Foursquare and other location-based services hold tremendous opportunity for media companies willing to get on board with an unconventional approach to interaction while it is still in its infancy. Following is a very basic overview of these services, including a glossary and tips for those who may not be familiar with these tools.

What are location-based services?

These are any programs or applications that take advantage of the mobile web and GPS capabilities of certain mobile phones to create an interaction based on a user’s location.

An Overview of What’s Out There

Foursquare is a popular location-based app that combines elements of Twitter, city guides and computer games. Users “check-in” to locations via a mobile app, alerting their friends as to their whereabouts and earning points, badges and special offers from local businesses.

Gowalla is the next closest competitor, though it operates on a slightly different system. Here’s an excellent comparison. Gowalla’s best asset is its “trips” features, which lay out a group of destinations in a particular city for someone to trace the path. This has huge potential for media and the travel industry.

Twitter added geolocation to its tremendously popular service earlier this year – and in mid-June they unveiled Twitter Places, which has venues targeted by geolocation that users can append to tweets. One leg up on the others is a feature  where users can explore recent tweets and other venues in their Places location.

Keep an eye on Twitter in this space – they have a lot more users than all the others combined, which could really push geolocation services further into the mainstream.

You can also never leave Facebook out of the equation. They are constantly developing new features to take on other social media – and word is they’ll be launching their own location-based features this summer.

There’s also MyTown, which isn’t as widely used, but has a unique focus on the gaming aspect of these apps. MyTown has a touch of Sim City and Monopoly in its gameplay, allowing users to accumulate and spend virtual cash to buy and rent property.

Early forerunners to these apps are Loopt and Brightkite, which were mobile apps/sites for early adopters of smartphones to find one another. Problem was – there weren’t all that many of us to make it very interesting. Loopt has recently added new features to become more focused on recommendations. Brightkite has, for the most part, remained without a focus on gaming, existing for more of a bare-bones check-in to alert friends as to your location.

Glossary of Common Terms

Check-in: This is where you tell the app where you are. You can check-in from just about any kind of venue – hotels, restaurants, stores, attractions, intersections, etc.

Shout: A tweet-esque message accompanying a check-in on Foursquare (though Gowalla offers something similar). This can be sent out to Facebook and Twitter if you have it set up that way.

Tip: User-added advice that pops up when you check in to a venue on Foursquare. This is what makes Foursquare useful, so tip often!

To-do: Like a tip, but more of a note to oneself.

Badges or Pins: Certain patterns of check-ins can lead to a user earning these virtual rewards.

Trips: Gowalla offers a collection of venues one can check into on an organized tour of a city. You can create these yourself or take public trips.

Mayorships: Some businesses offer exclusive offers for the user who has checked in to their location the most on Foursquare – aka The Mayor.

Do’s and Don’ts of Location-Based Services

Don’t check in at home – not only is it cheating, but it can be dangerous. Don’t check it at someone else’s house without permission and really, don’t check in anywhere you think it might not be wise to share (like where your kids go to school, for instance).

Don’t broadcast your location to Twitter or Facebook unless it’s actually interesting. At least include a shout or message if you intend to share your location beyond the service.

Don’t cheat. Foursquare is a game people take seriously, so don’t check in as you’re walking/driving by a place or otherwise stack your stats.

Note: That said, you can go to m.foursquare.com to leave shouts if you aren’t on the scene but want to update users as to what’s happening at a location. This is good for breaking news when you aren’t on location.

Do know that it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like people knowing where you are, don’t use it. If the only places you regularly go are your home and workplace, Foursquare isn’t made for you (and that’s OK).

Upcoming: Using Foursquare in journalism

Intro to Facebook for journalists (and any professionals): A guide that explains the basics of Facebook with a glossary or terms and a look at demographics.

Setting up an All-Purpose Facebook Account: Setting up a Facebook page you can easily use for personal and professional contacts.

Sharing Your Content on Facebook: Using your newsfeed to promote content, blogs and social media accounts.

More resources on Facebook you should check out:

• Search Facebook status updates at Openbook or OpenFacebookSearch
• Mashable’s Facebook Guide for Journalists: An excellent look at using Facebook for finding leads, effective sourcing, ethical issues and more.
• Facebook Demographics and Statistics, 2009-2010 (iStrategy Labs)
• Ways to get Facebookers to Read Your Story

Lots of news outlets have developed amazing new ways to get out weather information and pull in interaction from readers, but sometimes what’s simple can work in a pinch.

Most of the time when we’ve had snowstorms in the past, we at Cincinnati.Com have had a basic story file set up that we re-top and add to throughout the day as the news changes. Without the occasional total re-write during the course of the news cycle, it can end up reading like a very long Frankenstein of an article, with the possibility of specific items getting buried in all of the text.

I recently set up a basic Wordpress blog specifically to handle weather events news to avoid this problem. It has links to all the basic weather info we have available on the site, a way to search all of the posted entries and tags/categories that make posts easy to browse by topic or location. The blog uses the TDO mini Forms plugin that can allow our reporters – and our readers – to submit updates from where they are.

Even though we haven’t yet gotten a lot of reader submissions, the blog has been immensely helpful from a news management standpoint. Reporters can file to the blog from their homes, phones or satellite offices, all we have to do it click “publish” in our dashboard. No re-writes are necessary because as the story develops, we can just add news posts. The format also provides an easy way to “sticky” important posts at the top and generates an easy link for the day’s event cancellations.

This easy method of publishing updates weather news has been a great supplement to our info releases and content on Twitter, on our mobile site, text alerts and all of the usual photos and videos we bring out fr every story. The blog’s been doing great traffic on storm days and, from my view, has been a huge burden lifted from the backs of already busy online editors (such as myself).

Because this info has such a short shelf life, I’ve just been deleting all of the old content as soon as the storm coverage ends. We don’t want readers coming back for new weather updates only to find outdated info from last week’s storm. I know that isn’t the greatest option for the sake of SEO and outside linking, but it has made it very easy to essentially launch whole new blogs for each circumstance. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what they would do to prevent link breaks and confusion.

Anyway, that’s been our publishing plan these past two weeks – and if it’s something you think you could use, go for it. Wordpress is free, quick to set up and has lot of plugins to enhance user experience.

What has anyone been doing to cover these storms online? What have you been reading?

• 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.

You don’t have to be some online expert to look like you belong on Twitter – just avoid doing the following and nobody will know you’re a dog (or just an old-school journalist) on Twitter.

1. You sign your tweets

In my book, this is the biggest sign that someone is a journo without a clue. Do you seriously need a byline on your tweet? If it is your own account, your name and picture should already be on it. If it is your news outlet’s account, I repeat: Do you really need a byline on a tweet? You only have 140 characters to work with and you’re wasting them if you feel the need to sign your name to the sentence you just blasted out.

2. You ask the Twittersphere to respond by direct message

Probably the most frequent error I see. If you put an inquiry out on Twitter, do not ask people to reply by DM. Just ask them to reply. Why? Because if you aren’t following the person who wants to reply to your plea for sources, they can’t get through to you. Ask for replies or put your email out there instead.

3. You put out general links instead of specific links

I know you really, really want people to read your blog or website, but you don’t have to make it a chore. If you want to promote a certain post, send the link to the post. If they like your blog, they’ll bookmark it or subscribe by RSS – they don’t need your site’s home page force-fed to them on Twitter. Especially avoid saying, “New post about blahblahblah at yourhomepage.com! Check it out!” Someone might come across that tweet in a Google search two weeks from now and that post/story may be off your front page by then. Don’t waste people’s time. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl if you need to fit in a long link.

4. You don’t post links at all

The absolute worst. Don’t say, “I’ve got a new story/blog post about X up online now. Check it out!” Everyone who sees your name on Twitter doesn’t know your website or your news outlet. You’re part of the stream that could be coming from lots of Twitter sources – and you’ll quickly be forgotten if you do this. Right after they laugh at you.

5. You never reply to anyone else

Twitter is not a tool for you to blast out links to your work. It’s a space for interacting with your followers and asking questions of those you follow. Even if you only reply by direct message to friends’ inquiries, you need to reply when you are asked a question. you should also take the time to read others’ tweets and reply once in awhile. You might even learn something!

6. You don’t follow anyone

Slightly worse than #5. Everything said there applies. Don’t know anyone on Twitter yet? Go to Twellow and search by your beat, city or interests and start following some people. Go to Muck Rack and follow other journalists or news organizations. And re-read #5 – if people reply to you, follow them. Make them the beginning of your Twitter circle

7. You never re-tweet

This is a clear sign that you only use Twitter to push out your own content and don’t read anyone else’s. If someone says something interesting, if they reply to you and you want to share it or they pass out a link you’d like to pass on, hit re-tweet. It takes less than a second to pass on someone else’s tweet to your followers. Have you never read a tweet from someone else worth that one second? If you aren’t using a Twitter client with a re-tweet function, there’s also a button to re-tweet on the web form (just hover over the tweet with your mouse and you’ll see it).

8. You use your news outlets main website as your web link in your profile

Sure, it’s a minor point – but it makes you look like a journalist without a clue. If someone wants to contact you off Twitter, this link doesn’t help. If you have a blog or a profile page on your paper’s site or on your own, link it there. If you have a Google Profile, Facebook page, Linked In account or anything at all that reflects you, put that link there. Think about it, would you ever believe a source whose contact information was so incomplete? Which leads me to…

9. You don’t have a profile picture

If you use the default icon on Twitter, 90% of users will just assume you are a spammer or simply someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Again, would you trust a source without a face or some sort of recognizable image? It doesn’t have to be “you” per se (though it would help your cause), but it shows you made the basic bit of effort to complete your profile.

10. You exclusively tweet just about your published work

I’m not saying you have to get personal or tell everyone what you ate for lunch, I’m just saying you need to loosen up a little. Tell your followers who you’re meeting with today, what you’re working on or what’s going on at a event you’re covering. Feel free to add comment or answer questions on the news of the day (within all the usual ethical limitations of course) or re-tweet info from other users. Or, if you’re really feeling comfortable, go ahead and get personal. Readers and sources can like journalists when they seem like real people.

Instead, I think of my own age group – those too young to have ever experienced the heyday of newspapers and too old to live on hope alone.

Sure, there are a lot of journalists coming out of college right now (or in the last year) who will never be able to work in a newsroom as most of us know it, but I think they are better off than one might think. They’ve been trained in multimedia, they’re inexpensive, flexible and are far better prepared to become “new” journalists (mojos, start-up reporters, bloggers) because they never learned the bad habits of “old” journalists. Best of all, idealism is on their side.

No, I believe the truly lost generation of journalists may be my own.

A few days ago, Pat Thornton, an industry blogger and founder of Beatblogging.org posted that he left journalism. In the time I’ve read his work, Pat has always been full of ideas for the industry and he really believed it would change. For him to give up is really saying something.

As Thornton noted, “Maybe I would have been better able to withstand the upheaval in journalism if I had known the good times.”

And he isn’t alone. In response to Thornton’s news, a former classmate of mine, Meranda Watling, tweeted, “I want to believe journalism can make a difference. I haven’t given up yet. But I’m not sure how long idealism sustains you.”

I know this feeling of near hopelessness isn’t confined to our “gap generation” of journalists – but we are victims of some seriously bad timing.

We got to work just as or just before the bust started. Many of us attended journalism school in the late 90s/early 2000s, just as those schools were starting to rethink their focus on the web. If we learned anything about it there, it was half-baked, at best. Some of us got further training on our own or on the job, but many just got laid off (if we got jobs at all).

Consider this: Of all the very talented journalists I knew in my days in Kent State student media – 18 of 25 right off the top of my head are no longer in the business due to layoffs. From my experience, most newspapers killed their young first.

Even those who have managed to stay employed don’t have it so great. We, like everyone else, wait around for the next shoe to drop.  Every potential mentor and helpful editor has lost hope – or their job. If there are older journalists still working alongside us, we tend to catch a lot of the animosity over the widening technology gap.

Like Pat, we have been frustrated watching traditional media flail around looking for a business model, many ignoring much-needed changes in favor of doing what they’ve been doing for decades. Maybe we try to push change and just end up more isolated. Maybe we gave up a long time ago and are just going through the motions.

We can try to go on to other journalism jobs, but we’re up against experienced veterans put out of work by layoffs and kids right out of school who will work for (sometimes literally) nothing. Competition is a lot more fierce than it was even five years ago.

Eventually, my generation may have to leave journalism altogether. I know I’ve thought about it a lot, but I’m just not ready. News is too much a part of my life to take a backseat – at least, not until all the options run out. Part of me wants to stick around to see if it’ll ever be what I thought it’d be like – and another part admires Thornton for having the guts to give  up that ghost while he still has time to make a long career doing something else.

While I think journalism in some format will still be around for the long haul, I have to wonder how many people my age will still be around to contribute. More importantly, will anyone care?

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.

After seeing just about every low point of staff morale and picking up more tasks seemingly every day – I’m not really sure how to describe what I do anymore or see what could possibly come next in my career path. (I used to have a plan – but it’s pretty much moot now.)

I have my annual review coming up at work and I hope to craft a new job description for myself.  Problem is, I’m no longer sure what I’m best suited for or what skills might be most useful for my newspaper or any other media organization.

Right now, my business cards still say Social Media Editor. While I like keeping the title so it sounds like I have a really innovative and cool job, my paper really can’t afford to have a position like that of, say, Robert Quigley in Austin. (After reading about the cool stuff he gets to do all day seemingly without any day-to-day news constraints, I wonder what paper can.)

So here’s what I’d like to know from you:

What kind of non-reporting journalist would most benefit you as a news consumer? What would you like to see a local news outlet do differently (that could realistically be achieved by one person)?

If you work in journalism, what skills are missing from your organization? What kind of online position would help the newsroom at large?

• 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.

If I could go back to when I was in journalism school and share the following information with 2001 Mandy, she’d probably change majors. I won’t say when these stunts were done or who I worked for at the time – but it’s happened. I’ll repent for my sins someday.

Feel free to add your own or others you’ve seen in the comments.

Mandy’s Most Shameless Page View Ploys

1. Built a photo gallery when a story would have better served the subject matter
2. Changed the headline and summary to reflect something far more exciting/scandalous than the story’s subject.
3. Published an online story that only has a paragraph of text and a link to a competitor’s story.
4. Given premiere position to outrageous crime stories even though news judgment did not warrant it.
5. Published link bait from the AP and other services even though it was out of our coverage area.
6. Submitted news content to Digg and Fark before waiting for others to submit it.
7. Picked the sexiest girl out of a photo gallery to feature for a gallery in a prominent news spot.
8. Prominently featured crime stories/pet stories/disaster stories on the site long past their expiration date to keep getting page views.
9. Linked together completely unrelated stories to draw views to unpopular content.
10. Published content that is indistinguishable from advertising/press releases simply because it will get traffic.