Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged brand/reputation, curmudgeons, engagement on June 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Following last week’s tempest over the word “branding” in journalism, Steve Buttry has written up something that would be hard for anyone to argue against: tips for how to develop a brand as a journalist (call it a reputation, if branding makes you uncomfortable). Key point for why the term “brand” should cease to bother anyone:
“The opposite of brand is generic. And no one looking for a job wants to be generic, unless your strategy is to land a low-paying job.”
Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged brand/reputation, curmudgeons, engagement on June 25, 2011| 2 Comments »
Dear Leslie:
I was set to say I was sorry that you chose Gene Weingarten to ask about building a personal brand because, instead of a helpful answer, he supplied a curmudgeonly rant attacking what he imagines the word “brand” represents, which appears to be everything evil in the world of journalism. I also assumed it was partly your own fault for not realizing ahead of time that such a response certainly is consistent with Weingarten’s “brand.” How wrong I was. As your paper, published on Steve Buttry’s blog, makes perfectly clear, you knew his reputation well, even if you didn’t anticipate his exact reaction. As you note, Weingarten “certainly qualifies as a recognizable brand and reaps the benefits that come with textbook brand equity,” even if he himself refuses to recognize how those terms are now commonly used. You even appear to know Weingarten better than he knows himself, pointing out that interaction is the new-media currency, that “Interaction is a hallmark of the Weingarten brand,” and “he was an early adopter of interactive web technologies and fully embraces Twitter.”
I was all set to sit down here and rant myself. But everything I was going to say appears to be in your paper. Excellent work.
Also well worth reading is Steve Buttry’s own take on branding.
I can sympathize with those who don’t like the use of “brand” in journalism conversations because it originated in marketing and advertising. It still makes me a little uncomfortable, but I recognize it is in common use. There’s a better chance of getting people to stop saying, “I could care less,” than of stopping the use of “brand.” The language evolves, and as media changes so too does the language involved. What’s important is the idea and the application. If you get hung up on specific words, you will spend all your time just ranting. But maybe that isn’t the end of the world. Maybe it actually helps you. Maybe it’s your brand.
UPDATE: I had looked earlier for this example from last year of Weingarten’s take on the new media landscape, just stumbled across it.
UPDATE: Dammit. I like to think I’m original, but Google brings this post with the same title and basically the same point: “the word ‘brand,’ really boils down to one thing: the expectation your fans/friends/consumers have about you.”
Posted in Social media, tagged engagement, Facebook, social on June 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Even among newsrooms that see value in social networking sites, how they use Facebook differs. What doesn’t seem to differ is the lessons they tell others they have learned about what works on Facebook. Today’s example is a newsroom that has taken an extreme step: a Maryland newspaper, Rockville Central, that eliminated its standalone website and moved to all-Facebook publishing online. The downsides to doing such a thing probably should discourage publications of any size from doing the same thing (notably, the inability to build useful, searchable archives within Facebook, a huge handicap for both staff and audience), but the pluses are things to pay attention to, just as you would pay attention to tips on language and customs from someone who took an immersion approaching to learning a new language and culture (which is more or less what Facebook is in comparison with traditional news outlets). A couple (by going where the audience is your stories reach more people, and different people, than your website alone does; be a real person, not an officious, impersonal voice in your interactions) will seem familiar by now.
Slightly different than things I had read before was a detail on the tip “Timing matters.” Facebook activity peaks several times a day — before work, midday and around dinner. Publisher Brad Rourke tells Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman it’s best to target those windows for your updates, implying that people don’t scroll far down in their update stream: “What you really want is to share when they’re on, not before they’re on,” he said.
Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged crowdsourcing, engagement on June 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »
When the State of Alaska releases almost 25,000 of Sarah Palin’s emails from her tenure as governor today, the media won’t be the only ones poring over it. The Washington Post and New York Times are putting copies on the Web for the public to review and are asking people to alert them to what they find.
Once upon a time, seeking public participation in a reporting project would have been a remote consideration, and the Washington Post actually originally intended to invite just a small group to participate. Now it’s all comers. What the Post is asking:
“Please include page numbers and, where possible, a direct excerpt. We’ll share your comments with our reporters and may use facts or related material you suggest to annotate the documents displayed on The Post site. We may contact you for further details, by way of your registered e-mail with the Post, unless you specify otherwise in the comments.”
If this is successful, expect to see more of it — and expect smaller news organizations to follow suit. Perhaps no one would be considering this, or they would be slower to consider it, if news staffs were the size they were even 10 years ago. But the online news audience expects to have this level of involvement. It’s smart not to try to hold everything back.
UPDATE: Belated links — The Times’ site for reading the e-mails and submitting tips. I’ll post a link to the Post’s site … as soon as I can find the thing. The Post seems to have hidden it. Links that say “read the Palin emails” and solicit help point here, but as of this writing I see no links to any site with the emails or how to help (and, as usual with the Post’s site, it takes FOREVER for each page to load).
UPDATE: The Post has links to the emails here. Still not seeing anything like a “Post your tips here” link.
FOR A CONTRARY POINT OF VIEW, see this from Fast Company. I’m not sure you can declare a success or failure within hours of an attempt, but we’ll know within a day or two, anyway.
Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged audience, engagement, reporting on June 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The public editor (a.k.a., ombudsman) of the New York Times answers the question that some would say needs no answer: “Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper?” And he wastes no time: “Of course it is.” The article goes on to chronicle in detail the regular, daily evidence of the left-leaning perspective the paper’s staff as a whole clearly has (I’m not arguing), resulting, he argues, from the nature of New York itself and the kind of people drawn there, let alone (says I) the type of people drawn to working at the Times.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing, or neither? If everyone who worked at the Times — and at any news organization — recognized and remained aware through the day of how his or her views were similar or different than his or her audience, it would be a little less of an issue. I think people don’t necessarily expect you to think and act the same as they do, but they don’t like feeling that you perceive them as odd or that you don’t understand them, even if you disagree. This is part of why I and many reporters always say that if you get complaints from both sides on your story, you think you did a good job.
So why am I posting this? For this: You can’t be 100 percent neutral in almost anyone’s eyes. Your approach and coverage will inevitably be influenced by your own background and experience. If you don’t believe this, then go to your nearest Burger King, notice the people there, then visit BKs in very different places and notice the people there. Listen to conversations (to the extent you can without being intrusive). What’s important is not that you are on the same page as all of the people around you, but do you understand where they come from? Can you represent those people fairly? That’s all anyone really expects.
Posted in Mobile media, Online media, tagged audience, engagement, mobile on June 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »
At 1:22 p.m., my work was interrupted by an email-arrival notice; the Washington Post had sent out this breaking news alert: “Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announced Thursday that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.” This raises the issue of just what it is journalists are trying to accomplish when sending out a breaking news alert. It is technically true that the Post’s announcement was “breaking news” — Romney officially launched his run for president. He pulled the trigger. The paperwork is filed, and now he is subject to all the election requirements of a declared, official candidate. … However, is there any sentient individual not only on Earth but within interstellar range of the Earth’s television signals who feels the slightest twinge of surprise at this news? Any? … No? Then to my mind it’s not worth an alert, and I would wager that a great many other recipients of the alert are thinking the same thing. (For example.) If the Post made a habit of broadcasting this level of “news” via email alerts, a good many people would wonder whether it was worth the subscription for emails that interrupt work or make their phones beep/vibrate to alert them to utterly obvious or expected developments.
If you have any responsibility for such alerts to consider your own emails, before sending one you have to ask yourself: Will your audience consider them to be news that is worthy of the interruption? You send alerts to reinforce your identity as a source of fresh information important to your area (or topic). When you send out things no one really considers to be news, you convey the opposite message.
Posted in Online media, Social media, Uncategorized, tagged engagement, Facebook, social on June 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Mallary Jean Tenore of poynter.org collected tips for how journalists can build a bigger, more engaged audience. They are good for reminding journalists how the online world differs from the traditional worlds of print and broadcast news. For instance, you include the names of sources in tweets and Facebook updates about your story; if that seems to grate on your traditionalist nerves, think of the traditionalist parallel: names and places, as in getting local names and local places in the paper makes the paper inherently more interesting to local readers. And the tip to tweet follow-ups, even (or especially) if your follow-up is online later in the day that you first tweeted about the story, is a reminder that the online news world is always in motion, and your potential audience is moving in and out of the social network through the day.
However, some of the tips make me cringe at the potential of some journalist somewhere thinking all the tips apply equally to all stories. For instance: “Let sources know about your story, ask them to share it.” It probably would not be a good idea to e-mail Councilman Smith and ask him to tweet about your story quoting Councilwoman Jones calling him a pig and including his paraphrase of Dan Aykroyd’s line to Jane Curtin from the old Point-Counterpoint skits on “Saturday Night Live.” Similarly: “Comment on stories that have been written about the topic, and include a link to your story” does not mean you are encouraged to spout your opinion on whatever ongoing story you are covering; any comments you make should adhere to common sense and news guidelines on social media (or, as John Robinson of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., put it, “Don’t be stupid.”)
Posted in Broadcast media, Print media, tagged audience, curmudgeons, engagement on May 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Someday I’m not going to feel the need to react to tales like that from Poynter’s Romenesko about a journalism professor whose admission that he went without a newspaper subscription for a while enraged a newspaper columnist. The columnist’s objection, in summary:
“A journalism department chairman who can’t be bothered to actually subscribe to a daily newspaper? How do you think your students might one day actually get paid for their work?”
If every journalist in the world subscribed to a newspaper, that wouldn’t keep them all employed, nor would it convince all the non-journalists around them that they ought to subscribe too. Most importantly, if newpaper circulations rebounded to what they were 10 years ago, that wouldn’t necessarily convince advertisers to put all the money back in newspapers that they have diverted elsewhere, and it definitely would never recapture the classified advertising that has flown forever to such places as Monster.com and craigslist. (Hey, journalists, do any of you still pick up Editor & Publisher if you need to look for another job, or do you go to journalismjobs.com?) The news business has an advertising problem, not a paid-circulation problem. At current industry subscription rates, if you lose circulation but your advertising grows 25 percent, you’re in high cotton; but if you have a 50 percent increase in circulation but a 50 percent drop in advertising, you are headed for layoffs.
News people can’t worry about advertising problems. What we can and should think about is the larger issue represented by the professor’s decision to go without a paper for a while: changes in society in how people get information. If a newspaper (or TV news show) is no longer seen as vital, why is that? Is that our fault, or largely a change in technology and lifestyles? If part of it is our fault — how we present the news, the kind of news we present, the topics we don’t present — then is it fixable?
UPDATE: The Nieman Journalism Lab checks in on Newport (R.I.) Daily News, which appears to be having success charging for online access — but note that the company’s goal is not to make online news a self-sustaining enterprise but to prop up print circulation, and from there the task remains selling advertising.
Newsroom With A View 