Did the headline grab you to? When I saw Robert G. Picard’s post titled “Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay“, it grabbed me. Remember it’s just a headline…it’s meant to grab your attention. Although you may expect this to be a hit piece on journalism, it’s actually an economic explanation of where we are and what needs to change to bring more economic value to journalism. It covers many of the same topics we talk about here.

Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is “de-skilling” journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.

Take a deep breath, count to ten, erase the headline from your mind, and read this article. You may gain some insight from it!Similar Posts:

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Ok, this is the kind of stuff I absolutely love. A reader asks a question about a project he’s doing with some students, and we’re able to use that to show professional journalists how to cover a story in real time on a blog with a mobile phone.

Reader Dan writes:

A small group of seniors from my local rural Kansas high school are attending the presidential inauguration and I want to create an online experience for local friends, family, community members to follow this event, through the eyes and thoughts of the students. I’m thinking the students can text their thoughts to Twitter and I can use a hashtag to allow others to follow them there. Then I want them to post cell phone photos and Flip camera video to a Flickr group, so people can watch what the students are seeing too.

I then want this all to feed to my WordPress blog (backroadsnewsroom.com) I’ve been experimenting with this, but am still having a bit of trouble getting it all to flow well. Do you have any input for me?

First of all, this is such a cool project and experience for the kids. Secondly, this is a perfect example of how journalism is changing. A huge event in history is going to be covered through the perspective of some young people from a small town for their local community, but their coverage is going to be available worldwide. Unbelievably cool!

So what does Dan need to do this project? He already has a WordPress blog ($0)…he just needs a way to pull stuff from Twitter ($0) and Flickr ($0) into it. He wants to create his own “mashup”. Assuming the Flickr group has been created and all the kids have Twitter accounts, all that’s left to complete this project is a Yahoo! account ($0).

Oh yeah, this how-to….$0

Yahoo! has a really cool service called Yahoo! Pipes that lets you create your own mashups from just about anything. A couple of design considerations for Dan’s mashup are that he wants the kids to use hashtags, which is a Twitter convention to categorize tweets, and he only wants his students’ tweets (he said it was a small group) to show up in the mashup. This will keep people other than his students from showing up on the site.

This is very easy to do in Yahoo! Pipes. In fact, I’ve created a Pipe (it’s right here) that does exactly this, and it’s output is displayed further down this page .

My Pipe pulls the feed from my Twitter account and Newscoma’s Twitter account and filters only tweets that contain links to websites, which are indicated by an “http”. You can find the RSS feed for a Twitter account up at the top right.

I’m also pulling the feed from this Flickr group for Maui, Hawaii. The feed for this group is located at the bottom of the group page.

The “union” function merges all these feeds together,

and the “sort” function sorts these posts by their publish date.

How does this solve Dan’s problem? Mostly because he doesn’t even have to do everything I just did. He (and you) can use this Pipe any time you’d like.

All Dan has to do is:

1. Clone the Pipe I made to his account–Yahoo! makes this easy…just click the button!
2. Use the students’ Twitter feeds instead of ours–add as many as you’d like
3. Change the filter from “http” to “#inauguration” or whatever hashtag he decides to use
4. Change the Flickr group to the one he sets up for the students.

Viola–a live feed of what the students are experiencing at the Inauguration in chronological order.

Now all that’s left is to display the output of the Pipe on his site. Yahoo! makes this easy too:

1. Click on the “Get as a badge” link for the Pipe
2. (optional) Choose the “Customize the size, type and settings of your Badge” so you can set the height and width to 100%.
3. Paste the code into your site. Yahoo! generates a JavaScript that you can copy and paste directly into your post or page (make sure you’re editing using “html”–not “visual”).

The JavaScript for the one I’ve created looks like this:

<script src=”http://pipes.yahoo.com/js/listbadge.js”>
{“pipe_id”:”BH23SUzZ3RGILudirbQIDg”,”_btype”:”list”,”width”:”100%”,”height”:”100%”}</script>

Seriously, that’s the only code you have to deal with. Now you have a feed that’s constantly being updated by a several people (or just you) and displayed on your site.

Note: If you edit your post later and your Pipe all of a sudden isn’t working, it’s probably because your editor commented out the attributes. You can either remove the comments or just repost the Pipe.

Here’s what the Pipe I created looks like (if you’re reading through our RSS feed you’ll have to come to the site to see the Pipe)–again, it is constantly being updated. As soon as one of us adds a link in a tweet or something is added to the Flickr group, this will change.

You can stop reading here if you’d like…the rest is automatically generated by Yahoo! Pipes. But feel free to include your own examples in the comments!

Similar Posts:

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This is a post from journalist Paul Balcerak that everyone should take to heart who learned some very important things after entering the world of journalism. His bulleted points in a post at Wired Journalists is incredibly wise.

• Google isn’t Satan. Contrary to what many have said about Google running newspapers into the ground, I’ve found it to be insanely useful — to the newspapers I work for. Same with the rest of the Internet.
• Social networks are the new town squares. I just wrote this and I’ll keep saying it: You have to be where your readers are, whether that’s in real life or on Facebook.
• People still want their news five minutes ago. However, whether it’s Pulitzer Prize-worthy can wait a few updates down the line.
• Everyone is a reporter. Setting oneself apart now means not only keeping up with the latest toys, but using them in ways no one’s thought of yet.

And this is what some old school folks don’t get. Social networks are the new town squares, the new watercoolers, if you will. It’s important to remember that any good reporter goes to where the conversation is. In the old days, it might have been the round table at the coffee shop or at the local bar for a beer or two.

These days, it’s Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook or countless other platforms where conversations are being held nonstop.

And in two years, it will be something else. That’s what makes this new age of communication so interesting. As journalists of any variety, it’s pretty exciting but we need to be on our toes.Similar Posts:

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I started blogging roughly three years ago although I have been in news for almost two decades. I started blogging basically to just amuse myself. When you spend day in and day out reporting news and writing editorials, it’s important to have a creative outlet.

Thus my personal blog was born.

I honestly didn’t think people would read it other than my friends and my family. It began as an online journal but evolved into something a bit more much to my surprise.

But there was something also bubbling inside my cranium and that was that I needed to expand my horizons. Yes, my personal space on the web is designed to entertain me and hopefully others, but I also realized that I was inadvertently becoming an evangelist on new ways for news delivery. There is a difference between blogging and news and sometimes those worlds collide.

As I write this, I’m reminded that occasionally I will get an email asking on how a blog should be done. My advice is simple. Blog how you want to blog. If you are a political junkie, then by all means blog about that. If you want to post pictures of cats in sweaters, do it. That’s the beautiful thing regarding the blogosphere is that your voice is your own. And, I say this with utmost sincerity, treat people the way you want to be treated and I guarantee they will return to your blog.

In news, there are rules. On a blog, you set your own rules although I believe there are unspoken rules of etiquette depending on the tone of your blog.

I also believe with the addition of blogs in newsrooms, we are currently seeing changes in thinking from management perspectives.

We aren’t there yet, but we are getting there. It’s all coming together in many ways.

Of course, once we think we have it figured out, then it will all change and we will start all over again.

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Newscoma and I are only a few days into this project, but I’m already having a blast working on it.  One of the things we decided before we even bought a domain name was that we’d maintain our individual voices when writing for this site.  I’m talking about our real writing voices–the ones we use on our personal blogs.

My purpose of bringing up that fact isn’t to make this a personal post.  In fact, one of the reasons we wanted to make sure we maintained our own writing styles is that it’s the easiest way for us to convey our personalities implicitly without having to make personal posts.  Being able to write in your natural voice is one of the most liberating aspects of running your own show, and we wanted to make sure to convey that.

I’ve never worked as a journalist (as if you couldn’t tell), but I would imagine the restrictions on what journalists can write and how things must be written are quite a bit tighter than the ones I place on myself.  Just a hunch.

I don’t have deadlines to meet either.  Or an editor.  I also don’t have a steady paycheck that comes from writing.  There could be some correlation there.

One of our goals is to actually connect with our readers, and we think the best way to do that is to write in our natural voices.  Of course, there are techniques for writing effectively on the web.  For instance, shorter paragraphs work well, as does using bold font for key points to get the attention of readers who are scanning pages and search engines. But these techniques don’t connect the reader and the writer like a voice does.

I’m very encouraged by the fact that we’ve both maintained our voices so far, along with our other habits that make us different writers.  One difference I noticed earlier today is that I seldom include images in my posts.  I know I should–images help tell a story and make things so much more interesting for readers, and there are SEO advantages as well when they are used correctly.  But if I had my choice, the web would be text only.  I tend to write that way as well.  It’s something I hope to improve on as this project progresses.

I think I’ll start with my next post.Similar Posts:

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So you’re all ready to start blogging, or maybe you’ve been blogging for a while, and the question on your mind is the same one on everyone else’s…

“How do I get to the #1 spot on Google?”

And let’s be honest here–when we’re talking about search engine optimization (SEO), we’re actually just talking about Google.  Not that we’re going to turn Yahoo! visitors away at the door, but Google is the search engine that matters for now.  There are countless sites, eBooks, and marketing firms that say they can show you how to reach the top slot on Google.  I’m not going to tell you that.  I’m not telling you you won’t get there either.  I’ve made it to the #1 spot before and hope to again, but I can’t promise you you’ll make it there.

What I can do is tell you (for free) some basic things you can do to improve your rankings and increase your chances of making it to #1.  None of these things are “blackhat” or shady, just some very fundamental and easy techniques that will help you out in your quest to take over the internet.  I’ll be covering these in several posts, one topic at a time.  And today’s topic is on…

Letting Google Know You Exist!

Sounds too simple right?  Actually it is.  There are two basic ways Google will find you.  One is by following a link to your site from someone else’s.  When I started blogging that was not a possibility for me, so I chose the other route–telling Google about my site.  Even if you are getting links from others, you absolutely need to tell Google about your site.  In fact, they want you to tell them and even provide you free tools to do so.  They call them Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools actually give you a lot of good feedback about your site’s relationship with Google.  For instance, you can find out how many links to your site and articles Google sees, how many pages of yours Google has indexed (included in their search results), and any problems it sees with your site.  But you have to begin this conversation with them.

Luckily, it’s pretty simple.  Go to Webmaster Tools and register your site.  You’ll be asked to verify that you’re the actual owner, and this can be done one of two ways.  One way is to FTP an empty file to your website’s directory.  Google will tell you what to name this file.  The other is to include a tag in the header of your homepage.  Both are relatively easy to do.  Once you’ve uploaded the file or added the tag, you can verify your site.  One more step and you will have opened the doors of your site wide open to the big G!

Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that does exactly that–it maps out your site in a logical way that allows Google to efficiently flow through your site and drink up all of your wonderful content.  If you are using WordPress, you’re in luck.  There’s a plugin that generates sitemaps automatically.  It’s one of the first plugins I activate on a new installation.  Before I even write a word of content, I install this plugin.

Once your sitemap has been generated (it will be at http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml if you keep the defauls), all you have to do is go to Webmaster Tools and let Google know the address of the sitemap.  They do the rest of the work for you.  You can check back in a few days to find out just how much Google has learned about you.  Don’t worry–you’ll have plenty of other things to do in the meantime.

We’ve only hit the high points here of course.  If you want more information you can take a peek at this comprehensive guide to Webmaster Tools.Similar Posts:

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All I want for Christmas is organized information!

No, this isn’t a Christmas post.  Although it would make sense because that’s about how far behind I am.  This is about those pesky little things in WordPress and other publishing software called “tags”.  They’re easy to ignore, because they aren’t required to publish a post.  But if you aren’t using them, you’re missing a big opportunity for people to find out more information about your site.

You are more than likely already using categories to keep your posts organized, and that’s good.  But if you are only using categories, you’ll either end up with a ton of categories with accurate (and super boring) names,  or you’ll have cool and funny category names that don’t tell anyone anything about the posts.  As for me, I prefer category names that are fun or specific to the site, and I use tags as precise keywords that accurately describe the post.

Why not do it the other way around?  There’s one really good reason…sites like Technorati that collect information about blogs and websites use tags to help them organize the information about these sites.  And when you write a new post and ping these sites (make sure you are pinging these update services), they come scoop up all the tag information.  Technorati then knows which posts on your site are about what. Here’s a practical example that relates to news:

Let’s say you run a news site that concentrates on entertainment news.  You may set up a few different categories that draw people’s attention like “Bump Watch” (celebrity pregnancy), “No She Didn’t!” (scandal), and “On the Small Screen” (television).  See how those categories are much more interesting?  You can then use tags in each post to describe the keywords that are relevant to that post.  It makes more sense to use the tag “Britney Spears” in posts under each of these categories than it does to have a whole category for Britney Spears.  If you did, you’d constantly be adding categories for countless celebrities, some of which you may only write about one time.

You can use tags yourself as well.  If you’ve composed at least a few dozen posts and tagged them as you’ve gone, you can use things like tag clouds to give your visitors an idea of what your site is about at a glance.  Another use would be a “Related Post” plugin like we use on this site.  This little piece of code uses the tags and other information about your posts  to search through your post database and find posts that may interest your reader.

It only takes a couple of seconds to tag up a post, but there are huge benefits because they provide you and others with information about your site.  The larger your site becomes, the more you’ll appreciate and use the information you’ve collected about it along the way.Similar Posts:

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So I have a, umm, friend who was changing themes on her WordPress blog.  Not a problem right?  Shouldn’t be, but she was unable to find her Recent Comments widget in the new theme.  She wasn’t able to add it, although she could see it existed.   Where did it go?

Here’s the quick fix.  What happened was the number of widget sidebars was less in the new theme that it was in the old one, and the widget was still being associated with this sidebar that was now “gone”.  All you have to do is switch to the old theme, take the widgets off on that theme, then switch back to the new one.

Viola!  Your widgets that were “missing” are now there and ready to be added.Similar Posts:

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As an aging journalist with a heart of gold (well, all right, at least I think so) I found this through Dave Winer this evening.

It’s called Tweetree. It appears to be keeping our tweets together and works from various platforms.

Check it out. It seems to work very effectively and I’m thinking I’m liking it. Tweetree seems to aggregate a lot available in social media.

Even for an ol’ journalist, I’m getting it.

Newscoma

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I’ve been away for a few days visiting the in-laws who are sans broadband, and I have a lot of catching up to do, so I’ll keep this short…

For the last four days, I’ve been completely out of touch with the world, even though I was in Miami, which is a huge media market.  It was interesting to check the site today and read Newscoma’s post about television, internet, and print.  I realized just this morning that I don’t read the newspapers and don’t watch television for my information.  These are usually things I do when I computer isn’t handy.  All my news comes from online news sources, blogs, and Twitter.  Ok, maybe some from talk radio.

It’s really interesting to me how fast this change has taken place in my life, and it’s not just because I’m a techy.  My sister-in-law was saying the exact same thing today, and she’d never heard of Twitter before last week.  She’s still not a user, but she’s on the path.Similar Posts:

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