Our weekly webinar series continues over the next three weeks with social media. We will cover tactics for building your online community, making your content more shareable and using Facebook Subscribe for reporting. We will also have Fresh Air's Melody Kramer guest presenting during our third week.

In a webinar with stations, Barbara Van Woerkom, NPR Research Librarian, showed the steps she takes when digging for information online.

By the time a sad story about the killing of a rare white buffalo went viral, Scott Harvey had already written three stories. Scott is the news director at KETR and the station's sole full-time news staffer. 

The  buffalo, born about one year ago and named Lightning Medicine Cloud, was found dead last week at the Lakota Ranch near Greenville, Texas. 

In a webinar with stations, Margot Williams, NPR News Investigations database correspondent, showed the steps she takes when digging for information online. 

Our weekly webinar series returns this week with a series from NPR's Investigative team. Join us for this week's session on using social media tools to find credible information via skillful searching.

WEEK 1: Thursday. May 3, 1-2 p.m. ET

How to Use Social Media to Track Down Sources

Looking for online profiles, contacts, resumes, photos or personal connections for a person? Discover strategies and tips for using social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn,Twitter, etc. for news gathering, research and fact-checking. 

Margot Williams works with NPR’s News Investigations team. She's been a news researcher, database editor and investigative reporter for 30 years at Time Warner, The Washington Post, The New York Times.

We use GoToMeeting for our training webinars. GoTo is great -- it allows you to watch the webinar, ask questions through a chat box, talk to the presenter. But it does have some quirky tendencies.  Our goal with this post is to make the technical steps as painless as possible so that you can focus on the presentation and avoid doing something like this.

This may be the best, most informative, most inspiring 80 minutes of your day: NPR’s Matt Thompson explains what makes a dynamic public radio news website and what drives audience growth and audience engagement online. Watch the video

This is a presentation Thompson made at the Knight Digital Media Center for the Leadership Summit on the Future of Local News and Public Media.

Check out this beautifully shot interview at KUTNews.org.

I see all the makings of a traditional public radio two-way in this video because of the Q&A format, the thoughtfulness of the content and the ability to hear the subject speak in his own words. Beyond that, the interview stands out for several reasons: 

The subject is the focus. There is no host or reporter injecting himself into the conversation. For me, not having an intermediary creates a more intimate experience between me and the subject.

The first week at a new job is always a mix of excitement and confusion. It’s a quiz, really. How many new logins can you remember? How many new names and faces? Is this the way to the bathroom or the supply closet? Add to that a new city, new apartment, (same cats), and altered habits.

It’s fun but it’s wrenching. So after all that, why do any of us pack up our things and start over again? Well, we do it because of opportunity. We have the chance to use the skills we gained in our previous jobs and apply them to a new challenge.

You can find the recorded webinars from the following sessions below: 

Writing for the Web: Features and Spots
Writing for the Web: Headlines and SEO
Writing for the Web: Web-original Content

Slides for:

Features and Spots 
Headlines and SEO
Web-original content