Archive for the ‘Newspapers’ Category

Call B.S. then get a job

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Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review wrote an excellent post about journalism students and why “fake” news shows matter.

In summary, he said that the reason people enjoy The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is that they have the balls to call political and governmental figures on their BS.  This is, in part, what I was getting at when I wrote that you’re getting young people all wrong, although Niles had a better way of wording it.

He also noted that newspapers are “seeking [more] online journalism students than we have students to refer them.”  This also is why journalism students should not be buying into the doom and gloom speeches. There is still a demand!

So if any professor attempts to tell you otherwise, do what any good journalist would do: call BS.

And be sure to read Robert’s post.

Mark Deuze speaks at Temple, watch the videos

Posted on: by Blanda 2 Comments

Today, I had the pleasure of hearing one of the bloggers I read speak today. What was better is I got paid for it.

Mark Dueze , media theorist and writer of Deuzeblog, stopped by Temple Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab (where I work) to speak to the students and to promote his new book MediaWork. The book, as well as much of his presentation, is about Mark’s many interviews with creative professionals such as journalists, video game programmers, and advertisers. And I have to say it was one of the best lectures I have heard in my four years here.

First, he didn’t give us the usually doom and gloom, something that, as a student, pisses me off to no end. He also admitted as a journalism educator that colleges aren’t doing the best job of preparing students.

The video

Below are two videos that encompass the first half of the speech. I warn you, I recorded the presentation with a $100 camera, which was then compressed and put on YouTube. Therefore, the quality isn’t that high. Let me know if you are interested in the raw files.

Part One
Part Two Edit: (problem with number 2, will be fixed tomorrow)

Click through if you’d like to see a summary of his speech.

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If I ran a newspaper I’d….. (#1)

Posted on: by Blanda 1 Comment

I often have random thoughts on what I would do if I ran a newspaper or magazine. So I decided to put them out there for all to see, criticize, and comment. This is the first of what is sure to be a long scatter-brained list.

…make all of my staff (that’s reporters, designers, and copy editors) have their bylines link not only to their email, but a social networking page.

One problem would be the constant revolving door of whats the “hot” social network of the year. Maybe the publication could just make more dynamic author pages where readers could interact directly in a public conversation.

While I think the comments section of any article could serve as a forum for short term dialog, imagine the possibilities for writers that cover a beat or investigative journalists. Designers could get feedback on spreads and design changes.

How to use Facebook to leverage your college newspaper

Posted on: by Blanda 4 Comments

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I know what you might be thinking: “If I hear anything more about college and Facebook I’m going to chop my ears off and go into PR.”

Reality is, Facebook is the new beer. Actually that is an understatement. I’m pretty sure that the top two things that would piss my generation off the most would be the reinstitution of the draft and if someone took away our Facebook.

Hyperbole aside, college newspapers have a built in marketing system in place that ALL of their readers are already a part of, so why not take advantage of it? Here is how:

Create a “business” page.

Although currently limited in its use, the “business” page of Facebook allows “fans” to rate and upload media related to your product. Facebook even gives you a discussion board. I recently just created a page for The Temple News, and am fooling around with ways to use it.

How do I do this?

Well, first go to the “create a business page” erm… page. The rest is filling out fields and uploading pictures. The business page as it stands now is currently a crippled version of the personal profile page. You can rearrange boxes and add applications, however not every application works with the business page.

To know whether an application will work when you go to add it you will see these buttons:

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Be sure to hit “Add to Page”, otherwise you will do what I did and have a whole bunch of useless apps on your profile page. I am warning you that the search function for the Page applications is terrible. There is an “App for pages” section but when you try to search for anything specific it searches EVERY app making finding the right app a painful process of opening each one and checking if it has the above button.

The holy grail for the College Newspaper would be an RSS import feature like “Notes” which currently doesn’t work with profiles. So for now we are regulated to simply establishing a presence, manually (!) uploading videos, and trying to foster reader discussion. I still believe that the business page on Facebook needs a little bit more work before it is useful to newspapers though. If anything, it is another way to connect to your readers and community, and thats not bad for a few minutes of setup.

Oh and become a fan of the Temple News :)

Author RSS import

Speaking of RSS feeds, the most useful thing I have used facebook for is the Notes feature. Using Notes, anybody can import an RSS feed to blast their friends. If you can swing an author RSS feed, have reporters enter their author RSS feed as notes and you will start to see the clicks come poring in from their friends. I don’t have to tell you how this can drastically improve your reach as a newspaper. Plus readers can comment on the note as well as on your site so the author can get semi-private direct feedback.

How do I do this?

The following directions are good if you have a WordPress blog, which is the only CMS I can think of on the top of my head that college newspapers would use that has author feeds.

  1. Find a post you have written on your blog
  2. Click your name
  3. Look at the URL and add “/feed” to the end. For example: “ http://domain.com/author/username/feed“
  4. Copy that URL into Word/Notepad and hold on to it.
  5. Go to “http://yournetwork.facebook.com/editnotes.php “
  6. You’ll see a text field. Paste the link you put in word which should look like “http://domain.com/author/YOURNAMEHERE/feed “
  7. Click “start importing”
  8. In the upper right hand corner click “Confirm import”
  9. Set it and forget it.

Advertising

Facebook ads are cheap and they work. We used them to launch our blog Broad and Cecil. But I already told you about that…

There are probably other ways to use Facebook, but for now these are the most obvious. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do this. The fact that this all takes about 20 minutes of work for such a long term benefit should put this high on your “to do” list tomorrow.

Why Journalism students need to be selfish

Posted on: by Blanda 3 Comments

homeless-coder.jpgThere as been a lot of buzz around the media-journo-blogosphere lately about the demands placed on young journalists. As someone who is graduating (hopefully) in May, allow me to give an idea of my “strategy” for the upcoming job search: be selfish.

First, we must see that there are several Pros and Cons to our current situation (by “our” I mean my fellow students):

Pro:

  1. The Baby Boomer effect. Over the course of the next few years, the Baby Boomers will be retiring creating a huge vacuum of talent in every American industry (however, see #1).
  2. The Unknown. The reason I’m so excited to enter this field is that most of the conventional wisdom of the industry is no longer holding to be true. New ideas are needed, and I think we students can help. Nobody can even pretend they know what direction the media landscape is headed. Therefore the ability to learn quickly and adapt are almost as important as what you know.
  3. Everybody can be a star.  For the first time ever, it is possible to establish yourself as a journalist or writer outside of traditional channels.  Can’t get a job?  Then make one.

Con:

  1. The hiring freezes. I can’t fill in a personal anecdote here, but I feel like I see story after story about layoffs, downsizes and hiring freezes at newspapers and magazines
  2. The rich kids. I think journalism’s (especially in magazines) dirty little secret is that it is incredibly hard to support yourself on an internship of entry level job. In magazines you pretty much have to move to New York City where the cost of living is high and the entry level jobs pay $10-$13 an hour. Many internships require a student to move away from home, find housing, support themselves all for a low end stipend or no pay at all. Now I am sure there are exceptions, but as a whole, students who need to support themselves cant land themselves in the more prestigious internships.
  3. Nobody knows what to do. Its a very disturbing feeling to be sitting in class learning “new media” that you know will be obsolete in a few months (and that’s even if they teach new media at all). Which is why I love professors who are just adjuncts who hold a day job at a newspaper or magazine, I feel like they have to keep up as part of their jobs, and pass that wisdom on to students.

So what to do?

Its not new that we need to know how to tell a story on any platform and know how to write. But I think the best advice is to step outside of journalism and into business and economics.

We have been called the selfish generation and I think young journalists need to start acting like it. Think of yourself as a business.  Realize that you need to be able to sell yourself.  Step out of the employee-employer dynamic and into the contractor-client dynamic. There are going to be a glut of journalism majors graduating in the next few years into an industry that is scared to hire anybody. So we have to separate ourselves more than the previous generation in terms of skills and talent sets. There is more of a survival of the fittest aspect than ever, so make sure you have your act together.

We also need to come to the realization that most professors are not going to teach us the practical skills we need to know and will simply talk in abstracts like “the industry is changing” and “learn web stuff”. Lock yourself in your room for three hours with a Photoshop book and poke around. Become proficient in all of the programs, techniques being used in newsrooms, and even come up with some new ones.

Unfortunately, no one is going to help the next generation of writers. That’s not to say that no one wants to, but no one can. It up to us to help ourselves and each other.

Or maybe we should just stop trying to change the current system and start from the ground up.  But that’s another post…