Oct 21, 2008
Budget cuts hurting? Here are some free ideas to improve your news organization
The current topic at the Carnival of Journalism is:
What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?
(Yes, we’d all like to swing in our newsroom, lay some boot heels on chests, hoist the black flag and change everything by the end of business on Monday — but the reality is, that ain’t happening unless you have a couple buckets of cash to buy a paper of your choice and a rusty saber.) So what are some realistic, real-world examples of free (or cheap) ways you can help fuel change at your newsroom.
Spend 15 minutes with the links on this page. You’ll get at least one idea you can use today.
And if I can talk my way into this party, here are some additional ideas I’d throw on the table:
- Get to know local bloggers. Email them. Introduce yourself. Grab a coffee with. Link to them. You’ll find they have a good pulse on the community. It may be a different pulse than yours, but that’s a good thing. Be generous with your links to them, and you may find your organization with deeper tiest to the community.
- Get in front of community groups. You and your reporters should be hanging with the Rotarians and the Community Organizers if you want to make a stronger connection with your local market. They’re just as plugged-in as the bloggers, but may not be blathering on about it on their blog. This is also a great jumping-off point for efforts to create a more-focused Citizen Journalism effort. What if you gave a Flip Mino (customized with your logo and message) to a neighborhood organization or school in exchange for a promise of weekly upates?
- Encourage corrections. At the end of your postings/articles, ask a question: Did we get it right? Include a link to a form to add corrections, clarifications, and suggestions for further reporting. Great ideas and deeper connections follow.
- Encourage your reporters to think like curators. I’ve beat this particular drum previously, so I’ll keep it short here. But you’ve got a roomful of subject-matter experts; having them just report is wasting more than half their brains.
- Link. If you don’t link, you’re a dead-end.
Sep 29, 2008
Imagine if a mainstream site acknowledged the existence of blogs
Tip of the hat to the folks at bthesite.com for including prominent links out to Baltimore based and Baltimorecentric blogs in the main well of the recently redesigned site.
(Disclosure: I helped create bthesite.com and argued loudly for the inclusion of local blogs)
The local blogs have been there since day one, but were somewhat hidden in the left rail. Now, they’re pushed out front and center.
It’s great to see a major-market news organization showing signs that it realizes it lives in a wider web.
Sep 24, 2008
Hyperlocal won’t wait
Newspapers and TV stations have been throwing around the hyperlocal buzzword for years. Some have actually done something with it and launched web sites focused on tight geographic areas. But many of these are thinly-resourced and dependent on user-generated content that’s been slow to come.
So what happens when a media-adept resident of a neighborhood looks around and realizes that there’s an opportunity unmet by the local publisher or broadcaster?
In Cory Bergman’s case, he and his wife launch a neighborhood news site that winds up netting more readers than the local print community paper.
Bergman, who runs the excellent Lost Remote media blog, describes how he used off-the-rack tools to create what he calls his own hyperlocal experiment:
Soon after we moved to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard last year, my wife Kate reserved MyBallard.com after we noticed there was no daily news source dedicated to the community of 35,000. We rolled out a standard WordPress blog and started writing about news in the neighborhood. We added an events calendar, restaurant guide and a forum, too.
The lesson: There’s an entire subset of people who are absolutely comfortable with the tools of content creation who, when they see a need for news or communication, don’t wait for someone else or some vast media company to create it for them.
How is your neighborhood being served by your local newspaper? Is there an opportunity to do more? Have you already reserved the URL?
Me, elsewhere