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Video: Robert Scoble on How to Build a Career in Media
I don't know about you, but when I want to find out about the newest tech stuff, I read blogs and their related Twitter feeds. As a newspaper journalist, it puzzles me that somehow those blogs, with their limited resources and short history, manage to beat the mainstream media. Take, for example, uber-blogger Robert Scoble. When Flipboard's servers went down... more »
Who We Are
MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.
TVShift
KOMU-TV Puts Google+ Hangout Video Chat on the Air
As a reporter and anchor for KOMU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Mo., and the broadcast lab for the Missouri School of Journalism, I already chat with viewers via Facebook and Twitter on our "Livestream" behind-the-scenes webcam mounted on the news set. Now, KOMU has added yet another delightful distraction to the other side of the set. It's turned me into...
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Collaboration
Highs and Lows of "Post Mortem" Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR
Recently at the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director, asked a room full of reporters and editors if anyone wanted to share a "collaboration horror story." There were chuckles, but no volunteers. Horror story may have been too strong a term, but don't be misled by the silence. The thing is,...
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Social Media
In Search of Meaningful 'Social Media Optimization' (SMO)
I must admit that the acronym SMO sends shivers down my spine. It reminds me of search engine optimization (SEO), which in itself is a good and logical thing. Unfortunately, it has led to countless "SEO experts" who have infested Twitter.
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Embeds
How Storify Helps Integrate Social Streams Into Articles
Curation seems to be the big buzz word in journalism and online content these days. It's also an area that's generating a lot of product innovations. New services such as Keepstream, Storify, Storyful and Qrait are jumping into the space, aiming to offer new tools to help people curate web and social media content. Curation is a way for journalists...
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Social Media
Social Media Helps Drive Traffic, Engagement at NewsHour
When the PBS NewsHour relaunched both on-air and online in December, a new homepage was unveiled, a news blog was born and a new correspondent joined the team. But another big change unfolded behind the scenes as well: The addition of a social media desk assistant (myself) dedicated to fostering an online community and better distributing PBS NewsHour content digitally....
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Online Video
10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience
I love my iPad. One of the reasons I love it is that it's a great device for watching video. Some mainstream media integrate video very nicely into their iPad applications. However, it seems that all this slickness comes at a price: The conversation with the people formerly known as the audience is often non-existent. It seems that the potentially-messy-but-genuine...
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Embedded Report
PBS NewsHour Collaborations Require Buy-In from the Top
Collaboration is one of the public broadcasting buzzwords of the moment. The new PBS NewsHour is a national news organization that is trying to figure out how collaboration works. Collaboration was one of the bullet points when we announced the changes to the program. As with the staff reorganization, which I wrote about in my previous post on MediaShift, our...
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NewspaperShift
9 Tools to Help Live-Stream Your Newsroom
"We'd like to write blog posts, but don't have time." That's the oft-heard lament in newsrooms. More and more traditional journalists recognize the benefits of blogging and social media, but many just can't figure out how to add them to their existing workload. I have a solution that seems to work in our newsroom. When faced with this issue, I...
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Embedded Report
Merging Online, Broadcast at NewsHour Still a Work in Progress
About two months have passed since we officially became the PBS NewsHour. I wrote my previous update for MediaShift" just after the two staffs -- broadcast and online -- merged into one building and were getting used to having each other around. But, really, how merged have these two teams become? The initial good news is that, after our re-launch...
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Embedded Report
How to Use Meta-Stories to Engage the Newsroom, Community
How do we create a community? This question is frequently asked by editors as well as by marketing managers and other business people. More and more, I don't think you can create communities. Communities already exist. You can try and offer them a news service or a platform that the community finds useful and engaging, but forget trying to control...
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NewspaperShift
Why Young Journalists in Big Newsrooms Are Risk Averse
I'm going to tell you a secret about my newsroom. The 20-somethings there are indeed fast to pick up new technology such as social networking, RSS and the use of Flip cameras. They are also wonderful colleagues, as well as dedicated and intensely engaged journalists. Of course, that's not the secret. What is surprising is that our youngest colleagues are...
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TVShift
Merging Online and Broadcast Cultures to Reinvent 'NewsHour'
The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is re-incarnating itself as the "PBS NewsHour" on December 7. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes details involved in creating the new program, and chief among them is a complete reorganization of our editorial teams to create a merged newsroom for online and broadcast.
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NewspaperShift
5 Ways a Community Manager Can Help Your Media Outlet
Recently, the New York Times appointed its first ever community manager, someone to "concentrate full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers." Of course, the New York Times is a huge operation, and has an enormous community of print and online readers/users. Do we at...
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NewspaperShift
Journalists Can Embrace Emotions and Remain Neutral
Very recently I did something weird. Normally, when moderating our online community at Mediafin, I first read the news articles before I read the comments left by community members. Feeling a bit bored, I reversed this. I started by reading the comments and tried to figure out what the articles were about. It was a weird (but rather subversive) sensation...
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EducationShift
NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry
I have no idea what I will do when I graduate. I am majoring in journalism at New York University -- a fantastic university in an incredible city -- but my confidence in what career I will pursue after graduation remains unclear. Should I go after my passion for writing? Should I take a crack at my web video skills?...
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EducationShift
How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail
Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked...
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EducationShift
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front...
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Embedded Report
Developing Social Media Workshops for Journalists
For the last few weeks, my colleague Raphael and I have been organizing a series of social media workshops for our fellow journalists at the Belgian business newspapers and websites De Tijd and L'Echo. I'd like to open this up to reader suggestions, so let me tell you what we intend to cover in this course -- and I hope...
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EducationShift
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors
One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash's story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster "Twilight" was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to the tears and tantrums at the event on Sunday evening when it...
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Embeds
7 Ways To Keep Costs Low, Content Fresh Using Social Media
Life is tough for the newspaper industry these days, and survival is not assured. Whatever strategy a newspaper takes, one thing is for sure: They need to keep costs low. Yet newspapers still need to compile compelling content that can engage their reading communities. Social media can help a great deal in solving this problem. Here are seven attention points...
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Social Media
Journalists Still a-Twitter About Social Media
Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections
The micro-blogging platform Twitter was the breakthrough social media tool for journalists in 2008. It became a pipeline for breaking news for both professional reporters and citizen journalists, with the massacre in Mumbai, the Hudson River plane crash and Obama's inauguration highlighting its effectiveness as a source of live, user-generated online content. Journalists increasingly used it to cross-promote their own...
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Embedded Report
The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick?
Video is one of those new practices we have to get used to as newspaper journalists now working in a Web 2.0 world. One of the key issues is the quality of the video. Do we always need slick, television-style video, which require more specialized skills, or will our community accept "rougher" video, made by amateurs using less sophisticated cameras?...
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EducationShift
UBC Begins Study Program of New Media and Society
The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage with the world. But while today's students may blog...
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Education
Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools
Some journalism academics may be even more scared of new technology and more resistant to change than the worst print "dinosaurs" working in media today. But Web 2.0 has made getting online so simple that there are no more excuses for being disconnected. While some reporters see journalism education as a potential refuge from the rapid pace of change in...
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Embedded Report
More Time for Blogging! The Future Is Already Behind Us
At Mediafin, we started the year with some ambitious plans for our blogging activities. We want to create new blogs to involve more people, but we also want to become more active on our existing blogs. I'll tell you about what we're doing, the reasons behind it and how things seem to be working out at this early stage, as...
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EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
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Embedded Report
Wikis Still Slow to Catch on Internally, Externally
Our newsroom at Mediafin is transforming into an integrated multimedia operation. To prepare for this, we recently decided to create two wikis to stimulate talk and facilitate media training programs. At the same time we also created another wiki to encourage discussion amongst our readers. In this very early phase of the experiments, I learned that wikis are still an...
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NewspaperShift
A Newspaper's Role in Bringing the Community Together
Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community. This may sound self-evident, but it can be a tough sell in a newsroom working under high pressure. So how do you get reporters to buy into the proposition that they need to listen to their audience? They need to see for themselves the enthusiasm that the community...
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EducationShift
J-Students Take Multiplatform Approach to City Politics
Here's a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads, spending almost $30 million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver's sewage. This is what the first-year students...
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Embedded Report
How Newspapers Can Increase Their Google Juice
There isn't much difference between what appears in a small newspaper's print edition and online. Many photographs make it online that don't make it to print, and the AP stories are usually a widget feed from the AP. However, in order to maximize search engine traffic and the reader's satisfaction, newspapers need to rethink their approach to online content. Online...
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Embeds
FriendFeed Widget Motivates Reporters to Use Social Media
Blogs should be conversations. At least, that is how we think about blogging at Mediafin, Belgium's leading publisher of business newspapers and websites. This last week, I have been busy reorganizing our major financial blog, Bear&Bull, adding FriendFeed widgets in hopes of encouraging more audience interaction. The results have been surprising -- although the audience has been slow to react,...
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Embeds
NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus
The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University's list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: "Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod...
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EducationShift
Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions
Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking...
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NewspaperShift
How Audience Input Shaped Our Financial Crisis Coverage
It has been a while since I last reported about the changing work practices at Belgian business newspaper publisher Mediafin, but, as you may have noticed, something has gone horribly wrong in the financial services sector in the interim. In Belgium, our biggest bank, Fortis, was taken over by the French bank BNP Paribas. Another one of our largest banks...
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Embedded Report
How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site
I don't consider our print and online newspaper areas here at the Bowling Green Daily News to be Byzantine. But to an outsider it might appear that way. On paper, the hierarchy is pretty simple. Our newspaper's website is under the control of the online director. The online director reports to two different people: the managing editor and the general manager (which is me).
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EducationShift
J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach
Professors are commonly stereotyped as people who know more about books than technology. But as classrooms are now filled with a generation who grew up with computers, iPods and the Internet, more and more professors are starting to experiment with new digital learning tools. At last week's Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, academics...
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Embedded Report
Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow. At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs. The advice...
more »Embedded Report
Does 'Web First' Strategy Make Sense for Small Newspapers?
The Bowling Green Daily News doesn't have a "web first" strategy in the way we run our newspaper. That means that we don't post articles to our website before they appear in print. Apart from some breaking local news, most major stories don't appear on the Internet until after the press is running. Right now, our readers aren't particularly...
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Embedded Report
How Synchronous Communication Helped Engage Our Community
Most forums and websites are "asynchronous media" -- meaning that the people you see participating in an online conversation aren't all necessarily online at the same time. One person posts a comment in a forum on Monday, a second poster might reply on Tuesday, the original poster returns again on Thursday, and so on. People move at their own...
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Embedded Report
Blogger Conditions Worsen as Many Defend Palin Pick
Shame on us, the media, for thinking the Republican National Convention would pale in comparison to the Democrats' show in Denver last week. For bloggers on both sides of the aisle here in St. Paul, what the RNC has lacked in strawberry-lemonade smoothies, it has more than made up for with juicy stories. While Hurricane Gustav may have stopped...
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Embedded Report
Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School
"Nowadays it's essential for journalists to blog," says Professor Mary Quigley to a class of 16 NYU journalism students. The class is titled "Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)," and it's one of the few NYU undergrad journalism classes that focuses on new media. I sit in Professor Quigley's class unsure of what to expect. As a member of Generation...
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EducationShift
Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More
With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple -- planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.
more »Embeds
Blogs Help Humanize, Demystify Life in the Middle East
JERUSALEM -- Blogs exemplify the best and worst attributes of the Internet (and human nature). At their worst, blogs can be untruthful, bad sources of news and gossip. But without the profit motive, the need for immediacy, and the thirst for conflict, blogs can also help show a more complete picture of the Middle East. At their best, they can be a great source of anti-news and help demystify this murky region.
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NewspaperShift
Newspapers Can Do Online Video on a Modest Budget
I was as excited as anybody to be able to post video on our website. Our newspaper readers were turning more and more to their computer screen to read our news and it seemed logical that they would appreciate and enjoy seeing video enhancements for the print edition. My excitement soon turned to frustration as I started to run into hurdles.
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World View
How a Protester Pulled Off the Clandestine Radio Broadcast in Beijing
The voices of Chinese human rights activists can be heard on the radio. A former journalist describes the censorship she experienced, and a human rights activist explains the increasing crackdown on Chinese dissidents that has occurred these past few months. A former political prisoner complains about the appalling conditions in which he was held. Have the Chinese authorities gone wild and suddenly opened the airwaves?
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EducationShift
Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism
Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." All they needed was a pen and a notebook. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day's paper.
more »NewspaperShift
Walls Tumble Down as Mediafin Integrates Print, Online Newsrooms
The company where I work is well-known in Belgium for its print publications. Mediafin is the publisher behind the Dutch language business daily De Tijd and its Francophone counterpart L'Echo. But in recent years, the company's Internet sites have grown to rival the popularity of its print editions. In July, Mediafin websites reached a new high of an estimated 160,000 unique visitors on one single day, an amount roughly equivalent to the average number of readers per day. But even as online journalism continues to reach more and more readers, journalists themselves continue to balk at putting their work online.
more »Embedded Report
How Outside Firms Like TownNews.com Can Help Small Newspaper Sites
I decided early on that the best strategy for our newspaper to grow its web presence was to not to hire people, but to find other firms to partner with.
This took us from working with a guy with a server is his apartment to working with a phone company and finally a newspaper-specific host/content management system. We gave up control over many aspects of our website in order to remain flexible.
more »EducationShift
University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism
"Multidisciplined" and "flexible" were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying. The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.
more »Embedded Report
NBC's Penguin Story Goes from Web to 'Nightly News'
It was a seemingly prosaic moment at the end of the "Weekend NBC Nightly News" program Saturday, July 5: Lester Holt wrapped up the show with one of those ever-popular cute animal stories. The piece was about a baby penguin rejected by its mother and now being raised by a zoo worker in Boston. But there was a lot more to this story than met the eye, as Holt hinted at with his introduction: "It's a story we first reported on our website. It got a lot of traffic there, so much in fact that we thought maybe we'd air it right here. So here's NBC's Clare Duffy with our report."
more »Featured Comment
"This issue has gotten lost in the push for computer science and engineering. The ability to build tools is indeed crucial, but without writers and editors, no one will know about, talk about or consider using such tools."
— econwriter5
The Return of the Human: Why Tech Companies Are Tapping Journalism Talent
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