Oct 22nd, 2006 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Continuing the discussion about how to evolve journalism in a new-media world of bloggers and social media, Dave Winer wrote a post recently with some of his advice on how to do that, including:
- Encourage your sources to have blogs.
- If a person you’re quoting has a blog, point to it from your piece
- Start your own blog, point to it from every one of your print stories.
- Float ideas for stories on your blog, much as you would with a person on your staff
- As you learn, share what you learn with your readers
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Matt McAlister wrote a post recently in which he looked at what he called the “strategic role of editorial quality” in new media. The bottom line, he says, is that while it’s important, it isn’t as important as building a relationship of some kind with your readers:
The easy mistake to make is believing that because you have good information people will come. They might, and they’ll just as quickly leave if you don’t give them a reason to create a relationship with you or other members of your community.
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Haydn Shaughnessy has a post on his blog that talks about some of the debate around whether journalists should all become bloggers, or whether bloggers will replace journalists — and he says that there are some obvious reasons why traditional news outlets such as the New York Times are necessary, in particular because of editors.
Editors are important figures - they get in the way, they make mistakes but they generally teach you to write better, uphold a set of values and keep reminding you of what those values are, have a good feel for what a reader base wants to learn about, have news sense, story selection savvy, good packaging skills.
Meanwhile, Ethan Zuckerman says that more and more he is looking to hear from bloggers that have some special connection to an event or a place where traditional journalism isn’t reaching:
- folks who are in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time: the commuter in the London underground when the bombs go off; Gnarlkitty, as she visits demonstrations surrounding the coup in Thailand.
- folks who have an insight or perspective I can’t easily find in mainstream media: TheMalau writing about Congolese politics; Russell Southwood writing about African telecoms; Roland Soong writing about, well, almost anything.
- folks who make themselves part of a distributed effort to create new knowledge: the researchers who pick apart records of Congressional pay for the Sunlight Foundation, the bloggers who cover the Kenyan parliament for Mzalendo.
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
A blogger who writes at Webomatica wrote a post recently asking why — if newspapers are doing so poorly and Web 2.0 things such as blogs and social bookmarking sites are doing so well — newspapers aren’t trying to become more Web 2.0-like.
Give every reporter a blog, pay them the same salary, and open each article up to comments. Have users rate each article. If you really want to still have a print edition, only print the articles that are highest ranked. Let users help determine what stories to cover.
Not a bad idea.
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
In a recent interview with I Want Media, Business 2.0 magazine editor Josh Quittner said that he was asking all of his writers to start blogging — and more than that, he was planning to compensate them in part based on the amount of traffic to their blog. He said he got the idea from Om Malik, the former Business 2.0 writer who started a blog at gigaom.com and recently left to blog full-time.
I loved the daily interactions he was having with his community of readers. It made him sharper and more valuable to me at the magazine. And so I thought, how can we encourage our people to do a similar thing?
Not everyone thinks it’s such a great idea, however. Dan Shanoff wrote at The Huffington Post site Eat The Press that such a focus on traffic has the potential to ruin what makes blogs — and journalism in general — great. “There’s certainly the potential that Time Inc.’s journalists will divert their attention from the quality of their writing to the quality of their traffic,” he says. Others such as Jeff Jarvis and James Robertson note that journalists are already compensated in part because of their readership (or lack thereof).
I wrote a little about this debate on my other blog here.
