Online Journalism

How do journalists compete in a large media market?

“Your title tag and description are your first impression to attract potential audience” said Monica Wright. “You capture new online readership by setting yourself apart with useful and engaging tags.”

Building an audience online also includes:

• tracking your content
• web analytics
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• effective headline writing for the Web
• distribution through social media

What should you be tracking? Anything that is able to be tracked! Start by using the baker’s dozen list below:

• total news stories per day
• news stories by topic or section
• total blog posts per day
• blog posts by specific blog
• slide shows per week
• video stories per week
• podcasts or other audio stories
• news updates
• breaking news e-mail alerts
• SMS or other mobile network alerts
• e-mail news letters that are not sent automatically
• Twitter, Facebook or other social network posts
• user-generated content

By using web analytics, you will be able to track your audiences in order to learn what your audience is consuming. Web analytics softwares allow you to identify key data points, such as:

• pageviews
• visits and unique visitors compared
• engagement and referrers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) assist in driving more audience to ideas that people are excited about. SEO’s perform three main functions:

• spiders and robots: small computer programs that are sent out by search engines line Google and Bing to “crawl” the Internet and track and record the information found on Web pages
• indexing: take the information sent from the spiders and robots and build large database files with references to all the content connected to the right links
• queries: takes the keywords you’ve searched to look in the index for the most relevant results — it then returns and presents those results on Web pages for you to explore

When creating a headline, be sure to write for readers and robots. In order to make headlines better:

• use keywords
• user conversational language
• don’t be afraid to inject a little attitude

Social media is great at distributing information to many channels. Mark Briggs suggests:

• Targeting specific channels, such as: blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, reddit, Fark, StunbleUpon
• Increasing social capital: the concept of becoming the trusted center for a community

“The future of journalism means managing online communities and participating in various social networks,” said Mark Briggs. One of the greatest challenges facing journalists now is how to manage and leverage news conversation in social media networks.

The problem with news as a conversation is that participants are rarely as constructive or respectful as journalists and other readers would like. There are either too many conversations for news organizations to manage, or there are too few comments that generate actual conversation around the news.

While some journalists shy away from the interactiveness of reader comments, Doug Feaver, creator of the dot.comments blog, suggests that “comments provide a forum for readers to complain about what they see as unfairness or inaccuracy in an article, to talk to each other and to bloviate.”

Feaver makes a great argument – news conversation does have wonderful benefits, such as:

• they provide transparency on the reporting process
• they enable an immediate feedback loop
• they spread awareness of news coverage through word-of-mouth marketing

News conversation allows more tips to be discovered and more links to be shared, according to BeatBlogging‘s Patrick Thornton. Knowledgable users can provide journalists with tips, links additional insight or even clarify a post.

Journalists should make news participatory so that audiences can contribute to news and information by suppling additional:

• photos
• videos
• event lists (on calendar sites)
• edits (on wiki sites)
• message board posts
• blog posts
• votes and recommendations
• promotin on other social media sites (ex: Digg and SumbleUpon)

There is the 1-10-100 rule for participatory online community sites that states:

• 1% of the user community actual create content
• 10% of the user community will synthesize the content by posting comments, e-mailing links to friends, authoring blog posts on separate sites and linking back to it, etc.
• 100% of the user community will benefit from the actions of the first two groups

Journalists should be responsible for keeping all news conversations accurate and ethical. They can do this by:

• setting guidelines for participants
• monitoring offensive postings
• knowing their legal responsibilities
• correcting errors

LifeHacker posted  “Top 10 Ways to Rock Your Resume”, written by Whitson Gordon, on Mar. 5, 2011 and it already has over 115,000 views three days later!

1. Start with a Big List, and Then Shorten It- Keeping your resumé brief is important, but one of the best ways to make sure your resumé is as good as possible is to start long.
2. Know What Not to Include- Get rid of not-so-notable accomplishments, and anything outdated can probably go too.
3. Avoid Overused Phrases- If you want to make your resumé stand out, you’re going to want to avoid canned phrases like “team player”, “strong work ethic”, and “innovative”.
4. Quantify Your Accomplishments- Pick something quantifiable, something real and tangible.
5. Find the Keywords Your Employer is Looking for and Use Them- HR folks are scanning them for relevant keywords.
6. Strategically Tweak Your Dates of Employment- Strategically format your resumé to highlight the jobs, not the dates.
7. Try a Visual Slideshow or Video Resumé- While many employers will prefer the simple, single-page list of accomplishments, lots of others would prefer to see your personality and accomplishments more in-depth through a slideshow or video resumé.
8. Don’t Use it Until the End of the Interview Process- If you wait to hand in your resumé until the end, you’ll be forced to show yourself off in other ways, and keep your potential employers thinking about something else beyond the dull checklist of accomplishments.
9. Use Multiple Resumés for Different Potential Jobs- Tailor your resumé to each specific job you apply for, and send a unique resumé out for each one.
10. Proofread from the Bottom Up- One of the more interesting ways we’ve seen is to read it from the bottom up. This way, you’ll make sure you don’t skip over any sections, and will also help you see things from an angle other than the one you’ve already written and proofread it fifteen times.

Read the full article

For Senator-elect George Allen, freedom is the name of the game

Former Virginia Senator George Allen is on the campaign trail again, only this time he’s hitting the digital realm as well. On Thursday, February 17, 2011, Allen joined students from George Mason University and the University of Denver in a video conference to be aired on C-SPAN three the following day at five p.m.

Hosted by Steve Scully, political editor of the C-SPAN networks, the conference and interview session provided insight into Allen’s political platform. Given that he is running for Senate again in the coming term, these discussions provided some key insight into the lawmaker’s policy ideas.

Student questions ranged from rising tuition concerns all the way to the budget crisis. Throughout the interviews, however, Allen’s response to fiscal issues remained constant; if the country does not currently have the revenue coming in, it is necessary to have budget cuts and curtail spending.

“This country was founded on the concepts of freedom and responsibility” says Allen. No doubt Allen, a ‘common sense Jeffersonian conservative’, was influenced by his father, former Redskins coach George Allen Sr. However, the younger Allen claims that he learned his ideas about political and governmental freedoms from his mother, a woman of Tunisian descent who grew up during the oppressive Axis powers in WWII.

Throughout the interviews, many of the questions were not necessarily political in nature; yet all of them allowed the audience to gain insight into Allen as a person and his beliefs about the world today.

One question asked by George Mason University professor Steve Klein, discussed the advent of social media on the world today – particularly from the perspective of someone running for a second Senate term. From his response, Allen seemed aware of the social media basics and states that even his campaign video is on YouTube.com. However, his lack of elaboration leads one to believe that he is maybe not as tech-savvy as he leads on.

The discussion ends on a light note, with a student wondering how aside from sharing the same Senatorial seat as Thomas Jefferson, in what ways does he consider himself to be like Thomas Jefferson – one of the founding fathers of the United States of America.

While admittedly Allen has not written any nation-altering documents, he does reiterate his attempts to retain personal freedoms for all Americans; line item veto, and social security reform are just a few of the ways that Allen is attempting to give some power back to the American people – or so he says.

There were several sports analogies thrown in to further explain these issues – but that’s nothing that can’t be found in his new book, What Washington Can Learn from the World of Sports. No matter what side of the political fence the audience is on, it is undeniable that Allen is not just looking to score a touchdown in the upcoming Senatorial elections; he’s looking to win the big game.

To view the conference at the University of Denver’s online Distance Learning center , click here.