MetaFilter posts tagged with npr and twitter

"In every family picture ... my mother was wearing a habit."

tractorfeed — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:28:50 -0800

A Brother And Sister Get Married (And Later, Their Son Tweets It)

Let Facts be submitted to a candid world

Rhaomi — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:22:00 -0800

The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of this comprehensive study. More on the Declaration: full transcript and ultra-high-resolution scan, a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft, the little-known royal rebuttal, a thorough history of the parchment itself, a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document by the people of NPR and by a group of prominent actors, H. L. Mencken's "American" translation, Slate's Twitter summaries, and a look at the fates of the 56 signers.

This tweet was sadly not "Edited. By. Brooke."

joshwa — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:43:11 -0800

On the Media's Bob Garfield demonstrates How to Turn a Fan into an Enemy in Under 140 Characters.

Curator of the Revolution

k8t — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 06:04:07 -0800

Andy Carvin hasn't slept much for the last 19 days. Curation of news, social media, and rumor: is this the future of journalism? The story of @acarvin. Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at NPR (and formerly with PBS, the Benton Foundation, and founder of the Digital Divide Network), has been around the social media world for a long time as a blogger and commentor. He's also been liveblogging and tweeting major events for years. Since January, however, he's taken his tweeting to the next level. With only a few hours here and there for sleep breaks, Carvin's twitter feed has been a flowing stream of news, editorials, translated tweets, rumor crushing information, and an amazing amount of converged information coming out of Egypt. His 20,000+ followers include not only normal people but also news organizations and policy makers. This is not within his official role at NPR, although the organization has been supportive of his efforts. His curation of the news might be the future of journalism (according to The Atlantic). How does he keep track of all the information? "I use Tweetdeck for the most part. I'm not a partisan about it by any means, but it works for me, including on my phone. I'll usually toggle between various video feeds--Al Jazeera English, CNN, etc--on my Web browser. If I just have my laptop rather than my dual monitor I have at work, I'll use either my phone or TV to access the video. I have a number of columns in Tweetdeck for different things--twitter lists, hashtags, and sometimes individual tweeters. It's not really rocket science--it's just a matter of keeping up with the flow of information and knowing who's behind what post. Oh, and one other thing--I have access to AP and Reuters wires in real-time, so I monitor those as well. Mostly I keep them in the corner of the screen and wait for stories that are color-coded as urgent and referencing either Egypt or Mubarak. That helped immensely when things were particularly chaotic last week." Why does he do this? First it was Tunisia... "Tunisia is so rarely covered by any mainstream media, and yet for several weeks I saw twitter and FB lighting up with one protest after another. And once things started getting violent, around the time of the Kasserine massacre, I really started to try and get my NPR colleagues following along. And that’s about the time I decided to create a Storify collection on it, since I hadn’t seen anyone else do one. That was somewhere around Monday of the final week of protests." And then in Egypt... "Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what my goal is. It’s been evolving as the week has gone on…. When I first started, I was just casually retweeting stuff from sources I found interesting…. But as things intensified, I basically decided to drop everything I was working on and focus on capturing as much as possible regarding what was going on there..." And after all of this, Andy tweeted to all those that appreciated his efforts that they should donate to their local NPR station and let him know that they did so. Some say this is perhaps the future of fundraising.

The robot will remember it for you

ardgedee — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:24:01 -0800

NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter feed providing helpful links to news items from the past 14 years that might be relevant to current events. For example, when masses of people started googling medical information after a news item about 200,000 patients' medical histories being accidentally exposed, NPRbackstory linked to an April 2008 analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of storing patient records online. " The results, Keith will be the first to tell you, aren’t perfect. He estimated... that about 50 percent of the links aren’t really to archival stories.... Another 15 percent of the results are complete misses. Those are usually caused by search terms that have multiple meanings. And once in a while there’s something way out of left field, like this attempt to tie "plankton" to a memoir by the advice columnist Ask Amy. But the rest of the time, it works really well — plucking a gem from the NPR archives that adds context and depth to some subject in the news. Keith compared it to the way that Fresh Air’s three-decade archive allows it to air something old but newly timely whenever a past interview subject is in the news again." It's a personal project of Keith Hopper, using NPR's news API, Google's Hot Trends list of currently-popular search terms, and a variety of other tools; Hopper's page provides more technical info. [via]