Screen shot, yikyakapp.com
On Tuesday, Meagan Doll reported for Mediashift how the anonymous, location-based messaging app Yik Yak and the University of Florida’s Innovation News Center are collaborating. Doll spoke with INC’s director, Matt Sheehan, about why the university is experimenting with Yik Yak.
Our College’s mission is to not only provide training in the existing forms of good journalism, public relations, advertising and telecommunications, but also to explore the intersections of where all of those disciplines meet, as well as experiment with emerging platforms. Our INC’s mission is not only to serve our community and our students in the educational sense, but also to serve our industries in being a guinea pig or test case for what’s coming next. And with Yik Yak’s emergence on college campuses, we are in a unique position in that we have thousands of young people in our audience. And while many news organizations have that, we are tied into them because they are also the majority of our staff. So, we hear about Yik Yak, our news managers start using it, and it’s really a great tool for listening.
In the piece, Sheehan detailed how INC will try and use Yik Yak for news, the problems it has encountered so far and some advice for other journalists who are ready to experiment.
Just get in there and play. You have to. To understand it, you have to be a user, and you really have to jump in. Before we even thought about this partnership, I and my fellow news managers were on Yik Yak — the running joke in the newsroom was that we were probably on more than the students. We definitely had some very early adopters and some very heavy users among our students. And it’s a collaboration process with students in listening and finding how they use the tools and what the tools can be used for, and then helping them apply more of a journalistic approach to it than an entertainment approach, which so many folks use Yik Yak for now, as we found in the early days of Facebook and Twitter. Maybe not everyone is able to participate in being and listening on those platforms as much as we are right now — I’m not sure where they are in their development pipeline with opening these sort of features up to other media organizations or journalism schools — but just engaging and monitoring that is important. So take time to learn what the norms are for the platforms and don’t be afraid to jump in.
INC’s staffers aren’t the only journalists on Yik Yak though. In March, Chris Thompson wrote for Poynter about how journalists at a number of organizations used the app to get an instant response to Senator Ted Cruz’ presidential run announcement.
