Background.
Digital publishing continues to evolve at at dizzying pace. Platforms continue to launch new services and retire "old" ones; news organizations shift from embracing these technologies, to sometimes disavowing them shortly thereafter.
In the past year alone, for example, Snap Inc. switched from revenue-sharing with publishers to an up-front licensing model, and has since struck deals with The Washington Post, Condé Nast, and even campus newspapers. At the same time, Snap recently agreed to remove Al Jazeera's channel in response to a request from the Saudi government.
Facebook, meanwhile, launched the Facebook Journalism Project. As controversies over "fake news" continue to surround the platform, Facebook helps launch the News Integrity Initiative and begins more aggressively shutting down accounts, leading to a drop in activity for publishers. Google, meanwhile, has seen increased engagement with AMP articles, and will begin paying publishers to use "Stamp", their Instagram Stories/SnapChat Discover competitor.
And while some suggest that the term "publisher" has been rendered obsolete by new platforms, the debate over whether platforms are, in fact, publishers, continues to evolve, especially in the light of potential election influencing.
The purpose of this guide is to help instructors, practitioners and students as they experiment with multiplatform publishing. This is an evolving field: Trial and error is the primary way to learn, though we have attempted to provide high-quality, real world case studies for these platforms as much as possible.
The guide begins by listing options like Tumblr, Medium, and Wordpress for creating container sites for student
work. The second section explains the social media platforms that instructors and students can use to engage audiences, either by drawing traffic to their own site or by creating platform-specific content.
Since many of these tools are designed for multimedia, the guide includes an appendix of tools, mostly mobile apps, for creating content as well as design tools for incorporating media elements into complete stories.
Though experimentation with these platforms is a key element of learning to use them effectively, users of this guide are reminded that posting as journalists on social platforms is public and should therefore any content published should be accurate and fair. Assume that what you post is going to be found and will reflect on your professional reputations. We also stress that anyone using social platforms be mindful of issues like privacy and fair use. Some useful references are social media guidelines put out by the BBC, Reuters, the Washington Post and Arizona State University.