The social media curator RebelMouse launched over the summer and has become a popular tool for tech-savvy journalists. According to a Poynter. article, the site allows users to connect their social media accounts to form a page displaying content that they’ve shared.
The article mentioned that many journalists are using it as a means to aggregate their own work. Several news organizations, including Patch, TechCrunch, Salon and ProPublica have made use of RebelMouse.
Poynter. explained five ways journalists can use RebelMouse to their advantage:
- They can use it to showcase their tweets. Jeff Sonderman described it as “more elegant than simply embedding a Twitter widget.”
- Journalists can curate information about a significant story using Twitter hashtags.
- RebelMouse also allows for the creation of a “social dashboard,” which can aggregate all the photos videos and links from your or your company’s social media accounts. Here’s RebelMouse’s page.
- Journalists can create more interesting and riveting topic pages. Salon used RebelMouse for its recent election coverage.
- Organizations can use it to power their homepages. On the video journalism startup NowThis, the RebelMouse layout is what viewers see on the homepage — though I think it is unlikely legacy news organizations will embrace that idea any time soon.
As journalists we are constantly pressured to get familiar with and use social media in order to stay relevant to consumers. We want to present the news in a way readers want to ingest it. This seems like such a practical idea because consumers will have the option between flipping through different news and social media sites to get information, or getting it compiled all in one spot for them. It also seems like a great tool for self-promotion among journalists and a way to create something like a social media portfolio.
The article also read:
That last one is especially important, Niketa Patel, social media product manager at CNN Money, told me. If you want to hand-pick the stories that show up on your RebelMouse page and tweak their headlines, photos and descriptions, you can. And if you want to set it and forget it, you can.
