Stephanie Romanski

This may seem like an old topic, but it came up today at work and I wanted to talk a little about how I feel social media adds value for newspapers, even the smallest ones.

The question was basically this:

“Doesn’t adding video and photos on sites that aren’t your newspaper (ie. Twitpic, Twitvid, Facebook) put up a wall between your website/advertisers rather than draw them in?”

I suppose if you’re looking it from the dollar perspective, it does. But if you view it from the broader perspective of building reader loyalty, it does not.

The value of social media to promote our newspaper is something we really cannot afford to ignore anymore. One of the main points of social media is creating a brand with the folks who actually choose to follow us, which is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to ensure that my newspaper is everywhere our readers are, and more and more of them are on Facebook and Twitter and Friendfeed and the various apps associated with those. Doing this puts us in our readers minds as the place to come for news. I do mention our website at every opportunity on all of these places and I send them there whenever possible.

But keeping us “enclosed” and restricted to just our main website is a mistake in the Social Media arena. People share videos and photos on Twitter and Facebook using sites like Twitpic and Twitvid – especially things of a timely nature. It takes time for us to produce a 3 or 4 minute video with commentary, b-roll and captions/titles. Which is great for features or if we have notice to create it with an upcoming story etc.

But the nature of news is not always stuff you know about ahead of time. In the case of breaking news, the ability to quickly upload the videos and photos to get the actual news out to our readers who have come to expect immediacy – it should not be an issue of where we put it. We need to be able to get them the news as quickly as possible so that they come to think of us as the reliable source of info in this community. We can produce longer, better news videos once the breaking part of it has passed, and include much of the footage shot on things like Flip cams in with it. Those can be hosted on our site and enable us to put together beautiful packages people may return for time and again, or even pay for a DVD of afterward.

My videos that I have done and will do in future are of the brief, mostly raw footage, and in the case of recent tornado footage last week, my Flip videos were online for the Indy almost directly after they happened. The day after the storms, our videographer was then able to incorporate some of my own footage in a bigger video package he created for our all-encompassing coverage of the storms.

I do know that “how does it make us money” is the Big Question. But when we only focus on that, we lose sight of other benefits like reader loyalty. We need to generate as much reader loyalty online as we have for print.

The value, simply put, is loyalty and reader branding. If we can cultivate it and be everywhere the readers are, we will benefit greatly – maybe not right away, but over time. They want a richer experience online, and if you can give it to them in the manner of their choosing, they’ll be more likely to visit your main site and check out what else you’ve got to offer.

Another question I got was “If I’m a reader of your website, and I think you might have video of the recent storm, shouldn’t I just go to your website, then click on videos, and watch it?”

This is a valid question, but it misses the point of the realtime benefits of the web, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etcetera.

During the storms mentioned above, my paper and people around the state were using Twitter to post updates of the storm using the #nestorms hashtag. Twitter users were following that tag for reports, links, photos and video. They weren’t refreshing theindependent.com looking for that until the next day when we put together all of that coverage, reporter coverage, damage video etc. Twitter is realtime and that is the value. I think the #IranElection hashtag has helped more people see the value of realtime communicating and it feels like we need to be moving ni this direction.

Non-twitter users could also follow our realtime coverage on Twitter by visiting the page I set up here: http://ginewsroom.com/twitter/#nestorms which I promoted heavily when we learned storms were coming. Being able to get our news, coverage, videos and photos up fast is a value the readers appreciate. They remember that their local newspaper does this stuff and it makes them more inclined to start checking our website, seeing our ads, and trusting us to provide their local news. It fosters community spirit, involvement and loyalty.

So, there is definite value in putting the video online in other places than our website. it’s like a tease. We get you your breaking news coverage, now come to our website and see what else we can do for you.

The site I’m linking to is someone’s personal blog. It’s not part of any kind of journalism community or a network of community blogs (that I’m aware of) but this post is a great example of someone using many forms of multimedia to report a story that literally happened right outside his window.

The reason I want to highlight this is because I see this as a sort of wake-up call for journalists who are still resistant to plunging into the world of digital journalism. Those who might believe they can’t learn “new tricks” or are just plain resisting change. Grabbing some video or audio and getting it into your stories to enrich and enhance it is easier than you might think. Let me tell you what this guy did.

He was awoken by noises in the street. He looked outside, saw the police gathering outside his neighbour’s home, and so grabbed his camera and began filming (I should stipulate that he did not include footage of the person being arrested, just the police doing their thing and milling about). At first, he was baffled as to why the police needed a full film crew with him. As the day progressed, he followed the story. A couple of hours after the raid on his neighbour, he got a knock on the door. He grabbed his iPhone, fired up Audioboo, and recorded the convo with the police office dropping off anti-drug leaflets. He snapped a pic of the leaflet and wrote the post linked to above, adding all the multimedia elements. Both YouTube and AudioBoo provide easy-to-paste embed code you can drop right into your story.

Later in the day, he found the story about the raid on his local paper’s site and updated his post. And after that, he recorded a report on TV about it as well and added it to the post.

So using just a couple of tools (Kodak ZI6 video camera and iPhone) and nothing but FREE software available to anyone (YouTube, AudioBoo, Wordpress), he put together a media rich report on some drug raids taking place throughout his town.

I know he’s not the first to do this sort of thing, and he won’t be the last. But tools and software are becoming easier than ever to operate and share (Flips, Twittelator for iPhone has just integrated audio/video right in the app, Tweetie desktop for Macs let’s you record video right in its app…) and journalists, it’s imperative that you take advantage of these tools.

Ficly (formerly “Ficlets”) is back – and better than ever.

I apologize for breaking from usual chatter about the struggles and triumphs of a small newspaper to talk about Ficly, but it’s a site about writing. I wouldn’t have used this description over a year ago, but Ficly is like Twitter for fiction writers. And like Twitter, there is great freedom in restraint.

A long time ago, I followed a link recommendation from Wil Wheaton, which brought me to the most wonderful, awesome site for writers I’ve ever known: Ficlets.com (I won’t link because that site is now dead.) Ficlets restricted your story to a mere 1,024 characters, or a few brief paragraphs.

Some of the things you could do with it included prequel or sequel any author’s story and hopefully get a chain of different authors adding to one story; issue writing challenges; write your own little series; comment/rate stories (leading to one of the most instructive, constructive feedback sites I’ve used); use creative commons pictures from Flickr as inspiration for a story; use quotes or starters as inspiration.

A lot of fun packed into a neat little site. Ficlets (and the nifty Flickr inspiration) helped me break through a problem I have always had whenever I tried to write a long story – namely, I could never write anything longer than a short story.  But Ficlets helped me create a story, with characters I fell in love with and storylines galore. and with the help of being able to write brief sequels, I found myself with a workable outline that eventually grew into what I hope will be a book in the near future: CherryPopMcGee.com.

So I have a deep love for Ficlets. Imagine my dismay when I learned it woul be closing down. For reasons I won’t go into, the creator of the site was made to shut it down. Oh we had warning and most of us were able to save our stories – our babies really – before the last day.

And then, one day, came the word that he was rebuilding it. That he was taking his time to make the improvements he couldn’t make before. That he and a core group of people, out of the kindness of their hearts and love for the community they had originally built, were going to bring it back.

And after a very long wait, this weekend Ficlets returned with a new name, Ficly, a beautiful makeover, and a crowd of voracious writers ready to make it what it once was. As of this writing, already over 600 Ficlies have been written. To me, that is phenomenal and worthy of a visit, if writing is your thing I give it the highest of recommendations I can give it.