Zombie Journalism

Alexia Tsotsis’ highly unprofessional rants against “old media” and eventually her site’s own readers lead to a highly professional discussion amongst journalists about dealing with our critics on the web.

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Exploring the Role of Curation and Curators in the Newsroom

By Mandy

On June 13, 2012

In DFM

What do you think when you hear the term “curation”? Do you roll your eyes at the “future of news” talking head types likely posing the word to you (like right now)? Or does your mind reel with the possibilities?

Under the strictest definition of the term, curation is what journalists have been doing since before Gutenberg. We’ve always been responsible for collecting bits of information and reassembling it in a way that makes sense to our readers, but now we have so many more tools to use and streams to incorporate. It’s hardly a new idea, just a new way going about doing it.

Curation is a huge part of Digital First Media‘s plans. I/We see it as a way to give our readers a well-wounded view of a story or topic, while also freeing up our local staffs to do the original reporting they do best. It is with this in mind that I, along with my esteemed boss, Steve Buttry, will soon be hiring a national curation team comprised of a team leader and two curation editors.

While I do have something of a loose job description put together for these positions, the people who we’ll be hiring here will be trailblazers. Like a lot of us who are taking on experimental new roles, they’ll be determining (and always re-evaluating) what tools, practices and stories will work best for them and the company, rather than following directions from the top.

If you dare to wonder what a curation editor might do — we’d like to hear from you. Even if you aren’t necessarily interested in one of these jobs, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how curation and curators might best help you and/or your newsroom best serve readers.

Some ideas we’ll be exploring:

How should we provide curation around big national stories, where primary coverage will be handled either by our staffs or by our content partners?
How should be capitalize on local stories that might have national appeal?
How should we curate the social conversation around the day’s big “talker” stories in a way that would interest even those who aren’t on social media?
How should we help local newsrooms in their curation efforts without just taking it over?
What curation tools should we use? Which do YOU use?
What kind of content should we curate? Is there anything we should avoid?
How should we evaluate, verify and attribute content we curate?

You can join in the conversation in the comments below, on Steve’s related blog post, on Twitter (#DFMcuration) or, if you prefer to keep your ideas and interest confidential, feel free to use this private form.

A few details that may be helpful (this and more from Steve):

The curation team will be part of Project Thunderdome, which will handle national content for the websites of 75 daily newspapers of Digital First Media (scattered across 18 states), as well as some niche content that may be used by the sites of our weekly papers.

I look forward to seeing where this conversation takes us.

In Defense of Crowdsourcing: You Get Out What You Put Into It

By Mandy

On June 7, 2012

In Industry News & Notes

Yesterday, Dashiell Bennett via Atlantic Wire* brought some pointing-and-laughing to the plight of Darren Rovell, a CNBC sports business reporter who was burned by a source he found via crowdsourcing and then pouted publicly online about it.

Bennett, however, takes a leap that defies logic: He blames the act of crowdsourcing for this error. Blaming crowdsourcing for failed reporting is akin to blaming phones and email – it’s merely a method to find sources, the end result still requires actual work.

Last fall, Rovell asked his Twitter followers how the NBA lockout was affecting their businesses. He received a response from a man who claimed to be the head of an escort service catering to NBA players and fans who noted that his business was down 30%. After a few questions over email, Rovell added the source’s comments to his story. As it turns out, said source was a high schooler punking this reporter. (Wait, high schoolers watch CNBC???)

Here was Bennett’s break-down of what happened:

Rovell was done in by two classic journalism mistakes. The first, less obvious one, is that crowdsourcing is a lousy way to gather news. As Rovell himself suggests in his CNBC mea culpa… people will say almost anything if they think it might end up in print, and people you don’t know and never meet can’t really be trusted. It happens to lots of people, because it’s very tempting to rely on these kinds of tips. The information comes so easily, but it needs to be taken with twice the amount of salt. The second is a more traditional maxim: If a story is too good to check, it probably isn’t true.

Well, he’s right on one count: You really can’t trust information that you get from any source anywhere – via crowdsourcing or otherwise – so you have to do a little reporting and fact-checking on things like this. He is wrong, however, to suggest that this somehow proves that crowdsourcing in and of itself is a lousy practice for journalists. In actuality, crowdsourcing can be a very effective way to find sources, but it’s what you do with those sources that determines the outcome of the story.

Crowdsourcing wasn’t Rovell’s problem, failing to take a couple of extra steps to find out if this too-good-too-be-true source was for real was his problem. Had he even called this guy on the phone and asked a few key questions, the kid’s story would have likely fallen apart in a matter of minutes.

Not that Rovell helps his case by including this in his “apology”:

He duped me. Shame on me. I apologize to my readers.

As a result I will do fewer stories on the real life impact of big events which I do think the public enjoys.

There will always be people out there who want their 15 minutes of fame and not really care how they get there.

The lesson was not “I shouldn’t accept anonymous sources I interview over email at face value”, it was “I’m not talking to you people ever again.” Sigh.

Reporters should take his story to heart as a cautionary tale, it shouldn’t scare people off from crowdsourcing altogether. Instead, note these basic steps of verification for all hot tips you receive as a reporter:

1. Evaluate the credibility of the source

2. Follow up on the information with reporting – including interviewing the source

3. Evaluate the credibility of the information

4. Corroborate the info you receive against other sources

5. Evaluate your options based on the info you have

Here are some resources that might help you find your own verification process:

B.S. Detection for Journalists: A presentation and tips from Craig Silverman of Regret the Error (and me) on verifying information online
Tips for verification on social media from top social media editors in the business
How to verify and when to publish news accounts from social media from Jeff Sonderman at Poynter

* Yes, I realize that in merely responding to this opinion post, I’m falling directly into Atlantic Wire’s trap (also known as Forbes and Gawker Media’s trap), but it has to be said.

Women in Journalism: Be not afraid, for we are taking over

By Mandy

On June 4, 2012

In Industry News & Notes, Presentations, Rants

If you’ve ever read this blog, you know that I am anything but a downer about the future of media – in fact, I’m bonafide psyched about it. It is because of this that I ended up giving something of a pep talk/call to arms to the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association at the Pennsylvania Press Conference this past Saturday.

I haven’t really done any extemporaneous speaking since I was last required to as part of a college honors class, but I had a lot of fun doing it and I wanted to share it here with you. Obviously, these are the prepared remarks and I deviated a little bit in real-time (h/t to Steve Buttry for giving me the idea to post it here).

It’s great to look out at this crowd and see so many women working in this business – and who seem to know what fashion was like in the 1930s.

Admittedly I haven’t been in the business as long as some of you, but journalism in the past 10 years has felt like dog years to many of us – we’re all aging seven years with every one that passes. Everything keeps changing so fast. As soon as you learn one newsroom system or social media tool or pick up the latest lingo, another has come along to take its place.

When I first graduated from college, newsrooms were already cutting back instead of hiring. For me at least, this prompted an immediate career change. Instead of being a reporter as I’d always wanted, I decided to work on the web. There were tons of jobs out there for people who knew basic html, had journalism skills and were willing to adapt.

And thank God I did, I have no idea what I’d have been doing otherwise. (Between you and me, I really wasn’t a very good reporter anyway – mostly because I hate using phones)

I recently attended a reunion for those who worked at Kent State University’s student newspaper. Of those who attended school with me, I’d estimate less than 10% are still working as journalists. Some never even started. Many have been laid off in recent years, myself included.

It was at this reunion that one of my friends, one of those former journalists, took me aside. He’d heard I’ve been teaching journalism students at Georgetown University.

He says to me, “How can you give these kids hope? There’s nothing out here for them. There aren’t enough jobs for all of us that are already journalists.”

There is some truth in there. Enrollment in journalism schools continues to rise even as more traditional journalism jobs are disappearing.

But he is wrong. Journalism isn’t dying, it’s just changing. There’s a lot of reason to hope – not just for the kids still in school, but for the rest of us too. It IS a terrifying time to be a journalist, but it is also a very exciting time to be a journalist.

While the past few years have seen cuts in traditional newsrooms, there have been new ones starting up. We have new local and hyperlocal news sites and new investigative teams at the likes of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

We also have data geniuses and programming geniuses — all of these people we may not have recognized as journalists in years past — but they are out there working to reimagine journalism for the future. They’re making new tools to make our jobs easier – creating new ways to tell stories and, yes, make money.

Aside from all of that, this is an exciting time to be a woman in journalism.

Women are filling journalism schools faster than men. We have more women in our newsrooms than ever before – with hopefully more to rise in the ranks in the nest few years. Hell, we have a woman leading the New York Times, for crying out loud!

We also have many women among those striking out on their own to cover news the way they want.

Take Arianna Huffington. Whatever you may think of her, you have to admit she’s very smart.

In The Huffington Post, she created a booming media business that is changing the way we do journalism on the web. They found a formula that makes good journalism possible. It isn’t always elegant, but it works:

Cute cats + celebrities/ weird news = $ for reporters

And this investment in reporting paid off. The HuffPost won its first Pulitzer this year.

On a much smaller scale, there are other women making a successful go of it on their own.

Women like Tracy Record, who way back in 2005 — which is ancient history in internet years — started a personal blog about her neighborhood in West Seattle. In late 2007, Tracy quit her job as a TV news producer to work full-time for West Seattle Blog while her husband sold ads.

West Seattle Blog grew into a hyperlocal powerhouse that inspired other journalists to strike out on their own.

Tracy isn’t exactly cracking open Watergate, but she provides news that clearly matters to those who live there. With the aid of reader tips and paid freelancers, WSB covers local crime, traffic, business development – and even lost pets.

By mid-2008, the site made enough to support Tracy’s family, making it Seattle’s first self-sustaining online local news site.

All of this certainly wasn’t easy. Tracy and her family worked up to 20 hours a day for years to keep the site updated and filled with ads. She didn’t take a vacation until August 2009, when she could pay people to keep an eye on things back home.

But she did it by training her journalism skills on something she truly cared about – and it showed to her readers. Her engagement in the community – in person and online – drove readers to trust her to know what’s happening. It’s kind of old fashioned, if you think about it.

Back on this side of the country, we have Laura Amico, who runs the site Homicide Watch in Washington, D.C.

When Laura moved to DC with her husband, Chris, there wasn’t exactly a plethora of reporting jobs available. A crime reporter by trade, she was disappointed in the lack of local crime coverage. So she decided to change that.

In the fall of 2010, she launched Homicide Watch, a blog dedicated to covering every homicide in Washington D.C. — from crime to conviction. Laura sought to put a face and a story to many victims whose deaths went largely unrecorded by local media.

Using source documents, social networking and original reporting, Homicide Watch has become one of the nation’s most exhaustive resources on violent crime.

Probably more importantly, Laura’s work the family members and friends of crime victims a place to share their grief.

This spring, the site drew record page views of 20,000 page views a day.

If Laura were working within a larger news organization, she might not have gotten the resources or the time to run a project this big. By doing it on her own, with the aid of donations, grants and other sources, she was able to tackle this project her way.

And all this hard work has paid off, Laura will soon be heading to Harvard, where she was awarded a Neiman Fellowship for journalism.

These women are just two of the many out there doing news their own way – outside the traditional system. Now I’m not here to tell you that you all need to go out and start new websites or invent some new journalism tool (though it’d be cool if some of you did). What I’m saying is that so long as there are people with the will and the know-how, there will be journalism. And so long as we have women willing to step up and, if need be, go it alone – we’ll have female journalists running the newsrooms of the future.

So what can you do to help?

1. Push for more women to take on leadership roles in your newsroom. Support your female coworkers and competitors – because their successes are yours, too.

2. Speak up in news meetings, even if you aren’t an editor. Push to get your ideas heard both inside the newsroom and out in your community.

3. Don’t take no for an answer. On a panel aimed at female freelancers earlier this week in New York, a news website editor said he found male freelancers much more likely to follow up on a rejected story pitch with more pitches. Female freelancers, he said, he rarely heard from again. Don’t stand for that. You guys aren’t quitters.

4. Get out of your comfort zone and stay competitive. Do some freelancing outside of your beat area – maybe in something you wish you knew more about. Learn some basic programming. Start a blog, even if it is just to experiment.

5. Promote your expertise on social media. As women, we hesitate to sing our own praises – when we should be shouting from the rooftops to bring attention to the work we’re doing. We can’t afford to stay too quiet, lest all of those men on Twitter overpower us.

6. And finally, if you’re a veteran journalist, become a mentor to a young woman. Point her toward data journalism or beats in business and government — areas still dominated by men. Help her career develop – and you can probably learn quite a bit from one another.

If we support one another’s big thoughts and downplay our fears. If we occasionally dare to go out on a limb – maybe it won’t be such big news the next time a woman takes over a major media organization.

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When CoveritLive hands you lemons, make workaround Kool-Aid

By Mandy

On May 31, 2012

In Community Engagement, How Tos

The online media world was in one helluva tizzy late Wednesday and early Thursday when someone discovered that CoveritLive, the live publishing interface used by many brands and news organizations, was no longer offering free accounts. Many of us have been using the ad-supported version of CiL to hold reader chats and publish liveblogs for years now – and we were quite surprised. With several big conferences and annual news events coming up, news orgs will need some alternatives in place very quickly.

As of Wednesday, CoveritLive’s trial/free plan allows for only 25 “clicks” (whatever those are) per month, with all other plans charging per “click” with a capped limit each month. In other words – this is no longer a viable option for most newsrooms.

Eds note 2:17 p.m.: I’ve been told by a social journalism contact that CiL will be free and ad-free until July 1. (Not independently verified)

Having only recently posted my praises of CoveritLive, I felt compelled to help by pulling together a list of alternative workarounds for live chats and liveblogging.

If you have a suggestion to add to this list, please share it in the comments or submit it here.

If You Intend to Pay Anyway

ScribbleLive is probably CoveritLive’s best-known competitor in this space. ScribbleLive is a paid service used by many news organizations for live coverage, especially those in the tech world, and its functionality is quite similar to that of CiL.

No-Cost Workarounds

You don’t have the resources or the time to set up a whole new deal with a new vendor? OK, here’s some things you could try.

Note: This is a quick post, I intend to edit and add more suggestions below as I find or receive them.

Use your Existing CMS or Blogs

Call it low-tech, but if you have a website with a CMS or a blog, you have a liveblog (albeit a slower, manual model). We used to do this all of the time for liveblogging stories at TBD and it works fine if you set up an easy-to-follow system of posting.

Quick to-do: Start a new entry in your website’s CMS or your blog with the basic info you have for the breaking story or topic you’re tracking. When you have an update to add to this liveblog, put it above the last post, indicate it as an update with a timestamp like so.

Live Tweet and Display/Curate

It’s time to take your liveblogging to Twitter by either using your existing personal or newsroom Twitter account or setting up a special handle just for live tweets. To make sure those readers who aren’t on Twitter can still see the live postings on your site, you’ll need to do some quick curation.

For in-the-moment tweets, you could opt to use a simple Twitter widget embed to show this account’s tweets or display a hashtag search. If you want to keep the tweets on your site and in order, you’ll need to do some quick curation and publication in a tool like Storify. If you have the time and resources, you might opt for a more selective “liveblog” by live-curating tweets and other elements in Storify. You could embed the beginning of the live curation in a post on your site and all new updates you publish within Storify will automatically publish to that entry without refreshing.

Build Your Own Using Google Docs

My Digital First colleague Ivan Lajara, who always has an answer for such problems, mocked up a liveblog in Google Docs. Using the Docs “Publish to Web” feature, you can embed a live document inside your site or, for faster updates in a near-live format, put an iframe around the live document. He noted that text, URLs and images from Google Drive seem to work fine here, though users will likely have to refresh to see changes and it won’t be easily viewed on mobile devices. If you use the iframe method, be careful, as it is truly live and users will be able to see you typing as you edit.

Quick how-to from Ivan: Set up a regular Google Doc and make it public. To put an iframe around it using

<iframe src=”HERE GOES THE URL OF YOUR GOOGLE DOC” name=”frame1″ scrolling=”auto” frameborder=”no” align=”center” height = “1000px” width = “600px”></iframe>

If you try something like this on your own, drop me a tweet or comment and let me know.

More:

Elana Zak posted about a few other CiL alternatives over at 10,000 Words. She highlighted live blogging tools G-Snap, Wordfaire and WordPress’ own liveblogging plugin.

Live Chat Workarounds

Use Facebook chats

You could hold a basic chat int he comments within a Facebook post. It isn’t the most elegant process in the world, but at least everyone knows how to use it. If you’d want to archive this chat, you could opt to save all of the pieces in Storify using either their Facebook page search or (as I would recommend) their browser plugin for Chrome Firefox or Safari.

There are also several Facebook apps out there (I know of Clobby, what else?) to allow brands to hold on-page chats with fans. I haven’t used this method before, so I can’t speak to it, but it exists (if you have info on it, let me know).

Use Livestream/UStream chats

If you have video capabilities, sites like UStream and Livestream are great for engaging in chats with readers. You can embed the live video stream into your site and allow comments via the sites’ built-in social stream functionality. A downside? You can’t moderate the comments.

Use Google+ Hangouts On Air

Google+ Hangouts are great, their original downside was that only 10 people could participate. Hangouts have recently gotten an upgrade thanks to the newish ability to broadcast the live chat using YouTube. If you’d like to try it, check out how the New York Times uses this tool.

To add in questions from viewers to this chat, you might opt to pair it with Google+ page comments, Twitter, Facebook and/or a liveblog entry to collect comments.

Live-curate a social media chat

Using similar methods as I described above with live tweets, you could pull together a chat on- and off-site using Twitter or Facebook coupled with Twitter and/or Storify embeds. You might want to set up a special Twitter account just for live chats, as things could get a bit crazy for your followers.

If you only care to display the chat as it happens live, you could use a Twitter widget embed to show either a hashtag search or just the tweets of the newsroom chat Twitter account and those of the involved panelists. That chat “host” could re-tweet questions from followers and, for those readers not on Twitter, could share questions sent in via on-site comments or email as tweets.

If you want a more curated experience (or you want to archive the chat), you could use Storify during or after the chat. To do this, you’ll need to set up and embed the Storify in advance. When the chat starts, you can start pulling in the tweeted questions, answers and comments within Storify. Hit “publish” often to send the updates to your site.

More:

Cbox is a social chat product that embeds into your site. You can customize the look and feel and it seems pretty intuitive at a first glance. There is a free ad-supported version with the choice to upgrade to an ad-free version.

Chatroll is another social chat plugin that has a nice look and works in HTML5 (mobile FTW). It allows users to log in with Twitter, Facebook or chat as a guest. (Hat tips to Jen Lee Reeves)

Sunlight Live is an open-sourced live tool created by Sunlight Labs. I don’t know much about it, so I’m gonna tell you to bug Joshua Hatch for more info, as he made this suggestion to me.

If you have a suggestion to add to this list, please share it in the comments or submit it here.

Growing Your Audience: Advice from Bloggers and Readers

By Mandy

On May 22, 2012

In Community Engagement, Presentations

I’m giving a workshop to the Digital Ninjas at the New Haven Register at 1:30 p.m. (EDT) today about engaging and growing blog audience. If you’d like to follow along when it starts, it’ll be online on Chris March’s blog.

I’ve been crowdsourcing some advice from the bloggers and blog readers in my social networks to include in today’s talk. Got something to add? Leave comment or tweet me @mjenkins.

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UPDATE: Slides from today’s presentation are after the jump.

Kick It Old School: Engaging Your Community Through Live Chats

By Mandy

On April 24, 2012

In Community Engagement

The live chat is, in a sense, the original social media – the Arthur Crudup to Twitter and Facebook’s Elvis Presley. I think I set up and conducted my first live chat in 2004, when I was a fledgling web producer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The technology has evolved somewhat, but the idea remains the same: Get readers into a virtual room with reporters, experts and newsmakers to ask questions directly.

Back in the day, we used the earliest incarnations of CoveritLive to hold text-based chats with readers. Nowadays, newsrooms have a lot more options to do this, including Google+ Hangouts, UStream, Twitter chats, Facebook chats and enhanced text-based options via ScribbleLive and CoveritLive.

In my recent travels for Digital First, I’ve been teaching a little bit about liveblogging and chats – and learning a lot, too. In what I hope will become something of a regular thing here at ZJ, I’d like to highlight the work of some of my DFM colleagues and pass along best practices and how-tos for any other journalists who’d like to try out what they’re doing.

At the York Daily Record (in York, Pa., birthplace of the peppermint patty with the same name), business reporter Lauren Boyer has become a community fixture. While she’s active on social media, her best successes have come from a couple of older-school engagement tactics: Live chats and real-life meetups.

In early February, Lauren started organizing weekly CoveritLive chats with members of the community, beginning with a live chat with a local CPA firm to kick off tax season.

“This initial effort had only 30 live readers — but they posted A LOT of very specific questions about their income tax filings,” Lauren says. “This motivated me to keep it up, figuring the quality of the discussion — providing a public service to those few readers who tuned in — was more important at the beginning as people start to catch on.”

Lauren says a Valentine’s Day-themed chat featuring a local dating coach was the most engaged effort she’s seen so far. This particular edition had about 55 participants and was replayed nearly 200 times, making it one of the most-viewed stories on YDR.com.

Just last week, one of Lauren’s YDR colleagues, Sean Adkins, shared a particularly notable success story. Following a live chat with a local staffing firm, a local reader sent in her resume and was later offered a job earning $40K (now that’s community service!).

There are probably many opportunities for your newsroom to take advantage of free or inexpensive live chat tools. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

If a reporter has a big investigation or enterprise story published that got people talking, hold a chat with that reporter and/or some of the newsmakers involved in the story.
Hold regular chats with your reporters and columnists. When I worked at the Cincinnati Enquirer, we had chats almost daily with a staff member. From the TV writer to the food critic and the various sports reporters, all of these chats were on a regular schedule and usually got a lot of participation.
Open up a chat for your readers and staff to dish live during the big game/debate/local event.
Hold chats with experts in your community on topics of interest like taxes, health care, pet care, gardening, relationship advice, cooking, etc
Invite one or more local bloggers to participate in a chat about local issues or their blogging subjects.

Here are a few more ideas from CoveritLive.

Live Chat Best Practices

Step-by-Step Directions to Setting Up A CoveritLive Chat

Matt Thompson’s tips on using CoveritLive for liveblogging and chats

This may be an old hat to some of you (much like the phrase “old hat”), so please share your experiences with live chats in the comments area. What tools do you use for your chats? What topics and people have worked best for you? What best practices could you share?

How to Set Up A Chat Using CoveritLive

By Mandy

On April 24, 2012

In Community Engagement, How Tos

Lauren Boyer, a business reporter at the York Daily Record/York Sunday News, contributed to the following step-by-step directions for setting up a live chat between readers and panelists using CoveritLive. Many of these steps would also work for setting up a liveblog on your site where multiple staffers could contribute and readers can leave comments and questions.

First: Go to coveritlive.com and create a (free) account.

Create a chat

Click the “sign in” button in the upper right hand corner and log in.
Click on My Account in the upper right hand corner. The Build tab on the home screen should be highlighted.
Fill out the information about your chat accordingly: Time, date, title and a link to where the chat will be displayed on your site (if you don’t have this yet, put in your home page and add the real link in later). You can schedule chats and liveblogs as far in advance as you’d like (and CiL recommends getting the file prepped and on your site days in advance, if possible).
Click Next. On the next page, select a category (likely News or Sports).

Embed Code

Customize your embed code to the size of the chat window you want (make sure it will fit into your online story or blog template). Copy the code and paste it into whatever platform you plan on using for the chat (this might be a story file on your website or an entry on your blog).

If you are embedding the chat onto Facebook, WordPress or other sites that don’t allow iFrames, check the right box under the displayed embed code to get a custom code for you.

Set Your Panelists

Under Additional Options, click Add Panelist/Producers. Under Add Panelists enter your guest panelist’s e-mail address and press the green plus sign. Adding Producers would allow another person (presumably a member of your staff) to have admin access during the chat.

Then, click the green “Send Invites” button at the bottom. Click “Save” at the bottom of the screen.

More Options

Under Additional Options, you have these options available to add to your chat or liveblog:

Enable Email Comments: Would allow users to email in comments that will show up in the chat console.
Enable Reader Login Options: Make it so only logged-in users can comment. Login options include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or your own comment system.
Add Twitter Feeds: Add tweets from specific Twitter accounts or a running hashtag to the published stream. This is excellent for liveblogs, but could also work with chats.
Send an email invite to readers: Allows you to craft a custom email to send readers who wanted a chat reminder.
Add a Coming Soon Reminder: Enabling this gives you a special embed code that will have a box for readers to sign up for reminders when the chat starts. (Note: Make sure the link in your Location field is right!)

Notify your panelist

After you’ve set up the panelists in CoveritLive, let them know that they should have received an e-mail from an application called “Cover It Live.”

Tell them it’s important to save that email, as it has the link inside that they’ll need to click on at the time of the scheduled live chat. When they click on it, they will need to enter a login or username. It’s easier to tell them to enter a new username, since they probably don’t have a CoveritLive account (your staff, however, should have accounts).

Once they click on the chat link on the date of the chat, it will open what Lauren describes to participants as a “90s-style chat room” or an instant messenger window.

At Chat Time

Sign back into your CoverItLive account. Under My Account on the left hand side of the screen, click Upcoming. Locate your chat under CiL Events, click Launch Event Now.

Note: If you’re on an account used by multiple people, click Settings on the left-hand side of the chat console and change your display name to your name.

Only you and your panelist can see the reader comments coming in to the right side of the chat screen. To approve comments, thus making them visible to the public, click the green plus sign on the individual comment. To send a private message to the sender, click the yellow key sign. To block a user, click the red circle.

CoverItLive Chat Screen View (Image: CoPress)

Inside the chat, you have a lot of options for what you can do to enhance the reader experience, like adding polls, uploading media, adding trusted commenters (like other staff), displaying a scoreboard and adding in options on the fly.

Ending Your Chat

Just Xing out of the screen won’t do anything. Go under Tools on the left side of the chat screen, and click option that says End Live Event.

Afterward

Access Your Past Chats: Go to My Account > Completed Events. Select the event you want and click on the buttons along the top of the menu to see what options you have available.

Edit Entries: You can edit your chat after the fact here, if need be.

Save your Archived Chat: Keep this content around for others to see. You have the to either leave the chat on-screen for a user to replay or you can copy it all down as HTML and save it in a file in your CMS. This is a good idea if you want the chat to be searched by Google.

Check your chat stats: Log into the account and click Completed on the left side of the home screen. Click the button to select your event and click the “Statistics” button (looks like a pink, blue and green bar graph).

Google+ Best Practices for News Brands

By Mandy

On April 9, 2012

In Social Media

So your news brand has a Google+ account. Great. Now what? Maybe you’ve been sharing posts to see what works to stir up engagement and/or root in that SEO, but you’re thinking there has to be more (there is).

Since my overview of Google+ for news brands, I’ve curated some best practices and tips that can help your news organization get a little more comfortable using Google + and taking advantage of what it has to offer.

Being There is Half The Battle

You may have noticed that a lot of news organizations have somewhat abandoned Google+. This makes it prime spot on the social media map to make your mark.

“Google Plus users notice when a news org puts resources into the platform,” says Amy Duncan, Social Editor for BreakingNews. “They reward those news orgs by becoming regular commenters and content sharers on their pages. Simply put, if a news organization is willing to dedicate resources to Google Plus, it is very easy to become the best game in town.”

Choose Posts Wisely and Use Good SEO

You don’t need to post every story here, but be sure to post news you have exclusively or first in your local area, content you think will get a lot of people searching and talking about it.

When you post stories here, remember to use your SEO (search engine optimization) skills, as you want to help Google users find your story. In the text you post with your link, be sure to include the names, places and keywords people may be searching to find this info. Bold your headlines and any keyword phrases to add SEO value using these G+ specific shortcodes.

Google recommends asking questions of your followers when you post an update, and taking care to + mention the people and organizations mentioned in the stories (using @ before their name). You might even want to + mention people who may want to weigh in on your post, like experts in a field and/or certain active followers.

Like retweeting, take the time to share posts from your reporters and readers to your stream. For instance, if you see a G+ post from a staffer that might not be SEO-optimized, click “Share” and put it on your stream with better search terms included.

Make It a Priority During Breaking News

BreakingNews has made Google+ a core part of its social arsenal, winning it a dedicated following on the platform.

“In our experience, Google Plus is far from the ‘ghost town’ it is frequently described to be,” says Duncan, who manages BreakingNews’ Google+ account. “In fact, we have seen a very high level of engagement. According to All my +, each post on +Breaking News has received an average of 34 comments, 38 +1s and 27 shares. When a big story breaks, we see those numbers go through the roof.”

BreakingNews keeps posted content fresh by taking advantage of one of the key attributes G+ has over Facebook: The ability to edit after posting. It isn’t uncommon to see BreakingNews add updated info to the top of an already-posted G+ post, like so:

And this doesn’t just work for a curation giant like BreakingNews. Last summer, The Trentonian in Trenton, New Jersey (a Digital First newspaper) took to Google+ in its breaking coverage of a shooting in a nearby apartment complex. By using G+ in addition to the usual Twitter and Facebook to cover the news and crowdsource for information, Interim Editor Joey Kulkin got a big break on some insider info.

“Someone in one of The Trentonian”s Google+ circles wrote that she thought her cousin was the shooting victim laying in the parking lot. So I immediately latched onto her, and we kept in constant communication. She was really trusting and answered all of my reply questions. G+ is where she confirmed that the victim was her cousin about 10:20.”

Post During the Work Day

According to a February 2012 report from Simply Measured derived from the activity and engagement of the top 100 brands on the platform, Google+ is primarily used during work hours and not at home (which differs somewhat from Facebook, which has nighttime surges in activity).

According to the study:

86% of the engagement that takes place happens during working hours (5 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

89% of all engagement happens on the weekdays

Wednesday is the most popular day for brand posts and for user engagement with those posts

The highest engagement with brand posts happens between 9-10 a.m. local time

Google’s own best practices (released my way via a cheat sheet from a Google rep) say the most G+ users are online from 1 to 3 p.m. local time and say the best time to post are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. local time.

Of course, there’s also an app to help you figure out your own best posting days and times on Google Plus. Note: I haven’t tested this with a brand page yet, so let me know if it works for you.

Create and Use Circles

Circles can work both like Twitter and Facebook lists. Create them not only to direct who sees your posts, but to help you monitor the accounts you want to monitor.

First of all, know that as a brand, you can only add people to your Circles if they are also brands or if they have already added you to a Circle.

You might want to create a Circle for your paper’s employees (or even smaller segments, like reporters and online staff), other news orgs, local companies and organizations and those who have Circled your brand on G+. Note: People who’ve added you, but whom you don’t reciprocally add to circles, will still receive your public posts in their stream.

Google recommends creating Circles of your most engaged users to direct your post to them specifically (in addition to posting updates publicly).

Jen Lee Reeves, Interactive Directer at KOMU-TV, uses G+ circles to organize sources and contacts.

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If you’ve built some great Circles, be sure to share them with your readers. Like a good Twitter list, if you’ve curated a Circle of local newsmakers, athletes or even your staff, others may find it interesting and useful as well.

Hold Hangouts With Your Staff and/or Newsmakers

The Hangout feature of Google+ is, in my opinion, the best part of the whole shebang. Hangouts can connect your staff and readers face-to-face, using tools that don’t require a lot of technical know-how or fancy equipment.

Though you can only have up to 10 people actually participate on camera in a Hangout, you can live stream Hangouts to the rest of your readership using the built-in “on air” functionality, which streams and saves the video to your brand’s YouTube page.

The New York Times, which was rated in January as the news brand with the most engagement on G+, doesn’t flood the site with updates, but it does hold a lot of Hangouts.

During March Madness, The Times had a hangout with three of its sports reporters and five Google+ fans, which it streamed On Air. Pick up some pointers on how to do this yourself by observing these steps they took to make it work:

Gathered participants in the chat by choosing the first 5 users to RSVP on a G+ post promoting the Hangout
Lots of promotion for the chat, on-site, on other social media and, of course, on G+.
Published a piece on their site after the fact, featuring the video from the chat (now in their own video system to boot). This final post was also posted to G+ for those who couldn’t tune in live. This pretty simple final step is key, as it makes more readers aware of what you’re doing on G+ and how they can get involved in the future.

Try it out! Hold a Hangout with a few of your local reporters to talk about a local issue, live stream an editors’ meeting, bring in a couple of city council candidates to talk with your reporters on camera, bring in a few readers while you’re at it.

If you really want to make it interactive, team the Hangout up with a Twitter or Cover it Live chat, where a staffer on camera can relay questions from the readers who couldn’t join in on the camera chat.

Alex Byers, Senior Web Producer at Politico, offered this helpful tip for Hangouts:

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Hangouts also work well as an internal meeting tool. The spread-out Digital First engagement team does this for our staff meetings. I even used G+ to conduct my fantasy football draft last fall.

Don’t Just Duplicate Twitter and Facebook

For one thing, it can take a lot of time to replicate the same updates on three tools. Also: These tools are different from one another and their audiences expect different content and approaches. Switch up what kind of content you post to where based on the engagement you get from what you post on each channel.

Also, consider mixing up the order of your social workflow.

“Many Google Plus users use Google Plus in addition to Facebook and/or Twitter, if Google Plus is always the last place you publish, these users will notice, especially in a breaking news situation,” says Amy Duncan. “Not only will your Google Plus page become redundant to users in the context of your other online presences, but it will also become redundant on Google Plus itself, if your competitors are consistently beating you to the punch.”

Not every news outlet can afford to dedicate a staffer to Google+ like BreakingNews, but it’s worth testing out some timing changes to see if it works for your site.

Post More Photos and Videos

In their report I mentioned earlier, Simply Measured found that brands really benefitted from posting a cornucopia of media instead of just story links.

Interactive content, made up of video and photos, continues to not only be the most frequently posted content but it also drives the most engagement. For the Top 100 brands, it makes up over 65% of engagement happening on Google+.

Set Your Profile Up Right

I know I’ve already gone on about this at length, but a few more things I’d like to highlight:

Verify your Google+ page by adding links on your About page to your site’s front page, other social media accounts and any notable blogs, site sections or other links you want to highlight.
Include your paper’s physical location and an email address and/or phone number on your profile somewhere.
Add other administrators to the Page. More than one person should have access in case you are sick (boo) or on vacation (yay).

Monitor Your Stats and Posts

Use All My+ to track your brand’s engagement on Google+. When you try something news, run a comparison here to see if it worked.

If you want to see just how and where an individual update traveled on Google+, click the arrow to the right of a post to get the option to “View Ripples”. On every post that has been shared on G+, you can see who else shared it by looking at this actually pretty awesome visualization.

Interact in Your Comments

I shouldn’t have to tell you this – it IS a social network, after all. When you reply to commenters or want to thank those who spread your post around, be sure to + mention their name (much like you would on Facebook). Add +1s on the comments you want to highlight for others to note.

Ask Your Readers What They Want

Honestly, you should be doing this on every social channel you use as a brand on a fairly regular basis. When you try something new, ask your followers what they thought of it. Post open-ended questions like, “What would you like to see us do here?” Include a note on your About page asking for feedback and ideas.

The New York Times’ social media crew did this early on with their use of Google+ to mold a strategy over time.

More info:

Google+ ShortCode and Option Cheat Sheet

Google’s Hangouts On Air Manual

Top News Brands on Google+ (AdamSherk.com, January 2012)

Add a Google+ Badge to Your Site

Look up the Google+ engagement statistics for yourself and other users (All My +)

What I miss, guys? What other best practices or nifty G+ tricks would you add?

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