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Archive for May, 2011

How to use SEO in the newsroom

Posted in Online media, tagged on May 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

(Originally posted April 5, 2011)
One piece of a Q&A interview with the editor of Slate hits on a topic that remains a fault line in the newsroom: writing with search engines in mind. I’m happy to read David Plotz’s response because it sounds like the right way to handle it — you don’t let your knowledge of what gets picked up by search engines affect what you choose to cover, but once you write about something you sure as heck make sure you’re doing what you can to be sure search engines will find it. The relevant Q and A:

How much are Slate writers and editors encouraged to think about stuff like SEO when crafting a piece?

If there’s a story that we want to do just because we want to, we go ahead and do it. But when we’ve done it, we look to figure out what people are searching around this topic, what they are going to be searching for, and how we can ensure our menu lines and the various things that search engines pay attention to reflect how readers are actually searching.

Sometimes we see that people are looking for such and such topic on the Web, and if someone has a great angle on it, we decide how to do the story. So of course we keep an eye on it – it would be a mistake not to keep an eye on it.

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Lessons learned from a killing

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , on May 15, 2011| 2 Comments »

(Originally posted on Feb. 25, 2011)
Allbritton Communications unceremoniously demoted TBD.com to the status of glorified E! channel this week. If you remember all the way back to last year, when some people (like me) had high hopes for TBD as a model for local news online, read CJR’s interview with Jim Brady, who stepped down from leading TBD late last year when it must have become obvious that Allbritton intended to decapitate TBD. One thing that is true is that TBD’s model — aggregating news throughout the community, whether from partners or from competitors — was a success, as far as measured by traffic: In January, just five months after its debut, it attracted 1.5 million unique visitors, nearly double its December total of 838,000 and far surpassing November’s total, 715,000, the internal figures show; over the past three months, TBD’s traffic was substantially higher than Web sites operated by local TV stations WRC (Channel 4), WUSA (Channel 9) and WTTG (Channel 5), according to Compete.com.

“I’d even go so far to say that that model is, for a local news site, sort of indisputable. The debate over whether you work with people in your community, or whether you just say, ‘Here’s our website, and here’s all the stuff we produced today and that’s it,’ I think that has to be over. Newspapers had that power because they had the power of distribution. But on the web, people are going to go to all different sites, and so if you can be that place that connects people to good content that they’re interested in regardless of source, then you’re going to be the place they start their day. And on the web, that’s how you win: you have to be in somebody’s short list of sites they always go to. People would say, ‘Why are you linking off-site? You’re driving people away from your site!’ But what’s the counter-argument to that, that if you never link off-site, then people will never leave your website?

“I mean, they’re going to leave your website anyway, whether it’s to go check their e-mail or go to TMZ.com or whatever. So the concept that you’re losing people by doing that, is actually the opposite of what’s actually happening — which is that you’re building loyalty by performing the role you’re supposed to perform, which is to be a conduit for useful information.”

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Manifesto destinyo

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 20, 2011)
Some (a lot of) folks think newsrooms are full of pinkos, so I like to take advantage of that cultural prejudice to indulge myself by gorging a little on a manifesto here and there. In the 21st century, they’re a little scarce. Former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor Tim Radford has condensed his journalistic experience into a handy set of rules — a manifesto for the simple scribe. But you need not be a newspaper writer. The key to this manifesto is the conveying of information in the news, as described clearly in No. 5: “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.” And those of you who appear on TV could just as easily render No. 6, “Nobody has to read this crap,” as, “Nobody has to listen to this crap.” The news is the news, information is information, so if your job is the news, everything in this manifesto relates to what you do in one way or another.

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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 18, 2011)
It hasn’t worked this way for me, but one of the many branches of the Pew Research Center says that Internet users are far more likely to be active in real-world social groups. And I think most of the groups they’re talking about don’t involve dressing up in medieval garb. So why am I posting this is a news blog? Just as a way of reminding us all that people are active in their social networks, and people talk about things casually among friends, including topics in the news. Besides, I had to update this blog. I’ve had a cold and been away a while.

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The trend continues

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 5, 2011)
The internet is now the main source of news for those in the 18-29 year-old bracket. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the internet has, for the first time, surpassed TV as the primary news source for the demo. And among those 30 to 49, the internet is on track to equal, or perhaps surpass, television as the main source of national and international news within the next few years. I point this out not because it’s a new thing but because it’s a continuation.

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7 deadly sins

Posted in Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 30, 2010)
Gina Chen, who among other things contributes to the Nieman Journalism Lab, has a post on her own blog listing what she calls the seven deadly sins of social media use for journalists. It’s just another way of saying the same things about “do this” and “don’t do that,” but if you are someone who is still looking for guidance and “best practices,” every different way you hear these things is helpful. In summary:

Pride – If you’re proud of yourself for having social-media presence, don’t be. Do you have exchanges with your audience? If there’s not back-and-forth going on, you’re falling short.

Greed – On Twitter, do you like having a lot of followers but don’t follow that many people yourself? If so, you’re greedy.

Envy – If a “competitor” beats you to a legitimate story, link to it. I’ve explained this one just recently.

Wrath – That would be responding to the trolls who bait you in site comments. Gina quotes some advice from the Bible: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.”

Lust – Another term for this would be linkbaiting — posting or tweeting something trashy or vapid that will get a rush of traffic but does nothing for long-term audience engagement.

Gluttony – I think she was stretching on this one, which she defines as having too many overspecialized sites or feeds. I’m not sure that’s a big issue nowadays.

Sloth – Just what it sounds like: Not taking time to try to make social media useful.

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Call it beating a dead horse if you must

Posted in Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 28, 2010)

Poynter.org turns a spotlight today on a smallish TV station in Arkansas (it’s in the 180th ranked market) that has managed to gather nearly 20,000 Facebook fans. The news director offers four suggestions for news organizations to improve their social media presence (all of which should by now sound familiar):

1. Get everyone involved. Use the expertise in the room. Almost everyone in the 40-person KAIT newsroom has taken on a role in publishing online or on social media, from the news director himself to part-time studio camera operators. Producers, weather staff and newsroom managers are the most consistent contributors.

2. At a minimum, post items four or five hours before the news begins to push to the newscast, “but if you’re going to do it right you need to be there all the time, especially for breaking news and weather events.” Mid-morning, a poll — often related to local news — goes up on the station’s website and on Facebook, and often gets about 75 comments. The early evening newscasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. include website, Twitter and Facebook comments at least a couple times a week, as does the 10 p.m. newscast.

3. Find an internal social media guru, and let that person lead the charge. Ryan Vaughan, the station’s chief meteorologist, has embraced social media but has also told others in the building to run with it and see what they could figure out. New employees get training in KAIT’s three-screen approach (TV, Web, mobile).

4. Make sure your website is updated often and the stories also get shared on the appropriate social media. “If we think it’s something that’s going to get passed around, it goes to Twitter; if it’s going to get commented on, it goes to Facebook.”

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Crossing the digital divide

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 21, 2010)
About a month ago, Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about three signs your newsroom isn’t ready to cross the digital divide. A great many new-media and journalism-innovation types heaped praise on it. I wanted to post something here about it but struggled to figure out what to say. Thankfully, there is now a followup that helps: a Q and A with John Robinson, the editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, about changes that Michele’s original post prompted him to make. The Greensboro paper’s weekday circulation is under 65,000, so reading about changes in that newsroom is not at all like reading about structural changes in a place like Orlando, Atlanta or Dallas.

Read the whole thing, but here’s what seems to me the biggest change: Starting Jan. 1, the News & Record’s digital editor essentially becomes the No. 2 editor in the room, answering to John and carrying “the authority to direct anyone in news to do what is needed digitally. … He also is charged with knowing what the reporters are working on and making sure that they file online reports when we need them to versus when they get to it.”

In his own blog post about why he decided to make the changes, John wrote that when he read McLellan’s post, “I realized that our newsroom isn’t ready. That embarrassed me and inspired me.”

On a related note, not quite three weeks ago the new CEO of the Journal Register Co. made a much-discussed presentation about efforts to get that company transformed to a digital-first news operation, and his remarks share a key element with what John is trying: If you truly want to make a change like that, the people in charge have to be primarily digital, not rooted in the traditional platform.

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Lists and predictions

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 20, 2010)
One of the standby features that come out at the end of a year is predictions for next year. The Nieman Journalism Lab has been rolling out predictions for journalism in 2011. Give them a read, but look for trends and broad agreement. The views expressed are all over the map. Notably, I haven’t seen anyone predict the closing of any big-city newspapers — which was a popular prediction to make a couple of years ago — but one guy predicted big trouble, if not the end, for the syndication model.

On a related note, a contributor to Mashable offered his own top 10 predictions for the news media. It being the tech-oriented Mashable, the predictions are heavier on the tech side of things than the ones at Nieman are.

UPDATE 12/22: On a related note, Ken Doctor on Newsonomics brings us his list of 11 conventional news wisdoms that will be tested in 2011.

UPDATE 1/3/11: Belatedly, David Carr of the New York Times chimes in with his own media predictions.

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Link to anyone

Posted in Online media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 1, 2010)
I recently saw a journalist’s Facebook status update expressing reservations about linking to a story on the website of “a competitor” news organization. That journalist wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to say that, but it’s outdated thinking, for two reasons.

Most importantly, online, your ability to provide links to compelling stories, video and other content is what keeps people coming back to you, whether it’s your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, etc. etc. On the Web, no one cares whether you originated the story, but they care whether you are plugged in enough to the rest of the world to make their visit worth their while — and in this case, the “competitor” had simply posted a particularly juicy wire story.

Second, and the reason I put the word competitor in quote marks, is that whoever is that online your competitors are not the same as they are in the world of TV and newspapers. Your competition is everyone, every site that is trying to draw the attention of anyone. People have virtually unlimited options for how to spend their time online. Even if news online only had to compete for audience with other news online, how the public defines news is broader than the traditional media. One example from MG country: A group called Charlottesville Tomorrow covers planning and development issues in that part of Virginia, and the group has a news center set up on a Typepad site. Daily Progress editor McGregor McCance recognized that the group was all over those issues in a way his staff could not be, so he entered a partnership with the group. To varying degrees, there are individuals and groups everywhere who are intensely interested in certain issues, sometimes local, sometimes not. You can’t “compete” with them, and shouldn’t try. Pick your shots where it’s important, and if someone else has something interesting but not important enough for you or your staff to divert time to it, don’t be afraid to link to it.

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