Daytona Beach editor advises
“Get out there” to engage public
How do you tap into local, local news?
Poynter Online’s E-Media Tidbits features a lively primer by Michelle Ferrier on the outreach she conducts as leader of MyTopiacafe.com, an online community of The Daytona Beach News-Journal. Ferrier writes:
“I’m often asked what a typical day is like as managing editor of an online community. I often respond, ‘What do you mean by ‘typical day’?’ Running a hyperlocal online community like MyTopiacafe.com is more like running a political campaign than an online news site. You must be the candidate, campaign manager and media relations coordinator all rolled into one.”
Ferrier makes speaking appearances and hits local community events to evangelize for the site, which also conducts fund-raisers for community causes.
She is one more journalist who is finding the fun at the intersection of journalism and social networks.
|
 Harrisonburg is a small Virginia city with a population of less than 50,000. The town wasn’t exactly Happenstance until Brent Finnegan decided to liven things up by supplementing his alternative newsblog, Hburgnews.com, with a communal Twitter account. He called on his readers to text in news and soon he and his cronies outpaced the regular news media covering breaking news. This is an interview with Finnegan about his Twitter project.
|
Social Media vs Email: Which Is A Better Marketing And Communication Channel?
Email can be definitely used to engage, ask and get valuable feedback on a one-to-one basis. Email is great for real conversations and can be much more powerful than social media in involving intimately someone else into looking at something. Popular social media destinations tend to be relatively superficial. If you want to engage in a real exchange email may be again your very best social media tool.
Social media seems to have other stronger traits, including a greater ability to monitor discussion on social communities and networks for key conversations, keywords and topics as well as to identify top concerns relevant to what the company is promoting or trying to sell.
The idea that social media is a better tool to develop one on one relationships with other people is true only to a certain degree. You can develop really powerful one on one relationships via email as well.
|
Sometimes it’s better to just let the beat blogger say it for themselves.
Check out what Eric Berger is doing at the Houston Chronicle.
This is no small feat. Eric is recruiting local science experts to create and maintain blogs covering their specific fields of interest. As “science” is a huge study ranging from meterology, biology and all kinds of ‘ologies’ – Eric could theoretically create a vast blog network.
But conditions on the ground suggest that Berger should take it slow – one blog at a time. The first blog, Atmo.Sphere, looks like a great start. It’s described as “climate conversation with John Nielsen-Gammon and Barry Lefer.”
What does this development mean?
Eric is building a network. “The goal of these changes is to provide a neutral space for scientists
and the general public to meet and speak on the issues of the day.
There are blogs by scientists for scientists, and there are blogs aimed
at the general public. I’m aiming for a hybrid site where people can
get their questions answered by real, live scientists, where scientists
can get feedback, and everyone can find a bit of daily zen.”
The hard part is yet to come. Eric will have to keep the bloggers motivated and make them feel like part of his posse. A follow up post may talk with people at the Chron to find out what technology is driving this, but as always, technology is second to people power. The real effort was Eric finding a science blogger to dedicate themselves towards this project.
Read more from Eric to find out what he is looking for and what he hopes to get out of the experiment.
(yes, I really want you to click that link, because it’s a fantastic pitch to get the public involved in journalism)
Reddit has just bee redesigned. Not only is the site easier to use – but it’s easier to take advantage of the tools. Now you can create your own Reddit.
You chose the topic: Your beat
You choose who is invited: Can be public, restricted (anyone can view, but only contributors you choose can submit), or private (only contributors can view and submit).
Let’s say your beat is pharmaceuticals. Perhaps you have a rabid audience of people who know the industry already. They don’t need you to give them the latest news, what they want from you is analysis.
But to find out what the latest news is – they can help. With a custom Reddit you are getting the latest links, and a sense of how important they are as deemed by your community. That’s better than your personal RSS reader any day.
See that RSS link at the bottom of your Twitter page? Copy it.
Head over to Yahoo Pipes.
Start a new pipe. Paste in the URL of your RSS as a Fetch pipe.
Add a filter pipe. Put the real names of the people you need to follow most as part of the title, or if you only know their Twitter name, use that in the guid field. Make sure the pipe is set to permit any meeting these conditions.
Connect everything, preview your output.
Publish to the world, and check the public URL of the pipe output. Bingo – you have a Twitter custom group. Here’s an example.
|
I’m well aware that there are journalists who simply don’t want to understand the Web and why it’s important.
But I believe there are a lot of journalists who are perfectly willing to learn more Web skills, if only the pitch was made to them in the right way. They don’t want to be forced into extra duties without any explanation, they don’t want to be looked down upon by some snotty recent graduate, and they don’t want editors talking over their head with tech jargon.
So what’s the right approach when trying to nudge your fellow journalists into trying new things online? I’d love to hear some success stories, because this is becoming a bigger focus for me in my newsroom.
A few of my initial thoughts:
|
…I talked about news as a conversation. But until I started reading more blogs and getting involved in social media, I didn’t understand how quickly news gets shared, expanded, commented on, filtered and repurposed across the web. This is not a trivial thing. People once relied on the news to inform conversation. Now they are relying on the conversation to inform them about the news. If something’s important, they figure they’ll hear about it.
…I considered myself an early adopter. But until I saw how the best bloggers used social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic and FriendFeed as reporting resources and channels for distributing content (the beauty of community, after all, is that it allows you to gather and share information more efficiently), I didn’t realize how far behind we really were in harnessing the power of these new tools.
To expand on that last point a bit, when I started work on this piece I posted a short question on Twitter:
|
Yes, we have been talking with Ryan about using beat blogging as a ‘best practices’ space to learn about what some of the stars of Wired Journalist are doing.
Here’s another one: Wired Journalists now has more than 2000 members.
The Ning-powered social network that Howard Owens, Zac Echola, and I created back in January has exceeded our expectations, in terms of numbers, interaction, community, and the learning/teaching that’s going on there.
I’m talking about beatbloggers like Matt Neznanski and Web staff from smaller papers, like Carlos Virgen from Walla-Walla.
Jay Rosen has been talking about using Wired Journalists as a pool of talent to find reporters and editors and bloggers like Matt and Carlos as they bubble up to the surface of the network, and I’m excited about the possibilities.
|
 The unveiling of Google’s new “Friend Connect” program this week is very big news that must not be overlooked by local media companies as we work to become more web-centric. Friend Connect is the latest from Google’s “Open Social” project, which is designed to allow users to aggregate and take with them various important aspects of social networking sites. The logic is simple (and typical Google): the walled-garden approach to the Web is archaic. What’s needed is portability.
So as MySpace and Facebook duke it out to see who can gather the most users, Google says “let’s make it possible for people to take social elements with them wherever they go (if they wish).” To Google, the Web is the platform. To Facebook, for example, Facebook is the platform. This, Google argues, is limiting, so the Open Social project is a natural extension of the Google model.
|
