On Friday I’ll be presenting at the End of Journalism conference at the University of Bedfordshire. A really interesting range of papers, which I’ll try to Twitter/Qik/blog about. If you’re going to be around too, let me know in the comments.
The second part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists looks at how blogs have affected how journalists generate story ideas and leads.
Blogging's effect on story ideas by industry
For blogging journalists, blogs have disrupted the traditional processes of journalism in a number of ways.
Respondents spoke of a clearer perception of audience needs and interests as a result of comments and visitor statistics, which in turn fed into the choice of topics and angles to cover. Continue reading
Back in June I distributed an online survey to find out how journalists with blogs felt their work had been affected by the technology. 200 blogging journalists responded in total, from 30 different countries.
The responses paint an interesting picture: in generating ideas and leads, in gathering information, in news production and post-publication, and most of all in the relationship with the audience, the networked, iterative and conversational nature of the blog format is changing how many journalists work in a number of ways. Continue reading
Blogging cartoon in Romanian
A couple weeks ago I published the ‘5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life‘ cartoon, drawn by Alex Hughes. It was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news website visitor numbers, and that news organisations should be doing more with them.
The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever on the Online Journalism Blog . Continue reading
I’ve been speaking to news organisations’ community editors on the lessons they’ve learned from their time in the job. In the first of a sure to be irregular series, the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond:
Philip Meyer, author of the Vanishing Newspaper, is at it again, making a compelling point for the role of investigative journalism and original research in newspapers’ survival:
One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution. Michael Porter included it in his list of six strategies in his book “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.” The railroads survived the threat from trucks on Interstate highways and airlines by focusing on the one thing they could still do better: moving bulk cargo across long distances. Continue reading
Alfred Hermida reports on research by Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, on the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news: Continue reading
SEO Book.com has an excellent article with a range of tips on how to identify a topic for your blog, cover it well, and market it effectively. As always, here are the bullet points: Continue reading
Stat of the day comes from Cone (I’m sure there’s a fascinating reason for that name):
Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 93 percent of social media users “believe a company should have a presence in social media”. “56 percent of users feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”
But it’s MediaPost’s Research Brief that complements this with something more interesting for me:
Data from an August 2008 survey of Web merchants, sponsored by Internet Retailer, found that, of the 39.3% of retail respondents that use social networks, 32% have a page on Facebook, 27% on MySpace and 26% on YouTube.
So a significant proportion of retailers are moving into social media, consumers want more, and the trend continues.
A few months ago I had a call from someone representing new citizen journalism startup AllVoices. “Oh great,” I thought. “Yet another cit-journo outfit scouting for student journalists to populate their pages with free content.”
The (cold) caller didn’t inspire me with confidence. They clearly knew nothing of me or the course; they spoke of content being ‘visible to the world’ – as if blogs hadn’t been invented. And the site made me spit feathers: “The first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere,” it boasted – the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve seen all year. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 