I don’t think it’ll spoil anything to say we plan to use social media quite a bit in every aspect of TBD, so that training will be very important both before launch and as we go into the future and technology changes. Some of our staff, I imagine, will already have a rich background in social media use, while others may not be as comfortable just yet – so many levels of training will be vital.

I’m in the process of officially updating all of my documentation, so I’m in full resource re-evaluation mode. As I post on training plans, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing and offer your good examples of social media use you think we should take to heart.

Today – Twitter!

So most of us know now that Twitter is a rich way for reporters to connect with sources and readers as well as build their own brands. In addition to the basics of Twitter use, new users need to know how to find the right journalists, sources and locals to follow, using/understanding hashtags and how they can use Twitter for better reporting. I usually point newb reporters to the work of tweeting reporters on Muckrack and use the live presser tweets from @theHyperFix as a good example of live-tweeting.

There are a million great resources on using Twitter. I’ve collected quite a few I like to use.

The next logical step in Twitter training is using it’s vast amount of data to find information, track trends and find sources for stories. Sites like BackTweets, TweetGrid and Twitter’s own pretty formidable search engine can really help a journalist looking for people tweeting about [insert subject here] in their area and beyond.

Web Up The Newsroom recently had a great post about using Twitter search tools in reporting and sourcing that I think may be the best description of I’ve seen geared toward reporters.

Aside from the data search, Twitter’s geolocation data makes it easy to watch trends and tweets as they happen on a map – which is great if, say, news just broke in a certain area and you want to see what’s happening there from afar. I particularly like Bing’s Twitter maps (which can turn into quite a timesuck if you let it). SocialGreat is also nice if you just want to see what places seem to be trending across all the geolocation platforms.

If you’d rather see a list than a map of trending local topics, you could check your Twitter home page – or, better yet – check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). A lot of the time, these are silly chain letter hashtags or obvious news (like how Gulf and Oil are trending here right now), but sometimes you can see reaction to real-time events pop up in these trend searches (check it out right after a celebrity death or during a big sporting event to see what I mean). Trendsmap also has a great visualizer.

If you know what keyword you’d like to track over a course of time, Trendistic has a decent trend graphing application.

Aside from Twitter, there’s obviously a lot of other social media we’ll want to use in our day-to-day operations…but that’s for another post, my friends.

In the meantime, what are your favorite tips and tricks, apps or uses for Twitter I should be sure to pass on as we start training?

• Is there a flaw in the proposed federal shield law? This scathing rebuttal to an overwhelming support of a Federal Shield Law has definitely caused me some pause. For every organization that needs a shield law to protect sources that deserve it, others can exploit it to push through a salacious story that isn’t true. A much-needed “other side” to the discussion.
• Reflections of a Newsosaur posits: How long can print newspapers last? Alan Mutter takes a look at the Pew study of newspaper reader demographics to extrapolate just how long the print readership might last. He says the population of print newspaper readers will drop by nearly a third within 15 years and probably be less than half the size it is today by the time 2040 rolls around. Aside from that, how long can newspapers afford to print for that shrinking audience? (He touches on that in part 2, which is linked.)
• Former journalist Charles Pelton says media outlets are not properly leveraging their talented experts on staff into moneymaking opportunities for fear of ethical impropriety. I agree that his ideas, if handled properly, would not create issues and could create new revenue streams. His analysis is missing a very critical element: He obviously hasn’t worked at a media outlet in the age of mass layoffs. Many papers, in particular, have gotten rid of their on-staff experts and whoever is still left behind are so over worked already they could never take on this extra workload. Let’s mail this back ten years, eh?
• Michelle McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center is compiling a listing of online-only local news sites, from the corporate hyperlocal networks to independent local sites and blogs. She’s missing quite a few places, but watch this space to see what else pops up.

Surviving

• The Austin Statesman’s social media editor shares advice on creating fast, easy niche products from existing content. What’s your interest area? Your beat, your section or your newspaper doesn’t have to be the end-all, be-all for what interest your readers – but you can be the trusted aggregator for niche news if you want to be.
• The OJR’s Robert Niles always has great tips for the reporter looking to build a life outside a newsroom. Here he talks about building a better online presence by shifting your focus from writing stories to creating assets.  This means serving as your own archive and brand manager, building a source base and connecting with readers outside your day-to-day reporting.

Cool Stuff

• A lot of sites (Cincinnati.Com included) have been running with the idea of expanding data coverage on local crime, but the Knight News Challenge entry named Homicide Watch D.C. has a great idea to do more than that by  putting a focus on the victims instead of jut the crime. While such a database would be meaningful tot he community and become a valuable news resource, I think it would be tough to keep up in the long run.
• Ethnic media’s four-step model for the news industry’s future - Ethnic press has a lot of evolutionary tendencies that could be taken to heart by more general interest new providers – honestly, what they suggest here should have been done all along.

End of year/2010 Stuff

• An online journalist’s 10 resolutions for 2010 - A lot of good advice here for online journalists, beat writers and web developers alike.
• Ten things every journalist should know in 2010 – Great tips for the skills and basic understandings of the business journalists should learn or consider in 2010.
• The Gawker Decade: How Gawker Media Defined The 2000s – A thoughtful look at Gawker’s success and how it has changed journalism – mostly for the worse. Gawker and its properties have forced media to evolve, which is great, but at what cost to the overall business?

The Twitter

• Why Twitter Will Endure – David Carr explains the inherent usefulness of Twitter – and how because of its utility, he believes it will outlast its competitors once the novelty wears off.
• The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers – A detailed analysis with lots of data on how newspapers use Twitter. While I’m still unclear as to how they determine a paper’s overall rank (does it evaluate all the paper’s accounts?), it is interesting to see which paper’s interact the most, as opposed to blasting out updates all of the time.

• Prior to its demise, Editor & Publisher had written about allegedly “new tools” the newspaper in Knoxville uses to police website comments. First of all, I find it alarming that anyone, particularly a publication supposedly in the know about our industry, would find this community management approach new or innovative. I say the system Knoxville has employed is a bare minimum for every site with comments. (For the record, my paper has had a nearly identical system for two years – and it isn’t even close to ideal.)
• To their credit, E&P also talked to working journalists trying out Google Wave in the newsroom. Also features quotes from a familiar source (shameless plug!). I’d link to E&P directly, but they have a paywall that makes their news useless on the internet. I guess even a paywall on your site can’t save your business model, huh?
• Econsultancy has created a helful look at search engine optimization for jounos. SEO is a strange and complicated business, but it’s worth knowing the basics if you want to get your content read by more than just your regular visitors. Everyone says the future (or, really, the present) lies in the power of search – so it’s good to know.

Social Media

• Despite what some curmudgeonly types say, social media is definitely not just for kids. Recent demo studies say senior citizens are making huge inroads into social networks like Facebook and YouTube. I’m hearing all of the time how we need to keep hold of our senior readers by focusing more efforts into print, but maybe we as an industry just aren’t giving them enough credit in regards to the Internet.

• Speaking of social media in the newsroom, Mashable thoughtfully put together The Journalist’s Guide to Maximizing Personal Social Media ROI. If you ever wondered why there’s a push to get into social media or what exactly you can get out of it, it’s worth a read. They have really good ideas for building a social media routine and establishing priorities for reporters and other news managers using social media in reporting/branding/aggregation.
• If you aren’t very familiar with the mobile social network Foursquare, here’s something of a guide to get started. Foursquare has a lot of potential for journalists, mobile reporters in particular. I hope to write about this a bit more soon.

Saving Journalism

• Robert Niles asks: What should the government do to help journalism? Niles really goes out on a limb to suggest that the government can help journalism not by funding it directly, but by changing the health care system and raising taxes on the wealthy. Sound crazy? Well, I don’t see your solutions anywhere.
• In case you’ve been living under a technology rock, Apple’s making a tablet next year. Everyone’s been expecting it – and it very well could be the turning point in this particular realm of technology started by the likes of the Kindle and iPhone. For once, the journalism would would be wise to capitalize on what could be the beginnings of a new technology shift and we ready with tablet reader friendly news. No guarantees it’ll work out for Apple or for our industry, but it’s worth a shot.

Thankfully, the Nieman Lab Blog took the time to assemble what dominated discussion regarding the future of news this year and takes a look at what will likely be hot topics next year as the industry continues to reel and (hopefully) evolve.  Most notably, next year seems to be heading in a direction of looking beyond the industry itself to what the affects the changes in the industry will (or should) have on journalism education, politics and public policy.

And in the second camp of journalism industry blog posts, Paul Bradshaw reviews all of the complaints news folks have had against The Internets over the years in one fell swoop. From hating on Google to opposing blogs and user-provided news, he offers something of a summation of just how depressing some news execs can be when it comes to that which they don’t understand.

I’ve been working on a project with Gannett that tackles the next phase of our websites’ design to reflect a lot of these observations. I expect the same is happening at news companies all around the nation. I can only hope we all don’t continue to make the same mistakes in designing around the often conflicting interests in content and advertising.

The past couple of weeks have seen the roll out of a few new looks and ideas for online news presentation that really seem to focus on the observed needs and desires of readers, while not ignoring how much the online medium has to offer. These three presentations, in their own ways, seem to fit what we know users want…and quite notably, they dared to design them without ad positions.

NewsPulse

NewsPulse on CNN.com is a great visualization of the idea many of us have had for online presentation. It’s s simple, sortable stream of stories by media type, topic and various measures of popularity. It is essentially Digg without the Diggs and a lot cleaner interface.

Caveat: As a front page web news manager, I hope some measure of importance of news could be factored in as a filterable option, as many people who’d use this product might not otherwise see “important” headlines because they would not be popular or in a topic area they would tend to read. Of course, the user should probably visit another site if they want “important” news anyway (zing).

Living Stories

Living Stories, the new presentation experiment from Google, the NYT and WaPo is exactly what online news should be. I can’t get over how amazing this presentation is and how useful it can be for following a complex, long-term story or topic (like the health care reform).

A Living Story gathers all news updates, opinion, multimedia and conversation on an ongoing story in one place, at one URL. The format is best suited to help a reader see the latest developments in a story, with a timeline of events, important documents and user comments in an easy-to-digest fashion. What I like best about it that it is customizable, cookied for returning visitors to pick up where they left off and easy to follow offsite via RSS and email alerts.

Best of all, if this project works out for all parties involved, Google will make this available to other sites. It’d be a huge improvement in what’s currently available on most news sites, including that of the WaPo and the Times. You can read more about the living story from Paul Bradshaw, who is similarly dazzled.

Real-Time Search

You might not consider it a news presentation, but Google’s real-time search is a perfect format for breaking news. It builds on Google’s already formidable search presence with live news updates on a searched topic from news sites and Twitter (with more to come). It isn’t exactly made for news, but it should be. Maybe if we spent more time working with Google as opposed to trying to fight them, we could get something really great out of a product like this.
We at Cincinnati.Com used Google’s real-time search to supplement our coverage of University of Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly’s departure for Notre Dame.  It’s an improvement over Twitter search (which we’d usually use) in a lot of ways because it allows you to see the latest news on the topic from blogs and news sites. I do wish that, like Twitter search, it allowed you to customize a geographic range…but that can always come later.

News Corp’s Murdoch says he’ll hide his content from Google very soon. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if he does do it, how long will it take for regret to set in?

Pay Models

Alan Mutter points to the indicators and recent comments from newspaper execs that all point to a continuation of free news online at most outlets. A few places are going freemium, most notably the Star Tribune, who is mimicking the success of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a premium sports service. The discussion in the comments is good too.

More on “freemium” content at the SF Chronicle and BusinessWeek.

Social Media

STATS: Has Twitter Flatlined Just Short of Mainstream? – For a long time, Twitter was gorwing exponentially, as was Facebook. But then Twitter evened out and Facebook just kept going. What happened?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans – Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media – Nothing new here, but it is a nice little overview of how far the news industry has come in using Twitter. Mashable also has a shoutout for social media’s effects on local news.
Mashable has 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases for those who still aren’t sure what to do with those invites.

Speaking of Wave experiments, RedEye has ventured onto Wave. As much as I applaud experimentation with news technology, I really have to question RedEye on this approach. It’s like advertising that you’re having a party, but only a few of your readers will actually be able to go. They seem to forget Wave’s still in preview mode and not everyone has an invite.

• Taking the plunge and starting your own blog or news website? OJR has a great checklist to help you get off on the right foot. Whether you’re a college student or a mid-career journalist looking to get your name out there in a new way, this should really help you figure out your plan. And, if you use Wordpress to host your blog or site (I recommend it), here’s a friendly DIY guide to Wordpress troubleshooting from our friends at the OJB.

• If you’re looking for a new online storytelling or crowd-sourcing technique, try using a lifestream or eventstream to tell a story in a narrative form using tools like Tumblr or Posterous. Using a stream, you can combine blog posts, tweets, images and other sorts of updates around a subject from several different people to flow into a single “stream” in chronological order. It’s sort of like a Friendfeed that tells a story. Try it out.

• Or if you want to get really experimental, try the “mapped” writing model for online news. This technique isn’t so much a narrative as a “choose your own adventure”  for long-form news. It involves an overall summary (or nut graf, if you will) followed by a series of “threads” that don’t need to be read in a particular order. I learned about this model back in online journalism class back in j-school – and I never thought it would come into use. Whaddya know.

• Data fiends, multimedia producers and Flash fanatics can get great ideas for unique and innovative maps from 10,000 Words. Data visualization is a big deal for online media, buy now the key is making those maps simpler, prettier and fun. (Note: The images on the post are blown out, but it’s a solid list of examples). If you’re just a wannabe data fiend, the blog also has tips for finding and visualizing data. Very cool.

• User-generated content doesn’t have to mean “amateur” content. The Knight Digital Media Center offers up some great tips for training citizen journalists that could make submitted news a valuable information asset for your site (and it helps the community too). Remember, not everyone had to sit through several credit hours’ worth of copy editing class – so just be patient.

• Reporters, in particular, should consider expanding their social media brand by setting up a YouTube account. Those cats at Old Media, New Tricks have great how-to advice for branding yourself on YouTube. Yes, it can be more than just funny cat videos.

• Take it from me, it’s tough to manage comments on your blog or news site, let alone learning to love them and use them to your advantage. I think a lot of the opinion in this piece is a bit pie-in-the-sky (because I’ve been there), but they offer good tips, nonetheless, for understanding online communities and managing commenters.

• If you haven’t been using Twitter lists yet, here’s Mashable’s primer on what they are and how they work.

• This is more for organizations rather than individuals, but Social Media Today has tips for making employees into effective Social Media Ambassadors. Hint: It goes beyond just getting everyone on Twitter and calling it a day.

Geanne Rosenberg, writing for the Nieman Lab, jumps into the Federal Shield conversation, asserting that student journalists should also get the protections of their professional counterparts. If you read this blog, you know I’m a big proponent for citizen journalists, bloggers and other “non-professionals” to get this protection, so kudos to her for recognizing the rights of students as well.

The Nieman Lab has an overview of a longer paper from Marion Fremont-Smith at Harvard law about the non-profit model for funding news. There are a lot of questions out there as to whether or not tax law might need to be changed to allow for a current for-profit news org to become non-profit. Fremont-Smith’s paper argues there should be no new guidelines or legislation needed to make this happen.

A very interesting case is going on right now where TV personality Glenn Beck is essentially trying to use domain name laws to out an online critic (and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere). While it goes against the reason behind the law, it certainly is a creative way to circumvent other media law to take down those who oppose your point of view.

Who’s charging for content – or not

For those keeping score….

• Talking Points Memo: Exploring a membership model, but not an all-encompassing pay wall.
• Newsday – Creating a subscribers-only pay wall – and Steve Outing thinks they’re nuts & suggests a micropayment model.
• Dallas Morning News – DMN is betting on readers being willing to pay more to have a better newspaper – not online yet, but in print.
• Speaking of “premium content” that is “worth paying for”, Outing started a great discussion about what content readers might be willing to buy.
• And now for something completely different. Check out the new site for the non-profit Texas Tribune if you haven’t already. It’s lovely – simple, clean, easy-to-read. And everyone’s really hopeful this is a news experiment that will succeed.

Crazy ideas worth hearing

Robert Niles has a provocative idea – evaluate whether or not your site really needs to be in Google News, Crazy? Maybe, but check it out. There’s some potentially mind-blowing food for thought about why news sites and blogs may not want to be involved with Google News – and it isn’t about that silly  “freeloading” nonsense. He argues that search engine page views aren’t “quality” views and they might be leading to more spam.

Or, if you really hate Google and you’re Rupert Murdoch, you’ll insist the search engine is stealing your stuff against your will. Google finally had enough of the News Corp. owner, saying that if he really doesn’t want Google indexing his sites, he can be removed. Of course, this blogger thinks Murdoch knew that already.

Newspaper-sponsored blog networks! Catch the wave! While it certainly isn’t the first such blog network (ahem), the Guardian is hiring bloggers to cover local news.

And seriously, it’s been said before and said again, this time by Paid Content: When is someone going to buy Breaking News Online ? They’re the best there is at breaking news online – and yet, they are still independent.

And a word or two about the Twitter

Social Media Today has a great bit of coverage about Twitter lately i just had to share.

For one, there’s a much-needed reality check on Twitter’s trending topics from the folks at Social Media Today, more importantly, do those topics really reflect what people are actually talking about or what is really going on in the world?

They also take a refreshing look at Twitter lists from the “quality over quantity” perspective. In other words, it isn’t a popularity contest to get listed a lot, especially wen there are a lot of lists.

And get ready to take down your “English only” Twitter search filter. Soon enough, we’ll be able to translate tweets with no problem.

The report was compiled based on a survey of 2,828 bloggers, blog provider statistics and interviews with many key bloggers.

Fun facts from the study:

Bloggers are generally more affluent than the average person

The blogosphere continues to be dominated by male, affluent and educated bloggers

Most bloggers are “hobbyists” and are driven by personal fulfilment rather than financial gain.

The survey found that contrary to popular belief, many bloggers have had professional media experience, with 35% of all respondents having worked in traditional media as a writer, reporter, producer, or on-air personality, and 27% continue to do so.

While bloggers read other blogs they do not consider them a substitute for other news sources and the majority do not consider online media more important than traditional media.

31% don’t think newspapers will survive the next ten years.