News University offers Webinar on Facebook

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — We’ll be focusing on Facebook after we're done with Twitter, but if you want to learn about how journalists can use the social networking site, News University is offering a 2 p.m. Webinar on Thursday (that's tomorrow).

The session will focus on:

• Best practices for news organizations using Facebook.
• Techniques to build your online presence — personally and as a news organization.
• Ethical concerns.
• Strategies to build relationships with your online audience.

The cost is $24.95 and it lasts about an hour. I've learned a lot about the latest trends in online journalism from other News University Webinars. So, while we will be devoting some time on Facebook, this can only add to what we will explore.

The growing twitosphere

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Ignore Twitter at your own peril.

That was the message I heard from a presentation by Twitter media veteran T.J. Ortenzi at an Online News Association training seminar I attended last month in Ann Arbor. He cited some staggering numbers why. The microblogging Web site already has 25 million users and it's expected to quadruple to 100 million by the end of 2010 and 1 billion by 2013 (Well, Twitter thinks so in internal documents, anyway — we should be skeptical — we are journalists).