates and advertisers.”

But this is Wellman’s third try at launching a social network, he says. Maybe now he has it all figured out.

David Sheets is a former content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a candidate for Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dksheets@gmail.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

In my latest column in the Quill magazine about steps that college media can take to go digital first, I mentioned that you should use social media as an end in itself, not just the means to an end:

Social media drives lots of traffic to your website, no doubt. The CU Independent’s Facebook page is the source of half the page views to its website. But don’t treat social media as merely a marketing tool. That’s how newspapers thought of their websites in the early years, parking their online staff in their marketing departments or libraries. Since not everyone will click through to your website, be sure your social media presence has its own following.

I got an email today from Christine Jessel of WUOT, the U of Tennessee’s public radio station, asking for clarification about my point and what Facebook-only content I’d recommend posting. Here’s what I sent her in reply:

One way to make a Facebook page a destination in itself instead of just a pass-through (hopefully) for people to click on to your paper’s website, is to expand your “coverage” and include links to not only your site, but also to stories from your competitors.

So, here in Boulder we have the metro daily papers in Denver and Boulder, as well as the irritating “youth-oriented” daily that’s published by the Boulder Daily Camera that people think of as the CU school paper, and of course the local TV stations. When news happens that of interest to students, not only about the campus but in the larger community, I think it’s an opportunity for us to tweet and Facebook about it and link to other sources, including competitors.

I think readers appreciate that you’re being generous and willing to become a hub of news and information that’s of interest to them, and will become trained to come back to your Facebook page to keep up with news. That’s an easy way to cover more stories than just what runs in the paper or website.

Like the last comment I made in my Quill column, this advice about linking to your competitors is advice I’ve given to newsrooms for a decade or more now, not just advice for college papers or radio stations. I realize it goes against the grain of newsroom staff, especially management, to acknowledge your competition and — gasp — even send traffic their way!

But you know what? It’s 2012, and your audience doesn’t just read your stuff. Your audience reads your news stories, or watches your station’s newscasts, and then does what we all do: Click to other sites to read more, to see what other sources are saying, to get a fuller picture of the news they care about.

If you think you have an exclusive relationship with your readers in this networked age, you’re dreaming. Dreaming of an earlier media era.

The truth is, if you link to your competitors, your readers will apprciate the step you’re saving them, and appreciate your open-mindedness. And like I said to Christine, they’ll soon come to your site (or Facebook page) first, and visit the other sites you direct them to, but click the “back” button and return to your site because you’re shown them you’re a onestop hub for the news that matters to them.

It’s amazing the things that we see people tweet about. Personal beliefs. Private conversations. Elicit behavior. Groundless criticism. Uneducated perspective.

Yes, I’m talking about journalists, too.

Sure, some genuine news seeps through to the Twitterverse — the brilliant coverage by Andy Carvin of last year’s “Arab Spring” foremost among the examples. (Remarkably, a year later, his work still sets the standard.) Otherwise, what remains on that social network largely amounts to boorishness and self-aggrandizement, impugning and assuming, snobbery and effrontery.

When I came up through the journalism ranks, any sort of spotlight-hogging was frowned upon as ethically dubious, if not forbidden by company policy. Today, a persistent and effusive social media presence is considered essential to one’s employment, if for no other reason than to continually trumpet a media “brand.”

This deep bow to branding waxes ominous, thanks largely to such popular social media measuring sticks as Klout assigning a manufactured importance to digital socialization — an importance weighted in favor of quantity instead of quality. If we agree to hold up these sticks as accurate, then news reporting via social media is bound not to be.

Why? Because there’s a certain assurance news consumers get from a journalist’s professional detachment, and we see that assurance petering out now as news providers strive to be heard above the loud partisan polemic drowning rational thought — a polemic they help stir up.

The solution, short of wiping social media off the map, is greater attentiveness toward distinguishing personal from professional content. Though there are claims that a personal touch demystifies media and as a result makes news more consumable, personalization also blurs the line separating judgment from fact. And when journalists apply it, they put their profession at risk of being marginalized by “citizen” journalists who insist they’re merely following the example.

So, then, make that example an admirable one:

Separate personal from professional tweets — If this means creating separate Twitter accounts, so be it. And try not to use the company logo or any derivative as a personal avatar.

Exercise care with criticism — Do you love “50 Shades of Grey”? Do you hate the movie remake of “Spider-Man”? That’s fine, but keep those opinions off all professional social media accounts, unless it has a discernible job relevance. Otherwise, inserting opinion only waters down what little objectivity a journalist can muster.

Keep company matters inside the company — There may be discord between management and staff, or personnel matters that prove irksome, but venting discontent via veiled insult on social media not only undermines others’ faith in you, it also could prove actionable in a court of law. In the same vein, honesty regarding one’s own reporting or editing errors may evoke pangs of guilt and frustration, but it  reinforces credibility and respectability as well.

Rein in the urge to be defensive — By its nature, journalism invites criticism, warranted or not. Certainly, some of that criticism can be mean-spirited and vindictive, instead of constructive. Avoid driving a conversation further down the same dark road. As humorist Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with stupid people; they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

Resist posting vacation and food photos — It’s always good to get away from it all when possible; it’s bad to drag readers and viewers along. That beach picture with Diamond Head in the background, while pretty, smacks of braggadocio, and may even suggest to others a laxity at work — especially if the picture puts you in one place while the calendar says you should be somewhere else. Food photos, on the other hand, pose a different problem, one rooted in esthetics. Put simply, food never looks as good in social media as it does in person.

Avoid posting sales pitches — Ensure personal brand integrity by not promoting other brands in tweets through sales pitches or links to special deals. Leave that up to the sales people who are supposed to market those products.

David Sheets is a content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, a candidate for Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.