I’m giving a talk to DTH editors this week about ways they can use Twitter better and came up with these tips on what to do and what not to do. Anything else I should include?

(Marvin Austin photo is DTH file)

Patrick Thornton asked on Twitter yesterday “what’s in your mobile kit?”

Here’s what I carry with me:

• Several pens.
• A reporter’s notebook.
• My Blackberry.
• My Olympus voice recorder and a pair of headphones.
• A Casio Exilim that shoots video, records audio and takes photos.

I wish I would get into the practice of keeping my Nikon D-40 with me more often so I could get better using it, but it’s so bulky for most of my everyday use. Eventually, I’d love to have a MacBook to take on the road with me, but I can send short breaking news text to Twitter or e-mail from my Blackberry until then.

For the breaking news kits I hope to build at the DTH, I think some version of the above is a good start. We use Flip video cameras, and there’s no debating their ease. A microphone for the audio recorders would be useful to gather audio for publication and not just internal note-taking.

Because The Daily Tar Heel’s strategy next year involves social media more than ever, we felt it would be helpful to establish a policy to guide reporters on how to use it. My goal was to create a policy that emphasizes the value of social media while sets some standards so as not to embarass the paper.

In general, we plan to trust our reporters to know what is acceptable and what is not. We’re going to accompany this policy with training at the beginning of the year on how to use social media.

10 rules for using social media:

1. Use your own name and photo. If you using your account for DTH reporting, identify yourself as a DTH reporter in your profile.
2. Tell your editor if you plan to tweet as a DTH reporter. Likewise, let your editor know if you plan to livetweet something.
3. In general, do not post something online that would not be appropriate to run in the paper or on dailytarheel.com.*
4. You must disclose yourself as a DTH reporter to potential sources the same way you would if you were meeting face-to-face.
5. Do not disclose political affiliation on profiles and do not write about your political preferences in updates.
6. Do not criticize a colleague’s work.
7. Promoting your work via social media is encouraged.
8. In the interest of transparency, staff meetings are considered open unless otherwise stated.
9. It is acceptable to “friend” sources, but do it evenly. For instance, if you cover the Chapel Hill Town Council, if you wish to follow one member on Twitter, you should follow all of them.
10. Respond to people who contact you via social media. If you aren’t the appropriate person to answer their questions, refer them to whoever is.

In making this list I looked at several professional papers’ guidelines on social media. Most missed the mark with the limits that they placed. I want to make it as easy as possible for readers and sources to contact DTH reporters and place a high premium on transparency. My experience with social media is that it’s expanded my reporting capabilities and made me more responsive to our readership, and I wouldn’t want to limit other reporters.

Feel free to comment with suggestions/improvements. I’m also interested to hear if other college papers have social media policies or are looking to create them.

*Added after a suggestion from Jason Spencer.

I joined Twitter just over a year ago, after the early-adopters but before the masses. Connecting with professionals and college media gurus online opened up a world of things for me to read and learn.

It’s also changed how I do journalism. I’ve used Twitter to livetweet a presidential debate; update students at UNC during a bomb hoax; provide instant updates from a court appearance for six men charged with murder; and gather story ideas. Part of dailytarheel.com’s redesign process has included gathering feedback from Twitter followers.

Twitter’s invaluable, and if you don’t like it you probably don’t use it enough. There are people out there tweeting what they had for lunch, but if that’s all their feed offers, I don’t follow them. There’s more to Twitter: If you focus the community of people you follow on those with like interests and thoughtful updates, it’s worth the time and effort.

Three to 5 inches of snow is predicted for Chapel Hill on Tuesday — exciting because of how rare snow here is and because it’s a chance to try some collaborative journalism. 

Inspired by the recent efforts in Washington state following flooding, I’m really interested to see what Chapel Hill’s online community of journalists and residents can do. In situations like this, where news organizations have a public service responsibility, it makes no sense not to do as Ryan Thornburg suggests: ”Collaborate on commodity and breaking news; Compete and crowdsource on analytical and accountability journalism.”

I plan on Twittering (@saragregory), uploading photos to Flickr and saving other weather-related articles to Publish2. I’m going to use a #CH-snow hashtag for it all. If you’re in Chapel Hill/Orange County, I invite you to do the same and see what we can come up with collectively.

And of course, it’s quite possible — it being the South, after all — that nothing will happen, and grocery stores will sell out of milk and bread for no reason.