Funny, silly and a little depressing for the ladies...
10.05.2012
10.04.2012
5 Better Ways to Network Online (and Build Your Audience)
This article from Mashable.com offers some great tips for networking and building your online audience, and I've added some of my own twists for journalists.
1. Find the authors of the content you read. Follow the people you want to be like. Engage with them through their social media by thoughtfully commenting on their posts and adding to the conversation. Help them to notice you, and their followers will start to pay attention to you. Your favorite writer's audience can become yours too.
2. Write. Build up content. No one will want to stay on your website if you look like you're brand new. If someone goes to your page, make sure they will feel engaged and have a lot to read. Before you promote your work too much online, make sure you have enough of it to show so you look credible.
3. Leverage twitter keyword searches. Search for topics related to your area of journalism. Engage in conversations and allow people to get to know you.
4. Join relevant LinkedIn groups. Type in a topic you're interested in, and you can find dozens of related groups. You can start or add to conversations on the group pages. This is a great professional networking environment.
5. Meet the people who are looking at you. On LinkedIn, you can set it so you can see who has recently looked at your profile. Build professional relationships with these people because they are clearly interested in you.
We can go far by networking with successful people online.
1. Find the authors of the content you read. Follow the people you want to be like. Engage with them through their social media by thoughtfully commenting on their posts and adding to the conversation. Help them to notice you, and their followers will start to pay attention to you. Your favorite writer's audience can become yours too.
2. Write. Build up content. No one will want to stay on your website if you look like you're brand new. If someone goes to your page, make sure they will feel engaged and have a lot to read. Before you promote your work too much online, make sure you have enough of it to show so you look credible.
3. Leverage twitter keyword searches. Search for topics related to your area of journalism. Engage in conversations and allow people to get to know you.
4. Join relevant LinkedIn groups. Type in a topic you're interested in, and you can find dozens of related groups. You can start or add to conversations on the group pages. This is a great professional networking environment.
5. Meet the people who are looking at you. On LinkedIn, you can set it so you can see who has recently looked at your profile. Build professional relationships with these people because they are clearly interested in you.
We can go far by networking with successful people online.
How Many Clicks Is Too Many?
This Slate article addresses the practice of some news organizations of making users click to several separate pages to continue reading articles.
Some websites mandate that articles be split into separate pages once pass a certain number of words; at Slate, for instance, the limit is 1,000.
Because of the opportunity to maximise clicks, these organizations are hanging on to this model, much to the chagrin of users, myself included.
The piece highlights a problem that is experienced by readers, not just of sites that feature long form articles; sometimes even shorter pieces are split up, which can be bring real annoyance.
Getting readers to continue reading to the end a story has always been an issue, even for traditional newspapers with jump pages.
On the Internet, with people's attention spans diminishing almost daily, this model should not have survived this long.
News organizations would do well to think past their advertising revenue, and really consider the strength of their content, and if it's good enough to hold readers attention through multiple clicks.
As journalists, if the organizations we work for do employ this practice, then as we write we should be thinking, is this work powerful enough to get readers to click through six pages to the end?
As news consumers, what is the maximum number of clicks are you willing to make to get to the end of an article?
Some websites mandate that articles be split into separate pages once pass a certain number of words; at Slate, for instance, the limit is 1,000.
Because of the opportunity to maximise clicks, these organizations are hanging on to this model, much to the chagrin of users, myself included.
The piece highlights a problem that is experienced by readers, not just of sites that feature long form articles; sometimes even shorter pieces are split up, which can be bring real annoyance.
Getting readers to continue reading to the end a story has always been an issue, even for traditional newspapers with jump pages.
On the Internet, with people's attention spans diminishing almost daily, this model should not have survived this long.
News organizations would do well to think past their advertising revenue, and really consider the strength of their content, and if it's good enough to hold readers attention through multiple clicks.
As journalists, if the organizations we work for do employ this practice, then as we write we should be thinking, is this work powerful enough to get readers to click through six pages to the end?
As news consumers, what is the maximum number of clicks are you willing to make to get to the end of an article?
10.02.2012
Going (even more) mobile
As reported on Mediabistro.com blog Fishbowl NY, a new study from the Pew Research Center and The Economist Group shows that "64 percent of tablet owners and 62 percent of mobile phone owners use them at least once per week to catch up on the news."
But perhaps the most important piece of news from the study when it comes to the future of journalism is this one, listed in the Pew report: "People notice ads on mobile devices and may be even more likely to click on them than they are to click on other digital ads."
If this is true, it can mean that advertisers will be willing to pay more than they have been for strictly online advertisements. If advertisers re-invest in the news media as primary placement for their ads, then we may see a revival of the old media advertising model that made newspapers so profitable for so long. How much can hard data supporting user-ad interaction encourage advertisers to give the big bucks to back to news advertising--albeit on a different platform?
Pinterest and Journalism
Class assignment today:
After we have discussed Pinterest, I want you to search Pinterest and media watchdog sites for journalistic uses of the tool.
Find one board that is being used effectively, in your opinion, and write about it and link to it on our class blog (in the comments, below). What site is using it? How active it is? Does it tie back to stories/projects on the site? Are the pins all of site content (photos from a story, for instance), or are they pins from the community? Other comments are welcome.
9.30.2012
The Trouble With Aggregating...
What
happens when an Iranian news agency presents a story as its own... when it's
actually from The Onion? Check
it out here. They even changed the dateline to Tehran. Here is the Onion
parody titled "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama."
The Onion managed to keep a screen
grab from FARS.png before the article was pulled.
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