Archive for the ‘ Working on the Newsroom ’ Category

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5
Dec

The Twitter Revolution

I got an email out of the blue earlier tonight from Kari Cobham, a reporter at the Daytona Beach News-Journal asking some excellent questions about using Twitter and how to pitch it to her newsroom. The questions she asked actually came verbatim from her editors. Kari sounds like a reporter who “gets it” and I totally love her enthusiasm! She is meeting with these editors tomorrow and wanted some ammo to take in with her. I don’t know if I gave enough ammo, but I sure do talk a lot.

Here are her questions, and my answers:

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Wow, someone read my blog :) Thanks! Let’s see if I can be of help to you. The revenue question doesn’t sound like your biggest hurdle, but the awesome website Old Media New Tricks (http://www.oldmedianewtricks.com, @mediatricks on Twitter) had some wonderful responses to this question:

  • This effort is more about marketing our brand than a direct dollar-for-dollar payback. If we do this right, our brand is seen as a part of their lives. Besides, these social media tools are (generally) free. We have little to lose by trying.
  • If we don’t do this, then we risk becoming irrelevant. This is the way people are communicating at an increasing rate, and we are in the communications business.
  • This can be used for good customer service. Social media allows for us to respond to customers swiftly and effectively. It’s hard to measure the effect of good customer service, but it is easy to measure the effect of bad or nonexistent customer service.
  • It’s not about making money right now, but this just might make money in the long run. If we don’t plant our flag now and learn to do this the right way, we’ll be behind the curve.
  • We can reach an entirely new audience for our product. That’s the holy grail, isn’t it? With the economy the way it is, now is the time to try to reach out to new people.

The rest of your questions, let me take one-by-one.

How do we do it with with a shrinking staff?

I have a newsroom of 6 beats, 3 sports guys, 1 videographer and 2 photogs. They all have twitter accounts. So far only 1 photog and the video guy will tweet. Neither of them have quite got the hang of it yet, but I give them mega points for effort. My paper’s main Twitter account is me. I use Twhirl (twhirl.org) and keep it running in the background while I work. I watch for any updates the newsroom posts, I tweet it immediately. I listen to the chatter in there and tweet anything that will be newsworthy.

To answer your question, you need someone who will be willing to do this. I don’t think you will have much luck getting everyone to do it – yet. I haven’t. But you should find someone in your newsroom, or if you have an online team – a web editor, something – I don’t know how your newsroom is structured. Ours is sort of weird. Ask them if they would be willing to tweet headlines a few times a day. Or it may end up on your shoulders.

You have to build a network too. Someone must take some time and start following people in your area and get them to follow you back. Once you get the ball rolling, it grows fairly quickly especially if you tweet your headlines manually and engage with your followers. But someone simply has to to do it. Don’t expect the other reporters to jump on the bandwagon especially if they are worried about ‘one more thing’ they have to do.

The flipside to the above, is that manually tweeting the headlines isn’t all that time-consuming. At least for me. I tweet a hello message in the morning, answer an @reply or two, and then just tweet headlines I think the readers might find cool, or of interest to them. I include feature stuff, a good letter to the editor, the latest column or blog post from our community bloggers… it doesn’t always have to be a headline tweet. But I find something at random times, tweet it and then go back to whatever I was working on. At the end of the day, I tweet what we’re working on for tomorrow.

How do we get around the current prohibition against posting anything without first getting and editor to read and approve it?

This is tricky if your newsroom is really a stickler about this. The headlines I tweet are ones I can link to, so they don’t go on Twitter until it’s on the site, which means it’s been approved. I will tweet something like ‘Photogs have just been sent to check on a car accident’ or even stuff like ‘The Governor is in our office right now to talk to _____ about his budget plans’ or something. But if you check out my tweets at http://twitter.com/theindependent you’ll get a feel for the kinds of things you can say. And don’t be afraid to retweet your competition too :)

Can reporters Twitter in an interesting way, and engage in conversations with readers, without voicing an opinion, which is required to do their job? Will this have to be limited to columnists, who can have an opinion?

There are many ways a journo can use Twitter. They can use it simply to network with other journalists and make contacts. They can use it to cover meetings, events and breaking news – just look at how it was used during the Mumbai attacks. Watch CNN reporters on Twitter to see how they are doing it and use it as a guideline. I don’t quite feel qualified to answer this question very thoroughly, and my answer here might not be workable. But there are a lot of comments in this article you might find helpful: http://is.gd/aiRY – but no this does not need to be limited to columnists.

Will it generate sufficient audience to make it a worthwhile use of our reporters’ time?

Yes, but you have to take the time to build that audience. You can’t just start tweeting and expect them to come. You need to pimp the hell out of it in print and online. Reverse publish. Make the latest tweets visible somewhere on the website. Have the staff add ‘Follow Us on Twitter’ with the link to their email sigs. Follow people in your community from your paper’s main feed. Heck, follow people outside the community. I ended up searching for all Twitterers in the entire state. My logic was that perhaps they have ties to my town. And if not, then no harm. They know we exist. Invest in the time to grow the community in the beginning. Once it shows signs of growing on its own, then I think that would be the time to try and pull in other reporters and staff to maybe help out, or start their own account.

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Apologies to poor Kari for the length, but I hope it’s at least helpful.

12
27
Oct

A little disillusioned with video right now

I got to talking about video this weekend with my dad (also in the news biz) and the value of it for newspapers. Two years ago, we were given a chunk of change and allowed to build a studio in an extra room in the basement, near the morgue. Video was all the rage and we needed to put as much on the web as we could. We needed to produce shows, and film interviews and debates in our shiny studio.

We hired three videographers – one who was geared more towards advertising and filming “premercials” (Not fond of that word), one for the evening shift who could really get some great sports video and another during the day to cover news. We produced quality stuff, and everyone pitched in to help. I got a crash course in producing, running the switcher for our three-cam setup in the studio, and editing the final project. I’m grateful for that.

But two years later and we have stopped doing our twice-daily news show because no one had time to script and anchor it, and we weren’t growing viewership. We had to lay off a videographer. We still have our advertiser videographer, whose job has evolved into online banner creation on top of producing a weekly cooking show. And the videographer that’s left is run ragged from having to shoot/produce/edit news AND sports.

I’m looking at our stats. A large majority of our videos are getting maybe 30 or 40 views, whereas a not-very-good 40 second clip I shot outside my front door last week showing the season’s first snow got over 200 views. (I know these numbers aren’t metro paper numbers, but for our market, 200 views is pretty good.) A rather dry press conference video regarding the Nebraska State Fair move to Grand Island has nearly 300 views – because it is a hot-button issue here. (I am discounting any Husker video we do because I think we could put up video of Coach Pelini reading the phone book and Husker fans would watch it.)

Part of our problem is that we don’t embed the video often enough within it’s accompanying story (Thank you @gmarkham for bringing this up to me on Twitter last night. I wasn’t even thinking about that when all this came up.) This is something I’m hoping will change when we switch to new software for the website. It’s a bit of a process to embed YouTube code in our stories presently, and so we rely on latest video showing up in the list on the front page and only embed if it’s a big story.

But we often take the time to shoot and put up video that’s unrelated, or too big to embed. We filmed a recent senatorial debate and had to break it up into about 7 or 8 videos, uploaded over the course of a week. And no one has really watched any of them. It seems like wasted effort to me.

Here is my dream plan:

1. Donate our expensive handhelds that no one is using to area schools with the stipulation that they use it to film videos we can put on our site. This was an idea of our presentation editor and I like it a lot.

2. Buy inexpensive FlipVideo cams for the reporters and show them it’s as easy to download/upload video as it is to pull audio from their recorders. (This is contingent on them actually using the things. It’s a nice idea, but sometimes they are too busy, you know, doing the reporter thing to have time to shoot video as well. At least this is the argument I hear the most.)

3. Study our view stats and try to discover and predict what it is our readers actually want to see. Just looking at the first page of stats, I can already tell they prefer football highlight reels to pressers, and breaking news/hot topic videos to debates.

4. Focus on what the readers want and not what we think they want. I realize this goes against the advice of Rob Curley and Mindy McAdams, who are emphasizing giving the readers what they want alongside the stuff we think they should want – but we aren’t a metro. We’re small potatoes compared to the news sites I constantly see advice like this geared towards. We’re small and regional and are very very lucky to even have a videographer, much less two of them. I just think we sometimes waste their talents on videos that aren’t watched.

5. Get better at embedding video within the stories instead of leaving them as standalone.

6. Stop videoing grip and grins.

We have the ability to produce good stuff but we lack the time and people-power. This dream plan of mine means finding ways to eliminate video we don’t need to be shooting to free up our people to shoot the good stuff.

I don’t know that anyone has the magic formula for newspapers and video, or indeed if there even is one. I’m very much a fan of trying anything and everything and seeing what sticks. We’ve tried daily news shows and they failed. We’ve tried shooting what we think the readers want, and sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Now we need to take what we’ve learned these past two years and figure out what works for us.

0
13
Oct

Speaking to Nebraska Press Women

For some reason, a member of the Nebraska Press Women Association thought I’d be a good person to give a talk at their fall convention. After I finished laughing, I said I’d do it, and then began getting butterflies. I am not good at public speaking. I get nervous and start making very, very bad jokes.

And to top it all off, I completely forgot until the day before that I needed to prepare for this (to be fair, I did have a flurry of distracting things going on, like my sister’s wedding in Big Sur.)

But, I did have a jump on some things because I’d been preparing a basic blogging class for a community center. So that saved my bacon. I’m so very excited about social media stuff for journos though so I wanted to make sure I had that covered as well. This convention would be an excellent way to reach some folks in the far reaches of this big state who might not know about some of these tools.

I was told the place where they hold the con was… limited on ways I could present this sucker, so I ended up doing the dreaded powerpoint presentation. I hate powerpoint. But I did it anyway, and it did sort of help me keep my focus and stay away from bad jokes.

Here’s the presentation. Only viewable in IE I’m afraid. Thank goodness I have an IE plugin for my beloved Firefox :)

I took quite a bit of information and a couple of quotes from the totally awesome beatblogging.org and graphicdesignr.net sites – hope they don’t mind. But I thought the women should know about those sites.

Overall the talk went pretty well. Even got a hug from a lovely older lady who was very excited about Twitter. There were some concerns about how to maintain journalistic integrity through an informal blog, and whether giving out real names, bios and other contact info was “safe” for some reporters (especially those covering court beats.)

I heard a lot of the same obstacle arguments I hear from my newsroom (no time, we give away too much online) which tells me that there’s still a barrier between online and print, but by the end of my talk, a lot of them were nodding their heads and seeming to sort of “get it.” Especially when I gave them the scary numbers (layoff numbers etc.)

If I didn’t want to throw up at the thought of speaking in front of people, I’d say that I wouldn’t mind doing this again. And maybe refine the talk a bit. I didn’t have much of a direction on the things they wanted to hear so I went with what I wanted to talk about :) I just hope they got something out of it.