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from David Rohde:
Anthony Lewis and the need for journalism that inspires
At 10:00am on Monday morning, I read on Twitter that Anthony Lewis, the revered New York Times legal writer and columnist, had died at age 85. A few minutes later, I sent out a Tweet calling him “a giant of journalism who saved Gideon & Bosnia.”
The Bosnia reference was personal. Along with writing searing columns that pressured the Clinton administration to intervene in the conflict, Lewis put my family in touch with senior White House officials when I was arrested by Serb forces for ten days while covering the war.
My uncle, Sig Roos, a Boston-based lawyer and one of legions of Lewis admirers, emailed me to mourn his passing and again praise his help. After I was released, I returned to the United States and thanked Lewis in person. He was an extraordinarily kind, gracious and unassuming man, who mentored countless young journalist as tribute after tribute has described this week.
To be honest, as soon as I sent my Tweet about Lewis I regretted it. A man whose work had inspired a generation of reporters, lawyers and judges – and helped save my life ‑ was reduced to 48 characters.
from The Great Debate:
Social media life: What privacy?
It was almost quaint: Google’s recent apology for privacy violations. Granted, it came in the face of a lawsuit where the company got its hand slapped for “data-scooping,” a wonderful phrase that could be the slogan of our current lives. Google was found to have crossed the line with its Street View Project, where in addition to photographing houses and buildings along the world’s streets and avenues, the Googilians scooped up all manner of personal information from zillions of unencrypted wireless networks.
Really? I’m shocked. Not. Who doesn’t data scoop is my question?
I look at a bathing suit on line. For the next few weeks, whenever I open my laptop it pops right up. It’s like I am being stalked by a bathing suit. I vow to never ever succumb again to online shopping, a resolve that crumbles faster than my New Year’s resolutions.
from Financial Regulatory Forum:
Social media regulatory guidance for U.S. banks: a road map for the finance industry
By Margaret Paradis, Thomson Reuters Accelus Contributor
NEW YORK, March 15 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - The pace of social media usage by the U.S. financial industry has begun to rapidly accelerate. One drag on broader and deeper usage, especially by banks, continues to be uncertainty about regulatory compliance standards. Not all segments of the industry have been moving at the same pace. The broker-dealers and insurance companies have forged ahead in this area, relying on issued regulatory guidance. Additionally, asset management is catching up with the benefit of regulatory guidance issued early in 2012. Banking organizations, however, have been acting without specific guidance in this area, creating an extra risk.
In January 2013, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) addressed this risk by proposing specific guidance for the use of social media by federally supervised banks, and certain nonbank entities (collectively, banks), called Social Media: Consumer Risk Management Guidance (PDF).
from Financial Regulatory Forum:
IA brief: If you haven’t joined the social media bandwagon, you’re not alone
By Jason Wallace, Compliance Complete
NEW YORK, Feb. 27 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Financial planners use social media in their personal lives but shy away from it professionally out of concern over compliance issues and an uncertain regulatory environment, a recent survey reveals.
The survey of 3,500 certified financial planners was conducted by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards and released at the end of January It was accompanied by a social media guide for CFP professionals that can be broadly useful to any investment adviser representative, credentialed or not.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Censors are still China’s newsmakers
By Katrina Hamlin
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.
China’s censorship system is in good working order. Despite recent protests and the advent of new media, the country’s propaganda machine is far from broken. As a new book makes clear, the news is made by the state and for the state.
from India Insight:
Delhi gang rape case: ‘she deserved it’ is not a good argument
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily of Thomson Reuters)
The gang rape of a 23-year-old woman and the beating of her male friend on a moving bus in New Delhi Sunday night has produced debates about women's rights in India and about whether the death penalty -- or castration -- are suitable remedies for the situation. It has not prompted, from what I can see, any speculation that the woman got what she deserved because she was dressed like a slut... until today.
from MediaFile:
In a crisis, Twitter morphs into cable news
Twitter calls itself a “real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting.” That network is defined by its personalization: The person who assembles her feed is the person who reads it. This is usually a benefit. Last Friday it became a distraction.
My unfiltered Twitter feed was basically unusable as an information source -- a repetition of facts shared space with anger, and grief, and commentary, and still more of the same facts. Instead, I relied on filters, and the individual streams of people who are extremely talented at culling what’s important and cutting out the repetition.
from India Insight:
A Twitter high five from the Pope? Maybe someday
As a practising Catholic, I was eagerly waiting to read Pope Benedict XVI’s first tweets. I didn’t expect to be blown away by the first few, but interest was building on the Internet, and I was part of that. Not many in India or my home state of Goa seemed to care very much. Perhaps they didn’t even know that the Pope had joined Twitter. But the small step by Pope Benedict on Wednesday, marks a dramatic change in the way the Church communicates to its faithful.
No one expected the Vatican, usually conservative by nature, or the 85-year old Pontiff, to say anything path-breaking or revolutionary. As expected, the first tweet was bland, and the event anti-climactic. Pope Benedict XVI also proved himself initially incapable of tweeting on his own.
from The Great Debate UK:
How social media can play a major role in disaster forecasting and recovery
--Julian Hunt is Visiting Professor at Delft University of Technology and the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre. Joy Pereira is Deputy Director of SEADPRI, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. The opinions expressed are their own.--
The UN Climate Change Summit in Qatar will be negotiating levels of funding for adaptation against climate change. Social media, which can reduce impacts of disasters through community involvement and improved real-time management, must receive effective and rapid use of such funds.
from Anthony De Rosa:
Where social media fails
I’ve been thinking a lot about my use of social media and how helpful it is in informing the people who consume it. This election season has particularly made me think more critically about how sometimes the short, context-less text updates can lead to a poorly informed public. I’m certainly not the first person to realize this, as Craig Kanalley recently wrote in detail. People increasingly latch on to the latest minutiae of the campaign, the Big Bird, the binders, the memes, which have little relevance to the actual issues that matter: employment, foreign policy, the expanding income gap, so on and so forth. Here’s what we plan to do to improve the signal to noise ratio.
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Focus my updates on more short, rapid-fire networks like Twitter on doing fact checks, linking to substantive articles about issues related to how the candidates will govern: economy, taxes, social issues, etc.
Find flaws in the arguments of both candidates with detailed pieces that point out where they have either been too opaque or flat out lied.
Engage with people all over the political spectrum to start a dialogue and understand what they care about. It is “social media” after all and I see many people who are supposed “social media editors” who never engage their readers.
Spend more time live blogging, which allows for longer posts and rich media
The Elections 2012 live blog format gives us the room to provide context that you may not be getting from Twitter and Facebook. I’ve put together a number of lists that might also be helpful, which I try to update as much as possible:
