As part of the ‘Virtual Poynter training’, Kelly McBride discussed social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from the Roanoke Times. ‘In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere,’ McBride reports. Here’s a look at what the group came up with. Full story…
Jay Rosen, the NYU’s PressThinker, has recorded a BusinessJournalism.org podcast in which he cautioned journalists and news organisations against joining social networks without first forming a plan.
The 11th Readership Conference is addressing building new print, as well as digital audiences (not just stopping the old readers running away). So how exactly have newspapers across the world successfully built up new audiences? (Quotes and information courtesy of the WAN conference updates)
The Telegraaf in the Netherlands has used sport and social networking
Lara Ankersmit, publisher for online media, at the paper, said the partnership provided strong branding tied to popular sports events, and more than 170,000 registrations and e-mail addresses.
The Verdens Gang newspaper company in Norway has increased revenue while losing readers
Torry Pederson, CEO of VG said that good journalism that attracts attention, on all platforms. “Don’t cut down on journalistic resources to cover the important stories,” he said.
The Bakersfield Californian is focusing on who isn’t reading the paper
Mary Lou Fulton, vice president of audience development at the paper said “Before, we focused primarily on the circulation, profitability and content of our daily newspaper (…) The essential shift in thinking was to become interested in who was not reading the newspaper or advertising in it. That was a big wake-up call.”
The planned launch of a new ethical environmental online magazine was announced today.
Ecoforyou.co.uk will be free to readers offering environmental news, features, interviews and lifestyle tips. The interactive site will include live-links, video, audio and a ‘digital page turn format’, powered by YUDU and hosted by Planet Ink Ltd.
Without a print edition, ecoforyou is aiming to be a ‘100% carbon neutral publication’. The platform, YUDU, advertises itself as a carbon neutral company, off-setting its emissions by donating money to a carbon management company.
The site is relying on marketing through social networks with readers encouraged to use ‘forward to a friend’ buttons.
“We hope that ecoforyou will not only appeal to individual readers but businesses campaigners and industry leaders too,” said founding director, Gerry Cassidy, in a press release.
“They can easily email ecoforyou to their clients, colleagues and workforce and maintain their green credentials, without having to go to the additional expense of their publication.”
Ecoforyou will is not the only digital offering promoting green issues, the BBC already has a well established site, bbc.green.com.
Other eco websites include:
http://www.bbcgreen.com – lifestyle green living.
http://www.ecorazzi.com/ – offers a mixture of celebrity gossip and environmental issues.
http://www.treehugger.com/ – ‘strives to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information.’
http://www.ecogeek.org/ – publishes stories daily about innovations that are saving the planet.
Any other favourite green news sites?
In our Innovations in Journalism series we give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are developing.
Today’s candidate is Newsvetter – a site that wants to build better connections between journalists and PRs, starting with more targeted press releases.
Founder Andrew Fowler tells us more:
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m a former PR practitioner who worked in the profession for about eight years. I cut my teeth at a big PR agency and then after a couple of years started consulting for smaller companies and organizations as a solo practitioner.
I have spent the bulk of my career pitching ‘news’ to journalists – a core PR function that now more than ever is being equated with spam.
Why is this happening? Quality has given way to quantity. With the aid of press release distribution services and social networks, journalists are receiving record numbers of poor quality and irrelevant material from PR people.
In November 2007, I launched the online news vetting and delivery service Newsvetter. Based in Portland, Oregon USA, Newsvetter is designed to discourage mass pitching and help journalists extract higher quality information from companies and PR agencies.
Instead of sending press releases and cut-and-paste pitches, PR people go through a vetting Q&A process on the site made up of key questions commonly asked by journalists. Follow this link for an example of a completed Q&A.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
The vetting process provides answers to key questions which then allows journalists to quickly evaluate a story idea’s potential and verify its accuracy. Journalists can also register, create a public profile on the site which allows them to provide details about their beat, publication, current interests, recent stories, and when and how they like to get contacted. Journalists can share their profile URL with the PR people they work with. To see an example profile of a journalist on Newsvetter use this link.
After viewing a journalist’s profile, PR people email them news ideas, but only after they complete the vetting process.
To encourage quality, journalists can rate and comment on the work submitted by PR people. Comments and ratings become part of a PR person’s public record on Newsvetter (one that can be viewed by journalists, peers, employer, client etc.). One goal of mine is to create a system similar to eBay’s “feedback score” for sellers which will reward those who submit quality story ideas.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
The site is currently in beta. Under development are some changes to the user interface, which will make the site easier to understand and use, as well as some features that will make the service more attractive for PR people.
4) Why are you doing this?
I’m hearing loud and clear from journalists that the quality of news pitches to them is substandard (and largely irrelevant). Rather than talk (more) about it, I’ve created a working tool that addresses this issue head on.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Newsvetter will always be a free service for journalists. It is also currently free to PR people. In the coming months, Newsvetter will offer a set of premium features, which companies and PR agencies can pay to access.
6) How will you make it pay?
The pay-off is that journalists associate Newsvetter with quality and will thoughtfully review PR submissions that come through the site (rather than simply delete them ). PR people will see Newsvetter as a service that can help build relationships with journalists and increase quality coverage for their company or client.
Reporters and editors at the New York Times have been told to keep their political affiliations offline and out of sight in the build up to the US presidential election.
A memo received by the New York Observer sent to staff by Craig Whitney, standards editor at the paper, warns journalists that social networks and other websites pose ‘potential political entanglements’:
“When Facebook asks what your political preferences are, don’t answer, and don’t say anything in a blog, video, radio or television program or any other medium that you couldn’t say in the paper or on our Website – about politics or anything else,” the memo says.
An earlier memo from Whitney referred staff to the title’s ethics policy, which states:
“Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics. Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality or that of The Times. . . They should recognize that a bumper sticker on the family car or a campaign sign on the lawn may be misread as theirs, no matter who in their household actually placed the sticker or the sign.”
A good day for unbiased reporting? A bad day for bumper stickers.
Developers from Facebook and Google sitting on a panel at Supernova 2008 in San Francisco yesterday.
CNET has them saying that its the lawyers who are keeping them from using collaboartive technology for their respective friend-connecting APIs while the developers work on ways of sharing data between social networks.
Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect service last month saying it violated the site’s terms of service – the violation was redistributing user information from Facebook to other developers without the users’ knowledge.
What would Google have to do to not vialate the terms then?
Well, that one’s with the lawyers.
After last week’s report by the Press Complaints Commission into privacy on social networks raised concerns about access to users’ information by third parties, it seems no one is safe.
A Canadian computer technician has hacked into the private picture galleries of celebrities – well Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan – on MySpace, Valleywag reports.
Brian Ng used a loophole in MySpace’s mobile access to profiles. The method won’t work anymore apparently, but Valleywag asks whether the rush to make profiles and information accessible from all platforms is compromising security?
Norway’s largest city is in cyberspace, and its 713 000 ‘citizens’ are generating good revenues for the newspaper that owns it.
Schibsted-owned VG.no is not only Norway’s most read and most profitable news site, it also has a social network making a nice contribution to the news site’s admirable financial results.
A city of teenagers
VG is currently earning a gross margin of more than 50 per cent from this social network, called ‘Nettby‘ (Norwegian for NetCity), Jo Christian Oterhals, head of development, VG Multimedia & chairman of Nettby Community AS, Norway, told the audience at World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Gothenburg last week.
The 713,000-strong city is in fact the biggest city in Norway, bigger than the capital, Oslo.
“Teenage girls are very active here, and we all know that if you get the girls, you also get teenage boys,” said Oterhals, who explained that Nettby’s 713 citizens make up for 61 per cent of all teenagers in Norway.
This demographic is obviously an attractive one for advertisers, but premium membership is also an important source of revenue. “Premium membership is really important for us now, we have more than 50,000 paying customers at any given time,” Oterhals added.
City guards key to success
Nettby is Norway’s second biggest social network after Facebook, but VG.no is not worried about the competition from the trendy website, because the users and purpose of the two social networks are so different:
“Nettby is a place you go to meet new people; on Facebook you keep up with existing friends,” Espen Egil Hansen, managing editor of VG.no, told me on a previous occasion.
Nettby is very much like a party where teenagers hang out, flirt and meet new friends.
“But you can’t just open the door, the best parties are well administered,” said Oterhals.
“That is why Nettby has city guards, volunteers who help moderate and control Nettby,” he explained, adding that these city guards were hand-picked by Nettby’s own people.
“To throw a good party you need good planning, a place, a host, basic rules, a bouncer, an invitation and a few introduction. We try to provide all this,” said Oterhals.
No recipe to make teenagers read news
“Currently there are almost no links between VG and Nettby other than the logo, as it was very important for us when we started Nettby that the kids who came in there did not get the impression that this was their fathers’ website,” said Oterhals.
In other words, Nettby has not been a recipe to get young readers reading newspapers – a topic much discussed during WAN.
Instead, Oterhals told journalism.co.uk, part of the rational for running this social network was to be part of what is happening on the web and to figure out how young readers use the web.
“What is your competitor online is not as easy to figure out online as in print – it could be Google, it could be Facebook – so we stay awake at night thinking about what the next big thing will be, who our new competitors are,” he said
VG.no has also launched the site in Sweden, where it failed due to many Norwegian teenagers hanging out there, and more recently in Spain, where it is an add-on to the online operation of 20 Minutos, Schibsted’s Spanish freesheet.
“Analysts said Nettby’s success will last for six years max, so the challenge for us is to look at how can we repackage and launch it as new products. I think that will be our strategy for the future,” said Oterhals.
BusinessWeek.com has looked to data from its web traffic to update a story originally published in 2005 (pointed out by The Bivings Report).
After seeing that their article ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business‘ was continuing to attract significant traffic, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green decided the demand for the information meant an updated version was necessary.
“Type in ‘blogs business’ on the search engine, and our story comes up first among the results, as of this writing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still searching ‘blogs business’ because they’re eager to learn the latest news about an industry that’s changing at warp speed. Their attention maintains our outdated relic at the top of the list. It’s self-perpetuating: They want new, we give them old,” wrote Baker and Green.
The article has not only been given the new headline ‘Social Media Will Change Your Business‘, but now features annotations and updates from experts.
An editor’s note at the top of the revised piece openly explains this strategy (emphasis is mine):
“When we published ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business’ in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.
“So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.
“First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter-they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It’s clunkier language than blogs, but we’re not putting it on the cover anyway. We’re just fixing it.”
The original version still exists on the site, but directs readers to the updated piece. The writers have also been using their blog on the site to gain feedback from readers on what should be changed.
So that’s re-optimising the article for search engines, meeting the demands of readers and promoting the site as an up-to-the minute information source, all rolled into one.