BrianManzullo.com

Linking the print product with the online product: Do your readers know what you offer online?

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?

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When news organizations use – and abuse – social media

I finally had a chance to join in #journchat on Twitter last night. It is a conversation among journalists that takes place from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Mondays in which @journchat, the moderator, introduces questions (some of which come from other chatters) for journalists of all concentrations to discuss.

The fourth question was this: When is social media NOT the answer for your industry?

Like many of the #journchat questions, this one got me thinking. Despite the obstacles a news organization faces in terms of creating a social networking policy, there are very few disadvantages to social media in the journalism industry. It’s yet another way to reach out the Web, connect with readers and aggregate your content.

But there’s still a strategy involved. In my mind, one of the bigger disadvantages for news organizations using social media is when they abuse it – that is, when they post content recklessly without thinking about how to get more people to click and read.

Hence, my response:

“When news orgs spout 20 tweets to news stories at a time, thinking people will actually click on all of them.”

See the example on the right (the best I had at the time of writing this). While I greatly respect the staff at The Bay City Times from visiting its newsroom several times, its Twitter usage could use some work. It tends to roll off between 5-10 tweets at a time to its news stories throughout the day, particularly in the morning. Not a good strategy when you’re trying to connect people with your content.

You should aim for people constantly clicking and retweeting what you link to rather than simply hooking your account up with, say, Twitterfeed and plastering the site with consecutive links. As a Twitter user with a short attention span, the more consecutive links I see, the less value I see in each. They’re just Web updates.

Back to the #journchat. Fellow journchatter Sue Anne Reed brought up a point in response, when I said the “Twitter abuse” is a problem: “If ppl are annoyed, they will unfollow. It’s a great barometer on whether you’re doing something right or not.”

That is true — to an extent. I haven’t unfollowed @BayCityTimes. Therefore, I raise this question: If I’m following @BayCityTimes but not clicking any of its links, how much value is there in me being a follower?

This is why, I think, follower counts are overrated. Following on Twitter is a click of the button. That’s it. It is easy, particularly for new users, to start following people and not interact at all with them, whether it is through replying to their tweets, retweeting or clicking on their links. Unfollowing somebody takes more legwork, and most people don’t care enough to do it.

Want to truly gauge how effective your Twitter account is? Track your bit.ly links, for example, and see how many retweets you’re getting on your stories.

Furthermore… while I see a place for news organizations having Twitter accounts and centralizing content on the Twittersphere, I still don’t think it’s the most effective way to connect readers with your content (see my earlier post on giving Twitter “the human touch”). You have to put a face behind the tweet. It comes right back to personal branding and putting yourself on ground level with your community.

During a staff meeting last night at Central Michigan Life, I asked every reporter and editor to begin using Twitter, if they haven’t already. The benefits of using Twitter as a journalist is a topic beaten to death. But another benefit is to put extra faces behind retweets of @CMLIFE work. Every click counts.

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The Digital Roundtable: The beginning of live chatting on cm-life.com

Mid-September, I talked about one of my goals for the semester being the beginning of live chat discussions regarding Central Michigan University.

Well, we are well under way with it. We wrapped up our second “Digital Roundtable” discussion earlier tonight with CMU’s Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe, Director of Student Life Tony Voisin and Director of Academic Advising and Assistance Michelle Howard. We discussed a variety of subjects over one hour, including the football team, what we’d like to see in the next University President (we currently have an interim), graduation rates for students (in four years or more?), ways to promote the university’s academic programs and more.

Our first one was on Oct. 5 with our student body president Jason Nichol and vice president Brittany Mouzourakis.

So far, the Digital Roundtable is going pretty well (we use CoverItLive). CM Life hasn’t promoted these discussions as well as I would have hoped, but I think it’s a good idea to get our feet wet with this whole thing and look at ways to improve on it. Our next Digital Roundtable will have the desired promotion, I think.

But from doing just two of these one-hour chats, I’m already seeing the benefits of starting these live chats. Here’s three big ones:

• Reader input. People getting involved in our chat range from CM Life staffers, current students and alumni, and everybody is pitching in with good questions and ideas. For example, Chad Livengood, a former CM Life editor, pitched a great idea earlier tonight for the university to get more involved in recruiting:

  “I have a pretty simple idea for recruitment: Get some of your most enthusiastic alumni together (I’ll volunteer) and professors together and send them out into high schools. Since graduating in December 2005, I’ve sent a few students toward CMU’s journalism program who were contemplating going to Michigan State. I think glossy magazines and admissions recruiters can only do so much to explain individual programs. For journalism, one event that CMU faculty, alumni and current students who attend is the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association’s annual conference. I spoke at this event in the winter of 2008 when I still worked at the Jackson Citizen Patriot and was very disappointed to not see a single representative from CMU’s journalism school with a booth at the Lansing convention center.”

• A good connection between the university and students. While not as many students have gotten involved yet with these chats, these Digital Roundtable events provide a convenient way for students to connect with university officials, since not many can always make it out to an open forum. Many have expressed interest in the live chatting when they got involved, which is nice to see. My hope is we can get interim University President Kathy Wilbur in to one of these soon, since she’s starting open forums with students in residence halls.

• Story ideas. This is probably one of our bigger benefits as a newspaper. In the first chat with SGA, we were tipped off to the creation of an ad hoc committee to work with CMU Athletics on the controversial new tailgating policy. This led us to finding out the external sound system ban was lifted. In last night’s chat, we came up with a couple nice story ideas: How CMU is working with the expected decrease in enrollment, and (kind of related) the appointment of a CMU representative in Chicago to recruit prospective students.If you guide the discussion correctly, you can definitely mine out a couple really good story ideas per chat. Another great incentive to start them.

If you are the editor of a student newspaper, or an online editor anywhere, I’d recommend starting these discussions. Talk to university officials, student leaders, anybody – get them to join these chats. I mentioned three huge benefits of doing it, but there are several more that could benefit you that I might’ve forgotten about.

I’ll provide updates on the Digital Roundtable, as well as updates on other goals I set last month.

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My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown

Four years ago, aggregating at Central Michigan Life was virtually unheard of.

Staff policy was fixed on reporters and editors doing the legwork themselves – as in, make the phone calls, cross-reference and analyze. Don’t base your reporting on another newspaper’s reporting. Every story at CM Life required 2-3 sources at least before it could even be considered for publication. That was just part of the learning process.

In these days of Web 2.0, things haven’t changed too much. We still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. But, in cases of breaking news on cm-life.com, especially in big statewide or nationwide stories, aggregation can be key.

Case in point:

Last week, at midnight Thursday (or Wednesday, depending on how you want to look at it), the Michigan government shut down for two hours because it could not finalize a temporary budget nor a final budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year. It was the second shutdown in the last three years for a state that, really, has one of the weakest economies in the country.

Unfortunately, our political reporter(s) weren’t on the story. But I took matters into my own hands (I apologize for the cliche).

The link above will take you to the final product of our coverage. But it started at about 12:15 a.m., when I posted one quick graph on the government shutting down. It linked to the Detroit Free Press story (link’s broken now):

“The state government is shut down as lawmakers could not agree on a state budget by midnight Thursday, according to the Detroit Free Press. Keep checking cm-life.com for more details as they unfold.”

Immediately after posting, I tweeted it, Facebooked it and told everybody to keep checking cm-life.com for updates.

Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links. I tweeted every time there was a new update, particularly with the portion of the state budget that concerned students the most (the Michigan Promise scholarship to thousands of students).

This continued for about three hours, all the way until the end of the shutdown. I didn’t talk to one physical source- all information I got was from other reports.

The results?

• The story earned our site more than 500 hits on Oct. 1 (the morning it was posted/updated) and was retweeted eight times.
• Google News crawled our story and mixed it in with the other government shutdown stories on the Web.
• We had 12 comments, several in the early morning hours.
• Most importantly: We successfully informed our readers of the state government shutdown as it was happening and its impact on them (mainly college students with the Michigan Promise scholarship money).

Like I said, we still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. Nothing replaces those connections. But the lesson here is this: Sometimes, when you have no sources to talk to, you just need to roll up your sleeves, do your duty of informing your readers and centralize the content other news organizations are getting. Even if you are mixing those links in with sources you’ve talked to.

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Quotes to remember so far from ONA ‘09 livestreaming

Unfortunately, Mount Pleasant, Mich., is thousands of miles away from San Francisco and Online News Association 2009 at the Hilton.

But I did take some time today to check out two keynotes from today, via ONA 09’s Livestream. Here are some of the quotes that caught my ear, and they should for any journalist/media entrepreneur … some of these also were pulled from Twitter feeds, following #ONA09:

Evan Williams, Founder/CEO of Twitter (also started Blogger)

On the dips Blogger and Twitter went through at one point: “There was something I just knew in my gut in both cases, and my team knew, that this was worth doing. … As embarrassing as it is to go through those times, the alternative is worse. … That didn’t seem as painful as stopping. Giving up. That would be more painful longer term because there’d be this question and potential regret.”

“I get motivated somewhat by the world telling me I’m going to fail.” (Words I would live by.)

On managing uncertainty in what you’re doing: “It’s sort of the nature of the game that you don’t know where you’re going. It doesn’t bother me a great deal. That’s not an excuse for not having a vision where you want to go. But you don’t know what it’s going to look like. You know your vision is wrong in some ways. If I wasn’t comfortable with that, then I wouldn’t done most of the things I’ve done.”

Leo Laporte, host of syndicated tech talk show “The Tech Guy Labs”

(I didn’t catch a lot of this quite yet, but here are some quotes I found on Twitter that stood out to me)

“We’ve trained our audience to sit down and shut up. Now we have to train them to stand up and be heard.”

“Twitter is the first iteration of the Internet’s nervous system.”

“Podcasting is essentially dead. It’s just too darn hard.” (Couldn’t agree more.)

“Advertisers have tasted the crack of Google and Facebook; no longer like that shake weed that the networks are offering.”

“The bad news is that there’s no money in gathering facts. You journalists are the monks of the online world.” (He also said we do it for a passion with low pay and we sleep on rocks.) “But we need you.”

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Five goals for Central Michigan Life’s Web site the rest of the semester

As you can probably tell from the sporadic posting on this blog, my life has been, for the most part, Central Michigan Life.

We’re in the middle of Week 4 of the semester – football season is under way, our first CMU Board of Trustees meeting is Thursday and the archives from as far back as 1999, thanks to CoPress, are coming to the new Web site. Things are going well for the most part, despite a few hiccups here and there. But that’s all expected.

I did get a chance to outline five goals I have for CM Life, particularly in its Web presence, that I’d like to accomplish by the end of my first term as editor in chief, which ends in December. (Not the only goals we have, just some of the more prominent ones) Whether all of these come through remains to be seen. But it all goes back to what I’ve been pushing since the beginning — interaction. Engagement. Collaborating.

1) Building a Facebook following and taking advantage of it

In mid-August, our Facebook page had approximately 115 fans and was used primarily as a news feed for our Facebook followers. One month later, we are up to 463 and counting. It’s time to do more with that audience and get even more people to become fans.

Starting Friday or early next week, CM Life is going to promote its Facebook page on a much larger scale in the print edition and on Twitter.

And, in addition to posting some of our featured stories on Facebook, we are going to start discussions on AT LEAST Monday, Wednesday and Friday, covering the issues and topics on campus people care about. For example, what people think about the CMU presidential search? How will the football team fare this year? Would you want concealed weapons on campus?

We also allow fans to post on the wall, share their photos and post links. These are things we have to promote, as well, since most do not know about those features. After all, if you’re going to give your fans the opportunity to do things like that, you have to let them know.

2) Start bi-weekly CoverItLive discussions featuring public officials and/or student representatives

We’ve already started working with CoverItLive in covering CMU football games. Now my hope is to take it to the News side, where we can encourage students to come in, voice their issues, concerns, etc. and allow public officials, administrators, and student representatives to join in and listen. We also want to give students a chance to voice their comments, suggestions, etc. to CM Life.

But back to the CMU side of things… a bit of background: CMU, from my perspective, has been extremely lacking in open forums with administrators to discuss how to improve campus. A few years ago, our University President, Michael Rao (who is now gone to VCU), hosted forums at least twice per semester where he would field questions from students. Two years ago, that stopped, because the administration said there was too small of a turnout, and we haven’t seen much since.

A couple weeks ago, the CM Life Editorial Board met with the Student Government Association President (Jason Nichol) and Vice President (Brittany Mouzourakis) to discuss ways we can work with SGA. Doing CoverItLive chats was one thing I mentioned to them. Students can’t always make it out to meetings and forums. But they can easily log on to a computer, on to CM Life and join a discussion that way. It’s not in person, but it’s convenient, and we’re entering an era of convenience. If you make it easy, students will attend.

3) Build a “Hot Topics” area with pages centralizing the biggest campus issues.

This one may take a little longer to complete, depending on the time I have.

But in my opinion, it’s needed. Sometimes you can’t search for every story concerning a big campus issue by searching for a key term or looking for tags.

So let’s make it easy.

Our two biggest issues: The approved Medical School opening in 2-3 years, and the search for a new University President. Those will be our first two “Hot Topics” (tentative name). Another one we might do deals with the CMU operating budget. But we’re still working on starting that series.

We’re going to create pages for these issues that feature every story in chronological order, newest at the top, plus any multimedia and links we have concerning those issues. The list, which will look a bit similar to The Spokesman-Review’s “Quick Links,” will go below the second navigational bar on our Web site. The Mustang Daily, the student newspaper at Cal Poly, also does this.

This way, if you are coming to our site looking for medical school news, or presidential news, everything is one click away. And we’ll continue building other pages, perhaps one for football, that will centralize content as well.

4) Build a community photography site, allowing users to upload their pictures and review others.

Let’s consider this an extra credit project. This would be, by far, the biggest undertaking of the five I have here. But, if built right, we would have a gem of a sister site.

We are looking at building a sister Web site to CM Life with a simple premise: Users submitting their photos of around CMU and Mount Pleasant and rating others with “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” and leaving their comments. After every year, we could publish a book with a compilation of the top-voted photography and sell it. Anybody could partake in this – professional photographers in the area to people with no photo experience shooting with their iPhones.

In essence, we want to create something similar to Capture Cincinnati. Images are powerful and, giving everyone the opportunity to show off what life in their perspective is like, and what they conceive as the definition of Mount Pleasant, is paramount. Sure, we are a smaller market than Cincinnati, by far, but getting a few dozen people to partake in this would be a start.

For now, people can share photos on Facebook, but it is nowhere near as extensive and as interactive as it can be. We’re looking at building this site by the end of the spring semester, if not much sooner.

5) Get the entire staff involved online.

Here’s the one goal different from the rest, in the sense that it deals with the management part of being Editor in Chief. CM Life has no set Web Editor; I oversee the Web operation while the respective departments post stories, multimedia, photos, etc., along with doing all the tagging, linking and embedding.

Why? To give everybody Web experience. To give everyone an idea of how our Web product is different from our print product and how we can take advantage of it together.

The goal from here? Simply keep going. I stress my editors to use Twitter as much as possible, and to get involved on Facebook as well, particularly on our fan page. We’re also teaching reporters the core basics of writing for the Web, and including links with every story. We’ve also recently started embedding YouTube videos when the time calls for it. I also plan on getting everyone involved with the other four goals, as well.

Now that the new Web site is up and the resources are there, it’s time to take the next step and create the optimal news experience for today.

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The anatomy of a college breaking news story

One of the most critical parts of our job at Central Michigan Life is breaking news.

We print three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – which means we spend Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the office. So breaking news on those days is relatively easy. Everyone is in the newsroom to plan a course of action, including several reporters standing at the call.

But what about the off days?

Our fall 2009 staff faced its first test last week, when chemical exposure forced students, faculty and staff out of the Dow Science Complex early Friday. The university, after months of testing, finally made use of its Central Alert system to notify all classrooms and students subscribed to the alert service. That was our first whiff of the incident – the morning after a long production day, when much of the staff is tending to classes and other non-work related things.

Here is how we broke the story:

1) Getting a reporter and photographer to the scene.

A couple of our editors, including our managing editor, Dave, were in class when they received the alert at 10:44 a.m. They immediately made some phone calls and reached one of our senior reporters, Jake May, who agreed to head to Dow as soon as possible. They also called our photo editor, Ashley, who proceeded to make calls herself, and got at least one photographer to the scene.

But the beauty of a campus newspaper is this: While nobody is all that easily on call on non-production days, there are still reporters and photographers on campus going to class, staying in residence halls and so on. This means when city fire and police officials, along with a HAZMAT team, are sitting outside a building, we have reporters and photographers taking initiative, making phone calls, talking to people and getting right to work. We had at least one of each doing so in this particular case. A campus newspaper editor’s dream.

But while all this was going on…

2) While sending people out, posting the story online and spreading the word.

This part is critical. Central Michigan Life’s specialty will always be getting the in-depth story and providing coverage nobody else can. But when breaking news happens, readers expect you to be on top of it, even when a campus alert system beats you to the punch (which is expected, in this case). So while we have people working on the in-depth story, we had to get something online quick. We posted what we knew, making sure all the information was verified (from the alert itself). A good idea, too, although I don’t think we exercised this with the Dow story: tell your reporter to call with bits and pieces when they have the time, or have a second reporter go out for the sole purpose of doing this.

Don’t stop there, either. Take advantage of your social media crowd. Tweet it. Throw it on Facebook, if you can. Tell them to keep updated on your Web site.

We kept on top of it as much as possible until the main reporter, Jake, left the scene to compile the story. Then…

3) Breaking the story little by little with online story updates and Tweets.

We didn’t just wait for our reporter to have the full story typed before updating. Ideally, we want to train readers to check our site as much as possible when a story is breaking.

How to do that? Breaking bits a pieces of the story online with constant updating. Once the first five graphs or so are typed, edit and post. Once five more are done, edit and post again. We used Twitter to our advantage throughout, as well. A later campus alert told us to call CMU Police if we left stuff in the building. We tweeted that information right away and got it right into the story.

4. Now that the story is posted and developed, getting multimedia online.

While all this was happening, we had at least two photographers return to our office to upload photos. Ashley was in the newsroom looking through them and taking two select photos to throw into the story. This allowed us to put our story in the “Featured” slideshow area, the most prominent story area on our site.

In the meantime, our photo staff was compiling a slideshow and, when campus announced a small press conference outside the building with an update to the status of the building (at the time, it was set to close until Monday), we sent Jake, who had his story updated and posted, and gave a video camera to our managing editor to put together a video presentation. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting those on the Web, then tweeting and linking to them.

—

And that’s all she wrote. We broke the story, developed it, Tweeted/Facebooked it and put together several presentations of the story (slideshow and video) within one day.

We also had an update Monday, explaining the use of the Central Alert system which, prior to that day, was not used outside of testing.

All of this might seem like standard operating procedure for any college paper, but the trick to this was fully covering all angles of this on what is normally an off day for CM Life staff. You can’t teach passion in journalism and, sometimes, that’s what it takes to get people rolling on a big story that comes up.

We could’ve easily wrote the story, edited it, posted it and left it at that. But our staff kept thinking of ways to cover this story outside of standard reporting. The slideshow and video gave us those options. It’s constantly thinking outside the box that separates a great college newsroom from a good one.

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Want to maximize Twitter’s capabilities in a newsroom? Don’t stop with the news feed: Add the human touch

If you’re a Twitter user like me, you probably have a handful of news publications, organizations and blogs giving you updates every time they add content. Which, in many cases, is nice to have. It’s like a quicker and simpler RSS feed.

But if you’re like me, you also have certain publications, organizations and blogs that practically spam your feed. This can happen in one of at least two ways: 1) They constantly update with every little story that makes its way onto the Web, or 2) They wait until specific points during the day to shell out 15-20 tweets within a span of 2-3 minutes. There are more annoying ways this happens, I’m sure, but those, to me, are the most prominent.

Anyway, this sort of behavior, especially during a time where spammers frequently show up on Twitter, begs the question: Is this annoying splatter of information really all that effective in getting people to click your links?

A Grand Rapids Press copy editor, Todd Fettig, who happens to be my intern coordinator and a Central Michigan Life alum, conducted “experiments” throughout the day, using bit.ly’s tracking service given to users who sign up (for free). He tracked a comparison of how many people would click bit.ly links to a specific address when the Grand Rapids Press tweets it and when he tweeted it. He found comparable and sometimes bigger spikes in clicks when he tweeted a link than when the Press did.

(Before I go any further, do note that this is a very unofficial experiment. We have no way of truly knowing how many people are clicking The Press’ link, only how many are clicking Todd’s link, which bit.ly gives him)

I decided to conduct my own unofficial “Todd Fettig” experiment. I tweeted a link to an MLive story regarding taxes on beer, cigarettes and soda, a similar tweet that “michigannews” made about a half hour earlier. I used bit.ly’s Web site to create the link so I could track it later. Twenty minutes later, here was what I came up with:

Within a span of ten minutes after michigannews posted its link, 5 people clicked bit.ly links to go to the story. Within ten minutes of mine? 10.

That might not sound too drastic to you. But take into account that michigannews has more than 2,200 followers, compared to my 227 as of this posting.

So what’s my point?

If you’re a Twitter user, take a moment to reflect how you use it. You have news organizations shuffle links your way all the time. But how many times do you actually click their links? How many times do you find yourself clicking links and going to news stories because actual people are tweeting or retweeting them?

This scenario speaks volumes about today’s news and where we choose to get it in this information age but, for the sake of this post, let’s keep this in the Twitter realm. This calls forth how news outlets can maximize Twitter’s potential. Even with social media being as young as it is, we are programmed to look at news organizations’ Twitter feeds as simply news feeds rather than recommended reads. If you are one of these organizations, that is not necessarily a good thing. You want people clicking your links.

But when another one of our followers adds a human touch to those links, we tend to listen. We see value in those links, making it more enticing to give them that all-important click. That also makes it more enticing for a retweet, which gets even more people clicking.

Imagine the kind of power a news outlet can have on traffic if dozens of its employees built their own name brand within their community or audience, gathered sizable Twitter followings and spent even a small part of their day retweeting recommended links to stories on their publication’s site (without spamming). You will drive more traffic to a site that way than any automated news feed ever will.

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