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Archive for May, 2011

Debunking myths

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

(Originally posted Nov. 30, 2010)
Today’s required reading (for journalists, at least): Mark Luckie, the “innovations editor” for the Washington Post, addresses 5 myths about digital journalism. I’m not going to go into the details — that’s why I offer the link — but he touches on several of the key anxiety points present in newsrooms across the country. If there’s nothing in the five that hasn’t worried you, let me borrow your life for a while.

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Facebook – it’s everywhere you want to be

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 23, 2010)
On Monday business and marketing strategist Brian Solis posted an analysis of Facebook’s explosive growth, and his thoughts on the larger social implications (plus the implications for Google). It’s indirectly a good argument for the importance of Facebook for a news organization’s audience engagement. Within the piece are some stats that drive home how many sites of all kinds have added Facebook features:

More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform.

150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

According to comScore, Facebook traffic soared by 55.2% in the past year, hitting 151.1 million in October.

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Pulling local together

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 15, 2010)
SaveTheNews.org has an interesting look behind an experimental hyperlocal news-aggregation site in Boulder, Colo., Slices of Boulder. Steve Outing, who oversees the site, describes it as, “It’s curation, and aggregation, and intelligent semantic filtering and processing, and text mining, and personalization offered down to a micro level.” Aggregation seems a natural addition to mainstream news sites, but so far not many seem to be doing it. As Outing says:

“If local news organizations are to survive and be relevant, they must learn to curate and aggregate links to the best local content being produced online for their communities. If they don’t take this on, someone else will.”

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More tips for engaging the audience

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 11, 2010)
Poynter.org has a good post today on ways to get people to contribute good content to your site. But I have a beef with the title, because many people are going to look at “content” and think the tips apply to getting people to send in stories, photos, video, etc. They apply to everything, from in-person conversation to interviews to simple comments on stories or Facebook updates all the way up; it’s just trickier online. (Ironically, tip No. 1 is to avoid using the term “user-generated content,” which I’d broaden to avoiding the word “content” as much as possible, though it can’t always be avoided.)

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More required reading

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 10, 2010)
Here’s some long-ish reading that’s well worth the time: a piece by Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of The Guardian, on the value that linking and collaboration bring to journalism. You may be unfamiliar with The Guardian because it’s in England, but it’s a leader in the use of new media tools in service of Big J journalism. The post linked above includes several examples of that.

Here’s the important underlying philosophy of the approach:

“Openness is shorthand for the way in which the vast majority of information is, and will continue to be, part of a larger network, only a tiny proportion of which is created by journalists. Information may not want to be free, but it does want to be linked. It’s difficult to think of any information in the modern world which doesn’t acquire more meaning, power, richness, context, substance and impact by being intelligently linked to other information.

“Collaboration refers to the way we can take this openness one stage further. By collaborating with this vast network of linked information — and those who are generating and sharing it — we can be infinitely more powerful than if we believe we have to generate it all ourselves.”

One thing I would differ with Rusbridger on: He describes himself in the post as a utopian based on his own embrace of the changes and experimentation going on in journalism. I’d call him a realist.

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The missing piece

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

(Originally posted Oct. 29, 2010)
After several years of helping judge big projects with interactives and other online elements, you notice a pattern: Most of them involved a huge amount of work, and yet they almost always have the reader/user as an afterthought. It might be a pretty and impressive project, but it’s usually still a one-way communication: We, the news organization, have pulled this information together and present here in highly readable/viewable form for you, our audience. One project that didn’t is getting a lot of buzz at the Online News Association convention: the Roanoke Times’ I-81: Fear, Facts and the Future. As the Nieman Journalism lab notes, it’s not a particularly newsy topic, just one of lingering interest in the community. But the buzz is about the online presentation’s design as a hub that lets users interact with the data, read all the stories easily, and leave comments. It is a finalist for a Knight Public Service Award (and by the end of the day it may be the winner.) The site went up in May, and as of late September people were still leaving comments. The plan is to keep the site active and update the data on it.

11/1 UPDATE: It didn’t win.

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You can’t do everything

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 20, 2010)
The Knight Foundation announced a second round of traditional media (three newspapers, one public radio station) partnering with hyperlocal sites, essentially aggregating headlines from these small sites. In a post titled “Collaboration is the new competition,” Jan Schaffer of J-Lab gives details of how round one went. There’s not a monolithic model in it. Some of the partnerships called for links back and forth; some allowed the traditional media partners to republish material from the hyperlocal partners.

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The resources traditional newsrooms have lost in recent years seem unlikely to return, certainly not soon, given the continuing sluggishness in the advertising market. These kind of partnerships can help fill the voids that the past years’ cuts have left. No, it won’t be the same. But if you pick your partners carefully, as The Daily Progress has done with Charlottesville Tomorrow — a local nonprofit group that focuses on development and planning issues — then what you get will help your site become the hub where people come first to find reliable local headlines.

10/22 UPDATE: One of the newspapers that participated in round one of the hyperlocal partnerships, The Seattle Times, won the Innovator of the Year award from APME, in part because of that partnership.

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Some news organizations use Facebook well

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 19, 2010)
And then there is The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. I don’t mean to pick on that paper, but the blog Journalistics posted a listing of the number of Facebook fans of the nation’s largest newspapers, and The Star-Ledger had just 372 (although today it’s up to 381, probably people who saw the list). You as an organization have got to be making a serious effort to avoid using Facebook to have numbers that low. For example, the Facebook page of The Weekly Observer in South Carolina shows 1,167 fans. (TBO.com, the site affiliated with both The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, ranks 17th on Journalistics’ list.) Examining these two actually shows a lot about what to do and what not to do.

On the not-to-do side there is just one, but it’s a biggie: The Star-Ledger simply does not post very often. Five times all year, as of the time I’m writing this. The only thing they are doing write is including links.

So what does The Weekly Observer do right? A lot of it is the opposite of The Star-Ledger: frequent posting. From 12:30 p.m. Monday to now, there have been four posts. The paper is a weekly, but this fan page gets daily attention. And everything has a link. As noted yesterday, posts carrying images and links not only get more clicks, they elevate your posts in the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine whether your fans even see what you posted.

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Retweeting the competition

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 13, 2010)
Lost Remote posted a survey:

“Last week we posted an entertaining Twitter exchange between competing TV stations in Seattle, and ‘Zhendirez’ left the comment, ‘Heck, I retweet the competition when they have something interesting that I know we won’t.’ So what do you think? When (if ever) should a news organization retweet something from a competing news organization?”

For the record, I’ve always believed in the soundness of the theory that retweeting the competition (all competition, all platforms) tells people you are plugged into the news, no matter where it comes from, and they come to think of you as the premier news source. No one, however, encourages retweeting mere rumors.

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Like a foreign population

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 12, 2010)

The “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog reflects today on a recent study of young media consumers by BVA, a French market research firm, and <a href=”http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/10/digital-natives-more-different-than-you.html” title=”the larger implications for the news industry”>the larger implications for the news industry</a> if the findings can be extrapolated to young people over here as well. Summary: Our existing products may be very poorly positioned to appeal to this group, which distrusts all authority, relies foremost on friends for information, talks back, and values speed, mobility and bite-size information.

“The research is important to anyone worried about the future of the newspaper business, because it demonstrates how profoundly next-generation consumers differ from the aging geezers (this writer included) who account for more than half of newspaper readership in the United States even though they represent barely 30% of the population.

“The French study found that young people have utterly different attitudes than their elders with respect to such seminal concepts as, say, institutional authority. Further, those attitudes are diametrically opposed to the values, expectations and economic underpinnings that suffuse the newspaper business.

“The almost complete disconnect between generations means editors and publishers have lots to learn – tout de suite – about modern consumers, if they hope to preserve the long-term sustainability and value of their franchises. But it won’t be easy. Because learning to think, speak and act in this new and alien paradigm is even harder than learning French.”

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