Robert Niles: March 2011 archive
Online communities need leadership: Will journalists provide it, or will someone else?
March 28, 2011
Building a helpful online community requires much more than enabling a comment system for articles or throwing open a discussion board. We teach newswriting and editing in journalism schools, but today's interactive news publisher also needs to know how to elicit thoughtful, informative and instructive reports from readers who've never stepped foot in a j-school.Not to get all "After-School Special" on you, but if you don't talk to your readers about what to write on your website, someone else will. (Cue scary music.) Do you really want some troll showing your readers how to respond to blog posts on your site? (Cue scarier music.)
Kidding aside, writing in any interactive environment is an act of leadership. Your words, your tone and your style not only inform your audience, they provide a model - an example - for those in the community who will write for that community, as well. And your silence creates a vacuum of leadership that others may fill.
I've written before about the ladder of engagement that you should set up for readers on your website. But words of encouragement from you can help persuade your readers to take those steps. You want writing to become a rewarding experience, not just for your readers but for the others who will read them, too. When readers see the value that they're creating for other readers, that will encourage them to keep writing.
After all, wasn't the desire to help others through our writing the big reason most of us got into journalism, in the first place?
Here's some basic advice that you can copy and paste (and modify as you need) to encourage insightful, engaging and rewarding writing from readers of your site: More...
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Broadcast journalists also should learn to report what they do best and 'link' to the rest
March 21, 2011
The news coverage of the ongoing crisis in Japan reminds me of one of the better items of advice I've heard given to online journalists:"Report what you do best, and link to the rest."
I've found some insightful, thoughtful coverage of the disasters online, from stunning photo graphics to an engaging first-person account of trying to land a plane immediately after the quake.
Unfortunately, on TV, I've watched a lot of garbage, too.
Tim Goodman last week, in that previous link, tore apart the U.S. cable channels for their simplistic questioning and sensationalistic reporting in covering the Japan disasters, noting that they've fallen short of their international competition:
"Covering this trilogy of terror in Japan really underscores how much better prepared reporters and anchors need to be. The incessantly simplistic and embarrassing questions need to stop. Someone needs to tamp down runaway speculation. Also, the attention on the Middle East in past years has dulled producers' sense of keeping experts from Asia on the source list."It's a shame that going online to watch videos from NHK, BBC and Al Jazeera English was far and away the best option for Americans."
While I agree with Goodman's harsh assessment of the U.S. cable channels, I disagree that "it's a shame" that Americans have to turn to other nations' reporters for better international coverage.
I'm just glad that those options are out there, and thanks to the Internet, American audiences now can access them. If there's a shame here, it's that we have to go online to find this coverage, and that our cable channels are not bringing it to us, instead. I wish that American journalists, facing limitations in logistics, training and background, would recognize that other reporters on the scene are doing a better job and instead refer us to their work, rather than wasting scarce newsroom resources trying to duplicate something that they cannot. More...
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It's time for journalists to promote a better 'Twitter style'
March 16, 2011
Once again, Twitter demonstrated its value as a breaking news tool during last week's earthquake and tsunami in Japan. No other online tool I've encountered allows a reader to monitor, in real time, news coming from established news agencies as well as from individual eyewitnesses and other viewers around the world. But as effective as Twitter can be in bringing live news to readers around the world, the Japan disasters again illustrated where Twitter continues to fall short of its immense potential.For those of us who follow hundreds (or even thousands) of feeds, fresh information can be lost between endless retweets of old information. Massive retweeting also allows false information to spread globally, gaining credibility with reach RT. While those of us who've taken the time to sharpen the list of sources we follow are rewarded with accurate, timely updates, too many Twitter users fail to enjoy the tool's potential because they simply don't know which feeds to follow when news breaks.
Social media eventually develop conventions of conversation that allow people to communicate with as little misunderstanding as possible. From in-person conversations to telephone calls to online message boards, people have developd mostly unwritten common rules that dictate the form of their conversations.
Many of those conventions have developed already within the Twitter community. But we can do better. That's why I'd like to see news organizations and professional journalists use our leadership potential within this community to establish some additional conventions - ones that would help more people get better information when news breaks.
Yes, it's time for "Twitter style." More...
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The lessons of the past are the lessons for the future in search engine optimization for news websites
March 11, 2011
Now and then, I like to take a trip into the memory hole and remind folks what online publishing was like back in "ye olde times"... of the 1990s.Since I've been writing in recent weeks about search engines and how the affect news websites, I thought it worthwhile to remind folks (or tell our younger readers) what life was like in the era B.G. (Before Google). Because where we've been often provides some pretty good clues about where we'll be heading in the future.
Before Google, search engines determined which sites appeared at the top of their search results pages almost exclusively based on what appeared on those webpages themselves. This led to webmasters (a term that I just discovered my autocorrect no longer recognizes - sigh) to pack their HTML code with what they thought were the most popular keywords and phrases that would bring people to that page.
So readers would be scrolling along such pages, then come to a long blank section of whitespace, where the page's author had typed those keywords, over and over again, but set them in the same font color as the page background so that they would be invisible to a human reader. The words, though, would trigger a favorable placement for those keywords from the search engines.
Google came to dominate the search engine business because it found a way to work around this garbage, and to reward Web pages that actual human beings endorsed, rather than ones whose publishers best played the SEO games of the day.
In the early iteration of Google's algorithm, a Web page was assigned a score, called "PageRank," in large part based upon the total number of links pointing to that particular page. The more that other webmasters had chosen to link to a particular page, the higher it placed in Google's results pages.
You didn't even need to use a keyword on the page itself. So long as enough other people were using that word in their link to the your page, your page would rank highly in the Google results pages for that term (a phenomenon that came to be known as "Google Bombing").
To use a phrase from today's publishing era, Google was using social media to determine the value of a page online. More...
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Search Engine Optimization is dead - Long live Plain English Optimization
March 4, 2011
So, how did your website fare in the great Google SEOcalypse last week?Did you lose traffic? Gain it? Did you even notice?
Sistrix tracked the carnage among some of the top so-called content farms on the Internet, based on keyword positioning within search engine results pages [SERPs]. Among the losers in the Sistrix report were Associated Content, Mahalo and Examiner.com.
Personally, I don't track keyword placement in SERPs for my websites. I track traffic and revenue. And I did see a drop in Google-directed traffic late last week on one of my websites, but a slight increase on the other. When I looked more closely at the loss in Google traffic, I didn't see in decrease in referrals for the most popular keyphrases people were using to find my site, according to my Google Analytics report. All the loss seemed to be coming from the long tail, the all-but-forgotten, individually low-trafficked discussion threads and obscure listing pages on my site that I would just as soon Google ignore.
Well, consider that wish granted. The data does suggest to me, though, that Google's not targeting entire sites with this latest algorithm change, but individual pages based on the thoroughness and uniqueness of their content.
Frankly, tracking keywords and obsessing about how highly your copy ranks in search engines provides one of the faster ways to go crazy in the online news business. With Google moving more toward highly personalized SERPs, chasing keywords is a fool's pursuit.
It's time to forget about SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and time to focus instead on PEO [Plain English Optimization]. More...
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