Robert Niles: May 2010 archive
Second KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp begins this weekend
May 14, 2010
This weekend, 20 aspiring journalist/entrepreneurs will arrive in Los Angeles for the second News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. OJR is a co-sponsor of the event, which is presented by the Knight Digital Media Center (publisher of OJR) in cooperation with the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Marshall School of Business.The camp starts Sunday afternoon and runs through Friday morning. I'd like to invite you to follow the action through Twitter - we'll again be using the hash tag #uscnewsbiz. The events themselves will not be webcast, as the participants will be discussing their business ideas and concepts and we'd like to afford them a bit of privacy as they develop those. But summaries of the various talks and discussions will appear over the next week or two here on OJR, as well as on the KDMC website. I hope that you'll follow along.
Even though the physical event begins this Sunday, participants have been working up the camp for the past several weeks. Tom O'Malia, Director Emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School, has put together an online instructional course for the participants, to help them begin to learn some of the business concepts behind what they'll be doing as the develop their online news initiatives.
Changing attitudes is key. Too many journalists fail as publishers because they can't stop thinking and acting solely as reporters or editors - to stop thinking as employees and start thinking as business owners. Once you make that mental change, though, the next step is to cultivate a habit of lifelong learning and training, to develop the full range of skills that you will need to build a community of readers and customers, to cover that community, and to secure the income that you will need to make your business sustainable over a long term.
Those are the topics that we'll be covering, in person, at the camp next week. We've brought some great speakers and instructors to the event, including Susan Mernit, Lisa Williams, Tracy Record, Ben Ilfeld, Tom Davidson and more. We're also bringing back two of our alumni, Rita Hibbard and Bargain Babe Julia Scott, who will share their journey from last year's camp to their current work.
As I said in my introduction to last year's camp, we need to pry journalists from the culture of failure that's evolved around the news business. Opportunities abound in the information business. So, please, follow us on Twitter during the event and on the websites after... and join us on this journey. More...
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Is it time for news websites to stop using Flash?
May 7, 2010
Like many tech-geek online journalists, I've been spending more time with my iPhone in recent months. I use the phone's Web browser to update my various sites from wherever I am on the road, or even around the house.And I'm not the only person using Apple's mobile devices who's reading my various websites. The percentage of iPhone, iPod and iPad users reading my sites now stands just a hair under five percent, but it's growing swiftly - up from just over one percent at the beginning of 2010.
So it's as both a consumer and a publisher that I've been following the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe over the latter's Flash technology. Journalism educators should be watching this conflict, too, as they need to be making decisions today about what technology their students will need to be able to use in 2011 and years ahead. Today, I'm offering a collection of links for OJR readers who want to get up to speed on this controversy. More...
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The 4 parts of an optimized online news site
May 4, 2010
The Internet provided journalists a fresh opportunity to create new publishing tools and systems to better serve their audience and communities than what traditional print and broadcast methods had provided. But most news organizations failed to make substantial changes in their production process to take advantage of this opportunity.Sure, many newspapers and a few broadcast stations played around at the edges of innovation. But over the years most of those innovators have left the newspaper and broadcast industries, and are now at work at start-ups or other online firms. That's why I've pretty much given up trying to persuade current newspaper managers how better to publish online. So many of the ones I've met are more concerned with forcing their old pricing models and publishing practices onto the online market than serving the market as it now exists.
So, instead, I will direct my comments today at those who are leaving the newspaper industry, in the hope that they won't make all the same mistakes their former colleagues did.
Don't mistake the current practices of your publishing medium for the best practices of journalism. Don't limit what you can do to what you have done. Ultimately, those are the reasons why I urged journalists and educators two weeks ago to shift their focus from AP Style to search engine optimization. It's not that AP Style's a bad thing for aspiring journalists to learn. Far from it, AP Style continues to offer some excellent advice on writing, as well as a connection with the rich heritage of print journalism. But learning SEO is essential to building an audience in today's competitive online publishing market, more necessary for students than learning AP Style.
But on-page SEO is just a small part of what online publishers must do to fully optimize their websites to attract, retain and expand an audience. Site-wide online optimization prepares your website to offer the information potential audience members seek, within the context of a community in which they'll feel welcomed, empowered and rewarded for participating. More...
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