Best @RupertMurdoch tweets of all time

Storified by Anthony De Rosa · Mon, May 14 2012 12:38:49

A version of this appears on page 23 of the June 2012 issue of Reuters Magazine

We conducted a survey of our @Reuters followers recently, and asked them this:  sometimes the Reuters wire publishes alerts in ALL CAPS, usually when the news is urgent.  Should we run them in uppercase and lower case on Twitter, as we would for normal conversation? What is more important?

The answer choices were: a) Receiving accurate news quickly even if that news is delivered in an “all caps” tweet or b) I’d like news to be reformatted from “all caps” before being sent, even if it takes longer.

At the time of this post, we received 1181 responses, 77 percent were in favor of “all caps,” while 23 percent were opposed.

I want to address why I think it’s important to sometimes post “all caps” tweets. First, I need to explain for some who don’t subscribe to our wire why they’re in “all caps” to begin with. Urgent one-line messages on our wire are called “snaps.” They precede longer, more in-depth reports.

They alert people to urgent news. The folks who manage our Twitter accounts don’t post in “all caps” to the wire. We receive the snaps that way. When there is urgent news, the quickest and most accurate way to share that news with our Twitter followers is to take that snap directly from the wire to you on Twitter, without rewriting it, without caps and without the possibility of rewriting it and making a mistake.

While we review these options often, the survey indicates that this is what our audience wants. We save these type of “all caps” Tweets for what we believe is urgent news.

We’ll continue to review these decisions, and they’re subject to change to make sure we serve you best and provide you with timely, accurate information. Feel free to leave comments here under this post to let us know what you think.

Using a combination of in-studio anchors and citizens piped in from Skype reporting directly from the ground, Syria al-Shaab manages to broadcast 12 hours of live programming a day from a country that won’t allow foreign reporters in.

“They hacked into our Skype account about a week ago and sent a virus to all the contacts in it. Every time they do something like that, we know we are doing our jobs” said Summer Ajlouni, founder of Syria al-Shaab in a report by Dan Rather of HDNet.

The channel exists underground. The Syrian regime, according to the broadcasters, is watching, they’ve tried to shut down their satellite broadcasts and jam their Skype contacts, but it has only made the tiny outfit want to do more.

Ahman based Syria al-Shaab is bankrolled on the back of donations with a total of 15 people to run the entire network, in front and behind the camera. They rely on citizens for footage, which are taken with their cellphones and computer cameras.

The channel is seen by satellite and broadcasted online and shared across social media, by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Anchor Qutaiba Al-Khatib left a job in the UAE to join the fledgling Syria al-Shaab because he believed in what they were doing.

Dan Rather Reports will be taking a close look at Syria al-Shaab on HDnet, airing on Tuesday, June 12th at 8pmET/5pmPT with a reair at 11pmET/8pmPT. Here’s a preview.

Social location app foursquare has released a completely redesigned version that attempts to shift from making “checking in” the focus to discovering places to go, things to do and events to see.

In their third year, the company has faced some losses at the top of their team, including their head of talent acquisition, a top business development colleague, and their co-founder. Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley discusses the shakeup and the departure of co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Two startups are trying to disrupt the traditional television model. One of them, Aereo, has been taken to court by the incumbent networks. The other, Skitter has made deals with the content providers they’re rebroadcasting. Here’s a look at both in the latest Tech Tonic.

Facebook is launching a stand-alone photo sharing mobile application. This comes weeks after the social network bought Instagram for a billion dollars.

Someone please explain to me why this makes sense.

Here’s why I ask. Instagram, after its 2010 launch, quickly became the most popular photo sharing application on mobile devices. After the acquisition, many users feared that Facebook would ruin the Instagram app. Until now, Facebook has left the product alone. That was a wise move.

And now comes along this new mobile app, called “Facebook Camera.” In almost all aspects, it’s an inferior product to Instagram. The interface is clumsy; the filters are not as good; the product feels like something someone developed long before Instagram and was crushed out of existence.

Facebook should leave Instagram alone, but allow existing Facebook users to log into Instagram using their Facebook login. Some folks make the argument that Instagram users don’t want Facebook users on the Instagram network. I think that this is anti-social. Remember this: Instagram never wanted to be the cool indie band you liked before they became popular. They always wanted — and still want — to be as big as, or bigger, than Facebook. To appease these people, perhaps you decide to use Instagram in a “Path”-like experience, where you allow only people you want to view your photos by making your profile “invite-only.” This is already available on Instagram so I don’t so what the issue is. Path is a competing photo-sharing app that is banking on people only wanting to photo share with small groups and not the general public.

Facebook had easier options that it could have considered beside launching its own mobile app. Yet it pursued that path. Producing an inferior product must have cost money and certainly must have taken time to develop. Even if the app were developed before Facebook bought Instagram, it would have been less damaging for Facebook to pretend that it had never existed than to confuse the marketplace by introducing two competing products from the same company.

What were they thinking?

Mike Daisey’s fantastical story about the mistreatment of workers at Foxconn and how he duped This American Life into airing it as fact is now well known. (if somehow you’ve been under a rock for the last week, here are smart takes by Jack Shafer and Felix Salmon) It may not, however be the first time that This American Life was duped by a con artist.

In fact it might be the third time, as Jack Shafer pointed out after Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Moth” story was aired on This American Life, which Gladwell later copped to being not entirely fact based.

A story that This American Life aired back in 1997 involved disgraced former journalist Stephen Glass discussing his time as a psychic. Glass later wrote this story for Harper’s February 1998 issue, as Aida Edemariam recounts in a May 2004 story for the Guardian.

The trouble was, in the February 1998 issue, we had just published a piece by Glass, a colourful tale of late nights spent working as a phone psychic. It had been checked by a colleague and had passed muster, but I was set to work, rechecking. The Post’s Howard Kurtz returned to the story a week later: “The New Republic has finished sifting through the journalistic wreckage left behind by Stephen Glass and the findings aren’t pretty: two-thirds of the 41 stories he wrote for the magazine were at least partially fabricated. Six articles” – and here Kurtz quoted from the New Republic’s apology, a half-page model of restraint compared to the Times’s 14,000-word mea culpa about its own fabricating journalist Jayson Blair five years later – ” ‘could be considered entirely or nearly entirely made up’.”

Here’s the audio of  Glass on This American Life:

Here’s the full episode that Glass appeared on (h/t Gabriel Snyder)

Hat tip to Duncan Ferguson for bringing the Stephen Glass association to This American Life to my attention.

From Occupy Wall Street in its various locations around the world, to Tahrir Square in Egypt and now to Syria, where few reporters are able to enter, livestreams from citizen journalists increasingly are becoming the only window into what’s actually happening at any given moment during some of the biggest news events.

At the outset of the revolution in Egypt, a streaming video service called Bambuser allowed live video to be streamed directly from Tahrir Square. Ramy Raoof, human rights activist and editor for Egyptian Blog for Human Rights, regularly provided live video using nothing but his Nokia E90 camera phone.

This video, documenting a protest of the death and torture of Khaled Said, netted nearly 4,000 live viewers. The archive has been watched nearly 16,000 times.

Tim Pool has been written up in many publications, including Fast Company, Spin and Time Magazine for his livestreaming of Occupy Wall Street around the country and in particular in New York City. We spoke to Tim recently on Reuters TV’s Tech Tonic about the equipment Tim uses to capture events on streams that last for days and days.

Now, livestreamers like William Gagan and Geoffrey Shively are taking their act overseas. The two citizen journalists crowdfunded a trip into Syria to attempt to livestream from within the borders many journalists have been unable to cross. Shively is an agent with Telecomix, a loosely networked group of hacktivists who provide the connective tissue for livestreamers like Shively, as they have for others around the world, in Egypt, Libya and anywhere else that a need for raw uninterrupted access arises.

Gagan and Shively met up in Istanbul on Feb. 21st, and with the help of a fixer they met at their hostel, flew to Gaziantep, on Turkey’s southern border. They filmed these videos over the next two days, slipping into Syria three times.

They met up with the Free Syrian Army and recorded a message pleading with the world for assistance.

William, who goes by @WillyFoReal on Twitter, gave video updates on what he saw and heard as he slipped into Syria.

I interviewed William Gagan and Geoff Shivley about their entry and escape in Syria, the danger they encountered, and how they barely escaped with their lives after having their transmissions intercepted.

Facebook unveiled a number of new opportunities for advertising on their social network today, the biggest being the ability to post ads to mobile devices, which they had not yet been offering.

Facebook calls the new ad opportunities “Premium for Facebook” and it opens up the following placements:

• Larger ads on the side of the Facebook home page that users see when they first log in
• Ads that run inside the Facebook Newsfeed
• Ads on mobile devices
• Ads that appear when a user logs out of Facebook
• The ability to run video ads on all these placements

We were not aware of just how many folks were using Facebook on mobile until they filed for their IPO. According to the filing, there were 425 million monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile products in December 2011. This gives advertisers another opportunity to get their products in front of Facebook users. Mobile is growing at an incredible pace. eMarketer estimates Facebook’s ad rev will pass $5 billion this year, accounting for 6.5% of all online ad spending. That doesn’t even factor in the new ad opportunities they’ve unveiled today.

Here’s more on the way Facebook makes money from Reuters TV: Tech Tonic

Excitement around the meteoric rise of Pinterest may come at a cost to those jumping on the social media site. Its terms of service say it can distribute, license and sell any content you put on their site. What?! That’s right. And it is creating an uproar in the online world with many people wondering – can Pinterest really do this? I get to the bottom of this legalese with the help of tech, media and business lawyer and consultant, Ash Kalb.