If you’re in the online news business, you’re in the participation business.
If you’re a journalist, starting conversations is your job.
So what are you doing standing on the sidelines?
That’s the bare minimum. What are you waiting for?
Participation counts.
I saw a message on Twitter from Dave Cohn yesterday late in the afternoon that said he was set to interview Craig Newmark in 30 minutes. (Actually, I saw it 19 minutes after he posted it, so he was probably on the way out the door if not on the street when I replied.)
Today, Dave posted an explanation and a primer for journalists of all stripes who sometimes need quick questions along with quick answers.
It’s an introduction to microblogging, complete with a list of tools and how a reporter could use them to tap into the collective intelligence of his or her social network at the touch of a button.
If you still don’t *get* Twitter, start with Dave’s post, and then go read Jeremiah Owyang’s post that started something really fascinating this week, only substitute the word “journalism” for the word “marketing” and you’ll feel better about it, if that’s your thing.
{In the spirit of this whole carnival atmosphere, I’m going to post links to my fellow circus acts as my mental and temporal bandwidth allow today.}
Yoni Greenbaum has some suggestions for how a local newspaper might bring readers into the fold when it comes to covering the weather. Apparently, Back East you people have something white and frosty you call ‘snow’ and I hear there’s quite a bit of it coming down as I type this.
Yoni says:
“I believe that editors should start by treating weather events (in this case a snow storm) as an online story and as the day progresses, pick the best and the most relevant content to appear in print. They should ask what would readers want to read the day AFTER the snow storm, what do they need to know about the weather event they just lived through and what would be useful to them going forward?”
So, snowbound friends, how are you covering today’s storm?
{Carnival! There’s a journalism blog carnival under way, hosted — if you can wrap your head around that concept — by the folks at Scribblesheet, some sort of collaborative writing tool I haven’t had a chance to look at yet. Here’s a review of their product at the Online Journalism Blog.}
I’ve written pretty extensively about the merits of using free online tools to embed, well, just about anything, in an online news story. Here are two map-based examples from opposite ends of the spectrum:
In the major metro disaster scene category, we have The Oregonian’s coverage of what looks like a pretty hardcore wind and rain storm this week, with all the photos, multimedia, and many stories aggregated on a Google map that a Web Producer* built the complicated way: updating a KML file and embedding the map created by it.
Here’s a snip of what the page looks like today:
The headlines on the left are being pulled off of RSS feeds from a couple different sections of the news site; the photos on the right are from a Flickr collection of photos by staff photographers. (Any contributed photos here? Why not a call for readers who use Flickr to tag their photos something common and pull that feed?)
It’s easy to navigate, with lots of content (including video that plays in an embedded Brightcove player in the pop-up from the spot on the map – always nice to see that), and once the files are put together, it’s not difficult for a producer to update the map.
At the other end of the continuum we have my local paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, filling a hyperlocal need with a map of where to find houses and businesses decked out with lights for the holidays.
I love it. In fact, I live here, and I’m planning to use the map as a guide to take my family out to see the lights.
The folks in Santa Cruz (full disclosure: I worked at the Sentinel for a year) used ZeeMaps, a free map-building tool where you can add content to a map, embed it in your site, and most important for this exercise, allow your readers to add points on the map themselves.
Which means the map is an interactive, dynamic source of information for your community.
There are more than a few sites to help you get this job done. Check out FMAtlas or MapBuilder or even the ‘My Maps’ feature in Google Maps.
And if those tools are old news to you and you’re ready to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole, here’s the place to start learning about rolling your own embedded map.
Need more inspiration? Check out this list over more than 1,000 Google Maps mashups.
*The Oregonian Web Producer in question was Mark Friesen of NewsDesigner.com, who needs to update his blog.
Questions I have coming out of the first session:
A quick informal poll: Who handles your community site, and is it an every-single-day job or just an occasional role?
A few days ago, Dave Winer wrote:
“I’ve said it many times before, it’s worth raising again. Any newspaper or radio or TV station with a good reputation in its community could embrace the fresh ideas of the bloggers in their community by offering free blogs to members of the community, who may be new to blogging. I suggested this to the Times in 2001 — when a person is quoted in a Times article, a few days after the piece runs, contact them, and ask if they’d like to have a NY Times hosted blog. There would be no control over what appeared on the blog.”
He’s talking about the New York Times and letting sources have a space to speak without the intermediation of the reporter (and editors). (Is that accurate, Dave?).
Newspaper-hosted reader blogs and local blog aggregators are starting to pop up all over the place. That’s one approach: Become the community water cooler by giving the chatty folks a place to do their thing.
Dave’s idea has a similar root to the recently announced and denounced Google News commenting feature: Give the people who give you quotes a place to add context and elaboration.
My first instinct — and I think it’s a good one — is to recommend that every newspaper offer the usual suspects — local politicians, gadflies, and activists — their own blogs on the paper’s site. It seems like such a no-brainer, I can already think of six or seven people in my town I would call up today and offer blogs to. Maybe I will.
I want to save my favorite stories, right here, at your newspaper.com. Because really, what’s the sense in Digging a story about my neighborhood?
Newspapers should produce amazing local databases with great maps, ratings and reviews.
A newspaper company should buy Yelp.
Yelp now has an open API. Newspapers should stop trying to develop something better, and use the API to provide users with Yelp’s functionality on their own sites, applied to their local businesses.
Apply that logic everywhere it makes sense. No need to re-invent the wheel if you can tap into a massive database for free using an API, a la Google Maps mashups.
Do it this week.
Did ya catch that headline? Don’t sell it like hotcakes, sell it like blueberry pancakes. Be specific.
Let’s put that another way:
Don’t be an international news service that decides it wants to appeal to the demographic of roughly 18-30.
Sell to a niche, not a demographic. Local moms are a niche; Women are a demographic.
Kansas Jayhawks fans are a niche; teenagers in Chicago are a demographic.
Many many bonus points if you can find the niche in your town full of people with no outlet, no forum, no place that gets them together to share their experiences:
Somewhere, I like to think, there is or will be a network comprising only those who can find it. And when I finally stumble in there, they’ll say, “We’ve been waiting for you.”
That’s Sheila Lennon, found by way of Steve Outing today.
Find the unserved niche in your town.
Here’s a hint: If your newspaper isn’t covering it, it’s unserved.
Brainstorms, in no particular order
Ideas bubbling to the surface on a sunny Saturday…
All three of these ideas need some fleshing out. That’s where you come in.