If you’re a semi-retired professional who wants to build a consulting business, and you’re not an internet whiz, what kind of web site will really help clients find you? And how can you easily build and maintain a useful professional network?

My dad, Jack Gahran, is a semi-retired management consultant who knows many other semi-retired professionals. Today he asked me to look over the brand-new web site of a colleague of his, to offer some advice as to how it might be improved in ways that will build this person’s business.

The site is a pretty standard brochure site — a few static pages of basic information. It had a nice but simple design, and the content seemed to use keywords appropriately — both of which help search engines like Google index the site well. However, Google generally isn’t very interested in small brochure sites that are infrequently updated and don’t attract many inbound links.

I offered my dad’s colleague four basic tips for improving his site in ways that will make it much more visible in search engines, and thus more likely to attract inbound links from other sites (another thing Google rewards).

I get asked for this kind of advice a lot, so I figured I’d make a blog post out of it, so everyone can benefit.

Here’s what I told him…
1. Ask Google to start indexing your site

Eventually Google will find your site, index it, and start listing it in search results. But Google has a lot of sites to index, so it may take a long time for them to get around to indexing your site.

It helps to tell Google you’re there and ask them to list you, rather than passively waiting for Google to find you. Submit your site to Google.

You should also submit your site to Yahoo.

2. Add fresh content to your site often, the easy way: Blog

So far, your site appears to be mainly an online brochure. That’s someone useful for people who already know to look you up online, but it won’t attract much attention from search engines — and therefore won’t get much traffic from people who don’t already know who you are and where to find your site.

Search engines mainly care about timeliness and relevance. There is an easy way to make sure your site provides that: Add a blog to your site.

I noticed that right now, your site’s “news and events” section has no real content. I’d suggest turning that part of your site into a weblog (or “blog”) so you can easily add fresh items to the site on your own, without having to rely on a web designer to upload the content for you.

…You don’t have to call it a blog if you don’t like that term, you could just call it news and views, which would give you more flexibility in what sort of information you can post there.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: After discussing the following tip in the comments below, I decided that it’s better to integrate your existing brochure space into a blog, rather than vice versa. Read full instructions on how to get this done.

Talk to your web designer about integrating a blog into your site. You should set up the account with the blogging service in your own name, so you maintain control of it. But after you have the account it’s fine to get help with setup.

Once the blog is in place you can easily (right through your web browser) add fresh items to your site, and their titles and introductions will appear on that page, with the most recent item listed first.

You could write not just about news and events, but also share your insight or tips about things that might interest the people you want to reach — including answering common questions they have related to your areas of expertise. These can be really short pieces: just 1-3 paragraphs is enough. No need to write long articles.

The point is to post a new item at least a couple of times a month (of course, more often is always better, but you can start slow). Make sure the title and the first sentence of each post include words that you think people who need your services would search for.

If you add a tool like a blog that makes it easy for you to add fresh content to your site on your own whenever you want, over time you’ll grow the kind of site that Google likes, indexes often, and rewards with traffic.

Even better, when you regularly post fresh content to your site, that gives other people a good reason to link to your site. Inbound links are very important to Google. When people link to deeper content on your site (like specific blog posts, not just your home page), Google thinks your site is more useful and is more likely to position you better in search results.

Oh, and: If your web designers say they can’t easily add a blog to your site, they’re wrong. (CORRECTION: Actually, trying to add a blog to a static site is hard, which is why I now recommend moving your site into a blog.) You can create a blog using a free service like Wordpress.com and integrate that into any site. Once it’s set up, then you just keep posting to it.

3. Offer an e-mail newsletter, the easy way

It’s always easier for you to go to people than to expect them to always come to you. For this reason, many people still prefer e-mail to the web as a way to maintain business relationships.

Dad mentioned that he suggested you offer an e-mail newsletter for your past clients and other key contacts, and I agree, that’s a great way to maintain those relationships. However, you can get even more mileage out of this effort by using a blog to create your e-mail newsletter for you automatically.

If you decide to add a blog to your site (as I suggested above), you can use some features of a free service from Google called Feedburner to turn the items you post to your blog into items in an e-mail newsletter which interested people can easily subscribe to. That way, they can see your latest items even if they don’t remember to visit your site.

Set up a free account on Feedburner, and follow their instructions to connect your site’s blog (they call it “burning your feed”) to feedburner. Then, under their “publicize” section, select “e-mail subscriptions” and follow their instructions. You might want to get your Web developer to help you with this process, but I strongly suggest setting up the Feedburner account yourself, in your own name, so you maintain control of it.

4. Link to your LinkedIn public profile

Dad already suggested that you get active with LinkedIn, a popular online service for professional networking, and I agree it’s very helpful — especially for independent professionals.

One useful option that LinkedIn offers is the ability to create a public version of your LinkedIn profile that anyone can view, whether they’re on LinkedIn or not. (Here’s mine)

I’d recommend completing your LinkedIn profile as fully as possible, and then posting a link to it from your site’s contact page. Then, make sure you keep your profile updated.

…Those are my basic tips, intended for someone with little to no experience with online media. I tried to strike a balance between empowering him to make truly effective improvements in his online outreach, while recognizing that he probably won’t want to spends a whole lot of time online, or know how to use social media.

So even though I could have suggested many social media options for this person beyond LinkedIn, I don’t think that would be a good fit for his current skill levels and interests. Later on he could grow into that. But right now, I think it’s more important for him to create a more effective home base on the web.

I didn’t link to his site because I wanted to give him a chance to work on it first.

What do you think of these suggestions? Are they appropriate for the situation I outlined? Any disagreements, corrections, or suggestions to add? Please comment below.

In a recent post to the Wordtracker blog, The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO (search engine optimization), U.K. journalist Rachelle Money made some excellent points about how journalists can craft stories in ways that will attract more search engine traffic.

I agree with much of what she said. However, I do disagree with her about the role of a journalist in the editorial process.

Money wrote that some SEO advice offered to journalists seems:

…overwhelmingly concerned with headlines and how to write better ones for the web. I hate to throw a couple of spanners in the works, but I have never, not once, had to write a headline for a newspaper. That’s the job of a sub-editor; they write headlines, they write the sub-headings and the picture captions and the stand-firsts. I have never had to write a title tag either; that’s the job of the online editor, and they are likely to write the links too. So in many ways the advice given to journalists isn’t really for us, it’s for the production department or the online team.

…That may have been generally true a decade or more ago.

But not today…

Today news is being published by all sorts of individuals and organizations — not just from established, well-staffed mainstream media newsrooms. Small news operations — or even individual journalists and bloggers — are publishing a considerable amount of news without a multilayered, multidepartmental structure and process.

Today, many journalist already are writing their own headlines, tags, links, and other microcontent elements. And that makes sense — because when you’re trying to establish relevance in the context of search engines, it really helps to have the person who knows the story best (the reporter) choosing and using appropriate keywords.

I agree with Money that it’s important for journalists to know more about how SEO works — because if people can’t easily find news, it might as well not exist. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to advise journos to avoid learning key SEO skills because other parts of the staff will handle those details. Even if you currently work for a news org that delegates some SEO functions to other staff, you can’t depend that those other staff will remain on the job long term — or that you will, either.

Better to learn how to write search-friendly headlines, links, and leads now than play catch-up on your own later.

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

News is never just about what’s happening today — it’s also about context, including what led up to this moment. That’s why lately I’ve been intrigued by the Google News archive search. This feature, introduced September 2008, its worth a look — and maybe worth including in order to make more money off your historical archives, or to augment current coverage.

The Official Google Blog explains in Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time that this service presents archived news articles online — either as they were printed, preserving original format/context (including, in some cases, surrounding stories); or with a link to a news org’s paid archives. It also presents a timeline, showing how popular a search term was in news from past years or decades.

For instance, a Google News archive search for “space shuttle” yields a timeline with significant spikes in 1981 (for the first shuttle mission), 1986 (when the Challenger exploded after launch), and 2003 (when the Columbia broke up on re-entry).

An example of the early shuttle coverage I found here includes this March 24, 1982 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story: NASA sees little problem with lost space shuttle tiles. That’s actually a jump from a page 1 story. Other stories also appearing on the page include: “Begin to stay on after Knesset vote,” “Will match missiles with subs, Soviets say,” and “Military coup ousts Guatemalan government” — an intriguing glimpse into the tenor of that time.

That archived story was available for free — but my search also pointed to several articles for sale from newspaper archives. For instance, the Christian Science Monitor is selling its July 21, 1975 story Space shuttle to involve Europe, too for $3.95.

Not every news org’s historical archives are available in the Google News archive. Apparently Google strikes partnerships with news orgs to scan and serve their archives, or to link to existing online archives.

Participating in this service could be a way to turn your history into traffic. The Official Google Blog noted: “Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.” This means that participating news orgs could find their historic wealth increasingly findable, and thus potentially more compelling and/or lucrative.

(NOTE: I originally published this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Thanks to Tech.Blorge for the tip.)

As I’ve mentioned before, hashtags are a powerful tool that allows Twitter users to track what many people (especially people whom you aren’t already following) are reporting or thinking about a particular topic or event.

Here’s the catch: Hashtags aren’t an officially supported Twitter service. They’re merely a convention that Twitter users have adopted on their own, within the 140-character text-only constraints of tweeting. So you can’t really “follow” hashtags through the main Twitter site.

Many third-party Twitter tools and services “play nice” with hashtags — but you must first know what these tools are and how to use them in order to get maximum value from hashtags.

This can lead to a bit of basic confusion, especially among people who are new to Twitter. Specifically, how exactly do you follow a hashtag?…

For example, this weekend my colleague Pete Myers, publisher of Environmental Health News, asked me:

“So I just Twitter track #bisphenol and it will search for tweets with bisphenol? Where are instructions?”

I hear many similar questions. So let me use Pete’s example to show a few options for tracking Twitter hashtags…

YOU CANNOT “FOLLOW” A HASHTAG DIRECTLY THROUGH YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

This is perhaps the most confusing point for people who are new to hashtags — but it’s important to understand. From your Twitter account you can only “follow” other Twitter users (accounts set up for an individual, organization, project, event, etc.). A hashtag is not a Twitter account that you can click a “follow” button for.

A hashtag is not a source of tweets. Rather, it’s a way to label (tag) tweets so they can be easily pulled together.

TWITTER SEARCH: EASIEST WAY TO TRACK HASHTAGS

Since a hashtag is nothing more than a character string inserted into a tweet, it’s something that you can search Twitter for. Therefore, the most basic way to track hashtags through your web browser is:

1. Go to Twitter Search.
2. Search for a hashtag you want to track. Include the “#” in your search query. Here’s a search for #bisphenol
3. Keep that page open in a browser tab, and refresh it periodically to see the latest results. Or subscribe to the feed for your search in your feed reader, and check there occasionally for updates.

If I plan on only following a hashtag for a short time (up to a couple of hours), I usually just track it via twitter search. But for something I want to watch from several hours to a day or more, I used a different tool…

COLUMN-BASED TRACKING TOOLS

There are many, many third-party tools for using and monitoring Twitter. Several of these allow you to set up columns to track tweets based on search terms. One that I use quite often is Tweetdeck, a very slick Adobe AIR application that runs on your computer.

Tweetdeck allows you to configure up to 10 columns where you follow tweets according to criteria you specify. These can be all the people you follow on Twitter (your “friends”), or a subset of friends, or the ongoing results of a Twitter search. So if you search for #bisphenol via Tweetdeck, a column will appear showing all the latest tweets using that hashtag — and it will automatically update for you. You can add, delete, or reconfigure columns anytime you like.

There are also configurable web-based Twitter tracking tools like Monitter that offer similar capabilities. Personally I prefer Tweetdeck, but that’s just a matter of preference.

…So those are the bare basics for how to follow a hashtag. They’re definitely not the only options, but they’re some of the simplest. And if you want to look up what specific hashtags mean (or spread the word about a hashtag you launched or like), there are some hashtag glossaries that can help.

The catch is that hashtags are often cryptic — usually because they work best when they’re as brief as possible. So you might stumble across an interesting-sounding tweet containing a hashtag like #wci, #plurk, or #tpb and wonder about its context. Although you can follow a hashtag easily with tools like Twitter Search, Hashtags.org, Tweetdeck, or Twitterfall (which Paul Bradshaw recommended yesterday in Tidbits), those tools don’t easily tell you what a given hashtag means.

Here some promising new tools that can help you quickly put a hashtag in context — or let people easily look up the meaning of the hashtags you launch or use…

• WTHashtag is a brand new wiki-based hashtag glossary from Microblink. Since it’s brand new, a lot of popular hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If one of your favorite hashtags isn’t listed there, just create a free account and then add a page for the hashtag. Anyone can edit these pages, so if you feel some sense of ownership or concern about a hashtag, you can check off “watch this page” to get alerts of updates. I just created a reference page for #JTMpoynter, the hashtag for this week’s Journalism That Matters conference at Poynter.
• Tagref is a searchable glossary of hashtags that gets built directly via Twitter. To add a hashtag to this glossary, send a tweet to @tagref Twitter account in this format: @tagref #hashtag is definition. (I just did that for #JTMpoynter.)
• Tagal.us lets you set a hashtag definition via Twitter. This process is a bit more involved than how Tagref works, but every hashtag you define via Tagref also gets cross-posted to Tagal.us. One advantage: Other Tagal.us users can vote on definitions and decide which best describes a particular hashtag.

…All of these services are pretty new, so a lot of popular or new hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If some of your pet hashtags aren’t there yet, take a minute to add them. And whenever you launch a hashtag, be sure to list them in these glossaries. It doesn’t take long, and the findability benefits could be significant if any or all of these tools gets popular.

NOTE: I originally published this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

And in an age of information overload, the challenge for journalists is no longer just to provide more news content. Rather, our value lies in supporting relevance, insight, and (ultimately) meaning.

This is why, lately, I’ve been intrigued by Silobreaker. This Europe-based news aggregator site uses semantic web technology (Including visual interfaces) to make news more relevant — and thus, more compelling and useful.

This is pretty important because, since relevance has inherent value, it can be the basis of business models…

WHAT’S THE SEMANTIC WEB, AND WHY SHOULD JOURNOS CARE?

The semantic web is a set of technologies that help computers interpret meaning more like how humans do it. This can make various computer technologies (especially search) far more efficient and effective. It makes it easier for computers to get to the point in ways that people understand and value.

As this semantic web tutorial explains:

“The semantic web is not about links between web pages. It describes relationships between things (like A is a part of B, and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).”

…Apply that logic to news, and you approach what most news consumers try to do, with varying degrees of success, in their own heads. News consumers constantly try to create meaning by “connecting the dots” between a dizzying array of often-conflicting stories from a multitude of venues — and then relate those patterns to their own lives and interests.

They do this in order to form opinions and make decisions — which from their perspective is the whole point of news!

WARNING: SILOBREAKER IS REALLY GEEKY

I’ll tell you up front: Silobreaker is geeky. Its user interface can be confusing and frustrating. It’s often not easy to understand what the site is saying, or why.

That said, it’s still well worth exploring — mainly because of its search tools. These visually portray the potential relevance of current news topics. This can prove valuable to journalists, as well as to analysts and regular people.

For instance, let’s say I’m a Hispanic parent who cares about my children’s future prospects — so I’m very interested in education, and what educational opportunities or pitfalls may affect my kids. I start my Silobreaker exploration of this topic by conducting a “360-degree search” for stories that connect these topics: Hispanics and education. This provides a fairly conventional news aggregator-style overview of air pollution-related news, superficially not too different from what you’d get from Google News.

But for more insight into what’s happening in this field, I glance at the right-hand sidebar. In the top chart there, “article volume,” I see that starting in early October coverage of this intersection of topics picked up sharply, but has since subsided somewhat (although not completely). This clues me in that this field heated up for a bit. That’s useful context if I haven’t been monitoring this field regularly.

Scrolling down further in the right sidebar, I see a box for “network search.” I double-click that box to display a large diagram showing how the issues I named, plus many others selected by Silobreaker as relevant, currently relate to each other in detail.

The network view allows me to literally see how issues connect. The value of this is serendipity potential. I notice that one of the related topics is “higher education” — and I have two teenagers, so that gets my attention.

I double-click the “higher education” node to make it the focus of this diagram. The resulting diagram shows me how topics, companies, people, organizations, and places currently relate to each other in this complex field. More importantly, clicking on a blue dot on any connecting line tells me why Silobreaker thinks those issues are connected (articles, blog posts, etc.)

I find the network search especially fascinating — even though, to be honest, I’m not quite clear on how it works or what it’s telling me. But I do know that it has helped me to better understand interrelationships and how they evolve — something that’s hard to get at just by reading conventional news stories. So it’s well worth spending a few minutes clicking on topics and playing with the sliders in Silobreaker’s network view. Allow the diagram to rearrange itself around your selections. See if you spot interesting relationships you hadn’t noticed before.

SO WHAT?

Silobreaker offers the most obvious potential for people who need news. But for news professionals, still greater value lies here in being able to spot possible stories and angles before they become obvious. If you know what interests your community, and can express that in keywords or topics, then Silobreaker can show you what’s happening now that might be relevant.

This kind of tool can help create and shape stories, as well as tell them.

Silobreaker offers other visually interesting tools worth exploring. Each offers some advantages and frustrations. Expect clunkiness and confusion, but also some Aha! moments. Think of this site as an early prototype for a news business based on relevance. Where could we go from here?

(NOTE: I originally published an earlier version of this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

I edit the Tidbits blog. As I was producing that post, I was searching for a good, direct link for Ron Rosenbaum — a journalist and author who recently wrote in Slate that media maven Jeff Jarvis has been gloating over the death of print. I discovered that Rosenbaum blogs for Pajamas Media — and I prefer to link to people’s blogs, so they can speak for themselves.

I noticed something about Rosenbaum’s blog that, in the context of the current rancorous debate he sparked over the fate of traditional journalists, strikes me as somewhat sad.

This screen grab says it all:

RonRosenbaum.com: It's just a blog title, not a domain. Really.

The name of Rosenbaum’s blog appears to be a domain: RonRosenbaum.com. But it isn’t — that’s just the name of his blog. Even worse: The domain RonRosenbaum.com currently doesn’t resolve to any site.

This reflects a discouraging level of online-media cluenessness that is so common in the mainstream media mindset…

Currently, this domain is owned by The Authors Guild (not Rosenbaum himself). Apparently the Guild is doing nothing with this domain, not even forwarding it.

The domain RonRosenbaum.com currently doesn't point anywhere.

…That’s a shame, since people who might hear that Rosenbaum’s blog is RonRosenbaum.com would logically plug in that domain and go… nowhere…

According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, in October 2006 that domain did resolve to Rosenbaum’s blog on Pajamas Media — but since then, it hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’m surprised that Pajamas Media — which is generally pretty savvy about search visibility — would allow one of their blogs to have the same title as a nonfunctioning domain. They don’t do that with their other blogs. Maybe there’s some backstory that explains this choice in this case, but it seems fundamentally confusing to net users and thus a pretty bad idea.

Deeper irony: Given Rosenbaum’s current criticism that Jarvis is “dancing on [journalists'] graves,” I’m surprised that he would choose to blog on Pajamas Media — which bears this tagline throughout their site: “Sending the MSM down the river.”

Hey, Ron Rosenbaum: Is Pajamas Media gloating over the death of print? If so, why are YOU blogging there?

I’m just sayin’…

That’s what Horn Group VP Susan Etlinger did earlier, for the PR/Blogger panel her company is hosting tonight. She’s one of several Twitter users who helped launch this hashtag simply by adopting and promoting it:

Susan Etlinger helps launch a hashtag by using it.

And here’s the fruit that this kind of coordination can bear: Check out the #PRblog hashtag

…So: what’s a hashtag, and why is this so important?…

A hashtag is just a short character string preceded by a hash sign (#). This effectively tags your tweets — allowing people to easily find and aggregate tweets related to a topic, person, or event. For instance, for the recent Thin Air Summit, many Twitter users included #TAS08 in their tweets. Take a second now and check out that link to see how easy that hashtag made it to follow the action during and after the event. That’s much easier than trying to find and follow everyone who happens to be tweeting that event. It’s also a great way to discover new people you might want to follow on Twitter.

RESOURCE: The Wild Apricot nonprofit technology blog offers a great tutorial: Introduction to Twitter hashtags. This explains how to use hashtags in tweets, and follow them via Hashtags.org. However, you also can follow a hashtag simply by searching for it via Twitter search.

It’s essential to coordinate, promote, and use hashtags at least a few hours before an event starts. That way, your Twitter followers will know that the event is happening, and how to follow it. They’ll also know how to spread the word of the upcoming coverage.

Ideally, use the hashtag in promotional tweets a couple of times before the event — and include in those tweets a link to the event’s info page, if any, so people know what you’re talking about.

Then, just before the event starts, do what Susan did and post a heads-up on the hashtag. Then just make sure you include the hashtag in all your event tweets. The easy way to do it is to leave it as a snipped on your clipboard. But if you’re typing it manually every time, double-check your spelling before you post! A misspelled hashtag won’t do folks much good.

This kind of coordination would have been a big help at last night’s Changing Media Landscape panel at the Columbia Univ. school of journalism. Sree Sreenivasan assembled a stellar panel of media innovators, it was worth watching. (See Columbia blogger Greg Bocquet’s wrapup of the session.)

Columbia live-streamed this session on Mogulus, which provides a chat room for backchannel discussion. That is helpful — but it’s kind of a walled garden, and it also demands a fair amount of dedicated attention. Aside from the audio portion, that kind of live coverage is not the kind of thing you can have running “in the background,” to follow while multitasking — which is what a lot of Twitter users do.

Some people at the Columbia event or watching on Mogulus were live tweeting it — but they weren’t using a hashtag. In fact, they didn’t choose and start using a hashtag (#cml2008) until the session was almost over. Unfortunately, this meant that very little of their Twitter coverage was easily findable. It was also harder for their Twitter followers to promote this live coverage.

Why should Columbia j-school care about hashtags and live Twitter coverage of their events?

• Expand public discourse and awareness with a key community. Columbia is teaching new media, and Twitter is where more and more thought leaders, innovators, and new media enthusiasts hang out. These are the people who would be especially interested in panels like this — and who would forward to their followers (“retweet”) posts that resonate with them. Best of all, you get this benefit by requiring a minimum of effort from the community. They don’t have to go to your streaming video site and log in to participate in a small, closed chat unconnected to the rest of the internet. They just follow the Twitter hashtag.
• Gauge community reaction. People live-tweeting your event will do more than report on what’s happening — they’ll comment on it. They may even praise it, or criticize it, or raise questions. And other Twitter users may react to those tweets. If all or most of that discourse includes the event hashtag, it’s easy to follow later and get a sense of what people thought and felt about the event. This is often important after the event as well as during, since people tend to mull things over and debate.

What do you think about hashtags for live Twitter coverage? Do you use them? Got other tips? Please comment below.

What if you could read the label on news stories, to gauge quality and relevance? (Source: Keetsa, via Flickr, CC license)

I’m not talking about marketing news brands. I’m talking about marketing the merits of each story, right in the story.

Erin Kissane offers sage advice for writing product pages that I suspect could, with a twist, also make it easier for people (and search engines, and the semantic web) to grasp the value of quality news:

“Most product pages need to answer these questions:

1. Who is the product for?
2. What is the product?
3. What does the product do for its target user?
4. Why is the product better than the available alternatives?

“Stupidly simple, right? But the lack of answers to these questions is what leads to thousands upon thousands of wasted hours (and more money than I want to think about) spent writing, serving, and reading meaningless dreck that doesn’t inform users, promote products, or help anyone.”

Now: What if news stories included similar context? At least through some sort of categorization or tagging on the back-end. That could enhance relevance in search results, semantic web applications, or site features like optional pop-up boxes or an iGoogle-like personalized news interface.

That revised list might look like this…

1. Who is this news for? Communities or demographics most likely to be interested or involved.
2. What kind of coverage is this? Breaking news, update, alert, feature, interview, event report, data, analysis, backgrounder, info graphic, timeline, fact box, photo, commentary, how-to, topic introduction, etc. Most news venues already address this to some extent by section heads, but that’s usually more about topic than type of content.
3. How might this news help its target audiences? I’m not exactly sure how to best handle this, but example benefits might include civic empowerment and government oversight, personal financial stability, understanding the local economy, personal and public safety, knowing your neighbors, etc. (Help me think this through, what are your ideas on this one?)
4. Why is this news better than available alternatives? Here’s where being transparent about journalistic processes and expertise can really shine as a selling point — crucial in an age where most people have easy access to multiple news sources for coverage of virtually anything. What about “Reporter has 15 years covering education issues, including three years in this city.” Or: “All facts verified and/or corroborated.” Or: “This reporter is not affiliated with this issue or any related organizations.” Or: “Highlights Native American community impacts and perspective.” Or: “Eighth report on this unfolding story.”

These kinds of things often get discussed in a newsroom when planning coverage and writing/editing a story — but communities also would find this context useful, I think. It strikes me that news stories often assume either that people are able and willing to read between the lines to figure out this stuff out, or that they don’t really care about it. But in fact, these criteria help define relevance. Spelling them out could save people time and uncertainty. And: In an era of information overload, obvious relevance (not content) rules.

Clarifying relevance and quality context for each story (at least on the back end, but possibly also directly presenting it to communities) might help demonstrate the value of quality coverage. That’s not something that news orgs, communities, or individuals can afford to keep taking for granted.

Right now, I’m unclear how exactly search engines might use this information. I’ll investigate that further. So I’m thinking in the near term it might actually make sense for news providers or aggregators to either provide direct access to this information, where available, from stories. Or they could create personalizable interfaces (highlight stories related to local schools), or integrate it into site search (so you could, say, easily find backgrounders on a particular topic).

But in the long run, I suspect that adding this kind of context, in the form of metadata, might be very useful indeed to semantic web applications that relate concepts and context. Once we get beyond facile keywords and categories, there are many layers to what makes news useful. The semantic web might be the key to everyone — including journalists — getting more value out of quality news.