FAQ

Frequently Ask Questions about Nyouse

Q: Won’t Nyouse.com be overrun with spam?

A: No. Nyouse.com is moderated. So anything that isn’t news will be hidden from view. If a company has genuine news to announce, then they’re welcome to use Nyouse. But marketing and sales messages will be blocked. Repeated Nyouse abusers will be blocked from Nyouse.com.

Q: Why is using Nyouse better than just emailing a journalist?

A: If you know a journalist, or even if you know many journalists, then you’re already one step ahead of the average person. Nyouse was created to give people with no media connections a voice, and a platform on which to connect with journalists. By tagging tweets with #nyouse, a message can be viewed by limitless journalists. So even if you know a journalist or two, if you want to maximise publicity for your story, using Nyouse gives you potentially endless exposure.

Q: Why is using Nyouse better than just posting my message on Twitter?

A: A message on Twitter might be read by millions of people. But, if you’re like most of us and have hundreds or even thousands of followers, your audience is actually very limited. Nyouse is a system for identifying news items that you want professional journalists to pick up.

Q: What are the implications for newspapers?

A: Nyouse is not a news channel. It’s a communication channel for people to reach journalists with news. Journalists can then take that news to whichever media they work with. Nyouse is not trying to revolutionise the news – we’d just like to give ordinary people a voice and a clear channel for reaching the media with their story.

Q: What’s in it for a journalist who prefers exclusive stories?

(thanks to Jon Pratty for his question)

A: Nyouse’s primary goal is to give ordinary people a chance to present their stories to journalists. Whether or not professional journalists, citizen journalists or bloggers pursue that story is their choice. Nyouse can help journalists discover new stories, but there is no guarantee that many other journalists won’t find the same story.

To my mind (the mind of Leif Kendall) it seems that it’s better for society at large if a story is told by more than one journalist in more than one medium. If you (as a journalist) are anxious to secure a scoop, I recommend you check Nyouse regularly (or subscribe to the RSS feed) and follow up interesting stories with haste.

Q: Journalists don’t need Nyouse; they can just use hashtag searches to find news

(thanks to Stephen Hui for his question)

A: One problem with the current system is that there is no system. Without Nyouse, journalists can search for particular hashtags, but there is not currently a single convention for identifying newsworthy items.

By tagging a tweet with #nyouse, a person is making a clear decision to have their message featured on nyouse.com and delivered to journalists. And Nyouse is encouraging people to tweet their news because we’re providing a dedicated space for their messages to be seen by journalists. If enough people know about Nyouse, we can help to draw out stories that would otherwise be smothered by bureaucracy and apathy.

The other benefit of using the #nyouse system is that nyouse.com is moderated and will be categorised by location. So journalists will not have to sift through spam and junk to find nuggets of gold. As Nyouse expands we’ll be adding more features to make the news items easier to sort.

Q: As a journalist I can use Twitter in much more complex ways to discover stories. Why do I need Nyouse?

A: Nyouse isn’t trying to replace the methods that journalists currently use to find stories on Twitter. Nyouse is trying to cut a clear path through the noise so that when an individual with a small voice cries out, we can hear them.

Nyouse is another system by which journalists can discover stories on Twitter – it’s not the only one. We’d like journalists to carry on as normal, but check out Nyouse from time to time, just to see what people are saying.

Nyouse wants to help ordinary people and journalists. Let us know (comment on the blog or email leif@kendallcopywriting.co.uk) if there’s anything we can do better.