-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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Newsroom With A View 