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Posts Tagged ‘engagement’

Driving home the scale of disaster

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , on May 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Joplin before and after
Jot this idea down in case a disaster ever levels your city: Use Google Streetview to get a “before” scene of anyplace in town. The above from Joplin, Mo. (pros take note: the “after” photo by a citizen-journalist).

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Mysteries within mysteries

Posted in Print media, Writing, tagged , on May 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Lt. Schwenk
In a nearly 112-years-overdue, story-length correction, James Barron of the New York Times uncovers an impressive amount of detail about numerous errors the Times and others made in accounts of one man’s life, including in his obituary, and the mystery surrounding some of the facts in those accounts. But the real mystery to me is this: Why is this story more engaging than almost anything else I’ve seen in the Times in recent times? Is it merely the lure of a mystery? Or is it the look into the kind of details about a person’s life that we don’t usually get in the typical story — that I would have read all the way through a story about a modern person if it were like this?

The Bristol Herald-Courier has been treading some similar ground recently with stories about unsolved murders (the first was about a nurse’s death in Chilhowie, Va., and just this past weekend there was a three-parter, Outlaws or Inlaws). Murder mysteries have proven appeal, but is it the mystery or the people that draws an audience?

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Old question, new format

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media, Writing, tagged , on May 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Ben LaMothe poses a question on the 10,000 Words blog about engaging your audience on social-media channels, and I can’t help but notice it’s basically the same question that applies to any medium:

“Why people should follow you, read your updates, add you as a Fan or Friend, or care at all about your existence online? What’s in it for them?”

The key part: What’s in it for them?

What I always tell writers they need to answer up high in a story: Why should the reader care? It’s the same thing. If you don’t give people a reason to pay attention to you, they won’t pay attention. What do you have to offer that’s relevant to the people in your target audience? “News” is a category of answers to the question, not a sufficient answer in itself.

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The end of the world is nigh!

Posted in Print media, tagged , on May 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Weekly Dig
Newspaper design consultant Charles Apple rounds up how various newspapers played stories about predictions of the Rapture. For comics fans (like me) it’s hard to beat the front (above) of the Weekly Dig from Boston, depicting Jesus as Marvel Comics’ world-destroying Galactus confronting an Avengers-style group of various other deities. It’s an alt-weekly, so they have the kind of freedom to play around like that.

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To tweet or not to tweet

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

(Originally posted on May 13, 2011)
ASNE issued its own version of social media guidelines today, and though much of it is standard stuff, one part has already created some debate: Rule No. 4, “Break news on your website, not on Twitter.” This does NOT mean (as the full guidelines eventually explain) that you should not use Twitter (or Facebook, or Digg, or whatever has proven a good vehicle for you) to publicize breaking news. What it means is that if you have solid, factual reporting of something newsworthy, put it on your website, and WHEN YOU TWEET IT include a link pointing back to your site. In other words, do not put your news only and exclusively into your social media stream. As Media General Digital Media’s Alex Marcelewski explains, social media are a proven way to help drive traffic to your site:

“We have seen that breaking news traffic in significant numbers have come to use from those two networks (Facebook and Twitter), especially at work hours and weekends.

“To rely just on just the website to break news assumes people are actually checking the site throughout the day for breaking news. In the mobile world of today, that is fading.

“Journalists need to break news where the audience is. Yes they should not post non-solid info to anywhere, but when you have a confirmed incident/story and all you have are two sentences, then those two sentence would be posted to web and then to social media with the link back to the site (where the updates occur on the article).”

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Nothing new here

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

(Originally posted on May 9, 2011)
The headline on the new Pew study, Navigating News Online, was “Where people go, how they get there and what lures them away,” but it would have been just as accurate and more to the point if it had been “Every trend we’ve reported in the past few years is still true.” There also is no recommendation on what any news organization should in light of these trends (it says, “All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them,” which might be more accurately translated as, “We don’t know for sure what you should try”). A summary:

Most folks who visit news sites are infrequent visitors and don’t stay very long at all — less than five minutes a month. Yes, A MONTH. A small group — very small, in some cases — comes more often and spends more than an hour a month.

Google continues to be the top place driving traffic to news sites, but social media, and Facebook in particular, are growing fast as news referring sources. The study confirms, however, that Twitter barely registers as a referring source. (Note that is a general observation; if you are getting great results from Twitter, by all means keep using it.)

The “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links on news sites.

One bit of good news: The age of news consumers online is on par with Internet users overall. In other words, not the mostly older (I won’t say “dying”) group that is the audience for so much traditional media.

5/17/11 UPDATE: Some people have pointed out problems with the Pew study, among them Steve Buttry. Steve lists five problems, but each of the five is a lengthy complaint. They fall generally under the headings of methodology and sloppy stats. Perhaps the most damning criticism for most journalists would be No. 5:

“Whatever validity this study has is heavily skewed toward national news because PEJ studied only the top 25 news sites, based on unique visitors for the first nine months of 2010. Of the 25 sites studied, at most six could be described as local news sites, the sites of the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune. And some, if not all, of those have significant national audiences, at least for a sports franchise they follow. With that heavy a national sample, the study is nearly worthless for local news sites.”

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Own that hashtag

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

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The Lost Remote blog offers a reminder of why it’s a good idea, when you are using Twitter in your coverage of a big and/or ongoing news event, that you have a hashtag and to be sure your audience is aware of it. Also, an example of a use for hashtags I hadn’t seen before:

“Over on ABC News, they displayed a counter of #RoyalWedding mentions on air. But more interestingly, ABC used hashtags as a poll: #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess, with 82% concluding that Kate’s dress was a #RoyalSuccess.”

UPDATE: Maybe it’s a coincidence of timing, but here’s more on the subject from Twitter Media:

“Many news organizations —ABC News, CNN, BBC, ITV, Sky— amongst others —used the royal wedding as an opportunity to launch new Twitter integrations and to experiment with novel reporting approaches.

“Here are some new best practices that have emerged:

“Tracking total Tweets and Tweets per minute about a major story has surfaced as a state-of-the-art news metric (@ABCRoyals’ Tweet tickers). A nod to MTV for first employing this for a pop culture event in their 2010 MTV VMA visualization.

“Hashtags as polls capture the audience’s opinion while also shaping and driving the conversation. (ABC News with #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess and @SkyNews with #GoRoyals vs #NoRoyals.)

“For a shared story, using company-specific hashtags helps drive and identify your own audience’s tweets (#CNNTV, #BBCWedding).”

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It ought to be SOP

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

(Originally posted on April 19, 2011)
Poynter.org has some interesting details about the Pulitzer Prize the L.A. Times won for its investigation of outrageous public salaries in Bell, Calif. (among the more interesting details to me, as an editor and former reporter, is that a story can’t get on A1 in L.A. if it’s not filed by 2:30 p.m., Pacific time — before most stories at almost any paper in the Eastern time zone are even filed), but one thing that stands out is a little function that the Times took on as a result of the reaction to the stories:

“Once the Bell city salaries became public, town activists began filing open records requests to learn more. The City of Bell was often slow to respond to public records requests so the Times created a tool to help citizens get the answers they deserve.

“’As part of our coverage, we created a public records request form, to help people to get information from their local governments. One of our city desk assistants still answers those calls and helps people with their public records filings,’ Gottlieb said.

“Then, the Times created a special online DocumentCloud section where readers can share public documents they discover. The section also teaches readers about their rights to read public information and explains what California law says about open records and open meetings. The special section includes public documents that Times reporters obtain on a wide range of topics.”

It’s great the the Times started doing that, but it seems like something that a major news organization — certainly one of that size and prominence — should have been doing already. Maybe every one should.

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Case study: What NOT to do on Facebook

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

(Originally posted on April 11, 2011)
WABC in New York unintentionally served up a great lesson Sunday in the wrong way to use social media in newsgathering, posting a cryptic question seeking anyone who knew someone on a specific flight. There was no mention of what prompted the request, but it doesn’t take a nervous disposition to envision, oh, a plane crash, for instance. When the station’s fans pointed out the needless panic the station was causing, the station didn’t help matters much, posting only “Everyone is safe.” The station took a beating online, and you can bet it will take a while for its fans to get over the sting and for the station to regain whatever level of respect it had in their eyes before this.

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Lessons learned from a killing

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , on May 15, 2011| 2 Comments »

(Originally posted on Feb. 25, 2011)
Allbritton Communications unceremoniously demoted TBD.com to the status of glorified E! channel this week. If you remember all the way back to last year, when some people (like me) had high hopes for TBD as a model for local news online, read CJR’s interview with Jim Brady, who stepped down from leading TBD late last year when it must have become obvious that Allbritton intended to decapitate TBD. One thing that is true is that TBD’s model — aggregating news throughout the community, whether from partners or from competitors — was a success, as far as measured by traffic: In January, just five months after its debut, it attracted 1.5 million unique visitors, nearly double its December total of 838,000 and far surpassing November’s total, 715,000, the internal figures show; over the past three months, TBD’s traffic was substantially higher than Web sites operated by local TV stations WRC (Channel 4), WUSA (Channel 9) and WTTG (Channel 5), according to Compete.com.

“I’d even go so far to say that that model is, for a local news site, sort of indisputable. The debate over whether you work with people in your community, or whether you just say, ‘Here’s our website, and here’s all the stuff we produced today and that’s it,’ I think that has to be over. Newspapers had that power because they had the power of distribution. But on the web, people are going to go to all different sites, and so if you can be that place that connects people to good content that they’re interested in regardless of source, then you’re going to be the place they start their day. And on the web, that’s how you win: you have to be in somebody’s short list of sites they always go to. People would say, ‘Why are you linking off-site? You’re driving people away from your site!’ But what’s the counter-argument to that, that if you never link off-site, then people will never leave your website?

“I mean, they’re going to leave your website anyway, whether it’s to go check their e-mail or go to TMZ.com or whatever. So the concept that you’re losing people by doing that, is actually the opposite of what’s actually happening — which is that you’re building loyalty by performing the role you’re supposed to perform, which is to be a conduit for useful information.”

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