Online Journalism

Quality content published in some significant quantity, and engineered to be easily found in search engines is a recipe for a successful digital publishing business.

Throughout the course of my blog, you have learned how tweet, how to use photography, how to vlog, and how to maintain your comments area. The last thing you need to know to be fully prepared for the real world of blogging is how to market yourself.

The one phrase you need to remember as you strive for efficiency and marketability in your blog is search engine optimization. This phenomenon is the process of writing your articles in a way that will be easily recognized by search engine spiders who search the Internet for new websites or information.

According to Briggs, “content is king” for SEO because the better the content you have in an article, the more likely a robot or spider will be to pick it up for indexing. “Linking is queen” because if other websites recognize that you have linked to them, they may return the favor, increasing your authority with search engines.

Along with content and linking, there are also several other ways to increase your “Google cred.”  The first way is to use clear title tags because search engines look at headlines before anything else. The second way is to use HTML meta tags, or tags that provide information about an article, even though a viewer cannot see that information.

After you get your blog up and running and begin acquiring an audience through search engines, you will likely want to know how your website is doing.

The following is a list of the bakers dozen, or items that you should be regularly tracking so you have an idea of how well your website or blog is performing.

1. Total news stories per day
2. News stories by topic or section
3. Total blog posts per day
4. Blog posts by specific blog
5. Slideshows per week
6. Video stories per week
7. Podcasts or other audio stories
8. News updates
9. Breaking news e-mail alerts
10. SMS or other mobile news alerts
11. E-mail newsletters that are not sent automatically
12. Twitter, Facebook or other social network posts
13. User-generated content

Along with the bakers dozen, you should also track the big three of web traffic: pageviews, visits and unique visitors compared, and engagement and referrers. These things are more difficult for an individual to track, but never fear, there is plenty of software out there that can track these things for you. One of the most popular websites for web analyzation is Google Analytics, a free program offered by none other than Google.

Once you see how your website is performing, you will be able to make goals and adjust your current business plan. As Briggs so eloquently puts it, “track. Measure. Adapt. It’s the way the Web works.”

“Being social with users is easier than ever before, and the more a social a journalist is with people, the more sourcrs a journalist can mine.”

There is no denying that comments on news articles are a vital part of reporting today. Comments allow for a new way to connect with “the people formally known as the audience” and for fluid conversation.

When we allow readers to critique our articles we are providing for more transparent journalism. Message boards are beneficial to us as journalists because our audiences are able to give us direct information and footage of news, that we can then synthesize into well-organized news stories. The amount of information we can gather when we consider that “online readers post nearly 50,000 comments a month, more than one a minute, 24/7″ is almost inconceivable.

According to Patrick Thorton of Beatblogging, “it’s important (for us) to keep in mind that our communities know more than we do. When we remember that, it’s easy to understand why having conversations with the knowledgable users can lead to better reporting.”

“User comments on news sites, while vital to interactive storytelling in the digital age, often read like scribblings on a bathroom stall: anonymous, offensive and full of hate,” says Stephanie Goldberg in her CNN article “news sites reining in nasty user comments.”

In our nation, which places such high value on free speech, restraint on comments has repeatedly been ruled unconstitutional. We, as journalists, do have options that will allow us to keep our conversations as civilized and friendly as possible.

One of the most common ways to do so allows users to flag other comments as inappropriate. We, as site operators, are not legally required to delete the flagged comments but they simply give us a heads up that we should take a look at a certain comment.

A second way of keeping message boards clean, is allowing users to use Facebook Connect. Not only is this method convenient to the users, because they are not required to make a new account for every website they visit, it is convenient for us as well. Users who post under Facebook Connect are who they say they are on Facebook, which means that they will likely practice more constraint when writing inappropriate comments on a news article.

Comments will allow us to progress in the world of journalism in ways we never imagined possible. All that we need to remember, in the words of Mark Briggs, is to “treat our comment areas like a garden: a little care and nurturing every day will go a long way towards making a healthy community. And will remove any weeds as soon as they appear.”

To read Stephanie Goldbergs full article, click here.

For information on how to manage comments, click here.

The socialization of news is clearly the right direction for journalism.

This statement holds particularly true with the increasing developments in technology day-by-day. The only problem is, how do journalists continue to do their job while remaining as objective as possible?

It’s a lot like what Jon DeNunzio spoke about when he visited our class. News organizations want and need to interact with their consumers. They want to interact to get feedback on what they’re doing right and what needs improvement. They need to interact because it keeps them honest to their consumers’ needs and it makes journalists’ jobs easier.

By making news more social, news organizations can crowdsource and collect tips from citizens through tools like Twitter, and work with bloggers to gather more information.

Interaction also allows journalists to become transparent to their needs. Readers can comment and provide feedback to what they perceive as biases or inaccuracies by the journalist. As Doug Feaver, former editor of washingtonpost.com, said, online comments are a “terrific addition to the conversation” and “journalists need to take them seriously.”

The best way to become better journalists? Collaborate with your community.