NOTE: This list represents only the pieces I authored. My colleagues Adam Glenn and Michele McLellan wrote several other posts. You can find everything on the News for Digital Journalists blog.

Most important post: March 14: Pew research points to mobile opportunities for local news, info. There’s a lot to learn from in this Pew report. I spotted these strategic implications:

• Attract more young people to your news brand. Tomorrow’s audience has to come from somewhere. The research indicates that news orgs could promote long-term growth of their local news market via mobile offerings.
• Native apps not really such a great revenue strategy. In fact, Pews numbers paint a pretty dismal picture for trying to generate much revenue from getting people to pay for content. Now, if news apps became more service-oriented, that could change the picture…
• Embrace the spectrum of mobile technology, not just smartphones. OK, Pew, didn’t look at this directly, but when you look at their numbers you can see that feature phones are a big part of the picture. And the news business mostly thrives based on audience size. Ignoring feature phones means leaving money on the table and alienating potential allies.

Other posts…

Feb. 22: Disaster news prep: Google Person Finder. I wrote this after the Christchurch, NZ earthquake but before the big Japan earthquake/tsunami. Goal here is to tell news orgs how they can leverage this tool by embedding it in their own pages. Also, if your region gets hits by a disaster, I tell how to ask Google to spin off a new instance of Person Finder. You can spin off your own instance, but it’s better to see if Google will do it first to avoid confusion.

Feb 28: Engaging tomorrow’s news audience today: Report. Research from the Newspaper Association of America takes a closer look at sub-groups within the youth demographic for news audiences. I’d like to see more research like this. More importantly, I’d like to see some evidence that news organizations are actually using this research in their strategies.

March 8: Knight Community Info Toolkit: Help make your community stronger with better info. Summary of a new planning tool for community activists. This is the kind of effort I’d love to see news organizations get involved in, but it’s interesting that the toolkit is not really intended for news organizations.

March 9: Knight names new VP of Journalism and Media Innovation: Michael Maness. Pretty significant shift of leadership at the Knight Foundation. It’ll be interesting to see what direction Maness wants to take Knight’s programs. Especially now that the Knight News Challenge is in its fifth and possibly final year. (It was originally intended as a five-year contest program.)

March 11: Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen win Knight grant to build open-source news platform. I’m curious about this project — especially whether it will build upon existing open-source platforms (hopefully WordPress rather than Drupal, if so), and what kind of mobile functionality, if any, it will include.

March 17: New York Times launches paywall — and why most news orgs shouldn’t. Most people who watch the media business are pretty down on this strategy. Frankly, I’m also pessimistic — although I suspect the Times may be able to pull it off, for a while, without really hurting its audience size or search visibility. But there are so many loopholes, and so few real benefits to paying subscribers, that I’ve got to wonder why they’re even bothering with this. It seems almost like a philosophical exercise. They should be putting these resources into offering services that they can sell, if you ask me. As for the vast majority of news orgs: Don’t try this at home. The Times is a very special case.

March 22: Why “data journalism” is good for the news business. My UK colleague Paul Bradshaw wrote an excellent analysis of the many ways that data-focused content (such as interactive databases) and services (such as APIs of metadata from a news org’s content) can help build a news business.

They’re using ScribbleLive, a modular-oriented content management tool that “plays nice” with content from a variety of sources — social media, MMSed-in photos, blog posts, and — as shown — phoned-in audio updates from Egypt.

See Al Jazeera English, Live Messages from Egypt.

I’ve covered ScribbleLive before. I think it’s a great tool, and I’d like to see more tools like it for venues that cover breaking news. Another good option is Burt Herman’s Storify project.

trim x

RIP, Tr.im

UPDATE AUG 12: Tr.im reports that they’re not dead yet. Hey, congrats to them for working something out, at least for now. But still: As Aron Pilhofer notes in the comments below, relying on any third-party for a core functionality represents a significant risk, so I still stand by my advice in this post.

Yesterday the popular URL shortening service Tr.im abruptly bit the dust — begging the question of whether existing Tr.im shortlinks would suddenly break. (Tr.im says its existing links will continue to function at least through Dec. 31, 2009.)

This doesn’t affect me much, since I rarely used Tr.im — but others relied heavily on Tr.im and its statistics for how its shortlinks were used. Bit.ly, which also tracks shortlink statistics, is now Twitter’s default link shortener. PaidContent recently covered how difficult link shortener service business is. Which means that other link shorteners could fall down and go boom at any time.

So if you really must rely on shortlinks for any reason, it probably makes more sense than ever to create or control your own link shortener…

Despite their difficulties, shortlinks continue to grow more important to how people communicate online — not just because of Twitter’s 140-character-per-post limit, but because of the continuing popularity of e-mail, forums, and print media.

Long, unwieldy URLs still break or truncate surprisingly often in e-mail software — especially when people read their e-mail on mobile devices. They simply suck for sharing links via SMS text messaging. They also can screw up the layout of online forums and blog comments. And some print publishers include shortlinks in their content or ads to make it easier for people to type in URLs that they encounter in print. (Shortlinks don’t matter as much for links from web pages, blog posts, or HTML e-mail where you can specify a complete destination URL without displaying it in all its convoluted ugliness.)

As I wrote earlier in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, hosted URL shortening services present several challenges of their own:

• Reliability. If a shortening service you use goes down or dies, your links to your content would cease to function.
• Security. If the shortener you use gets hacked, your existing links could end up pointing to different destinations — even to perpetrate phishing attacks on would-be visitors to your site.
• Branding. When you use a hosted shortener service, the links you create visually promote their brand — not yours.
• Breaking the web Tech bloggers such as Joshua Schacter have written about how redirects such as shortlinks can impair how well the web works.

In theory you’d like your shortlinks to continue working forever. But judging by how they get used, the vast majority of shortlinks attract the vast majority of their traffic within a few days or weeks of distribution. Still, you never know when something you published, tweeted, or e-mailed in months or years past will suddenly regain popularity or relevance. That’s why shortlink tracking is handy.

For all these reasons, if you routinely publish shortlinks to your content (via social media, forums, e-mail, SMS, and other means), it might make sense to build your own URL shortener, rather than rely on a hosted service.

Amazon.com recently did this. It’s apparently a fairly straightforward technical task — perhaps not always trivial, but very doable for any news site. It doesn’t necessarily involve changing your existing URL regime for published pages. Rather, it’s about generating short redirect URLs that point to your pages.

But if you’re using an open-source CMS like WordPress, shortener modules probably already exist. If your CMS uses a MySQL database, you might be able to use the open-source software Kissa.be to roll your own link shortener. (NetHakz explains how.)

Gary Love, director of product development for the Houston Chronicle, noted in a comment to my Tidbits post:

“For many [sites], the work of creating a URL shortener might have already been done as a side effect of creating canonical user- and SEO-friendly URLs. For instance, Drupal sites allow clean URLs to be created, but it all falls back on IDs in the background. A module like Global Redirect makes sure all content goes to the canonical URL.”

Also, consider buying a short version of your domain. This helps you promote brand while preserving brevity, and also makes tracking proliferation of your redirects easier. Look especially for non-U.S. top-level domains that might work. For instance, the Roanoke Times might secure this domain from Spain for its shortlinks: rtim.es

Once your custom shortener is in place, you could use it in a couple of ways:

• When publishing shortlinks to your own content, make sure you include the shortlinks generated by YOUR system, not the shortlinks generated by a Twitter client application like Tweetdeck. This way, it’s likely that the shortlink with your domain would get copied in any retweets — and thus propagate not just your content, but your brand.
• If your site offers link sharing tie-ins like “e-mail this”, “tweet this”, or “share this” with each content item, make sure your own shortlinks (not the original long URL) gets copied into those recommendations. That will make it even easier for the people who encounter those shared links to re-share them via their own preferred channels.

…Of course, this strategy won’t prevent site visitors from creating their own shortlinks to your content via their preferred services. But that’s okay. You’ll at least retain some control over the reliability, security, and branding of links to your content from social media and e-mail.

That said, many sites make it surprisingly hard to post. Not excruciatingly difficult — but just laborious enough to be a barrier to some would-be contributors.

This week I’m experimenting with using different tools to post to Contentious.com. Here’s the first one:

My Tumblr Experiment

I’m doing this because some of my clients use fairly complex content management systems, where each post requires a surprising number of steps.

Most commonly, here’s what site contributors must do…

1. Visit a web page.
2. Log in to the site CMS.
3. Navigate to the appropriate place to write a post.
4. Enter the post title and content in the appropriate fields (Including manually specifying links).
5. Fill in other fields (categories, tags, byline, subheads, siderail copy, etc.) needed to integrate the post with the site’s format.
6. Go through a separate process to upload and caption images or other media.
7. Preview the result.
8. Publish the post (or save it as a draft to be reviewed).

That many steps may be warranted if you have something substantial to say. But what if you just want to post a quick brief pointing out something interesting, a la Jim Romenesko?

Like Romenesko, I work with Poynter Online’s content management system on a daily basis. It does the job, but it’s very complex and labor-intensive. Each brief Romenesko post requires  more steps than what I listed above. And for the posts on the E-Media Tidbits blog? All told, not including editing the copy, I must take about 30 steps to get a post onto that blog and integrated with the site. (Add another 5-10 steps if I’m including an image, which I usually do.)

…Which is probably why most of those “Tidbits” aren’t very short. Personally, I think ethat’s way too much work to do for brief items. But even given the length of Tidbits, on average, I spend much more time producing those items on the Poynter site than I spend writing or editing them.

I’m not complaining about the Poynter site or CMS. It does a lot of things remarkably well. But it’s no secret that it is labor intensive.

The same is true for other sites I work with based on customized versions of Movable Type and Expression Engine, among other tools. Posting there is probably more work than it needs to be.

Fortunately, there are interesting microblogging tools such as Tumblr, Posterous, Delicious, and even Friendfeed that might offer solutions, if they can be integrated with the sites effectively.

Here’s what I think is needed to make it work:

• Bookmarklet for posting, so you don’t have to go to a separate page. When you’re browsing a page you want to post about, just hit the bookmarklet and a little posting window pops up, pre-populated with basic information about the page or other content item you’re viewing.
• Simple interface. This tools is meant for posting quick hits — so don’t try to cram in tons of options.
• Mobile-friendly posting. That’s simply crucial to any online publishing tool these days. Too many CMSs don’t make that easy — but most microblogging tools are pretty good at it.
• Posts (or cross-posts) directly to the main site. That is, the content being posted becomes part of the main site’s archives, can be linked to directly, and can be found through the site’s search engine.
• 3rd-party interface posts are integrated with posts from the CMS. That is, I could post two briefs via a microblogging service, then one meatier piece via the site’s CMS then two more briefs via the microblogging service — and they would all appear in the blog in sequence, as if they all came from the same place.

So far, Tumblr is lacking on those last two point, as far as I can tell. I don’t think (thought I’ll check again) that the Tumblr posts syndicated to Contentious.com are getting archived here. And I dont’ think I could get them to post as regular Contentious posts, mixed in with the posts I do via WordPress.

The latest version of WordPress (2.6) did bring back the “press it” microblogging bookmarklet-based tool, which is excellent. But what about cumbersome CMSs that don’t offer that kind of option? Could a thrid-party posting tool fill in the gap?

I’m sure my readers collectively know far more about this area than I do. Please comment below to help me learn how to address this issue. Thanks!

Picking up on my post yesterday, Univ. of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams challenged me (and her other readers) to translate my quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.

Here’s my first shot at that:

• Content management systems (including blogging tools): First, I’d have the students run a group blog on a topic of their choosing for a year to get comfortable with the content and commenting apects of blogging. (A group blog is likely to get more activity and discussion than individual blogs.) This blog should be based on an expandable, customizable tool like WordPress. Then the students should be taught the basics of information architecture, and from that figure out how to expand or customize their blogs to deliver or integrate new kinds of content or services. This could be as simple as finding and installing WordPress plugins to add features, or integrating content from other places (such as Flickr or del.icio.us). The goal would be to get them to not just understand, but demonstrate that on their own they can envision, research, evaluate, and act upon options to do more with their content online. There’s a lot you can do without getting too geeky. They need to gain the confidence that many options are within their personal grasp — they don’t always need to get permission or beg someone else to do things for them.

There’s a lot more on my list, of course…

• Mobile tools and mobile media strategies. These students all have cell phones anyway. Require them to subscribe to mobile news and information services, and critique the quality of the service and user experience. Also, require them to create whatever kind of content their phones support (photos, video, audio, GPS data, even just SMS to Twitter, etc.) and post or stream it from their cell phones. Include participatory exercises based on SMS or MMS to include students who don’t have data plans on their phones. Free services like NowPublic, Flickr, Qik and CNN’s iReport could be especially helpful and even fun for your exercises.

• Social media. The point here is to help students learn a key tool for engaging communities, while also gaining experience with how influence works and information travels through social media. I suggest starting with whatever social media services most of the students are already using (like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter) and explore both the one-to-one and group interaction options through exercises. For groups, it’s probably better to get them involved with existing, active groups on these services — rather than try to start a new group from scratch. Where possible, use both web-based and mobile options for these services. They should learn to use these tools for community outreach, story/issue research, and promotion of their work.

• Economics and business theory/models. Journalism students should be taking courses in the media business that offer the fundamentals of historical, current, and emerging media business models. They should learn what budgets and balance sheets look like, how grant funding and investment works, and how to evaluate the economic environment they’re operating in — including how it’s changing. Get them used to seeing the big picture and looking ahead. Practical skills could include analyzing the economic environment of the local community, spotting emerging trends that could offer journalistic or other media opportunities, and writing a basic business plan to capitalize on those opportunities.

• Business skills. This could involve evaluating and estimating revenue options from grants to investors to advertising to subscriptions to partnerships and more, as well as knowing what steps to take to pursue that funding. Example exercise: Develop a strategy and action plan for increasing online revenues for the campus or local daily paper — including calculation of expenses and revenues, and a timeline for implementation. In addition, they should be aware of what it takes to start and run a business — requirements for taxes, healthcare, getting SMS shortcodes, working with advertisers, etc. No part of the business that supports their journalism should be alien to them.

• Management skills. I’m envisioning this both from an entrepreneurial and organizational perspective. In all exercises, put the students in a decisionmaking role and guide them through learning how to manage time, resources, and people — whether employees, collaborators, or community members. For instance, if a class project is increasing online revenues for the campus paper, divide that mission into sub-tasks, assign someone to manage each part of that project, and require them to make decisions and delegate. Teach them how to use tools like Basecamp to coordinate team efforts. In fact, it might be a good idea to coordinate projects with other j-schools around the country or world, since increasingly in the media business project teams are widely distributed. The point is to encourage them to take charge of the process, not just to pigeonhole themselves as content creators.

• Marketing, advertising, and SEO. In addition to taking a marketing basics class oriented toward media products and services, j-students should learn the basics of search engine optimization — since findability generally translates into traffic, engagement, and revenue for most media ventures. Exercises can include learning to use Wordtracker to optimize headlines, stories, and metadata to increase both traffic and relevance; using Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns to a news/info site (such as for the campus paper) and suggest strategies to boost traffic and engagement; developing and running Adwords campaigns (with a modest budget) to promote a class project; researching niche ad networks that might help support various types of coverage or beats, etc.

• Community engagement and management. This is perhaps one of the most marketable skills any journalist can have for the next several years or decades. The point is to get them used to creating news as part of a conversation, rather than simply as a one-way product for publication. It’s about promoting constructive public discourse through active engagement. Exercises could include participating in an active community forum; working as a volunteer moderator for an active forum where contentious topics arise; taking and active role in editing and discussing a Wikipedia page of interest; helping to coordinate (not just cover) local events like town hall meetings, conferences, or festivals; participating in or running local meetup groups, etc. These experiences tech how to handle conflict, foster consensus and diversity, produce events, and demonstrate respect and understanding for communities in order to build credibility. In this respect, working through local government, advocacy groups, social service agencies, neighborhood associations, and ethnic or religious groups could be as valuable (maybe more valuable) than working through journalistic or media organizations.

…I realize that my list sounds like a hell of a lot of stuff, but I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what today’s journalists really need in order to take advantage of current opportunities, spot emerging opportunities, and take charge of their own destinies (rather than relying on a paternalistic news org to shelter them while they write, write, write).

I realize also that there may be resistance in journalism schools to much of what I propose, for reasons ranging from “we’re not a vocational school,” to IT staff resisting implementing the kinds of tools I’ve mentioned, to the need to integrate curricula more closely with business schools, to the tenured faculty who must teach at least some of these topics not knowing or caring much about them.

I’m not saying this would be easy. But I do think what I’ve outlined, in addition to teaching core journalism skills and values, is what today’s j-students really need to prepare for the kinds of careers they are most likely to have — and the kinds of media they can play a key role in inventing or developing.

Thoughts?

(And thanks, Mindy, for making me think this through more.)

Right now, several of my clients are working on site redesigns and also are looking for ways to increase site traffic. One of the most basic strategies for attracting more traffic to your site is making your site more appealing to search engines. That’s why I’m suggesting that these clients might consider adding a “blog” to their home page, because search engines love blogs.

…OK, I realize now I need to learn to say that differently when talking to clients. All of these clients are from major, respectable media organizations — consequently, they have a generally negative immediate reaction to the word “blog.” Even though these people are savvy about online media, they still tend to immediately associate “blog” with a negative and largely inaccurate stereotype: poorly designed rant-fests that attract trolls and flamers like cockroaches.

No, that’s NOT what I’m advising for their home pages.

Rather, I’m saying it can be useful to manage the newsiest parts of your site with a blog-like back-end — a content management system interface that makes it easy to post discrete items, categorize and assign a permalink to each, and present them online in reverse-chronological order. Then you generate a feed (RSS) from that content, so you can syndicate the most recent items to a space on your home page layout.

Here’s how you can benefit from that strategy…

Benefits: When you use a blog-like back-end, it becomes very easy to keep fresh content coming to your site’s home page. Search engines like that very, very much. When they see a frequently-updated home page, they’re more likely to index your site more frequently — which increases the chance that your content will be showing up more often and prominently in search engine results.

What might this strategy look like? This morning I found two cool examples:

• Joni Mitchell’s site: Impeccably designed, of course, from this accomplished musical and visual artist. See the “latest news” column on the left side of the home page? That’s fed from the news section of the site (which has its own feed). This sure doesn’t look like a “blog,” but it’s a very blog-like approach to managing and presenting content.
• Environmental Defense Fund: See the “news and publications” section of the home page? That’s fed from the news section of the site. (Here’s the feed.) Personally, I’d place that content much higher on the home page layout, but it’s useful to have it there.

What other sites have you seen that either use this approach or could benefit from it? Please comment below with your examples.