Dig into online journalism

Want to dig deeper into online journalism? Here are some ideas.

• A recent post on the 10,000 Words blog outlined five ways to “get involved with the online journalism community today.” Two of them I’ve mentioned in a previous e-mail:  the regularly scheduled #wjchat on Twitter and the online chats at Poynter.org.
  Another of the suggestions on the blog is to take part in the Carnival of Journalism, an online community of journalism bloggers dedicated to sharing ideas on a specified topic each month. January’s topic was about how to make universities hubs of information in communities, and February’s topic was about how to increase the number of news sources.

• Check out last year’s winners of the Online Journalism Awards. One of them was NYTRMG’s own  Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Flipping Fraud project, which was the focus of a session in the HR conference room last year. But there are plenty of others to look at and learn from, including the Tennessean’s coverage of last spring’s Nashville floods and a VoiceofSanDiego.org special report on education.

Chat about journalism on Twitter, elsewhere online

Twitter, the website

 

You don’t need to attend a dedicated training session to learn new or better ways to work. Talking with others who are up to date on the latest trends in the industry and eager to share is useful and, at the least, a great place to start. Here are some suggestions for reaching out beyond the StarNews.

Online training on your own time

If you’re looking to start your year by strengthening your journo skills, plenty of places online can help you out. Here are a few webcasts, webinars and other resources to get you going:

• Reynolds Week 2011: The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism gathered a group of fellows and instructors last week at Arizona State University for intensive study in business journalism. The Reynolds Center’s blog for the event includes video, slideshows and notes from presentations. Topics include Finding Business on Every Beat, Organizing the Biz Beat and a panel discussion with award-winning business reporters. Check it out at http://businessjournalism.org/category/workshops/reynolds-week-2011/.
• NewsU.org: This Poynter site has online courses on a bunch of different topics, and many are free. Ones we can access without cost include Beat Basics and Beyond, Build and Engage Local Audiences Online and Language of the Image. If you see one you like that isn’t free, check with me because we might have taken it in the past and have free access with one of our logins. See what’s available at https://www.newsu.org/.

WWGD?

Finally finished reading “What Would Google Do?” It was one of the books Amy Eisman recommended we read when she worked with us for the Maynard Institute.

Reno’s public art rules!

Ali Sullivan, public art technician for the city of Reno, led me on a walking tour of downtown Reno’s public art. Here’s her take on it:

I highly recommend taking a tour or wandering on your own. The art is beautiful, and the walk is fun.

Tips for better SEO

Gil Asakawa, who is in charge of audience development for MediaNews properties, took a brief look at our Web sites today with an eye toward SEO and user engagement. StarNewsOnline came out fairly well.

He looked at the site late Sunday night, when Crossroads was in the featured story spot. He mentioned that the image attached was eye-catching and unusual compared with a typical news site illustration.

This is the image that appeared on the StarNewsOnline home page when Gil critiqued it.

(I noticed it didn’t have any photo credit, which made me wonder which photos it was made from and who made it. But that’s a different issue.)

He also liked that we had so many photos with the headlines in the story list to the left of the featured story. But the one story without art had the bullet that all text-only headlines get, and he was confused because it looked like a quotation mark or something. With only one up there, it seemed to be signifying something when it really just takes up space. Not much we can do, but there you go. Yet another reason to try hard to get art for all stories.

The criticisms were mostly that locations and names needed to be included in more of the headlines and moved closer to the front of the headline when they were there, even in the top teases that go with the “In Case You Missed It” topper. That’s what people search for and what they scan for, so they should be at the start of the line of text.

Audience determines your path

Consider which audience you want to work for rather than which company.

That’s the advice of Dennis Joyce, an editor with The Tampa Tribune and TBO.com‘s data center. The audience for your work will determine much of what you get to do on the job, so you should consider that when thinking about your career.

That also means that every journalist should be an audience expert to succeed. Web analytics and market data should not be concentrated in just a few hands. It’s important that everyone in the newsroom know who their audience is. So if no one seems to be giving you that information, seek it out. And if you have that information, be sure to share it — along with the skills to interpret it.

Rob Curley, the cult hero of news Web sites everywhere (or something close), has a list of 5 P’s that can help a site grow an audience. They are

Passions: People look to the Web to find out every little thing about what they care about most. Find a topic people are passionate about, and go with it.

Practical: News you can use. Give people the tools they need to live their lives and the tools that make it easier and better.

Playful: The Web is fun. People don’t watch lol cats videos for hours because it helps them do their jobs. It’s fun, and people look for that.

Personal Communication: The Web connects people through various communities on Facebook, on Twitter, through e-mail and chat, with forums and bulletin boards, and plenty more.

Porn: But you knew that already.

He follows up his description of the 5 P’s on his blog with a bit more about what newspaper can do to make the most of their Web sites:

My guess is that newspapers might be able to compete much better in all of the chaos that we find ourselves in if we would just look at what readers used to like about our print editions and embrace those sorts of equivalents with new media.

It isn’t just the journalism that made the printed newspaper work. It’s the comics and crosswords and movie listings and the product reviews and the sports stories and Dear Abby. And especially the ads.

Makes sense to me.

Key numbers as important as keywords online

11, 60, 110, 140.

No, those aren’t winning lottery numbers or the digits that hold the secret to the island on “Lost.” (Unfortunately.) But they may hold the secret to successful Web headlines, as Dennis Joyce from The Tampa Tribune explained.

140

the number of characters in a tweet
Using Twitter is a great way to practice getting the most important elements of a story in as short a space as possible. It’s not only a way to improve headline-writing skills but also a way to work on writing tighter leads and nut graphs.

110

the number of characters in a tweet if you leave room for the link and/or a retweet
Think cutting it down to 140 characters is tough? Even if you can, you still have work to do. A TinyURL is at least 15 characters, so if you want to link to your story you have to leave room for that. And if you want people to be able to forward a tweet to their followers you have to leave space for “RT @” and your Twitter name. So get those headlines down to 110 characters.

60

the number of characters that AP puts in bold face in its headline feeds and the standard length for Web heds
Shoot for an online headline that’s 60 characters or fewer. Search engines may include only the first 60 to 90 characters in their search results, so a headline on the short end of this scale can only help.

11

the number of characters that scanners see before they make a decision to read the rest
Make those first couple of words count because that’s all some readers get through before moving on to the next line of type. Back into a headline with a less-than-arresting clause and your audience may get no further.

Editing when you don’t know the answer

Today we heard from Merrill Perlman, former manager of the copy desks at the New York Times. She talked mostly about how to listen to your brain when it spots something wrong but you don’t immediately know why.

This happens to me all the time. I hate it. I stop on something that strikes me as strange but I can’t figure out why. Well, Merrill gave us some strategies for what to do next to figure out what needs to be fixed.

Concentrate on what you know, not what you don’t. That means that when you can’t figure out what’s wrong with something that made you stop and think, focus on what you do know about it and see if something doesn’t fit. An example she used was a story about the natural history museum that talked about tigers and gorillas being in the wing for African mammals. I don’t know a whole lot about tigers or gorillas, but I do know that National Geographic has covered the murder of gorillas in central Africa and that types of tigers include Bengal and Siberian. Neither of those tigers are named after anything in Africa, so maybe that’s the problem. (Which it clearly is, if you do happen to know something about tigers and gorillas.)

If you have to start rationalizing about how something could be right, consider that it’s likely not. The default position is to not change something without good reason and if you can’t immediately come up with a reason that something definitely is wrong, the next step can be to figure out how it could be right. But if the reasoning gets convoluted, you should probably just ask or find another way to double check the info.

Merrill also gave us a great handout listing hints that something might need to be checked. These include

• Coincidence: When a name shows up twice for different people, for instance, with no note about the fact from the writer, you want to consider that maybe it’s a typo of sorts.
• Errors often travel in pairs: Just because you find one mistake doesn’t mean your work is done. Check the related facts, too, and you might find another error that the same moment of carelessness or poor transcribing or whatever also caused.
• What’s corrected a lot: Know what has tripped up reporters before, like whatever the local version of Britney (not Brittany) Spears and Mecklenburg (not Mecklenberg) County are.

Secrets to successful Web writing

Amy Eisman, in addition to opening a critique of some Web sites, as I mentioned in a previous post, also talked about how to optimize writing for the Web. This means not just how a story is structured, but also how the headlines are written, what’s included with the story and whether it’s a traditional narrative story at all.

One of the key things to remember is how people read online — at least English readers. You know how the front-page design of papers such as The Bakersfield Californian is referred to as the “hot L” design? Well, we’ll call the online reading pattern the “hot F.”

These images are heat maps from eye-tracking studies done by Web site usability guru Jakob Nielsen. (From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Instead of focusing on the top right of the page — a pattern that many newspapers are built around with that being a key spot for a lead story — online readers focus on the top left first, making the beginning of sentences and headlines extremely important. The images show just how attention can drop off as eyes travel to the right.

This means you don’t want to back into a lead or a headline or the story itself. Avoid wasted words such as “Hello” or “Please.” Just get to the point or you’re wasting a reader’s time.

Another important note is that while readers of the print product tend to be browsers looking for something to catch their eyes, online users are on a mission. They are task-oriented and looking for something specific.

But if you give them what they’re looking for, they’ll read it. Studies show that people actually read more of a story online, possibly because they went out looking for it specifically and it fills an immediate need. They don’t mind scrolling if the information is what they were looking for.

Alternative story formats including Q&As and lists are popular online, of course, but sometimes what would be “the Story” in print is the least important part of the story online. Don’t think about a linear story with special Web-only attachments; think about how to tell the story regardless of the tool.

Some great examples that could translate (if it was determined they were worth the resources):

• Interactive Vietnam Memorial: At footnote.com is a fantastic example of an interactive project that could live forever. It identifies the people behind the names on the wall in Washington. On a smaller scale, it could be applied to local monuments or lists of names.
• The Vegas Strip over time: The Las Vegas Sun has a great interactive map showing the change to the Strip over time. This would be a great way to show change over time to an area, like the loss of green space or farmland to development or the change in the shoreline and loss of homes.
• Football Chalkboards: The Guardian has this great interactive for users to map out game plays and “analyse” player performances. We probably couldn’t use something like this unless we licensed it somehow, but it sure is cool, so I included it in this list anyway.

We also got some suggestions for further reading:

• “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis, who also writes the Buzzmachine blog.
• “Wikipedia Revolution” by Andrew Lih
• “We the Media” by Dan Gillmor (This book’s been around a while but is still topical.)
• “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson
• “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky (If you aren’t up for reading the whole book, there’s a good summary of its key points in either the Time cover story about Twitter or the Wired story about the new “socialism.” I can’t remember which. But both are worth reading, anyway.)