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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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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Debunking myths

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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

May 15, 2011 by Guy

(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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