Help Your Audience Find You On Social Media Networks.

As you search out your audience, it’s inevitable that you’ll miss people who might be interested in checking out your facebook and twitter feeds. The best way to capture those people as fans and followers is to help them find you.

Use keywords related to your publication in your posts. If you have an RSS feed to your Facebook or Twitter account, try using these keywords in your headlines so you get picked up in searches.

List yourself on Twellow: It’s like the yellow pages for twitter. You can list yourself by different categories like “Healthcare” or “Fashion.”

Expand your reach Being retweeted increases your twitter visibility. So how can you find people who will retweet you frequently? Twitter search “RT Keyword,” then follow the users who appear most. They’re most likely to start retweeting you.

Continually promote your social media networks from every outlet at your disposal. Promote from your website. Add it to your email signature. Promote Facebook on Twitter and Twitter on Facebook. Join groups pertaining to your topic. Let people know you’re there. The more people you reach, the greater chance there will be that someone else interested in your message will find you.

But don’t forget to find twitter followers—spammers, really--who don’t belong. I’ll talk about that next post. 

Pay-Per-Click Model Spells the End of Newspapers

Ignore that time stamp above. It’s June 25, 2015. Despite previous proliferation of free online content, newspapers, magazines and other media conglomerates have successfully implemented a pay-per-click model for accessing print content on the internet. They’ve successfully won lawsuits to prosecute copyright infringement so blogs can no longer summarize the important point of posted story. Knowledge is no longer free.

So what does the world look like? Is the internet populated with rumors? Are the citizens grossly misinformed? Are the journalists fat, happy, and well-paid? No.

Simply put, newspapers are obslete, the analytical style of the most popular magazines is a thing of the past, and the media conglomerates are wimpering, sniveling little businesses fighting to stay alive.

The people—the bloggers, the Tweeps, the Facebook frienders—are the news source of today. They see, they post, they share. Are there lies and misinformation? Sure. But there’s also a discerning population of internet browsers, made cautious by rampant internet rumors and then educated by the librarians and teachers of the world to weed out the misinformation. These webcrawlers know how to read and verify. They’re not afraid to dispel rumors by posting whip-like comments exposing the lies.

~

A lot has been said this week—this week in August 2009—about implementing a pay-per-click model for print content like Apples has with iTunes movies, music and television shows. Rupert Murdoch and others in the newspaper industry have said that a pay-per-click model will revolutionize the newspaper industry, pulling it out of its current economic slump.

Courtesy | Jeremy Kemp via Wikimedia Commons

The missing factor is that which is most obvious: music, movies, and television shows are timeless. When a consumer buys any one of the three, they’re able to enjoy the content for eternity. News is not the same.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Pull out a newspaper from June 1, 2004. How about one from Aug. 5 1982 or from any other date? Do the articles hold your interest in the same way that breaking news does today? Is the front page item a classic, an absolute favorite that you read over and over again? Unless you’re an absolute media junkie, I suspect not.

Looking for a new business model in an economic downturn is wise. But Murdoch and others must realize that when they borrow a business model from a successful enterprise, they must consider all the differing factors between that company’s business and ours. Otherwise, they’re just hammering that final nail in the coffin of print media.

Finding Your Audience on Social Media Networks

Where's your audience? Courtesy | Barb Ver Sluis via Public Domain Pictures.net

On a daily basis, 100 million people view Facebook, 20 million view Twitter, and 12 million view LinkedIn. But if you don’t know which network your audience frequents or if can’t find them there, it doesn’t help.

Here are a few quick tips on how to find your audience on social media networks.

Query “What social networks do you use?” from polls, blogs, e-newsletters, any social media network you’re already on, or anywhere you’re already in contact with your audience so you can find where your efforts will be most productive.

Search keywords related to your publication in Facebook’s search tool and Twitter's advance search. You can friend/follower people whose profiles match these keywords and join groups related to these words so fans/followers can find you.

The paid service TwitterHawk or free Twitter tool Tweetbeep automates some of this work by monitoring your selected keywords and sending you an email summary at regular intervals.  

Friend/Follow Your Competitors’ Followers. If a user is following them, they should be interested in your content as well.

Use Mr. Tweet for Twitter. It’s a free service that finds users who interact with people you follow and may be interested in the same things. A link to their profile lets you quickly log-in and follow them.

Of course, you can’t find everyone on every network. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to help them find you. I’ll write about some cool tips and tricks for helping your audience find you in my next post.

What Can I Do With Social Media?

Courtesy | Mark Coldren via Public Domain Pictures.net

Whether you’re friending, following, or linking to people, it can be a jungle out there when your publication joins a social media site. When you’re asked to jump right in and get to work, the first question that may come to mind may be: What can I do with social media?

Obviously, you can communicate with your readership… but what does that really mean? You can:

Generate Traffic – Add your RSS feed to Twitter or Facebook to link readers back to your website. Or, post teasers that tell readers about current or future content on your website. Get them excited about your content!

Stay Relevant - Find out what is on readers’ mind. On Twitter, the homepage shows the thoughts of everyone you follow. On Facebook, people can write right on your publication's wall. Concentrate on those users who seem keyed in to your community or on the general community chatter. It might give you a lead on a great story.

Research Articles – Query your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to learn more about a subject. My experience with this hasn’t been perfect, but I’ve heard about plenty of successes. In one article, a journalism professor tweeted that she wanted to know what she should tell journalists about twitter.  At least 20 people responded. This same idea applies with groups on LinkedIn and discussion boards on Facebook.

Contact Freelancers and Assign Articles – Some pubs use LinkedIn to contact freelance writers. If you work for a niche magazine, this could be especially helpful. I’ve also heard that some people work in GoogleDocs so freelancers can review their submissons and make edits. Just be aware: this will not track changes.

Find Advertisers… or let them find you – If a local or niche business discovers your website for the first time through your Facebook or Twitter page, are you prepared to help them? Talk this over with your sales team. Do they have a media kit ready? Is there a number that advertisers can call?

Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in business is something so new there are no hard and fast rules. But if there is one rule, it would be this: Decide what you want to accomplish before you sign up for social media and then make a plan on how to get there.

I’ll come back tomorrow with some thoughts on your first step: finding your audience.

Managing Social Media

We've all heard the jokes about people who join Facebook and spend days feverishly setting up a profile. Their friends and spouse get worried, stage an intervention, and eventually the social media newbies quit Facebook, relieved to have broken the addiction. 

Courtesy | Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures.net

Well, that's in part true. Setting up and maintaining a social media network does take time, especially at the beginning. But it has its advantages--both for business and pleasure.

As a journalist, your time is already at a premium. Over the next couple of posts, I'll tell you my tips for monitoring and engaging your publication's audience on Facebook and Twitter. I'm no expert, but I've learned  a lot by trial and error. 

I'll start next time by writing about the advantages of using social media networks for your publication. 

Money for Page Views: Journalists Turn Into Revenue Lapdogs

Remember last week, when I posted about Michael Hicken’s article in The Faster Times “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are”? Well, it turns out there may be a good reason for his rather inflammatory view.

Courtesy | Anna Cervova via Public Domain Pictures.net

Money.

In an interview last week with Fishbowl NY, The Faster Times founder Sam Apple explained that his journalists are being paid 75 percent of the ad revenue generated by their respective pages on the site.

That means that if any one of the 19 angry readers who commented on Hicken’s article (so far) or any of the countless other journalists who he’s inflamed or ostracized clicked on even one of the ads accompanying his unsatisfying and un-researched prose, they have helped him. Infuriating!

Now, correct me if I’m wrong here, but a scenario in which people are responsible for ad revenue doesn’t sound like journalism, it sounds like sales. And when journalists are forced to behave like salespeople, it runs against all of their journalistic training.

Who would bide their time covering zoning meetings or bridge commission meetings, or getting bored to tears at a meeting about whether the town should invest in new banners for main street or a new stop sign on a side street, when they knew that covering just one rock band concert with an ad for cheap tickets could net them an awesome 75 percent of sales.

As journalists, we vow to inform the public, to remind them of things going on in their very neighborhoods that they simply might not have the time or patience to track down. Turning journalists into another lapdog to revenue is probably the worst possible scenario for journalism.

Can We Trust The Internet? Winnowing Out Misleading, Untrue Sites

“I think it comes down to whether we can trust the internet to winnow good from bad in the blogosphere,” Trina commented on my post Coming Out From Behind the Byline: One Journalist’s Take On New Media.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about this idea of winnowing: weeding out those websites and blogs with URLs that aren’t worth typing. The internet has provided me with countless examples of where good sites can go wrong.

A citizen journalist using just a video camera uncovered reporters censoring former presidential candidate Ron Paul at a gathering of GOP candidates for president on Mackinac Island, MI about 19 months ago, reported columnist Tim Skubick for the Leelanau News. Or that’s what they thought.

Courtesy | Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures.net

“I don’t want these Ron Paul people, but I need shots of audience people eating and crap like that for voice over,” the producer says in the roughly 60 second video, which Mr. Skubick says garnered 65,000 hits in its first week in youtube.com. (The original video seems to be unavailable, but see another posting by searching “Censoring Ron Paul support?” on youtube.com.)

Unfortunately, Skubick reported, the citizen journalist didn’t check the facts. After shooting a ten-minute segment with Ron Paul, “the goal was to get some generic video of what was going on inside. To make sure the video was not slanted to favor one candidate or the other,” the producer asked them to avoid filming more Paul supporters.

But one posting and a flood of vicious emails later, the reporters stand accused of censorship, a cardinal sin in journalism. “No one called; no one suspended his or her judgment to get at the truth,” writes Skubick.

That’s not the only way that new internet sources are straying from the straight and narrow path that journalists follow in reporting the news.

Six minutes before medical examiners pronounced Michael Jackson dead, an IM feed reported the King of Pop’s demise. Events shortly after proved this report true, but internet outlets that passed along this news even an hour afterward were in the wrong.

Old Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC took several hours to confirm and report this historic event. Why, you ask?

“Someone may have been calling the hospital, the family, Tito Jackson, Jesse Jackson, not only for confirmation but for a voucher that the next of kin had all been adequately notified,” said Scott M. Fulton, III, on Betanews, where he blasted these new media sources. “You remember journalism, don't you? Or is that too much ‘old media?’”

Let’s be clear: bloggers, youtube.com posters, and other internet content producers are not all journalists. Some are simply people with a computer, internet, and desire to share their opinion. But the internet gives them the same platform as the rest of us.

So how do we winnow out the good sites from the bad? For now, the truth is that we can only control the content on our own websites. There is no ranking system where we can decry the distributors of false or misleading content.

I’m curious though, about search engine optimization. I won’t pretend to completely understand SEO, a complicated phrase that simply means “how I get my content to the top of a google search,” but I understand that this calculation does depend in part on linking.

By not linking to questionable content providers, can we keep a website low in search results, thereby reducing the number of people who click through to their site?

I’m not naïve enough to believe that one person alone can change a site’s placement in search rankings or even that a collective effort can change the ranking of some of the most popular sites, but maybe together we can begin to winnow out the worst of the worst.

The Internet Isn’t Killing Journalism; Overpaid Journalists Are

Shocked? So am I.

But that’s the view taken by Michael Hickens of the Faster Times, who says that when he was editor of Ziff Davis Enterprise, he made $90,000—and had reporters who made more than that.

My experience—and the experience of several colleagues I polled—has been nothing like that. We toil for salaries less than half of that figure.

So, are overpaid journalists killing newspapers? I’d much rather say it’s the Internet.

Coming Out From Behind the Byline: One Journalist's Take on New Media

What does it mean for a journalist to come out from behind the byline? I've been asked this more than once. The next question, inevitably, is "Why would I want to do that?"

Well, my dear colleague, let's start with why. Step with me into the info-bahn. It's a cluttered place, with pages and pages of information on just about everything. Want to know about obscure patents for things like inside-out style garments and canine testicular implants? There's a site for that. What about how to trap a muskrat? You'll find that too. How about the true tales from Albuquerque? (It's a fun-sounding place, what can I say?) Here's one and here and here.

So, how are you going to stand out? Why should Ms. Susie Q. Internet Searcher come to your site? Well, that's where it gets a little tough: come out from behind your byline. You have to talk to her. It's simple but scary. 

In every J-school classroom, in every newsroom, and in every community, journalists have been told to stay objective. The school board member who just purchased a trumbone company which then got the school's contract to supply the new music department wants a fair shake. Have you been asking neutral questions? You might have a nose for the news, but make sure it's connected to objective eyes. That lesson has sunk in.

But now, with journalism in crisis (Yes, it's a tired cliche. I know) we're being asked to do something new. Engage the audience. Tell them what you really think. That trumbone guy? He might not have known that his shiny new trumbone company would be competing for the school's music program contract, but it is certainly suspiscious. Can you talk about it?

FUN FACT: The German name for this instrument is "Sackbut", which actually means "pull" and "push."

Can you tell readers about other schools that have been fleeced by trumbone-toting school board members? Can you tell them about the nationwide rise in trumbone sales despite cuts in school music programs? Can you talk about your own experience learning to play the trumbone? Can you tell them something, anything at all about trumbones?

That's part of what the new journalism is. Or, at least, that's the part I've learned about so far. So, for now, that's what coming out from behind the byline means to me.

Of course, when I learn more, I'll let you know.

Just look for me, lightly pushing aside my byline to come out and chat for awhile.

Finding The Media For Your Message

Even those new to journalism quickly learn that you can’t bring print material directly to the web. Nearly everyone can spot when you regurgitate print material in a blog, webcast, video, or slideshow.

It’s up to the saavy web journalist to repurpose, recreate, or simply start from scratch when creating for the web. So how do you choose a media for your message? Consider the strength of each medium.

Blogs are undeniably popular. Just about every journalist making the leap to the web begins by writing blogs. They’re not articles and they’re not op-ed pieces, but on many news sites, they’re a comfortable mix of conversational speech and news reporting.

Webcasts invites the audience to join you in listening in on a special interview or explore some minute portion of a larger topic. They’re kind of like the sidebar for the web. On an interview webcast, the subject often does most of the talking. For other podcasts, reporters talk about things they didn’t mention in their stories or even the background to their stories. One of my favorites is the How Stuff Works “Stuff You Should Know” webcast.

Slideshows are basic. Get the pictures, craft the cutlines, and post. Audio slideshows take this simple form to a whole new level. How? By combining all the power of pictures with a simple interview-style explanation, it reaches beyond the short two to three sentence explanations offered by the traditional slideshows. For example, you could interview a sculptor about a statue he is carving and combine it with pictures showing his weeks of progress. Suddenly, this familiar form seems more interesting.

Videos give you the opportunity to connect with your audience as a person. Consider this example:



Would you feel the same about the subject if he you could only hear his musical rendition of his cover letter in a webcast?

After one week, this video received close to 8,000 views on Youtube.com and its creator, Alec Biedrzycki, has been interviewed by CNN. Maybe this want-to-be marketer would consider a career as a web journalist?

Be Your Own Editor

When I wrote for a daily newspaper, I remember calling my editor from meetings—school board meetings, sewer planning meetings, mobile home association meetings, you name it—to tell him a synopsis of the entire lengthy ordeal.

“Well, that’s interesting,” he’d say. “Tell you what: write something up about that, say, 6 inches.”

It always amazed me how he’d sort out the day’s garbage from its gold so quickly. How’d he do it? Instinct? Experience?

When writing for the web, you have to call upon that je ne sais quoi with every post. You have to be your own editor.

Since I’m in no way an expert (see last post), I combed through the best resources I could find for advice on how to be your own editor.

Get to the point.
The first thing an editor looks for in a manuscript is its purpose, says Writersworld.com. Hook your reader with a catchy intro and then land them with a solid lede. Tell your reader why they should keep reading and then keep them reading with relevant material.

Ask “What kind of reading will my target audience be doing?”
The Society of Technical Communication (pdf) urges editors to consider the function of the communication—is it meant to inform, educate, entertain, or persuade—and the reading strategies used to complete this function. If your reader wants to quickly learn something, an article or blog post with an overview, lists, and summary could help.

Think in Subheads
An editor once told me that subheads enable a reader to put an article down and come back to it a week later without feeling lost. The concept is a bit different on the Internet. Here, subheads enable the writer to organize thoughts in a cohesive manner and let the reader skim the article and read the sections they’re looking for quickly. Be careful, though, to follow the next bit of advice.

Get Rid of Clutter
Sometimes all your notes organize into three neat and tidy categories. Sometimes they don’t. Then you have three choices: scrap the material, post it elsewhere, or shove your notes under the rug and hope no one notices the ever-growing bulge. (OK, I made that last one up.) Seriously though, if it feels like you’re stretching when you’re writing, etc. then it will feel stretched to your readers.

Keep it Tight
You thought you were done once you cleaned up all that clutter, huh? Nope. Not even close. Embrace your inner copy editor here. Editors look out for redundant quotes, phrases, and words. Lately, they’ve been rallying against “ATM machines” and “future plans.” Eliminate those phrases! My favorite English professor told me not to be afraid to “Kill your babies.” Brutal, I know. Practical. Yes. Don’t fall in love with your copy. It can only end in paper-cuts.

Make heads and links clear.
How’d you get here? If you’re lucky, you followed a link about being your own editor. If you’re not, someone has created a new nasty form of rickrolling for journalists.

Think the same way for your readers. You want them to find information they want to find. Maybe they’ll hang around for awhile then, leave some comments if you’re lucky.

Ensure that its “All for One and One for All.”
Here’s the one that stumps even experienced editors. On the web, not everyone will stick around for the whole party. Make every page count toward the whole, but make sure each page can stand on its own.

More On Mr. Cronkite: Learning From The Way He Was

If I were writing for print, my editor would have handed that last post back to me.

By making my headline, “Remembering Walter Cronkite,” I made a contract with you, the reader, to talk about my memories of Mr. Cronkite.

I should have told you that as an avid news watcher who was born in the mid-80s, I never saw Mr. Cronkite report that JFK was assassinated. I never saw how his exhaustive research into astronomy colored his broadcasts on the space program, or what he saw as his great disappointment: being at a loss for words when the first man landed on the moon.

For me, Mr. Cronkite was the epitome of journalistic standards. He’s the man we’re all compared with and the man we all revere. What struck me is not all the broadcasts he made throughout his life, but the effect he had on journalism after he “retired.”

"He used his halo to
bash his former employers
over the head."

-Paul Taylor

Whether it was strengthening the journalism program at Arizona State University or pressuring television to improve its coverage of politics, Mr. Cronkite made a difference.

Mr. Cronkite "was quite willing to use the moral authority he had gained as a broadcaster," said Paul Taylor, a former politics reporter at The Inquirer and the Washington Post. "He used his halo to bash his former employers over the head."

Though we may fall short of Mr. Cronkite’s high standards, as journalists, the least we can do to honor him is to try.

Next post, I’ll talk about how to be your own editor. I know its sometimes I still am trying to learn.

As Mr. Cronkite famously said, “And That’s The Way It Is”

Remembering "Mr. Cronkite"

When I sat down to write today, I had an entirely different topic in mind but the news waits for no woman so there’s something far more important for today.

After more than six decades as a journalist, Walter Cronkite died at the age of 92. Famously dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” he brought America the news of John F. Kennedy’s death, the first spacewalk, and the deaths of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. He is said to have helped broker the invitation that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and to have turned the U.S. opinion on the Vietnam War.

Legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite speaks at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington celebrating the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2004. Photo | NASA/Bill Ingalls

The tribute in the Philadelphia Inquirer brought me to tears. Along with describing all of his varied accomplishments, the writers referred to him as “Mr. Cronkite” throughout. For me this was the utmost mark of respect—breaking with AP Style and expending an extra four characters each reference to refer to him as Mr. Cronkite.

But my discussions of this article, of his presence in American journalism—and international journalism, in fact—and of the respect given to him by other journalists led me down a different road than I expected. More times than not, I heard about how journalists no longer live up to the high standards set by journalists like Mr. Cronkite.

For one, journalists no longer talk to people with respect, I heard. “When was the last time journalists referred to anyone as ‘Mr. So-and-so?” queried my father. And the president doesn’t count, he says. “He’s the president of this country. He deserves to be called ‘President Obama,’ not ‘Mr. Obama.’”

In another conversation since the death of Mr. Cronkite, I heard how journalists today just don’t care about the people behind the stories.

A high school football player had been pulled from the quarterback position had on his high school’s varsity team. He wasn’t playing well enough. A journalist published the coach’s less-than-stellar comments along with her own analysis of the quarterback’s weaknesses. The young man was crushed. When the journalist arrived at the next game, the coach headed for her like a bull for a red cape. She just didn’t care about the young man whom she so ruthlessly covered.

What’s changed in journalism? With the explosion of bloggers, the introduction of online editions, digital media and new social media like Twitter and Facebook, and the constant newsroom layoffs, the news force—the number of journalists left—is shrinking. We all have had to take on new roles to keep the presses running. But in our rush to conquer this new online world, have we lost what makes us journalists?

I joined the profession to tell true stories, to explore the truth behind political hype and to learn about the community’s thoughts and values. I bet a lot of other journalists came onboard for the same reasons.

For my part, I’ll admit it: I’m guilty. As a journalist, I like to use people’s first names. Maybe I feel like it breeds familiarity. Maybe it’s because I’m horrible with names and it’s easier to remember one than two. Maybe it’s generational. Maybe it’s laziness. To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. But if it matters that much, I’ll refer to everyone as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” And I’ll try to remember just how much people care.

World Wide What?

For journalists, the world wide web is a scary place. Scarier than the monster under the bed when they were little. Scarier than that slasher movie they saw when they were 13. So scary, in fact, that there’s countless reasons why, like:

1. Fear of wide-open spaces – What do I do with no picas or inch count?
2. Circular logic: My blog topic should appeal to my audience. Who’s my audience? Depends on the blog topic.
3. Procrastination as long as the possibilities are wide.
4. Writer’s block, oh, I mean massive writer’s block.
5. Oh, the possibilities: Grocery list or Capote’s “In Cold Blood”
6. Plenty of brainstormed ideas...maybe it should be a book instead. With a nice solid ending, say 300 pages?
7. Commenters. Isn’t that what the editorial page is for?
8. No editors? Breakdance or Breakdown?
9. Wait, I need to come up with a headline? This is bad. I hate my headline.

For journalists, fear of the internet is the fear of the unknown. Limitless possibilities mean limitless responsibility.