SacBee’s Ortiz takes blog to top by engaging his users

This post sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

At most news organizations, sports and entertainment blogs rule the roost, but at The Sacramento Bee, Jon Ortiz has been able to take a blog about state workers and their issues to the top.

After spending several months at the top, Orti’z beatblog The State Worker, is currently the third most popular blog at the Bee. With football season ramping back up, the Bee’s 49ers blog rose to number one. The Bee’s crime blog rose to number two on the strength of a permanent link from Yahoo!

It’s impressive and rare to see a serious blog like The State Worker consistently one of the top blogs at a major metro newspaper in terms of page views and unique visitors. Ortiz said the 16-month-old blog has resonated with users because engaging users has become a cornerstone of how Ortiz approaches his job.

Many journalists have started blogging, with varying degrees of success. Many of these journalists are approaching blogging like writing newspaper stories. Ortiz said this approach won’t yield much success.

“I think there is a whole generation of journalists struggling with that,” he said. “They want blogs to be moment-to-moment versions of print, and they’re just not.”

Other journalists have taken to adding opinions to their blog posts and writing in a more informal style. But that’s not the key to being a good blogger either. Good blogging is about building community, and engaging users is one of the best ways to do that.

Ortiz said any good blogger has to make himself read his users comments. In the comments, bloggers can find tips, corrections, story ideas and more, all of which can make a journalists job much easier. Ortiz has a regular feature dubbed “blog backs,” where he takes corrections, suggestions and criticims from users and posts them.

“You just really get into the mind of your most arudent users,” Ortiz said about reading comments. “The percentage of commenters to users is less than one percent. Commenters are probably your most passionate users — often the most knowledgeable.”

Ortiz said reading and responding to commenters is a great way to tap into the expertise of your most knowledgeable readers. These most knowledgeable users are the ones who can become future sources for stories and are the people who are pushing bloggers to become better. Ortiz also finds future sources through e-mail and said that responding to user e-mail is an important way to build a blog.

Ortiz has found that people who e-mail him, rather than post comments on his blog, are more likely to use their real names and be willing to go on the record for stories and blog posts (Ortiz writes for both print and the Web). If Ortiz ignored e-mails, he would have lost out on a lot of valuable, on the record sources.

But Ortiz takes e-mails a step further. He often gets thoughtful comments and stories of how new government policies are affecting state workers from users that he shares with his readers. Ortiz said these blog posts that originate as e-mails from users are some of his most popular posts.

Originally Ortiz would ask users if he could use their e-mails on his blog, but now many people e-mail him asking if he’ll consider posting their e-mails. Many of these e-mails share personal stories that help add a lot of color to Ortiz’s blog. This blog post, for instance, contains two e-mails from state workers discussing how furloughs have impacted their lives and abilities to pay their bills.

Users are now even CCing Ortiz on e-mails they send to politicians and government offices. Not only do these e-mails tell stories that Ortiz may not have been able to get otherwise, but they also provide a lot of traffic to his blog without a lot of work. All Ortiz had to do was engage his users, and they began responding back.

Between Ortiz’s beatblog, column and print stories, he reaches quite a few state workers in California. He estimates his beatblog alone reaches a third of state workers. With all those knowledgeable readers, Ortiz would be a fool to ignore their expertise.

“It’s me and nearly half of a million of them,” he said. “I would be a fool to think that I could ever surpass the knowledge of that collective audience. It’s just not going to happen. I can either embrace that realization and try to leverage my points of contact or I can just try to continue telling people what they generally already know, that’s not very helpful.”

If Ortiz’s users are so knowledgeable, why do they even need him or his blog? Because The State Worker has such a big reach with state workers, Ortiz can get the governor and government to answer questions, whereas most of Ortiz’s readers can’t. And because Ortiz gets those answers, he has built a very loyal following.

When Ortiz pitched the idea for this blog to editors, he said he wanted to change how the Bee covered state workers. Instead of just writing down what the governor said at a press conference or doing a write up of a new law or policy, Ortiz would report on new laws, for instance, while also sharing the stories of how these laws and polices affect state workers. The only way to really do that well was to actively engage with state workers, and that’s what Ortiz has done.

GothamSchools targets loyal and casual users with different content

This post sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

GothamSchools, like most news Web sites, serves multiple audiences: one part loyal readers and insiders and another part casual readers. But does the same kinds of content appeal to both of these audiences?

Regular readers are much more knowledgeable about a beat and some of these readers are even experts. The kind of content that appeals to these people is much different than drive-by readers, who may be new to an issue. These differing audiences with differing expectations and knowledge levels have led editors at GothamSchools to develop different kinds of content to appeal to each audience.

GothamSchools attracts a lot of insiders in the New York City education scene: teachers, principals, parents, education policy makers, other education journalists, etc. This audience is very knowledgeable and they’re coming to GothamSchools for the latest information on New York City schools. These people don’t need to wait until the dust has settled around a story; they’re fine with learning tidbits along the way.

For this segment of the audience, GothamSchools has short blog posts under the heading “Margin notes” that break news, report a story as its unfolding, excerpt another blog, give thoughts from someone in the education community, link to content around the Web and more. These blog posts can either help tell more about a previously reported story or they can help tell tidbits as a story begins to take shape. This is content, however, that most likely won’t appeal to casual readers and may even confuse some.

These posts don’t have to identify everyone because insiders know who the players are. These posts may also crowdsource and solicit user suggestion. GothamSchools’ editors view these blog posts as a place to get users involved with reporting.

“When we’re tapping into our insider pool, that’s a blog post,” writer and editor Elizabeth Green said.

On the other hand, most casual readers would be lost if they just stumbled upon a short blog post that didn’t contain any background information or identify all key players. For this audience, GothamSchools offers longer content that is written much like a newspaper story. These pieces are thoroughly reported, involve talking to lots of sources and never contain information from one side of an issue. These stories are self contained and don’t rely on other GothamSchools content to tell a larger story.

These stories serve regular readers fine, but they’re more aimed at casual and drive-by readers. A parent who may have received a link in her e-mail would benefit much more from a thorough, self-contained piece than from a short blog post that excerpts another blog or just has a tidbit about an issue.

“We’re certainly a niche site, but we have a lot of general readers,” Green said about GothamSchools ability to appeal to casual users.

This may seem like arguing semantics. How do readers even know which content is aimed at them? GothamSchools recently rolled out a new visual design that indents blog posts from the rest of the page and puts a double carrot, >>, next to these posts. By having a visual way of differentiating between stories and blog posts, GothamSchools is making it easier for readers to see which kind of content they are viewing.

Green believes that it is important to make it clear to readers when GothamSchools is reporting a story versus when it has a completed reporting story. For instance, editors may have information from one side of a story (a principal on budget cuts, for instance) and want to get that out there, but editors don’t want readers thinking that’s the whole story.

“I don’t think it’s fair to put a full story out there with information only from one side,” Green said.

In fact, sources became confused by the different kinds of content that GothamSchools offered and some even accused GothamSchools of being “just some rag,” before they realized that GothamSchools offered in-depth content to go along with short blog posts. Editors and writers were having issues with these sources who didn’t understand the difference between a blog post and a fully-reported story. Editors are hoping this new visual design will help sources realize what’s a fully-reported story and what’s a blog post that may contain only one viewpoint.

Green and other editors debated the merits of this change. There were concerns that users would not get the distinction, but so far users and sources have been receptive to the changes. Editors wrote a blog post detailing this change and others that helped users understand what was happening.

The blog posts and stories work hand in hand though. As a story is unfolding, writers and editors will file blog posts with new tidbits, links to what else has been reported, thoughts from insiders and more. After a story settles and has been thoroughly reported, editors will go back and write a complete story that will sum things up for regular readers, while also telling a complete story for casual readers.

“It’s a balance of giving a good first draft of history and with being rigorous,” Green said.

Q&A: David Cohn says Spot.Us needs to scale with technology, not people

David Cohn recently expanded his community funded reporting project Spot.Us to Los Angeles. Cohn sat down with BeatBlogging.Org and discussed his plans to expand to more markets, his advice for those planning on applying to the Knight News Challenge (where the money for Spot.Us came from) and other thoughts on Spot.Us.

me: Spot.Us recently expanded. What has been the biggest challenge with expanding Spot.Us beyond the Bay Area?

David: A few things. I think the main thing is making sure that we are in a position to expand even more without partnering with an organization like USC. It’s great that we are working with them — and that we will have somebody who will play my role down south — but in the end, the site needs to be able to scale via technology, not people. Of course there will always be people involved (the reporters), but we are not a news organization. And surprisingly that is difficult for some to understand. The best way we can do that is by NOT scaling up our staff.

me: Why does technology, not staff make more sense for the Spot.Us model?

David: If we are in five cities am I going to hire five local managing editors? Especially when in those cities some pitches might have other editorial sponsors (local news orgs). In the end, we are a platform for journalism but not a journalism organization ourselves. It would be like asking why WordPress doesn’t have editors who work with all the bloggers of a certain topic. Why would Spot.Us have an editor who works with a local region? We want projects to have an editorial process — and we need to make it transparent whether or not a project has a news organization that is an editorial sponsor or if it’s a truly independent reporter — but it shouldn’t be our place to then force the independents into “our” editorial structure. It is just our place to make sure the public knows and understands that it’s an independent reporter that they would be supporting.

me: How important is USC to allowing Spot.Us to transition to a new market?

David: At this point in time — very important. My hope is that with a little more time organizations like USC will be less critical. But they provide an “in” to the journalism community. I have made inroads here in the Bay. but I have no connections in LA. It also provides some journalistic credibility that I don’t have (some people still look at Spot.Us as a cute project of a young kid).

me: Obviously, you’re going to concentrate on expanding to LA first, but have there been discussions about expanding to other markets?

David: Yes. I’m looking at lots of different cities. Somewhere in Texas, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Miami, etc. Basically major metro markets.

me: How much does the existing media landscape impact that decision? DC and New York are pretty well served, while Chicago has its two main news outlets in bankruptcy.

David: It does come to mind. For example everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to be in NY or why I’m not already. In truth, the media scene in NY is a rat race. And my goal isn’t to do national horse-race stuff. I think there is this notion that small is bad. I disagree. There is so much talk about journalists as innovative entrepreneurs but not enough about journalists as small business owner entrepreneurs. So I want to examine and make sure we aren’t going someplace that is saturated, but rather that is also a place that has potential partners and a vibrant online community.

me: You said that you aren’t looking to have a managing editor for each market and that you want the technology to scale, but do you envision hiring some more staff if you move into several new markets? If so, what would their roles be?

David: If anything, I would want to hire more tech people (programmers). After that, maybe a marketer (I have an idea for reverse advertising that I hope to alpha in a few weeks — not really sure what to call it yet or how to describe it, but it’ll be cool. If it works, we will be giving our advertising budget to the public, and we will need to start selling advertising.

me: Speaking of programmers, you just wrote a post about good, fast and cheap Web development and how you can’t have all three. What’s your advice for hiring Web developers for people applying to the Knight News Challenge?

David: if you win the Knight Challenge go for Good and Fast. Make sure you know what you are doing in that “fast” time period or you’ll ruin it. But it seems to me (and this is what I did) that I already just won the lottery. I got to play with other people’s money. So rather than try and cut corners on development, I cut corners on other things (pay for myself), and I built a site that did exactly what I wanted it to do for the launch. The phase I’m in now is more middle of the road….. but I don’t regret doing the good and fast route to start. When you look at some of the other Knight News projects Spot.Ss has done better than others (not to point fingers), and I think it is in part because I recognized I couldn’t get all three. If you try for all three, it’s like going to0 fast in a three-legged race.

me: I’ve talked to people who have received grants from various foundations and many of them don’t really get how Web development works. They are surprised by the costs and time needed. Do you have suggestions for how to get educated on Web development?

David: I totally agree. I’ve talked to a lot of the same people and that’s kinda who that post was about. If you don’t know about Web dev at all, be aware that you’ll have to make this choice: good, fast or cheap. On how to get educated: talk to as many developers as possible in as many programming languages, frameworks as possible. In the end you’ll find there is no secret technology that will meet all your needs. You should hire the developer that is best for you — not based on the technology that you heard will do it for you (Drupal Kool-Aid or Ruby-Kool-Aid, etc).

me: From an organizational perspective, how is Spot.Us doing? When your grant runs out, will Spot.Us be able to be supported?

David:: That is an excellent question. In truth — I don’t know. But that’s better than being able to say “no” without a doubt I like to joke that “considering all the things that could go wrong — we are doing fantastic.” No group with an axe to grind has taken over nonprofit media with this method As you said, the problem is actually the opposite; it’s hard to get the public to see a value and donate to journalism. But I’m fighting the good fight and I still make a promise to report back everything I learn as honestly and openly as I can.

me: Has the economy had an impact on Spot.Us?

David: Hard to know. We launched in November of 2008. The economy blast happened in November of 2008. Didn’t really get to experience too much before that. If I were a betting man — I’d say yes. But there is no way to prove that.

me: Switching from Spot.Us to the News Challenge, what advice would you give people applying this year?

David: Be bold…… Make sure you focus on the three things Knight is looking for: 1. local (so many that apply are not local) 2. digital innovation 3. Open source. Other than those three restrictions — go with your craziest ideas.

In fact, I argue the crazier the better.

Women use social media more than men

Women make up the majority of users on most social media sites, according to Information is Beautiful.

Here are some popular social networks with a majority of users being female:

• Flickr is 55 percent female.
• Twitter is 57 percent female.
• Facebook is 57 percent female.
• Ning is 59 percent female.
• MySpace is 64 percent female.

YouTube and LinkedIn have an equal ratio of males to female. Digg is the only major social network that is heavily skewed towards males, with 64 percent of users being male.

I have a lot of theories as to why there are more females on social media than men but nothing concrete. It’s clearly important, however, to understand the demographics of each social network, and news organizations — especially newspapers — have struggled for years to attract as many female readers/users as they do with males. Creating more social products can only help attract more females to news products.

Engagement, not unique visitors should be No. 1 goal

Unique visitors can be very misleading, especially since so many Web users are drive by users that stop by to view one Web page, before quickly going elsewhere.

What’s more important is how we engage with our users. Drive by users aren’t worth nearly as much to advertisers (or to content producers) as dedicated users. Try this statistic on for good measure:

The average Facebook user spent 5 hours and 14 minutes on the site in July, whereas the average NYTimes.com user spent about 14 minutes.

Which one of those users is more valuable? Obviously, Facebook users are much more dedicated users than NYTimes.com users. Facebook is also getting less drive by users, and drive by users aren’t that valuable. NYTimes.com is one of the better journalism sites out there, and it does fairly well — as far as news sites are concerned — with time spent per user per month.

But news sites — and most Web sites — can learn a lot from leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is continually adding more features to make Facebook sticker: chat, applications (popular games like Farmville are making the site very sticky), the news feed, etc. In fact, time spent on Facebook has soared 699 percent since April 2008.

News organizations need to figure out how to grok what leading social networks are doing, because news Web sites need to get stickier. Clearly, people want to be social. News organizations need to embrace being social and start engaging their users better.  News has to become a conversation.

Getting more users is good, but getting more engagement out of each user is better.

What I’m reading

This is a new feature on BeatBlogging.Org where I share the links of the stories that I’m reading. This will be different than The Dose of social media, as these stories aren’t just social media related. Also, I’m thinking about doing a once-a-week social media roundup too.

• Starbucks launches iPhone app: use your phone to buy coffee http://bit.ly/1f3YcC
• Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole | TED talk http://bit.ly/2LdHGz
• WARNING: Twitter Worm Spreading via Direct Messages http://bit.ly/2hr49
• Study: Microbloggers are really boring http://bit.ly/adcoe
• Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations http://bit.ly/14LCnx
• HOW TO: Launch Your Own Indie Journalism Site http://bit.ly/1z0y5
• Study: Twitterers More Receptive To Ads Than Other Social Net Users http://bit.ly/gnvtL
• Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good http://bit.ly/105BLj

News orgs should look to government for innovation

I never thought I’d say this, but we need to look at some of the innovative things that government is doing.

In a recent post for Poynter.org, I looked at NASA’s internal employee social network, Spacebook. The core behind the idea is to create a more collaborative culture at NASA. And why not?

The Web has made collaboration easier than ever before and that’s what Spacebook is hoping to tap into:

The network allows NASA’s estimated 18,000 employees, regardless of where they’re stationed in the world, to interact and collaborate.

The site gives employees the ability to change their status on their profile pages, share files, friend other NASA employees, follow their friends’ activities a la the Facebook news feed, join groups that interest them and more.

Spacebook asks users to list their areas of expertise, which NASA is hoping will make it easier for employees to find colleagues when they need to collaborate or ask questions. Linda Cureton, chief information officer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told the blog Space Marauder that Spacebook is an asset to NASA in this down economy:

” ‘With the constraints we’ve had in hiring and our workforce issues, you want to know who knows what, such as experts on batteries or encryption,’ Cureton said. ‘There may be certain skills, abilities and talents that exist throughout the center, and you want to be able to tap into that knowledge to know areas of expertise of people.’ “

So while, yes, as a former government employee, I’m a bit stunned to say that news organizations should be looking to government for innovation, I’d dare say there is more innovation going on in government right now than at traditional media outlets.

Now a site like Spacebook may be overkill for smaller news organizations, but I can see it helping out larger companies that have multiple offices and bureaus. What about a company like Tribune? Couldn’t an internal social network help get people from different newspapers together on company-wide innovation efforts?

Why not? Tribune needs it.

Rethinking commenting system

Most newspapers have virtually identical commenting system to one another, but why is that? Shouldn’t there be more variety? The Washington Post developed a new commenting system, WebCom, that is radically different from what other news organizations are doing.

The Post is hoping this new Flash-based commenting system will help spur better discussions. Take a look at the new system and let me know if you think it will foster better conversations. I have a feeling that some people will really like it, while others will be completely disoriented by it.

I did an in-depth write up of WebCom over at Poynter, but here are some key take home points about the new commenting system:

• WebCom is very visual, and the system is built around giving users a visual way to see how many comments there are, which comments are the most popular (by rating), which comments are spurring the most follow up questions and so on. It looks a lot different than any other commenting system I have seen. From a visual perspective, it works.
• The Post offers a standard threaded comment view, because some people are a bit thrown off by the new look. WebCom presents comments in a giant Web, which can be disorienting to some people.
• It’s Flash based, which is both good and bad. Flash allows the Post to create a beautiful and fluid way to display user comments. But Flash has issues: It’s a system resource hog, it doesn’t play well with screen readers and it has other accessibility issues. Those are all serious concerns.

Watch the video below for a walkthrough of WebCom:

Bit.ly and Ow.ly best URL shorteners

Not all URL shorteners are created equal, especially if you’re shortening URLs for work.

What good is it to shorten a link if it doesn’t work for end users? That will deprive you of page views and frustrate users (potentially losing customers). Speed and reliability matter.

Twitter and social media users know how important URL shorteners have become. Without URL shortening, Twitter and other microblogging services would be much less functional. Many journalists and news organizations are sharing links via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. For these people and companies, URL shortening reliability is very important.

Royal Pingdom did a great study comparing the speed and reliability of URL shorntening services. Key findings:

• Ow.ly had 0 downtime between July 16 and August 16 of 2009. That’s amazing. Bit.ly was close with 99.98 percent uptime. Tr.im came in last with a 99.10 percent uptime, which translates into almost 80 hours of downtime a year.
• Is.gd is the fastest URL shortening service, followed by Bit.ly and Ow.ly. Snipurl was the slowest.
• “Five out of nine services had a 99.9% uptime or better, which we have to consider acceptable.” There is a big difference in 99 and 99.9 percent uptime, especially when you’re trying to share links at peak times of day.
• When speed and reliability are combined, Bit.ly and Ow.ly tied for first. Tr.im came in last.

BeatBlogging.Org is out of funding

Our funding has officially run out, which is why things have been quiet on here lately.

I still have some more content coming and some house keeping to take care of. We are looking for new partners (particularly academic institutions), and are working on some things behind the scenes. It could be awhile before we have funding or backers again, but in the meantime, I’ll try to keep the light on here.

The site itself and all its content will remain up indefinitely, and there will be new content appearing here, just on a slower time frame.

Thanks for everyone who read the site and helped us report. BeatBlogging.Org has been a great success because of you.