Ryan Sholin

Tag: community

  • Participation counts.

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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? Start blogging here: wordpress.com Start sharing your photos here: flickr.com Start sharing your bookmarks here: del.icio.us Start developing a social network here: facebook.com That’s the…

  • Twitter hints for reporters

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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,…

  • How do you cover snow?

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    Ryan Sholin
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    {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…

  • Map thyself

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    Ryan Sholin
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    {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…

  • Brainstorms, in no particular order

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Ideas bubbling to the surface on a sunny Saturday… Has Joe Weiss ever thought about building a hosted Soundslides service, where users could upload their publish-to-web folder and get a friendly piece of embed code spit back out at them? Plus, of course, anyone could browse through any uploaded Soundslides show, and embed it on…

  • Who’s your community site manager in the newsroom?

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Questions I have coming out of the first session: For newspapers with community sites, like Bakersfield and Raleigh, who is the go-to person in your newsroom for managing threads, policing comments, and general cheerleading for the site? Do you have a dedicated position leading it or is it rolled into other Web roles? Is cloud-seeding…

  • Giving your sources blogs cuts out the middleman

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…

  • Mine, mine, it’s all mine!

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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?

  • If you can’t beat ’em, or buy ’em, use the API

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…

  • Find yourself a nice comfortable niche and sell it like blueberry pancakes

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…