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Posts Tagged ‘engagement’

Manifesto destinyo

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

(Originally posted on Jan. 20, 2011)
Some (a lot of) folks think newsrooms are full of pinkos, so I like to take advantage of that cultural prejudice to indulge myself by gorging a little on a manifesto here and there. In the 21st century, they’re a little scarce. Former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor Tim Radford has condensed his journalistic experience into a handy set of rules — a manifesto for the simple scribe. But you need not be a newspaper writer. The key to this manifesto is the conveying of information in the news, as described clearly in No. 5: “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.” And those of you who appear on TV could just as easily render No. 6, “Nobody has to read this crap,” as, “Nobody has to listen to this crap.” The news is the news, information is information, so if your job is the news, everything in this manifesto relates to what you do in one way or another.

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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

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

(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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Call it beating a dead horse if you must

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

(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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Facebook – it’s everywhere you want to be

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

(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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More tips for engaging the audience

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 11, 2010)
Poynter.org has a good post today on ways to get people to contribute good content to your site. But I have a beef with the title, because many people are going to look at “content” and think the tips apply to getting people to send in stories, photos, video, etc. They apply to everything, from in-person conversation to interviews to simple comments on stories or Facebook updates all the way up; it’s just trickier online. (Ironically, tip No. 1 is to avoid using the term “user-generated content,” which I’d broaden to avoiding the word “content” as much as possible, though it can’t always be avoided.)

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More required reading

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 10, 2010)
Here’s some long-ish reading that’s well worth the time: a piece by Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of The Guardian, on the value that linking and collaboration bring to journalism. You may be unfamiliar with The Guardian because it’s in England, but it’s a leader in the use of new media tools in service of Big J journalism. The post linked above includes several examples of that.

Here’s the important underlying philosophy of the approach:

“Openness is shorthand for the way in which the vast majority of information is, and will continue to be, part of a larger network, only a tiny proportion of which is created by journalists. Information may not want to be free, but it does want to be linked. It’s difficult to think of any information in the modern world which doesn’t acquire more meaning, power, richness, context, substance and impact by being intelligently linked to other information.

“Collaboration refers to the way we can take this openness one stage further. By collaborating with this vast network of linked information — and those who are generating and sharing it — we can be infinitely more powerful than if we believe we have to generate it all ourselves.”

One thing I would differ with Rusbridger on: He describes himself in the post as a utopian based on his own embrace of the changes and experimentation going on in journalism. I’d call him a realist.

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The missing piece

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

(Originally posted Oct. 29, 2010)
After several years of helping judge big projects with interactives and other online elements, you notice a pattern: Most of them involved a huge amount of work, and yet they almost always have the reader/user as an afterthought. It might be a pretty and impressive project, but it’s usually still a one-way communication: We, the news organization, have pulled this information together and present here in highly readable/viewable form for you, our audience. One project that didn’t is getting a lot of buzz at the Online News Association convention: the Roanoke Times’ I-81: Fear, Facts and the Future. As the Nieman Journalism lab notes, it’s not a particularly newsy topic, just one of lingering interest in the community. But the buzz is about the online presentation’s design as a hub that lets users interact with the data, read all the stories easily, and leave comments. It is a finalist for a Knight Public Service Award (and by the end of the day it may be the winner.) The site went up in May, and as of late September people were still leaving comments. The plan is to keep the site active and update the data on it.

11/1 UPDATE: It didn’t win.

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You can’t do everything

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 20, 2010)
The Knight Foundation announced a second round of traditional media (three newspapers, one public radio station) partnering with hyperlocal sites, essentially aggregating headlines from these small sites. In a post titled “Collaboration is the new competition,” Jan Schaffer of J-Lab gives details of how round one went. There’s not a monolithic model in it. Some of the partnerships called for links back and forth; some allowed the traditional media partners to republish material from the hyperlocal partners.

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The resources traditional newsrooms have lost in recent years seem unlikely to return, certainly not soon, given the continuing sluggishness in the advertising market. These kind of partnerships can help fill the voids that the past years’ cuts have left. No, it won’t be the same. But if you pick your partners carefully, as The Daily Progress has done with Charlottesville Tomorrow — a local nonprofit group that focuses on development and planning issues — then what you get will help your site become the hub where people come first to find reliable local headlines.

10/22 UPDATE: One of the newspapers that participated in round one of the hyperlocal partnerships, The Seattle Times, won the Innovator of the Year award from APME, in part because of that partnership.

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Immediacy wins

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 8, 2010)

While helping the boss to gather material for a presentation that included examples of how Media General newsrooms increasingly are using new tools, one example drove home why reporters/photographers/videographers should have smartphones with not just photo but video capability. It was not at all an obvious case. The obvious ones are things like hurricanes, major fires, really big stuff that calls for having as many electronic eyes and ears in the field as possible. This one, though, was an everyday traffic accident. The above video from WNCT of a motorcycle-truck wreck seems, on the surface, to have not much going for it. But what made the hair on my neck stand up was how it differs from the traditional print or even TV coverage of such an event. The reporter moves around the scene. The camera pans slowly. If I were from there and drove that street, I could place it exactly in my mind. Still images can’t do that. A bigger, more expensive camera could do that too, but somehow the phone camera provides a sense of immediacy that is much stronger. Or maybe it’s seeing it on the computer screen, potentially minutes after the wreck, that makes it feel more immediate.

News staff without mobile news reporting ability is a waste of resources.

Coincidentally, while I was working on this post, Ryan Sholin — a frequent blogger on the subjects of new media and the future of news — had a post of his own making the same case but probably better. Certainly with more explanation. Summary: “Because we have inexpensive ways to gather and distribute video in larger numbers to our readers and viewers and users in a fragmented audience, equipping a larger number of reporters with easy-to-learn, easy-to-edit point-and-shoot cameras is a logical choice that makes sense for our readers.”

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Don’t let this happen to you (sound familiar?)

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 7, 2010)

You know, the first three paragraphs say it better than I could:

“‘Epic battle between cows, bear caught on cam.’

“The headline was a web site manager’s page view dream, and when a Eugene, Oregon TV station posted the story to its site, it took less than 24 hours to be republished by ABC and AP affiliate web sites nationwide.

“The only problem was that the person and the place in the story were both wrong, exposing countless stations to potential liability for copyright infringement. How it happened is a valuable lesson to anyone in the content publication and aggregation business in a new world where social media accelerates viral stories. ”

There’s a whole string of errors. It’s worth sending around to anyone on staff who has authority to pull in user-generated content.

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