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Archive for the ‘Online media’ Category

General workplace lessons

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

(Originally posted on June 3, 2010)

A must-read blog post by Steve Buttry, with lessons that apply to any job anywhere, not just or even particularly in media. The summary:

-Don’t let complaints about the things you can’t control distract you from focusing on what you can control and finishing your job.
-Take responsibility for your work and admit your mistakes.
-Tradition is no excuse for failure to innovate.

A warning to people who aren’t sports fans: The explanation of these three lessons is entirely in the context of sports. However, you don’t have to be a sports fan or even understand the nuances of any one sport to appreciate the points he makes.

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Using social media for reporting

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

(Originally posted May 26, 2010)

A great example from The Palm Beach Post showing ways to use social networking sites as reporting tools. The summary:

The Post’s social-media editor saw something on Twitter about a popular restaurant closing. She instant-messaged a business reporter, then 1) searched Twitter, 2) searched openbook, a site that lets you find public Facebook status updates even if you’re not logged on or have never used Facebook, and found two posts seemingly related to the business’s trouble, which she sent to the business reporter, 3) did a Google search of social media postings, and 4) tried two search engines for photo-sharing services. As the post says:

“The point of all this is not that Ouzo Blue’s closing is the news of the century (although they did have great melitzanosalata…) but that there are several social-media avenues available to search for information on a news story, to find people to interview and more.”

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Digital first – early lessons

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

(Originally posted May 20, 2010)

I can’t MAKE you read it, but a Poynter.org post about the early lessons of the reformed Journal Register’s “digital first, print last” approach ought to be required reading. Why:

“When we started out, we said, ‘We’re going to do what? How are we going to do this?'” said Laura Kessel, managing editor of the Willoughby News-Herald. “Now we’re showing ourselves that we can operate in a world that, even six months ago, used to be foreign to us.” 

The lessons are useful for both newspapers and television stations because many of them deal with audience-interaction and moving news online first. From Perkasie News-Herald Managing Editor Emily Morris:

“It’s been such an interesting experience to find out what residents are concerned about and then incorporate that into our coverage. We still have to get out there and cover stories, but I think all the reporters are thinking a lot differently now about what tools we can use to do that.”

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Tending to your ‘naked little creatures’

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

(Originally posted May 17, 2010)

For those of you who have any responsibility for writing headlines for the Web, the New York Times has a must-read column by David Carr on that subject. The basic problem being addressed: You can’t just take a headline that would work perfectly well in a newspaper and push it out to the Web and, by extension, your site’s RSS feed:

“Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, ‘naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.'”

Headlines for the Web have to be written with search engines in mind. That means short (the programs that search through headlines don’t even read as long as a Twitter post) and to the point, but ideally without taking too much life out of the headline.

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The thinking behind continuous-news strategy

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

(Originally posted May 13, 2010)

I’ve heard more than once news people questioning why news sites (many, not all) put their newest stories at the top of the list of headlines as new things are posted through the day. A post at Lost Remote sums it up:

“This is hard for traditional news sites to grasp – we’re used to the finished news product and deciding which story to tell the audience is the lead – but continuous news is how people consume information online. It also doesn’t hurt that the format plays very nicely with Google. I’ve seen what happens at stations that switch to this web-native format, and the results are astounding: instant jumps in pageviews and time spent on site, and by several multiples as well.”

That post also cites a longer explanation posted on the pomoblog. A key point:

“The paradigm of ranked presentation is what the newspaper industry dragged with it to the Web in the mid ’90s, which was then copied by the television industry, because, well, that’s the way media companies did it. … Meanwhile, the people who built the Web moved in an entirely different direction, in part, because they knew something media companies didn’t — that the Web is a real time database, not a transport system for content.”

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A slog

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

(Originally posted on May 7, 2010)

One of my least favorite parts of any local-election season was always compiling profile information, especially when there were a lot of candidates. You knew it was going to take forever to pull together, it would be largely boring stuff, it would disappear almost forgotten, and most people who needed it might never see it. The Web, of course, lets this stuff have a longer, more useful life. This year the Winston-Salem Journal made it easier for people to sift through it by compiling it into a searchable database. It might still be tedious to compile, but it’s more useful for voters.

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Getting your videos seen

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

(Originally posted May 6, 2010)

Interesting if unsurprising fact from a report that says the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels, with newspaper sites lagging in both total video views and growth: Google drives nearly 40 percent of the views, so you need to be sure your videos are tagged with search engines in mind.

Another interesting fact: Although video on newspaper Web sites has the lowest rate of being viewed, the people who do click on those videos are much more likely than viewers on other sites to watch through to the end.

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Find something different

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

(Originally posted April 27, 2010)


The RTDNA site posts tips for better video storytelling from NBC News Correspondent Bob Dotson, who presented an RTDNA@NAB session called “How Better Storytelling Can Save Your Job.” Among the tips: avoid pack journalism, meaning that when covering a news event that others are also covering, find something different that no one else can see.

This reminds me of a discussion about covering annual events, such as major festivals, during a recent peer review at the Danville Register & Bee. One editor said he won’t send reporters anymore to cover such events. And it’s true that if you tell a reporter to bring you a report on the festival, you’re going to get the same expendable story every year. That’s why it’s better to ask the reporter to come back with a story about someone or something particular that he or she finds at the festival. For instance, a Winston-Salem Journal reporter once went to cover the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, one of the all-time big annual events in the region. Stories about it are almost always interchangeable — scenery, weather, a few happy quotes. But this one reporter came back with something different — he had gone to the area where the competitors in the strength events, the guys who toss around telephone poles and big rocks, were waiting for their event. They were passing the time by showing off, bending nails and smashing things against their heads. Fascinating stuff, and no one else had ever gotten it before.

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Socialize your promos

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

(Originally posted April 21, 2010)

Among the experiments in Media General newsrooms for using social media to promote upcoming content, Sara Diamond of WJHL has started using a webcam to make 1 1/2-minute promos for Facebook saying what stories the station is working on. Many TV stations — and some newspapers — do these kinds of promos for their websites. Posting them to your Facebook fan page as well just makes sure they are in more places and are more likely to be seen by more people.

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He’s doing part of your planning for you

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

(Originally posted April 13, 2010)

Mobile-First Strategy http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/3707622

View more presentations from Steve Buttry

If there’s a large event that’s going to attract many people from your market — a big festival, a sporting event, a concert — you have a built-in opportunity to get your live coverage and updates to a motivated audience. Better yet, here’s the outline for how to do it (the link provides a better, fuller explanation than the above slideshow). Here’s why you should print that out and save it:

“These events are ideal because the people involved have a shared interest that you can serve for content. Advertisers from your community and the distant community share interests with this audience. The people are not going to be reading a print edition of your home newspaper (even if you ship to the venue, you won’t reach many of the people) and they won’t be watching a TV station back home. They will be away from their office computers and if they travel with a laptop, they will leave that in the hotel room most of the time, while they are at the arena (or the National Mall) or out enjoying the host city at restaurants, bars and tourist attractions. But more and more, these travelers will have smart phones that will make great vehicles for distributing your content about the event they are attending, for engaging them in conversation about the event and for enlisting their help in covering the event and the related community travel experience.”

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