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MobileShift
How Publishers Can Bypass Apple with HTML5 Web Apps
When the iPad first arrived on the scene, our Belgian business newspapers, De Tijd and L'Echo, embraced it. We knew tablets, with their lightness and convenience, would become important for our communities, and so we dove into building apps and offering our readers special deals on iPads. Quickly though, we learned that despite the opportunities the iPad offered, there were...
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Social Media
How to Use Social Tools to Curate, Research and Expand Sources for a Story
Our website, Tijd.be has existed for 15 years now, and my colleagues recently asked me to write an opinion piece about what the next decade and a half will bring -- a daunting task. I had some ideas, of course, but I wanted to eat my own dog food and actually tap into my social media networks to write the...
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Embeds
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...
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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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Technology
Linden Lab's Rosedale Considers 'Scrum' Method in Newsrooms
My software developer friends talk a lot these days about two words/concepts: Agile and Scrum. At first I thought it was typical dev talk with no relevance for newsrooms, but I eventually realized these notions are part of a major shift in the way all companies -- including media companies -- will have to adapt. As Wikipedia explains it, agile...
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Social Media
'Liquid Newsroom' Project Developed with Radical Openness
People often think it's best to hide their good ideas and develop them in secret. The goal is to beat the competition by emerging only once your concept is fully developed and ready to go. This can be the case with a new business, or a piece of journalism. At the moment, though, people seem intrigued by the opposite approach....
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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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NewspaperShift
How Immersive Journalism, Games Can Increase Engagement
The average reader spends 25 minutes a day reading the newspaper, while the average online user spends 70 seconds a day on a news site, according to data from Hal Varian, Google's chief economist. (JD Lasica has more on this presentation.) As a journalist, I'm not satisfied when people just scan my headline and then move on. As a citizen...
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Philosophy
Why Journalists Should Learn Computer Programming
Yes, journalists should learn how to program. No, not every journalist should learn it right now -- just those who want to stay in the industry for another ten years. More seriously, programming skills and knowledge enable us traditional journalists to tell better and more engaging stories. Programming means going beyond learning some HTML. I mean real computer programming. As...
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Weblogs
Newsrooms Should Use Blogs to Battle Bloat, Complexity
Media professor and writer Clay Shirky recently wrote about The Collapse of Complex Business Models on his blog. That post was in turn inspired by Joseph Tainter's 1988 book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Shirky wrote: When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the...
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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
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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NewspaperShift
FT's Long Room Uses Velvet Rope Approach to Online Community
What determines a successful community? The number of unique visitors or page views? The number of comments? Those metrics can be important, but there are also qualitative aspects to consider. Are the discussions on your site respectful and insightful? Are members deriving value from the community? Or are you hosting flame wars that lack intelligence and decorum? In order to...
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Online Forums
7 Keys to Hosting Successful Chats With High-Profile People
In recent weeks we at De Tijd, a Belgian newspaper, have been experimenting with chat sessions where members of the Belgian government are brought in to discuss politics with our community. I'm very enthusiastic about this because I feel that our newspaper has enabled its community to have a direct, high-quality conversation with policy makers. I reported in a previous...
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Social Media
Using 'Socratic Conversation' to Unlock a Community's Insight
How can you unlock the creativity and insights of your community? Well, you can give community members a blank canvas and hope they are inspired to paint it with ideas and contributions. You can also provide them with access to experts such as journalists or external sources for chats, discussions and other interactions. Both methods have their merits, but they...
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NewspaperShift
The Five Habits of Highly Successful Community Managers
Talking about communities, and newspaper communities in particular, often leaves people with a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's true that being a community manager enables you to meet wonderful people, but the reality of daily community management can be difficult and unsettling. Every community manager has to deal with community politics (the online equivalent of office politics), disillusionment and a...
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NewspaperShift
Five Ways to Use Mind-Mapping Tools in the Newsroom
About a week ago, I was in a meeting with some colleagues, preparing our coverage of an upcoming news event. We were jotting down ideas in long lists; it was quite literally linear thinking. But linear thinking isn't always the most helpful way of looking at a problem, because it restricts the way that you associate ideas together and limits...
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Virtual Worlds
Virtual Worlds Show Promise for Newspaper Communities
In my previous post, I talked about the browser-based virtual environment Metaplace, which I think may provide a way to boost interaction with our community on newspaper website Mediafin. To test how well virtual worlds could be used to build a community, I undertook some experiments in organizing "conferences" in worlds like Metaplace and Second Life. And the results turned...
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NewspaperShift
5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites
I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than...
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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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Social Networking
Journalists Should Customize Social Networks to Maximize Experience
Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience. But many journalists don't know how to get the full benefit...
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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...
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.
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