Diary of a Digital Dinosaur

Here’s the Dodo Bird Discoveries du jour:

• At the Social Media I workshop, Jewel Gopwani of the Detroit Free Press said pick a short Twitter name so it doesn’t cut off in retweets. In fact, she recommends only tweeting 120 characters so text isn’t cut off when people retweet.
• At Becoming a Social Media Maven, an NPR journalist said he uses LinkedIn often for searches, as a quick verification of what sources say about their credentials. “You can quickly fact check a source,” he said, sussing out false claims about employment or university degrees.
• A moment of intergenerational serendipity came at the workshop What’s Next for Journalists After the Newsroom? It happened that the night before I flew to AAJA, I’d had dinner in Seattle with my daughter, who works at Densho, a Seattle non-profit that’s created an online archive of video interviews with Japanese-American detention camp survivors. She’d been transcribing some interviews and we ended up talking about Fred Korematsu and some of the landmark civil rights  lawsuits filed to challenge the laws that rationalized the incarceration of Japanese-Americans. It turned out the moderator for the panel was Ling Woo Liu, director of the Fred Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights. It was a wonderful kismet moment for  me to go up to Liu afterward to talk about Densho and our common ground in work that keeps alive the memory of these forebears who make what we do possible.  
• Favorite tip from Becoming a Social Media Maven workshop: KSAX, a small TV station in Minnesota, did a Facebook contest to motivate viewers to like their page. They promised when they got to 3,000 likes their meteorologist would get Tazered  – the goal was met in  no time flat!

— Sarah Eden Wallace