I ran the last 10 posts in the Community Editors series through Wordle. The larger words are those used most frequently – clearly reflection is uppermost (“Think”), and discounting mentions of the media, news, journalists and journalism, “People” and “Twitter” feature most strongly. You can see it in full here.
Will 2009 be the year news organisations finally went open? Barely a month after the New York Times allowed users to build on 28 years of content with its articles API (with immediate results), The Guardian is opening up over a million articles to developers for free as part of its own ‘Open Platform‘. Continue reading
Chris Deary, Community Editor at Hearst Digital, adds his 3 things he’s learned about community management to this ongoing series.
Understand your audience and give them community tools that are designed to meet their needs.
There is a tendency to want to throw as many community tools as possible on to a site without considering what your users are actually going to do with them or giving them a reason to use them.
It’s the “If we build it, they will come” attitude. But why should they? What is it about your discussion forums or blogs that is different to the millions of other sites offering the same functionality? This is where the role of the Community Editor is really important in terms of setting the tone of the community and figuring out ways of encouraging interaction and participation.
This isn’t a negative point. Often what you get from your users will far exceed what you expected, both in terms of quality and quantity. But there has to be an understanding with any user generated content that you cannot have 100 per cent control over what the community will do with an idea or with a tool.
Once you invite user participation you have to relinquish a certain amount of control, but the important thing to emphasise is that most of the time, what you get back will be worth it. You only have to look at Twitter to see how a community can take a tool and use it in ways its original creators would never have imagined.
It’s easy to come up with big, headline-grabbing initiatives that lead to short term, one-off spikes in traffic and look impressive to others within your organisation. But the key to building a community in the long term is doing lots and lots of little things really well.
They are the kind of things that your colleagues in other departments probably don’t even know you do, like helping a user who can’t log in or dealing with a moderation issue when everyone else is eating their Christmas dinner.
The website of the ABCe, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) subsidiary responsible for website traffic measurement standards, is embarrassingly bad. Continue reading
She was trying to make sure media (literally) used the “right” image of Barack Obama during the campaign. Jodi Williams was one of the many young brains behind Barack Obama’s media campaign.
Jodi Williams, who was part of Barack Obama's press team in the presidental campaign. (Photo: Bente Kalsnes)
I met her at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels to talk about the digital changes in campaigning and dealing with the media. She had no doubt that all the new digital tools made it easier for political candidates to communicate independently from mainstream media, on their own platforms. Continue reading
A few months ago Uruguayan student Maite Fernandez interviewed me about online journalism. I always try to make these responses public for other students who may have the same questions, so here are the answers as transcribed by Maite:
One major way lies in distribution. Print news spent decades setting up a distribution infrastructure (typically delivery vans, vendors/newsagents and paper boys); broadcast news did the same with distribution over time (scheduling and running orders). But online, distribution is networked – and it is done by readers and, to a lesser extent, the journalists themselves. As I’ve written elsewhere, we are all paperboys now. Continue reading
The following was written for Birmingham City University’s alumni magazine, Aspire.
If you’ve followed recent media coverage of Twitter, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a website where people talk about what they’re eating, or stalk minor celebrities. Continue reading
Financial crisis, digital revolution, crumbling media companies – these are shaky days for media and everyone involved in the field. How can journalism students make sense of it all?
I asked several of the speakers and participants at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels one question: What is the best piece of advice you will give to journalism students in the middle of this upheaval? Here is what they want you to focus on:
Ben Hammersley, editor, Wired Magazine: Everything comes down to being able to write well. Before you write well, forget Facebook, Twitter, etc. And you learn to write well by reading lots of good stuff and write a lot yourself. And find a good editor! Continue reading
“The future of magazines is glorious,” said Simon Wear of magazine house Future UK, wrapping up the industry event ‘What Happens to Magazines?’ held in London lon Monday. “Both print and online,” he added.
He would say that, though: Future has been selling a successful 1.7m magazines a month through the recession with its hobby and geek-lad magazines. As written elsewhere, you could call 2008 the Year of the Niche title as people look to do things at home, cheaply, or the things they love most during the economic downturn. Continue reading
In January I made the following presentation to the Association for Journalism Education, talking about how digital technologies can be used to facilitate research. Let me know if you have had any similar experiences with using digital technologies in research yourself.
Online Journalism Blog 