Robert Niles: October 2010 archive
Letting go of the rope: Why I'm no longer a newspaper subscriber
October 27, 2010
As of this week, for the first time in my life, I am no longer a newspaper subscriber.My wife and I let our Los Angeles Times subscription lapse this week, after years of watching that once-vital newspaper decline into, at worst, self-parody. We held on much longer than we should have. As a former Times employee and a life-long advocate for journalism, I didn't want to be part of undercutting something I once considered a vital civic asset.
But I've also come to see that my subscription to the Times wasn't an act of support for journalism, it was an act of co-dependence for sick and troubled organization. In its current form and under its current leadership, there's simply no way that the Times will again become the force for community enlightenment it once was, and continues to pretend to be.
Incremental change will not save newspapers. The time is long past when that could have helped. Even at newspapers where management hasn't engaged in conduct as outrageous and irresponsible as at the Tribune Company, continued newsrooms cuts and additional reorganizational task forces won't restore mid-1990s profit margins as more independent online publishers begin to provide viable alternatives to the daily newspaper.
It's past time for newspapers to blow it all up and start over. By dropping my subscription to the Times, I'm casting my vote as a consumer for Tribune and the Times to do just that. When I subscribed to the Times, I was effectively supporting its publication and corporate management and encouraging the decisions that they made for their company and this newspaper. I don't wish to continue doing that any longer.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage sexist and lewd behavior by people who, by their positions, ought to be community leaders. (I know that Lee Abrams and Randy Michaels are gone. But Sam Zell, their ringleader, remains.)
I don't want to keep paying to encourage financial corruption by a corporation that ought to be devoted to exposing and building outrage against corruption by others.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage cheesy and deceptive front-page ads.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage the Times to move its front-page deadline before 6 pm. More...
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The Inigo Montoya approach to search engine optimization (plus, the word of the week)
October 22, 2010
A few OJR readers verbally jumped me last week for my first Inigo Montoya feature. So I'd like to take a moment of your day to explain why I think nit-picking about language remains important.First, allow me to admit that I'm a dreadful candidate for the office of language cop. If it weren't for gym, grammar would have been my least favorite subject in school. If your readers can figure out what you meant to say, you done wrote good enough, in my view.
But getting your readers to understand what you're trying to say is just part of your job as a writer online. You've got to lure new readers with your words, too. Your current readers can help, by retweeting, liking, sharing and blogging your articles. But, for many of us, the bulk of our new readers arrive via search engines.
Search engine optimization [SEO] rewards obsessive attention to language - English as well as hypertext markup. Writing for my own website, without a copy desk to save my reputation, has forced me to think more carefully about the words I use. That's why I started looking up the definition of at least one word I thought I knew in each article I post.
This new habit is changing the way I write. I'd like to think that it is helping me use adjectives more precisely, but at first it just made me afraid of them. Discovering how little I knew about the alternate meanings of words such as "incredible" disturbed me.
So what did I do? I stopped using so many of them. Rather than take the time to look up all those adjectives and adverbs, I just cut some of them out. Those I kept, I meant.
Sure, the language can expand to accommodate slang and idiomatic meanings for many words. But do you need to burden your writing with them?
Search engines reward articles with a high percentage of relevant keywords. Stripping extra words from your work leaves you with a higher percentage of those keywords in your remaining copy. If you want to use an adjective in your work, then make it carry some weight. If a word doesn't work on multiple levels, it's not doing enough work for you. Pick another one, or do without it. More...
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Five questions you should ask about your online brand
October 20, 2010
Following Robert Hernandez's piece from Monday, I'd like to talk a bit more about branding yourself online.Whether you like it or not, and whether you intend to or not, you build a brand online with your first public post. Given the ubiquity of information available about people from a very young age today, I'd even argue that *not* posting anything about yourself suggests characteristics for your personal brand (i.e. you're a technophobe or maybe just highly protective of your privacy).
Don't allow inaction to define your brand. If you want to maximize your audience, your social impact and your economic value online, you should build your brand actively, and with intent.
So here's your first question:
What is my brand name online?
What's the name that you use (or will use) online, the one by which the most people are most likely to know you? (See Robert's piece, linked above, for some great backstories on how a few online journalists came to their online brands.)
Your given name is an obvious choice, but it's likely not unique. (I remain thankful to this day that I registered my daughter's name as a dot-com domain before a bikini model of the same name could get to it.) Nor are given names always short and easy-to-recall. Which are you more likely to remember? "Markos Moulitsas"... or "Kos"?
Don't worry too much about this question, though. If Internet users can come to regard "Amazon" as an online store instead of a river in South America, almost any word can be branded to almost any purpose.
For what does your brand stand?
Here's where we get to the important stuff. What do you want people to think of when they think of your brand?
For writers, the answer might be your area of expertise - the beat you cover. Or it might be a specific tone, an attitude, if your subject matter tends toward the eclectic. When I worked at Disney, trainers drilled into my head that our brand stood for consistently high-quality family entertainment. Choose whatever you want. Just choose something. Don't let inaction or a lack of thought define your brand.
Your brand name provides an initial opportunity to define the meaning of your brand, but what you do under that brand name will have far greaterin influence on your audience. But before you think about how you'll do that, envision what it is that you want people to think or feel when they encounter your brand. More...
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The Inigo Montoya word of the week: 'Incredible'
October 15, 2010
This week's post is for all the independent publishers and bloggers out there who don't have an in-house grammarian to advise them, but would like some inspiration to think more carefully about the words they use in their posts.So I'm kicking off this feature in honor of the character from William Goldman's The Princess Bride who utters this famous line in the Rob Reiner film version:
For those of you not clicking the video link, here's the quote: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Too often writers type superlatives without care for the subleties that the individual words they select offer. This week's Inigo Montoya word of the week is "incredible."
Folks typically use this adjective to suggest a positive quality, but it actually means "not credible," that is, something not worthy of belief, confidence or trust. As a journalist, pretty much the last word you want someone to use in describing your work is "incredible." :^)
And yet... here are a couple of examples from the past week's news where someone missed the definition: More...
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How journalism can promote civic engagement - or undercut it
October 13, 2010
Recently, my wife spoke in person with a reader of her website.He shared with her his frustration that other readers on the site were writing about what he considered inferior products, but that no one was bringing up what he knew to be a superior alternative.
"How are people going to know the truth?" he asked.
Let's leave aside the question whether this reader's opinion about a product did, indeed, reflect the "truth." He had information that he wanted the site's readers to see, and he wanted the site's editor to write about that.
My wife, however, suggested that the reader de-lurk and write up his point of view, himself. The reader was flummoxed.
And here we have yet another culture clash within the transformation of journalism online.
This reader, who was older than the average reader on the site, was operating under the old model of journalism, where gatekeeper reporters did the work of reporting information. As a reader, he tried to make his views known by appealing to the editor of the publication and asking her to devote more time toward reporting the issue that concerned him. That's the way it's been done for generations, so that was the approach he took.
My wife, however, tried to get this reader to see a new model, where readers directly engage in reporting and discussing information. If readers see holes in coverage, they should fill them by contributing their information to the site.
The second model, of course, is not exclusive of the first. My wife, like many independent online news publishers, does plenty of original reporting for the website. But her website would have only a small fraction of the pages it now offers if her reporting were the only work published on the site. The new model of interactive journalism, empowering readers to become reporters, is allowing the public access to far more information than it had available to it under the old way of reporting.
Of course, that raises questions about the accuracy of all this new reporting, which is why it becomes important for journalists to engage and recruit knowledgeable readers to participate in this new information marketplace.
I've written before that journalism in this decade is an act of community organizing. But what I haven't addressed is how this change in reporting models can change community organizing itself. More...
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Thinking about starting an online news business? Here's your start-up checklist
October 7, 2010
Have you been thinking about starting a news website? Are you considering "being your own boss" as the next step in your journalism career?You can stumble your way into entrepreneurship, but you'll likely find a greater chance of success if you start with a plan.
Starting a news website requires its own step-by-step process, sharing some steps with the launch of any new business, but including several steps unique to either journalism or online publishing.
Based on my experience launching and running news websites, here's a checklist that I would recommend to anyone thinking about starting an online news business. I hope that you will use this list to help you along with the process of launching your site - or at least to give you a fuller sense of the work that would be involved, should you be considering this step.
This isn't meant to be a complete guide to starting a news publishing business - that would fill a book - but simply a checklist for you to use as you proceed.
The name
☐ Select a name for your publication
You'll want a name for which you can obtain the ".com" domain of the publication name, without spaces or special characters such as hyphens. It should be easy to spell when pronounced phonetically, and while including a keyword that potential readers will be searching for is helpful that's not as important as the other criteria.
☐ Register your domain name
Once you've selected a name, don't hesitate to register it with a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions. Don't bother adding any of the hosting or e-mail options they'll try to sell you. You'll figure out that later. Just get the domain.
☐ Open a business checking account
No, you don't have any income yet, but you'll want a bank account as soon as you have a business name. Separating your business account from your personal from Day One will help you with accounting, taxes and projecting a professional image to your customers.
☐ Register a fictitious business name.
Banks often can help you do this when you set up your business checking account, which is another reason to take that step immediately.
☐ Trademark your name
I didn't need a lawyer to trademark my website's name. I simply followed the steps on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. All of the paperwork can be filed online. Once you've applied, the process takes months, but the earlier you start, the earlier you will have your trademark in hand.
Getting operational
☐ Select a calendar app or system to record deadlines, meetings and assigned tasks
Once the work of establishing your name is complete, it's time to get operational. You do not want to be relying on memory, or little random slips of paper to keep track of key dates and tasks as you move forward. More...
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