Terry Boyd is a veteran journalist. The guy’s been shot at in Iraq, interviewed some of the most important people in the military and business and pounds out good, old fashioned reporting like it’s his job. Well, it kinda is.

So when Terry, who is now an entrepreneur and chief operating officer/editor of InsiderLouisville.com, decided to push back on a recent piece I wrote for his website, I paid attention. I’m also a trained journalist, but when smarter people talk, I listen.

Terry read my original submission about customer service in the social era. In it, I identified the car dealer in my example by name. Terry didn’t want to publish the piece without giving the dealer a chance to explain … in the piece. More social media inclined, my response was, “That’s what the comments are for.”

As we went back and forth on the issue, I suddenly realized a critical difference between blogging and journalism: Fairness.

A piece of journalism, even an editorial or opinion piece, written by a trained and ethical journalist, at least attempts to give opposing sides or viewpoints an opportunity to respond before the article or program is published. A blogger just publishes, one-sided or not, assuming that if anyone wants or needs to respond they can do so in the comments.

Is it fair that a blogger pushes the other side to the comments? I would argue yes, but there is some weight to the notion that a portion of the audience doesn’t read the comments. They aren’t published in a blog’s main RSS feed. For many people, that story is one-sided.

Meaning it’s not fair.

But this is looking at the effect, not the cause.

The true critical difference between blogging and journalism, or at least journalism as we understand it (institutionalized, done by professionals, etc.), is that traditional media is produced for consumption. Today’s media is produced for engagement.

(Upon further review, I wasn’t the first to think this. The Pew Internet and American Life Project pointed it out in a recent presentation on the changing digital landscape.)

So long as a blogger doesn’t limit the opposing viewpoint or dissenting opinion from being heard at all, fairness is offered.

At the end of the day, I asked Terry to remove the name of the dealer. Not because I didn’t want them to be identified or that it would have caused an issue with InsiderLouisville.com’s ability to sell advertising or be seen as a trusted source for news. I asked Terry to remove the name of the dealer because it took away from the overall point of the piece. Less was more. See for yourself and chime in if you like.

Regardless of whether or not bloggers offer fairness, we sit in the midst if a chaotic crossroads in media history. True journalism — trained, ethical, balanced — isn’t going away, even if the major networks are picking political sides of the aisle and it seems that way. As a people, culture, nation and world we need journalism.

Even if the definitions that make up that hallowed institution change.

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The tools of social media are disruptive, to say the least. But knowing where the landscape is shifting makes a big difference in finding the safe places to build your future business foundation.

Want to own a newspaper? A magazine? TV Guide sold for a dollar, but it might have been overvalued.

Here’s what to look for as journalism — both the outlets and the individuals working in the industry — go social.

More Breaks in Format

There were already enough technology disruptions in media. Consider the tremors of local television stations (finally) ditching their analog frequencies, and moving to digital transmitters. They still cling to their old digits for branding purposes, but that will continue to fade. In one way, this is an advantage to the TV newsroom, which has less reason to cling to tradition, and more energy to focus on creating something new.

Breaking formats means abandoning the emphasis on appointment delivery for news, and more real-time and on-demand models. The “there’s an app” culture wants simple information, delivered simply when the button is pressed. Those media outlets that figure out how to package their product for anytime anywhere delivery will enjoy a serious first-mover advantage.

Curation Trumps Creation

The current payroll doesn’t support enough bodies on the street to cover the news the way it’s been covered in the past — just as a swelling mob of informed amateurs begins spewing competitive product. Not competitive in quality, but in value to the consumer.

The role of the editor in the future will have less to do with with tweaking the content of your staff, and more to do with finding, discerning, and linking to material produced elsewhere. It might be professionally done, it might be linking away to full databases, or it might be linking to bloggers (and providing context about their own biases and potential conflicts of interest.) It will probably involve linking to corporate stories, and putting the objective context in. This isn’t that far off from today, where much of the content of a paper or a newscast is generated elsewhere, but the approach to the job will shift as it becomes the majority of the time spent in the editorial role.

Story Selection Favors Trending Topics

This effect will be two-fold. Wave One will be as the new generation of journalists naturally taps into their networks of friends and sources to see what “the people” are talking about. This has always been the case, although in one market, “Trending Topics” was what they talked about at Lou’s Pub, or in between breaks at the city council meeting. Now we have a real global conversation, which is a disadvantage. (A bunch of people talking furiously about a football game on Twitter can sweep a Trending Topic.)

Expect Trending Topics (and the Facebook equivalent, once someone figures out how to mine it) to become relevant not just at the journalist level, but at the newsroom level. Newsrooms don’t want to miss on delivering on the things people appear to be interested in. This will take off further when Twitter fulfills the promise of a true “local” trending topic at a market level — and when there’s enough corporate adoption that discussions are more rounded and grounded. Today’s buzz is too tech-heavy, and too limited to certain topics because other industries haven’t contributed to conversations.

Story Selection Favors Crowdsourcing

Remember, the outlets that have housed the function of journalism for the last century are still coping with fractured audiences and lower revenue. The man-on-the-street has long been a staple of filling time and creating engagement, and there will be less time to turn stories around. Watch for more success with the crowdsourcing of stories, and eventually seeking out those stories that can be more easily sourced online.

Which leads us to…

Story Production Favors Crowdsourcing

Watch for more blatant and obvious calls for interview subjects. This has both positive and negative effects. Yes, it’s wonderful for transparency to know that a news outlet was fishing for someone with that exact issue, complaint, or circumstance. When done right, it is awesome.

When abused, it will impact the credibility of the news organization, and eventually drive the quality of the resulting journalism down.

As a reporter, I can’t tell you how many times I went out to cover a particular story, but once the answers started coming in I realized I was on top of a much better story. When advanced and intelligent crowdsourcing techniques start sifting through the public with greater ease, you’ll see many reporters finding exactly what they were looking for — and not finding the unexpected truth.

What You Can Do To Beat The Trends?

Traditional media will not be as powerful as it once was. That’s for certain. But it’s a huge mistake to assume there will be no influence at all. I don’t know about you, but the prospect of fighting a 700-pound gorilla isn’t made any more enticing just because it’s lost 100 pounds.

Individuals and organizations would be better suited to not chase the Social-Network-du-jour, nor chase Fans and Likes just for the hell of it. Instead, take a periodic inventory of where you spend your online influence, compared to how the people who are in the news are spending their online influence. Eventually, you’ll start to see the correlations for yourself, within your home market.

The five shifts I outlined are indeed coming — but they will not come to every media market at the same time. Being too early to the party will be deflating and discouraging, and almost as bad as being too late.

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Sunday’s Courier-Journal, Louisville’s daily newspaper, is one of the few tactile media publications I still read. I get the paper every day delivered in my RSS feeds, but Sunday mornings with local newspapers are still useful, if for the experience alone. My wife enjoys perusing the coupons. I like reading feature stories and the agate page of the sports section to see items from out-of-market or small college teams the paper never covers.

Sunday, I ran across an interesting article about Fred Greenhalgh’s podcasts at Finalrune.com. The piece was a nice explanation of how Greenhalgh is sort of bringing back the radio drama through his podcasts. The article was a nice read and of decent length and gave me a few moments to revisit my days in radio, but also appreciate the modern medium of Internet podcasts and what can be done with them.

But then I realized something very, very sad.

Image via Wikipedia

The article, found in the Sunday Forum section of the Courier-Journal, was written by Barry Newman. Of the Wall Street Journal. Fred Greenhalgh lives in Portland, Maine. Not a shred of this article had anything to do with Louisville, Kentucky or the surrounding area. On the surface, that might seem like a nonsense criticism of the Courier-Journal’s lack of local focus and wire copy back-falling. I did enjoy the article, after all. But when you consider the similar story of J.C. Hutchins, you see my point.

J.C. Hutchins couldn’t get 7th Son published. The Louisville native had created a masterful first attempt at a book, but publishers were frigid on it. Not one to give up on a dream, Hutchins turned the unpublished work into a published one using the Internet. The 7th Son podcasts grew virally until legions of Clone Army insiders were downloading, blogging, taking pictures in Clone Army shirts and more. The imagination of Hutchins’s futuristic, sci-fi story captured that of thousands.

So much so that a publisher finally realized the mistake and published 7th Son.

A Louisville native, product of Atherton High School, Western Kentucky University graduate, using podcasting, creating audio experiences that not only capture imaginations like radio dramas, but lead to overcoming publishing world obstacles and turning his book dream into reality … that’s the story the Courier-Journal needs to tell. Sadly, it hasn’t. Searching the C-J finds no mention of J.C. Hutchins anywhere. Other local newspapers don’t fare much better.

While there’s nothing wrong with the Courier-Journal telling both stories, and one example does not an industry fault make, the facts of the matter are this: The Wall Street Journal charges for its online content because it is original and serves its audience supremely. The Courier-Journal and similar local newspapers could never get away with monetizing their content because they’re so busy finding wire copy (ironically from the Wall Street Journal) to fill a spot in their Sunday Forum that they don’t even notice stories that their audiences would really care about.

While local newspapers aren’t exactly facing competition from primary new media sources (yet), they must get rid of the notion that they are to supply the entire world’s news and notes to their readers. Or at least realize that if their content isn’t locally relevant and of service to its geographic footprint, it is less relevant than other mediums that are. We will pay for good content. We won’t pay for our local newspaper’s online version. And yes, those two concepts are very much connected.

Oh, woe is journalism. Daily newspapers are dying. People don’t trust traditional media anymore. The American (and global) consumer has turned to blogs and social networks for news in the new media era.

November research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that only 29 percent of the public thinks the news media gets their facts straight and a paltry 18 percent think they deal fairly with both sides of a news issue. Online news has eclipses all channels other than local TV as the top source for local news for Americans. Online news has eclipsed all channels other than television for American’s source for national and international news.

It’s over. Put a nail in the coffin of newspapers and traditional media.

Or wake up and get a healthy dose of reality.

Just for gits and shiggles, I decided to run traffic comparisons of local newspapers and top news, politics or entertainment blogs in several markets across the U.S. Without exception, newspaper websites still kick blogging’s ass.

In Philadelphia, Philly.com trounces Phillyist and Philebrity:

In Albuquerque, The Journal has around 150 times the traffic of DukeCityFix, a leading entertainment and events blog.

In Portland, The Tribune is hardly worried about competition from The Portlander.

In Chicago, the distance between the Tribune and Chicagoist is like that between the Cubs and a World Series title.

And in my hometown of Louisville, The Ville Voice gets around one percent of the traffic of the Courier-Journal.

Certainly, Compete.com data is not 100 percent accurate, but I would venture to guess none of the blogs would surrender their actual analytics for fear we would know their actual traffic, which I’d be willing to bet many are reporting much higher than it actually is. The simple fact of the matter is that while local news and information blogs have niche audiences that are appealing to a number of advertisers for a number of reasons, when you look at traditional media versus new media in online news, the majority of people still prefer their news from the traditional media houses.

Just another reminder that social media is an emerging and relevant channel to which public relations professionals should pitch stories and brands should connect with audiences. But the rest of the world is outside the bubble. Forget about them at your own peril.

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Mediaweek magazine puts together a “Digital Hot List” each year of the websites or companies they see as having the potential to wow the web world. Their list never seems to be much of a surprise, especially when you consider Google, Facebook and Twitter are sort of default entries, but there’s always one or two on it that raise an eyebrow.

This year it’s the Wall Street Journal‘s website, WSJ.com, in at No. 8. Yep! The website property of a traditional media outlet is on Mediaweek‘s Digital Hot List. And no, it’s not a joke.

To further perplex the digerati, The Journal is one of the few papers that did not take down its pay-to-play subscription model a few years back. That’s right. You have to pay to see much (not all, but still) of the WSJ.com content, a policy considered blasphemous by many in the social media set.

The online audience at WSJ.com has spiked by as much as 44 percent in recent months according to ComScore, it is now the largest newspaper in the U.S. and both the print and online versions are profitable. Mediaweek calls their model the, “envy of the industry.”

“They made a decision a long time ago that most didn’t,” Mike Shields, Mediaweek’s senior editor for digital media told me yesterday. “The Journal is not free. They never wavered or changed that. That is as key to the success as the content they deliver. That precedent is enviable and hard for someone to copy, particularly if you’ve been giving away your content for 10 years.”

Called crazy in 2005, The Journal is on a hot list in 2009. And, unfortunately, their success is leading many newspapers to consider charging for their content. I say unfortunately because most of them will do so at their own peril. For The Wall Street Journal has two things going for it the others don’t.

First, The Journal is a niche publication focused on the financial world. The people who read the journal can afford to subscribe. Many of them probably have their businesses pay for the subscription in the first place. For many, The Journal is a requisite of their job. You read it or you fail.

More importantly, however, The Journal has the one thing most newspaper’s do not: an abundance of quality, original and exclusive content.

Pick up your local paper. Now go through the first two sections and count how many stories are actually local. My guess is fewer than half. For some newspapers, 25 percent is more like it.

“(The WSJ) reporting is really good and they provide content that isn’t going to be anywhere else,” Shields said. “They aren’t repurposing A.P. (Associated Press) stories.”

Shields noted there’s nothing wrong with A.P. stories, but most “local” papers would be “local” flyers without the wire services.

My hope is that newspapers don’t fall into the trap of thinking they can do what The Wall Street Journal has done. Sure, they can do it, but not without increasing editorial staff and changing their focus to hyper local. They can’t do it unless they’re willing to be more than just copy-paste engines with a few good writers covering stories relevant to their readers.

And I’m fairly certain few publishers will have the vision to see the solution does not lie in how you charge for your content, but in what kind of content you produce.

For more on the Mediaweek Digital Hot List, visit the story at Mediaweek.com. For The Wall Street Journal, visit WSJ.com.

Jason Falls

I’m proud to say the first legal action that may (I have my fingers firmly crossed) smack newspapers right across the face for allowing their website commentors to post anonymously could stem from a case developing here in my home state of Kentucky. Kymberly Clem, a student at Eastern Kentucky University, is suing the Richmond Register and an online commentor known as 12bme for defamation.

Clem was kicked out of a mall in August of last year for allegedly wearing a dress that was too revealing. She bought it at the same mall the day before. The commenter claimed on the Register’s story of the event that she was actually kicked out for exposing herself to a woman and her children who commented on the dress.

Clem’s attorney says the person fabricated something and represented it as fact. That’s defamation.

Of course, the Richmond Register is hiding behind the First Amendment right of freedom of speech, saying the paper and the commenter both have the right to speak freely in a public forum. Certainly they’re just trying to avoid paying Clem a bunch of money. Surely the people who run the Richmond Register aren’t dumb enough to believe their own argument.

The short-sighted “principles” of the newspaper industry in allowing people to comment anonymously on their websites is the primary reason most people fear public discourse on websites and blogs today. Calling the people who frequent them “people” is sometimes a stretch. The spirit of the First Amendment is to ensure that people aren’t censored and should not fear retribution for honest and fair discourse. It is not meant to protect spineless dweebs who just want to spew rumors and hate and see how many curse words they can get away with before being thrown out of the room.

A newspaper website’s comments section isn’t a public forum in the spirit of the law, either. A public forum is a town hall meeting, a political rally or an venue to discuss matters of import in the interest of public good. A newspaper website’s comments section is just a place for readers to ask for clarification, chime in with their opinion or participate in conversations around the subject. They have no greater impact that the discussions themselves.

And, of course, the fact that newspapers have allowed the dredges of the web world to rum amok on their sites means these “public forums,” while read by many of the community elite, are populated mostly by a nation of turds.

My hope is that Clem wins and newspapers everywhere do what they should have done years ago: Hold the readers and commentors accountable and responsible for their words and actions. When they do, the quality of discourse on the sites will multiply by 1,000 overnight.

If we aren’t free to see the speaker, then the speech isn’t truly free.

Agree? Not? The comments are yours.

Jason Falls

On my recent journey to London, England, I had a moment to meet and chat with Lizzie Hodgson, the founder and CEO of Indiconews, a citizen journalism site that is beginning to take hold and grow in the United Kingdom. Indiconews differs a bit from many of the other civic journalist sites in some unique ways, including the fact Hodgson is building a database of interview opportunities for her site users, connecting the dots between citizen journalists and politicians, newsmakers and the like.

We sat down for an episode of SME-TV on the morning of my arrival in England.

Since Lizzie and I chatted, Indiconews had a nice pick-up. Site citizen reporter ASidwell’s original coverage of large chain coffee store Costa Coffee coming to the town of Whitstable, England, which is populated with several locally owned shops, was picked up by several national newspapers, including the Daily Mail and Telegraph, and even a local television station. Congratulations to Lizzie and Indiconews for the exposure. It’s yet another feather in the cap of citizen journalism and proof that yes, we the masses, can break the news.

For more on Indiconews, check out their site at http://www.indiconews.com.

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Jason Falls

Last summer I spent a good deal of time researching and preparing a presentation for Blog World & New Media Expo on putting social media in the newsroom. The point was to show media outlets how some were using web 2.0 and social media technologies to expand their online offerings and engage audiences around their news-gathering products. The focus was directed at executives and media outlets as opposed to individual journalists.

Tonight I have the honor of joining one of my favorite journalists, Todd Mundt of Louisville Public Radio and morning host at WFPL, in a presentation to the Louisville Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. We’ll share a good bit of information on how individual journalists can leverage social media to gather story ideas, monitor the buzz or happenings in their beats or communities, connect with influencers to have fast access to pertinent information they are reporting and engage with audiences to increase the impact of their work and promote it to larger audiences.

Here’s an exacerbated outline of what I will bring to the table. Todd certainly has plenty to add. I’ve long admired his effective, yet simple uses of social media, including posting what stories the WFPL newsroom is working on via Twitter just before I leave the office. It makes me have WFPL top of mind when I get in my car to drive home and makes me listen more often. Clever, he is.

Some General Points For Journalists To Consider

1. Consumers are not trying to take your jobs, they’re just using new tools available to them.

Journalists certainly can be taken aback by bloggers and consumer-generated media. But the citizen journalist, blogger, content provider online is just average Joe Q. Public using the technology that is now available to them. It’s not a personal front against you or your profession. Don’t be defensive with them. In fact, go the opposite route and embrace them and all their content. Know that as much as the public likes to produce content, most them also know where to rank the random from the schooled. You’re a journalist. Your content is going to be valued at a higher level because of your training.

2. Social media sites, even Wikipedia, are not reliable sources by themselves.

The biggest concern a journalist should have in diving into social media is thinking that all this user-generated stuff is reliable. By definition, Wikipedia is an unreliable source because it uses the wisdom of crowds to produce its fact. You can find great sources and resources through social media, but don’t forget your training just because you become comfortable in the space. A journalists insistence on fact-checking and multiple-sourcing is what separates good from what everyone else is doing.

3. As constraining as the time may be, your participation is the key to success.

You can give me all the excuses in the world. You have too many stories to cover in too little time and on too tight a deadline. But if you don’t embrace the audience waiting for you in social media, you soon won’t have enough of one to keep your job. The pointers below are design to help you build and maintain an audience through social media to reverse the downward trends tradition media has been suffering from.

How Reporters Can Leverage Social Media To Gather Story Ideas

1. RSS

RSS feeds allow reporters to monitor hundreds of sources in very little time. By subscribing to the content of industry websites, trade magazine’s online versions and even blogs of industry watchers, journalists have a cyber finger on the pulse of the beat without having to leave their laptop. Sure, if something is published there first, you are “scooped” to a certain degree, but if you find something on an industry blog, follow up with verifications and quotes and are the first true media source to report it, you’ll beat most people to the story and look good in doing so. Even if you just have all the feeds pumped into your RSS reader to search for sources on a topic, you’re ahead of 90 percent of your brethren.

2. Google Alerts/Live Search/Twitter Search

Just like public relations pros trying to monitor what’s being said about their brands online, you should monitor the terms, companies or individuals you’re covering. You never know when someone will Tweet, “Just saw Mayor Finebloom get arrested for groping a teenager at BW3′s!” Okay, maybe no one will ever Tweet that, but wouldn’t you like to be on top of it if they did?

Subscribe to Google Alerts on the keywords and the RSS feeds of the search results at Live.com and at search.twitter.com to make sure when something is said online about that company or person, you know it. The great thing about all three is they are available as RSS feeds and come to your reader automatically if you’re using No. 1.

3. Participate in relevant blogs, forums and communities

Cover civic issues in your community? There might just be a forum like Louisville’s History & Issues where people talk about a variety of items not yet covered in the local news. If enough people are talking about it online and it hasn’t been covered offline, you’ll be the first. You can also build up your own reputation as a contributing member of these communities and a trusted source for information by participating. When you do that and someone has a hot tip, they’ll come to you first, knowing you’ll vet it appropriately and report on it if warranted.

And it’s not just forums or message boards. Relevant blogs, the community sections of other media outlets websites and social networks on certain issues (like http://pickensplan.ning.com/ – a social network of people supporting the energy solutions of Boone Pickens) are all powerful places to find ideas, sources and more.

4. Create news or sidebar elements using crowdsourcing

Once you have connected with these communities, be it on Twitter, Facebook or on a forum or message board, you have the opportunity to crowdsource to supplement your work. If you’re doing a story about how technology effects homeschooling and you regularly read and comment on Preschoolers and Peace, which has an engaged audience, maybe you can email Kendra Fletcher and ask if she would post a poll or survey for her readers for you. Better yet, if you have a few hundred followers on Twitter, you can just ask them the questions and collect answers to create some survey results to complement your stories. To be more scientific, you can create a survey with SurveyMonkey.com and just ask those you’ve connected with on your various networks to visit and take the survey.

How Journalists Can Use Social Media To Monitor Their Beats Or Communities

In addition to the items above (RSS, alerts and participating in relevant blogs or communities), there are some tools and strategies that can help reporters stay abreast of what is happening in their respective beats.

1. Twitter

Journalists have a hard time getting their heads wrapped around Twitter, as do many users when first confronted with the service. But if you think of Twitter for what it is — a big room full of people having conversations about a variety of topics that you can participate in or monitor if you like — you can start to see some benefit from it.

More importantly for journalists, Twitter is conversations happening here and now. As my friend Albert Maruggi pointed out at a Social Media Breakfast last year, Twitter is the police scanner of the 21st century. I would argue that it’s better because it’s not limited to emergency personnel. Twitter is anyone, anywhere in the right now. If something just happened that is newsworthy, someone is probably reporting it on Twitter. It’s foolish not to monitor it.

2. Twitter search

Though mentioned above, I wanted to repeat that searching for keywords or names of people or companies you cover on Twitter is the best way to see what’s being said. You can subscribe to the RSS feed but if there’s some sense of breaking news, you can just refresh the search page to see new results in almost real time. Twitter even tells you dynamically now many more Tweets mention the search term since your last scan right there on the page.

3. Twitter Local

A third-party application you will need to download to your computer, Twitter Local shows you all the tweets of people in a certain geographic area. The snapshot here shows the most recent Tweets within a 25 mile radius of Louisville, Ky., last Sunday morning. This is the application I would use as an assignment desk editor or producer covering a certain community. It shows you everything being said in an area, not just that said by people you follow.

How Journalists Can Connect With Influencers

Just like building relationships with your readers and audience members, connecting with newsmakers and influencers online is an important facet to leveraging social media. All of the relevant contacts — newsmakers, political candidates, public relations staff members or other journalists — are moving into roles with increased online presence. Many have Twitter profiles, Facebook accounts or even personal blogs. Make it a point to connect and communicate with those individuals in the online space. They’ll know you’re there and will use those mediums to reach you. You can then reach them there in return. Plus, if you know the Mayor’s Chief of Staff is active on Twitter and you can see when he last Tweeted, he has less chance of saying he didn’t get the message or or didn’t have time.

Additionally, there are several Web 2.0 tools and services to help reporters find sources, contacts and information when working on a story. Those include:

1. Help A Reporter Out

This e-mail-based listserv works like ProfNet but is monitored for spam and streamlined for efficiency by communications and PR innovator Peter Shankman. All you do is visit http://www.helpareporterout.com and file a query. The needs are then sent to a network of PR pros who have pledged to only respond with relevant information. Anyone who doesn’t is kicked off the list.

2. PitchEngine

PitchEngine allows reporters to search for social media press releases based on keywords or topic searches. While certainly very useful, PitchEngine is somewhat limited to date. It only offers up social media releases created by PR professionals using PitchEngines SMPR creation tools. My guess, however, is that Jason Kinzler’s creation will soon improve by offering aggregated information from other sources.

3. MicroPR

Very similar to HARO, MicroPR is a Twitter-based resource network that keeps queries and responses within the 140-character confines of a Tweet. Created by Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, the service allows reporters to message @micropr on Twitter with their need, sends the need out to its network of sources, then points relevant responses back to the reporter. For those appreciating brevity, MicroPR is certainly useful.

How Journalists Can Grow Their Audience, Reputation And Relevance Using Social Media

As with anyone in social media, the more engaged you are with a community of followers and the more value you provide them, the more your community will grow. By being a journalist as opposed to someone less “qualified” to provide an unbiased look at issues, you will automatically have an air of credibility other bloggers or community sources might not have, unless you use your journalistic training as an excuse to be arrogant or elitist. Nobody likes an asshole, so don’t abuse your credentials that way.

Otherwise, by participating in conversations, offering your perspective, opinions and even insight, while respecting accuracy and the ethics of your profession, you’ll quickly become a well-though-of resource in the conversation if for no other reason than you elevate the level of conversation. Participation is the secret sauce. But here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Understand that the readers no longer come to you.

You must engage them where they feel comfortable. By extending your participation in the subject matter to groups on Facebook, interested parties on Twitter, pockets of people on message boards, forums or blogs, you actually promote your media outlet/content to those groups while building your credibility. Soon, they will start directing others to your content because A) It’s good and B) They “know” you.

2. Identify the 3-4 active community points and concentrate on them.

Frankly, if you’re covering, say, art and architecture, you’ll find 1,000 communities on-line that might be useful. Focus on those confined to your geographic area or containing the most people of influence to your audience. Twitter should be your catch-all, but you can’t be everywhere all the time. Pick the most active or useful communities but stay active in them.

3. Learn how to bookmark and build voting circles.

When new media writers are hired these days, they almost have to come with two qualifications: the ability to write and the ability to engineer traffic/promote that writing. If you are going to look to pick up some free-lance work as a writer for online properties, you’ll get more opportunities if you can prove you can drive traffic. If you can drive traffic, you’ll supplement your benefit to your full-time organization as well.

What this means is that you’ll need to become familiar with sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Reddit and the like, submit good content to those sites regularly and build up a network of friends who will vote for the content you submit. You’ll certainly be asked to vote for their submissions as well. As long as you don’t over-do it with submitting your own content all the time, you can become a traffic driver which comes in handy when you really want to push people to a particular piece you’ve written.

4. Make responding to comments part of your job.

The primary “community” you will build will be in the comments section of your pieces. If your outlet currently doesn’t allow for comments, push for them. If you’re at a large media outlet where trolls and anonymous punks populate the comments with sarcasm, dive in head first and hold them accountable on your pieces. They’ll eventually go away if they know you’re going to be participating there. By creating an environment of sharing and conversation as a supplement to your work, you’re building an environment for community to blossom. Care for it and guard it like it’s your most prized possession and it will grow larger than you ever imagined.

That’s quite a bit of advice squeezed into one blog post. Certainly there are some ideas I missed. So to you journalists or those who have some ideas of how to help journalists, what tools, techniques or strategies would you add to the list? What did I miss? The comments, as always, are yours.

IMAGE: Journalists on duty by Yan Arief on Flickr.

The early feedback from my Blog World Expo panel, “Putting Social Media In The Newsroom: How Social Media Can Help Traditional Media Maintain Relevance,” is very positive. Of course, few people will tell you it stunk to your face, so we’ll see. The slide show:

My fellow panelists, Jeremy Pepper and Daniel Honigman, were the stars of the show of course. Both a brilliant guys and it was an honor to have them there as our expert opinion leaders.

I would love to hear more feedback on the panel, the topic and so on. Please use the comments section for that below.

The lasting thoughts I challenged everyone to think about, blog about and help start conversations about include:

• Embrace intelligence of audience – Let us trust our communities can use the tools appropriate. But what are the risks of doing so?
• Protection for citizen journalists – Where does libel fit in citizen journalism and should traditional media outlets that embrace it extend their protections to their community? (Hat tip to Keith Rhoda for the thought.)
• Separate and elevate paid staff content – How can we keep trained journalists and their content as the core of media?
• Prove the business model – How can media outlets use social media content to drive business and solidify the bottom line?
• Change the advertising model – Cost per click and cost per thousand aren’t sustainable business models. What can media outlets to do engage their audiences with or around advertisers or their products? How do we see cost per engagement or cost per performance models evolving?

I don’t consider these to be statements of fact leading to questions, but just hypothesis to invigorate discussion. I’m excited to see what people have to say about them

Thanks to all who came, Tweeted it and so on. It was fun and I was thrilled to discuss the topic with each of you.

I was able to catch up with Kathy Jacobs of AllVoices.com at Blog World Expo Saturday. She is the community guru for the site, which is a news content effort totally driven by user submitted news — a citizen journalism lab of sorts. Kathy and I both learned of the bombing in Islamabad from a breaking news item submitted on the site by one if its users, so I knew right away that even though the community is relatively small at this point, it’s efficient.

Since citizen journalism, specifically having the traditional media embrace and use it, is one of the topics I’m speaking on at Blog World Expo, and is a subject matter of keen interest to me and, I assume, some of you, I thought we would devote some time to AllVoices.com on an episode of SME-TV.

I love what AllVoices is doing and I think for crowdsourcing and citizen journalism fans out there, it will serve as a powerful and fulfilling site to bookmark and participate in. I have concerns about citizen journalism being fully embraced by the mainstream but hope we can all point traditional media and citizen journalism folks the same, collaborative direction so that the future of our newsgathering organizations has a healthy mix of wide spread contributors without sacrificing accuracy or standards.

What are your thoughts on how the two can blend? If you’ve checked out AllVoices.com, tell us what you think about it.

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This week’s entry in our Media and Social Media series brings us to what we believe to be the only traditional media property totally driven by social media. And it’s not that this particular magazine made a transition to that status. I Am Modern Magazine for Moms was started with that model in mind: to produce a magazine completely driven by user-generated content.

I Am Modern Magazine For Moms

I Am Modern was the brain child of publisher and editor Hulya Aksu who wanted to provide a connecting point for upscale mothers, many stay-at-home moms that make up a large portion of the single-most influential buying target for advertisers. With limited funding, an outside-the-box approach and the burgeoning social media movement shifting into full throttle online, Aksu had a plan: To publish a monthly magazine completely driven by user-generated content from a social networking website centered around connecting the upscale moms in the Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia area. It was user-generated. It was hyper-local and it was socially driven.

“The unique combination of those three movements gave us immediate business and social success,” Aksu said. “We have been profitable from the first issue of our print and online magazines supported by advertising revenues.”

And while Aksu declined to share specific revenue figures from the privately owned company, she did report a 100-percent advertising revenue growth each quarter since the publication began in the fall of 2007. I Am Modern Magazine for Moms now has two quarterly print editions and a popular website that provides hyper-local expert and entertainment content to area moms.

Skeptical of the success of relying totally on users to provide “expert” opinion pieces, photography and more, I asked the question of Aksu, “How are you doing on content? Is there enough? Have you had to be creative to cultivate what you need?”

Her answer:

“Jason, we have content coming out of ears. What some people do not realize is that there are highly educated, very smart women living in the suburbs who are treated very poorly by corporate America as they try to re-penetrate the job market after taking time off for their families (babies). They are experts in their fields and they are looking for viable outlets to contribute back to their respective communities. Volunteering is one way. Writing and being involved in a hyper-local social media movement is another one.”

Some examples of the articles users have written include pieces on whether or not you need flood insurance in Loudoun County to giving your child fluoride treatment after drinking tap water in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties with a comparison of the fluoride levels in each.

While the profitable end result is the print editions of the magazine, Aksu says the website is what makes it all work, and not just because it’s the primary submission tool. By using forums, blogs, article ratings, polls, social bookmarking, RSS feeds and more, the online community is vibrant and interactive. But the community doesn’t stop there. By taking the online community offline, I Am Modern bridges the gap between virtual community and an actual one.

“We have monthly meet-ups that take place in different local restaurants for up to 50 of our readers to get together and have a good time while meeting new people in their community,” Aksu said. “Nothing can replace the power of pressing flesh with real people. Social media helps us get out of our isolated lives and meet our neighbors.”

That is perhaps the strongest example of what I would consider a fundamental strategy in the application of social media tools for long-term success. Cultivating a community online only gives you benefits if the bottom doesn’t fall out of online interaction. By migrating your online community offline and seeing strong connection flow in both areas, your media outlet, company or brand is better prepared to withstand shifts in the market like the dot-com bust of 2000 or a major brand crisis.

No matter what happens with the online world or the social media “market” as it were, affluent moms in Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia will most likely stay connected through it all.