For Samford Crimson journalists

Some newspapers inflate their circulation numbers based on the idea that you’re going to read your copy and hand it on to another reader. Conversely there’s a downplaying of statistics for online news sites. Amy Gahran picks up where Dan Thornton starts and runs with it:

Thornton suggests that if your newspaper factors shared readership into your print circulation, then to be fair you should also try to estimate how many people encounter your online news without ever logging into your site as a visitor. This includes people who:

• Block cookies
• Use a feed reader or personal home page (like MyYahoo)
• Get news or headlines via social media or news aggregators
• Access mobile or cached versions of your news (which often aren’t estimated adequately)
• Read reposts of news stories elsewhere online

According to Thornton, “There’s a big elephant in the news room. Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?”

Therefore: If you think your online readership (as estimated by direct Web site traffic) only represents only a small percentage of your estimated print circulation — think again. When considering the future of your business, how many people visit your site ultimately may be less relevant than how many people connect with your news content and brand via any online or mobile channel.

There’s a great distributed network of people out there just beyond the individuals reading your stuff. How might they pass it along? Who might you be influencing because of it? From the business perspective the key, as Gahran says, is in recognizing the opportunities in a broader view, and communicating that value effectively to advertisers and other potential partners.

Note: Cross posted from my JMC 352 blog.

From the BBC’s Future of Journalism conference, via Paul Bradsaw:

Head of BBC Newsroom Peter Horrocks spent most of his session fielding questions from employees concerned about how their particular corner of the corporation would be affected by multimedia newsrooms. That aside, general themes from his presentation and responses to questions included:

• a need for a broader range of skills, such as information design and software development
• While strong single-platform performers will be encouraged to continue doing well on that platform, everyone else will be encouraged to work across platforms

The same will be important in newsrooms here as well. Don’t forget: even as we talk of a broad skill set the elemental foundation of quality journalism remains just as important.

Paul Bradshaw gives us plenty to think about when it comes to using social media in the practice of our journalism. He finds there is a small amount of extra work, but a worthwhile reward.

As journalists we used to be active in seeking those people out – and we used reliable, often official, channels to do that, meaning we were often too reliant on particular sources. Now sources are increasingly coming to us and the work is in making ourselves visible, accessible and trustworthy; and in filtering and verifying the information they provide.

That’s not ‘more passive’ journalism, it’s getting out of your silos and making contact; it’s moving from being a conduit to a stimulator. It’s moving from a linear production process to a networked one, and too few journalists are doing it.

The feedback, the better angles and the better reporting you can produce will be worth the effort. Doing so will also help you build a better brand for your newsroom and for yourself as a journalist.

The horrors in Mumbai reinforce a few of the things Mindy McAdams preaches about the future of newsrooms:

1. Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
2. Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
3. The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
4. Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
5. Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
6. Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
7. The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
8. Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis.
9. Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
10. Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.

All of these things are true. You should also consider that breaking news of the chaotic sort is always difficult to sort out as it happens. Facts like fatalities, wounded or attackers are seldom as they seem during the actual event, as you might have noticed if you followed this story as it unfolded. This will require a cool head on your part and considerable editing prowess whether you are in the field or riding a desk during coverage of tragic events.

Do you hear or read people discussing community journalism? In a sense we’re already undertaking it here when we cover “the Samford bubble” as some call it.

Paul Bradshaw has been asking community editors in the United Kingdom about the concept, and the answers are relevant in the U.S. as well. There is advice here that will serve you well at The Crimson and far beyond:

• Know and treat your community as individuals
• Be flexible
• Show your humanity
• Trust the readers
• The strongest community is one that belongs to its members

Did you know that the New York Times is about to roll out a big video campaign?  The implications are worth some thought, says Mindy McAdams. She points to Peter Ralph’s seven strategies for success and Rob Curley’s quantity versus quality debate.

Did you know this? The Samford Crimson has video cameras and we’re ready to upload videos to the site. See me, Emily, Lindsey or Franklin for more ideas.

Mindy McAdams is an author and professor of journalist at the University of Florida. She’s always good for a regular read, which is why she’s including in the blogroll to the right. Recently she’s written a few posts worth your notice.

• Stuff to teach the next journalists
• Gear for recording phone calls
  

A word about recording phone calls: this is one of those laws that changes from state to state. Alabama is a “one-party consent” state meaning that it is legal to record the call so long as one participant knows a tape is rolling. Some states have different rules in place for taping calls.

I’d like you to meet Professor Leonard Witt from Kennesaw State, who recently linked to a series of videos trying to answer the question “What skill set does a journalism grads need?”

He’s linked to a few videos there, and they are worth seeing. The obvious answers — writing good leads, crisp copy, good sense of ethics and law and so on — will forever apply. Today you’ll also need to be a varied journalist. The less intimidated you are by evolving software and emerging technology the better off you’ll be. If you can write a mean story on deadline and shoot a great picture and bring home good video you’ve become an invaluable resource.

Make sure you’re a solid editor too.

Jeff Jarvis is on faculty at CUNY and is one of the bright minds and loud voices of progressive journalism. He’s in the blogroll here and I wanted to share with you a few of his recent entries of interest.

Here are his notes from the opening session of his interactive journalism class this semester. They’re worth a quick read.

And you’ll also want to read Jarvis on this idea

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public.

[...]

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed.

[...]

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

This is the way to cover stories and life.

Disclosure: Jarvis was once the president of Advance Internet, the parent company of al.com, my previous employer.