The Novice Journo

To: Jim Brady

The beauty of local news is that one is writing for a small community. This small community will respond better to social media interaction than a non-cohesive national audience. The best way to interact with and engage this audience is to give readers their own avatars so they feel like part of a community when they are on a site, then encourage them in various ways to make their unique mark all over aspects of the site. Some sites already do this to a certain extent, but I think it is a strategy that hasn’t been explored to its fullest potential yet.

Every reader is an individual

DCist, a local news blog, has many active users. The most active 50 each week can be viewed here. The site tracks how often they post comments. I think this could be easily expanded to include how often they send in story tips, on-scene photographs, or post on message boards. For a breaking news event, these unique users will be more inclined to send in their content if they know it will be obvious who the credit goes to. Unique users who post comments regularly will begin to interact with each other. If these comment threads are monitored to make sure they don’t disintegrate into personal attacks, the users can build atop each others ideas, respond to each other, etc. With the advent of Twitter, comment threads are already moving in this direction, with many users making reference to “@Anonymous 4:35 a.m.” or however another user wishes to identify himself. Of course, some users will still choose to remain anonymous, but I think a majority will like the idea of having posts tied to a unique identity. The anonymity of the Web also won’t necessarily tie a username to a real name.

Tools

• Twitter Lists: Our site can make lists of users grouped by certian categories (the categories they choose). For example, some Twitter/avatar users of the site can be grouped into lists by neighborhood, by interest, by job type, etc. Because these lists are open, the users can interact better with each other and keep conversations going with like-minded individuals.
• Sidewiki: This Google application works like a sidebar conversation on a web page. On a news story, it could act like a different kind of comment box for regular unique users. Users can add not just insights but pictures, video and other content.
• Alerts: Today’s readers prize instant knowledge. They should be able to create through their personal avatars specialized alerts so they can filter out what they aren’t interested in and keep the alerts they really want.
• Google Wave and Google Latitude: These brand-new Google applications have different journalistic uses. With Latitude, a unique user can interact on the site with their phone from a certain location, and that could be tracked. For some, this might be too much of an invasion of privacy, but I feel many users would like the idea of being able to be located geographically and differentiated from a user in another neighborhood or city. For Wave the uses would be similar to Sidewiki, with side conversations going that can include various types of media like videos, pictures and live conversation.
• Phone Applications: BlackBerry and iPhone applications are the way of the future for mobile readers who want their news instantly. Our local news website would have one of these that would work on smartphones of all types. Their phone could be linked to their online avatar so that if they post a comment or add to the conversation in other ways, it will be tracked.

In the future of social media, I believe all users will have one unique identifying avatar that they can use across all platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc. For now, we don’t have the technology to intergrate like that, but I feel like our site would be on the cutting edge of social media if we used this approach. Our readers would like it too.

Politico’s Facebook fan page isn’t great, but it’s not horrible either.

The page has over 4,000 fans. Considering their circulation and reach, that doesn’t seem like much.

The page is pretty active, but sporadic. Some days will see five or more posts, while other days don’t get posts at all. The posts get a fair amount of comments and “likes” from fans of the page, but it’s not an overwhelming kind of thing. The comments are usually pretty intelligent and don’t stray into the crazy territory.

It seems like Politico is doing everything right: they post stories at good times, the stories they post are compelling, and yet, they don’t seem to have a huge Facebook following.

Their Info section is well done, with links to their best pages (Click, 44, the Arena). Their photo page could use some work — it only really has art by their cartoonist. On the other hand, Politico doesn’t really have a lot of unique photography, and that’s not what they’re known for.

The Notes section could use some work. They seem to have tried to start posting top stories of the day, but the last posting was a month ago. Their Discussion section is also pretty dead. There are only a handful of discussions going on and I wouldn’t even call a one post a “discussion.” Their Events and Video sections are empty.

It’s unclear why the fan page is so unpopular. It may be because their reporters don’t really interact with readers in the comments. If I were to comment on a particular story and the reporter responded directly to me, I would be really excited, and probably comment all the time. But readers only have themselves to interact with.

I would recommend more interaction with readers, a beefed-up discussion section, more videos and events posted, and a daily Note with the top stories of the day. I would also recommend they post more stories more often, and make sure they’re the top stories of the day.

Irritatingly, none of the sites that group journalist twitterers list Politico writers. I know of a few already, but I feel like those lists should be expanded.

I’m actually going to compare two Politico.com twitterers, because I feel like they each have different strengths and weaknesses.

Mike Allen tweets infrequently, but his tweets are often important, breaking news. He throws in, inexplicably, lots of links to the print edition too. Not sure who that is aimed at. Here’s a sample:

1. AP: Obama wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”5:11 AM Oct 9th from web
2. For a donation, the House GOP campaign comm. offers membership on the NRCC “Physicians’ Council for Responsible Reform.” http://bit.ly/xW8R24:45 AM Oct 9th from web
3. POLITICO/House ethics unanimously votes to expand investigation into Rangel’s finances to include his revised personal financial disclosures3:56 PM Oct 8th from web
4. BREAKING — Senate Finance Committee vote on health care TUESDAY10:30 AM Oct 8th from web

All of Mike Allen’s tweets that I saw seemed to be published from the web. I can’t believe he doesn’t have a BlackBerry or some kind of mobile web device, so I suppose this means he just chooses not to use it.

It’s nice not to be overloaded by stupid tweets I don’t care about, but Allen really doesn’t seem to be tweeting as often as he could. Maybe getting TwitterBerry or something would help. He also rarely interacts with readers.

Allen’s collegue Jonathan Martin is his polar opposite on Twitter. A few newsy tweets are mixed in with tons of @replies and random comments. Here’s a sample:

1. 4 ticks left, Tenn lining up 4 44-yrd fg 4 THE WINabout 18 hours ago from web
2. If anybody not watching, put on tenn-al. tenn has ball back, down by 2 w/ just over a minute leftabout 18 hours ago from web
3. @treyditto – half-smke, loaded, and strwbry shake. my go-to.about 19 hours ago from mobile web
4. @jaketapper — hardly, but tis not first time i’ve heard go-go!about 21 hours ago from mobile web
5. Some of the tourists at ben’s chili bowl not quite, um, ready when the go-go starts blaring.about 21 hours ago from mobile web

A few tweets ago, there was something about Bill Clinton, but the majority of tweets were about go-go music, food and a football game. He also tweets constantly, at a rate of about 2-6 an hour.

Martin has way more interaction with readers than Allen, and I think his more personal tweets would attract a different twitter audience than Allen’s. Martin is considerably less popular though, with about 4,000 followers vs. Allen’s 12,000. Since Mike Allen is more well-known, it’s hard to say if the numbers of followers each has is attributable to their different styles or simply name recognition.

When you’re a busy college student with two jobs, efficiency of news reading is key.

I’ve been trying for years now to perfect a method of reading news that allows me to absorb the largest amount of information in the smallest amount of time. For awhile, I only read the Washington Post’s print edition. That lasted until I couldn’t afford the subscription anymore.

My next stage was to make bookmarks of my favorite news sites and try to check them as often as I could. But the problem with that method is that essential and interesting stories would often move out of the rotation of the front-page, and it became difficult to keep track of which stories had been published that day.

So to make sure I could keep track of every single story, I signed up for hundreds of RSS feeds from newspaper sites and blogs. This started a period in my life where I spent about three hours a day trying to keep up with the 600 items that would come in. This didn’t last long, not so much because of the time investment but because I had no idea which stories were more important. On the other hand, I NEVER missed a story.

Eventually, I moved to my current method of news consumption — the email newsletter. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy to skim, is organized by interest, and there’s a clear hierarchy of importance.

After signing up for about six of these newsletters initially, I’ve narrowed it down to four: Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet.

I’ll ignore the Cheat Sheet because it’s different from the others.

Politico falls in the middle of the spectrum, in my opinion. They publish far fewer stories every day than the other two papers, but the layout is clean and they will have their centerpiece story with art way at the top of the email.

The New York Times has the best newsletter. They put 3-4 of their best stories in each category in it, which makes it easy for me to get caught up. Their centerpiece thumbnails work well to pull me in, and I’m always interested in the quotation of the day.

The Washington Post does the worst job. They often don’t include art, have too many stories in each category (5-6), and there’s no way for me to include Tom Toles’ daily cartoons in the email, which is one of my favorite things about the Post. I actually can’t show what the newsletter looks like because unlike Politico’s or the NYT’s emails, it doesn’t include a link to a web page version.