One part of the online battle for journalists is building an effective Web presence. But it doesn’t mean much if your readers know little about it.
Admittedly, one of Central Michigan Life’s struggles throughout the past year has been consistently promoting its online content. Like most other student newspapers around the country, our only effective promotional tool is our newspaper. And in Mount Pleasant, a city of less than 25,000 people, our print product is still our readers’ main source of news.
We have to use our print product to link our content with the Web, just like we would link in stories online. It’s pretty simple: if you don’t do a good job of telling readers the benefits of regularly checking your Web site, they won’t go to your site. (It kind of goes without saying that they won’t go if you don’t deliver on those benefits, either)
A couple signs I’m seeing that point to readers not engaging enough with us at the moment: Zero responses on many of our conversation starters on Facebook, and fewer constructive comments on the Web site’s stories (although the Leadership Institute story we ran generated a lot of talk).
Over break, I tossed around a couple ideas on what CM Life can do to better tell readers what they can find online that they won’t find by reading the paper. Obviously, you want to promote your videos, slideshows and other multimedia content. But we’re also active on Twitter and Facebook, too, and want to find ways to interact as much as possible with the community.
The “What’s on the Web” rail on the right was what I came up with (full paper here). It’s right on the front page, along part of the left side. In a nutshell, it pinpoints a discussion topic on Facebook, who to follow on Twitter and why, and what’s new in multimedia. Since we don’t have a live chat scheduled yet, we asked for readers to submit suggestions to our Online Editor on who they’d like to talk to.
We’ll more than likely customize the way this looks as we go along the rest of the semester, including a variation that runs along the bottom if the design calls for it. I may look to add something related to Web site comments (Comment of the Day, perhaps? We already run featured comments on our Voices page) But this, basically, was what I had in mind — a starting point for the discussion and important campus issues to go online. We’ll also continue working toward linking print stories as much as possible with extraneous online content (whether it’s multimedia, PDF documents, etc.).
I’ll probably update later this week or next week on whether we’re seeing any sort of response from this initiative. It may be a difficult thing to measure, but it’ll be interesting to see how print-only readers respond. I’m looking for more Facebook/Twitter interaction and, hopefully, more involvement in Web site comments.
If you’re working for a student newspaper, feel free to share what your staff is doing to promote Web content. Do you find your audience responding to a heightened Web presence? What else is your newspaper doing to promote Web content/discussion?
Posted by Brian Manzullo at March 15, 2010
Journalism, Social Media