We’ve spent many words recently debating the best way for newspapers to manage user participation, particular comments on stories and forum posts.

Most journalists value quality communication and are distressed to see rants, insults, cursing, lies and innuendo pass for online commentary, especially on their own newspaper.com.

It’s an understandable position.

There are a number of strategies to try an elevate the nature of the discourse on a newspaper.com, such as enforcing real identity, or using a Slashdot/Digg-style reputation system, or pre-screening comments (my least favorite), to outsourcing the entire headache to Topix.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why quality blogs usually have quality discussions?

Consider, for a minute, how quickly a discussion on your newspaper.com would spin out of control if you allowed comments on a story about butts on TV.  Now look at the interesting discussion on this Lost Remote post (maybe not the best example I could find of a great conversation, but it is a logical contrast to what might happen on a typical newspaper.com).

Some blogs get more and better reader discussion than others, but you rarely hear any more about bloggers debating whether to disable comments and wondering if this whole commenting thing is really worth it (as you do from some editors).

Sure, blogs use some form of pre-screen (first-time commenters on howardowens.com, for example, go into a moderation queue), but any filters on blog comments these days have more to do with trying to block spam than worries over the content of reader comments.

Why is that?

I would say, primarily because blogs get the close attention of their owners. There is little opportunity for trolls to get a foothold on a well-run blog.  Most blog owners apply high standards for the conduct they will allow.  They monitor closely. They participate in the conversation.  In other words, they are actively engaged and involved.  They are owners.

How involved are reporters and editors involved in participation on their web sites?

Not much.

And until we fix that weak link in our participation strategy, we will continue to struggle with developing the kind of online community our newspaper communities deserve.

Newsrooms need to develop an ownership attitude about participation on their web sites.  Only then will the technology solutions really work.  There is simply no substitute for real, sustained, dedicated participation in the conversation by editors and reporters.  Without it, newspaper sites will continue to struggle to grow and retain audience.

There was a time when I considered CNet the go-to place for technology news.

It’s been three years at least since CNet was a habit.

And I’m not alone in concluding that CNet is now largely irrelevant.

“There are other sites now where you can get serious technology news,” says CNET user Alan Wilensky, a San Mateo, Calif., analyst who advises companies on their Internet strategies. He used to read CNET.com daily but is now more likely to go to rival tech sites such as TechCrunch and Engadget. “I’ve gone totally cold on CNET,” says Mr. Wilensky, who has no link with CNET or the dissident investors.

What’s killing CNet: Blogs.

You could even make the case that blogs killed Business 2.0 (link to historical artifact — note no updates since October, decades ago in Internet years).

The tech sector was the first media sector where we saw blogging really take hold — in pre 9/11 days, which spurred political blogging. Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in blog growth, both in shear numbers and in the large volume of quality blogs covering a wide range of topics.

Local blogging has been growing. Some of it is very good.

Journalists shouldn’t be too quick to conclude that blogs are not a threat to their local newspaper monopolies.

Yet, we continue to hear from MSM journalists who dismiss blogging, such as this from a reader calling himself Tito:

A blog is no more than an online journal or column, if you want to use an industry term. A blog doesn’t make me a better journalist nor does a blog make you a journalist and blogging is certainly not where the industry is headed.

Such a narrow view of blogs is to completely fail to understand blogs.

And to so easily dismiss blogs as a competitive threat is to fall on the wrong sword in the name of “quality journalism” (whatever you may mean by that).

And as the WSJ link above notes, more and more bloggers are figuring out how to generate handsome revenue to off set their low overhead.

If you don’t know Dan Kennedy, you should.  He’s a former media critic and current journalism professor in the Boston area.

He runs a great blog called Media Nation.  Mostly, he blogs about New England politics and civic affairs, but he also covers local media.

Today, he did a post about a GateHouse Media reporter, Cathryn Keefe O’Hare.

He tagged along with this modern journalist as she covered an MLK-day event. She took notes, shot video and stills with her Casio, and posted story and video to her site.

Dan writes about the process.

Is it a great video? No. Does it help get names and faces online? Yes.  Does it help provide some context to the story? Of course. In other words, it does its job.

Dan’s concludes:

“The thing that remains true, whether it’s in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story,” says O’Hare. “And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can’t tell their story.”

The modern journalist just gets the job done.

And, most importantly, learns along the way.

Howard Weaver linked to this post from Zac Echola before I saw it, but it’s an important map of how the wired get and filter news.

The following quote should be required reading in every newsroom in the U.S. tomorrow morning.

Shortly after polls closed last night, my wife got a text message from Obama’s campaign. He was the projected winner of the South Carolina primary.

A few minutes later I logged into Gmail, where Obama had already sent me an email about the victory and where I could watch his speech.
About a half an hour later a friend in Washington sent me a text with the percentage breakdowns.

This morning I logged on to Facebook to see a notification from Obama, a simple copy/paste job from the email sent earlier.

Sometime today, I’ll watch his speech and Clinton’s concession speech on YouTube, since I was busy playing Super Mario Galaxy while he actually gave the speech.

Except for a CNN breaking update I got via Twitter last night (after Obama’s text message), I knew who won the primary without ever seeing a newspaper or TV site.

Only today, when I checked CNN’s excellent primary elections section did I go to an MSM site. News that I care about comes to me, despite the source.

I, like many other people, only go looking for news (on my days off) if something has first come to me to pique my interest. Then I find a site with valuable, contextual information laid out in a way that I can explore the data (in this case, exit polls). I can passively receive information I’d like to know.

If you’re not actively seeking out your audience, you’re doing something wrong.

Media organizations should be doing the same thing Obama does. It should be everywhere I am and it should provide valuable, easy-to-use added context and content if and when I decide to hit their sites.

There’s obviously one point to be made here — that news organizations need to make it a practice to push out their content to every available channel.

But the other lesson is: Your audience is also sharing what they know, either informally, or via special-interest sources.  The big question is, when your audience wants more and trusted information, are they going to find it on your web site as soon as they want it?

Web-first publishing needs to become a newsroom habit.  It’s the thing you do automatically, so that when any size story breaks, and your audience wants more and trusted information — and a place to discuss it — your site is ready for them.

For many months, I’ve wanted to play around with setting up a vertical search engine using Google Custom Search.

Today, I finally got around to it.

Here it is: MediaGeeks.org, a vertical search engine for media professionals.

The initial group of 140 URLs I’ve fed into the search engine are mostly from my blog roll along with obvious media sites (such as E&P and OJR).

If you know of a media site I should have included but didn’t, send me an e-mail to howard owens (one word) -at- gmail dot com.

Also, if you view the source of the home page, you can see how to add the MediaGeeks.org search widget to your blog or site.

The search engine is only useful to the media community uses it, so link to it. Tel your friends.

In the era of Packaged Goods Media, the journalist played a command-and-control role. He or she determined the news of the day (news judgment), organized it around his or her own sense of importance (news value) and published it to a compliant audience.

The role was linear and uncomplicated.

In the era of distributed media, the relationship between journalist and audience is asymmetrical.

As “audience” transmutes to “community,” and the level of communication and information increases exponentially, as news becomes less ecclesiastical and more egalitarian, the role of the professional journalist is changing.

Fortunately, there is still a role.

Here are six roles the modern journalist should serve:

• The Ethical Role. Yes, journalists get bashed about because of real and imagined lapses in ethics, but the challenge now is to raise the bar on professional ethics, and then provide ethical guidence to today’s participatory audience. We should deal more swiftly and transparently with ethical errors within the profession, but we should also provide teaching tools on information ethics, what ethics means and why it’s important, and how to spot compromised ethics.
• The Guide/Filter Role. Editors and reporters should assume some responsibility for providing their audiences with pointers to the best stuff on the web, be it the best-reported of the important news or the most interesting and entertaining articles and videos. In a command-and-control environment, we cared only about directing people to what we ourselves did. Now our role is to help audiences sift through the glut of information assaulting them daily by providing pointers. This is the value-add role, and if done right it can help overcome the digital-age tendency for people to focus too narrowly on their own interests. If done well, it will bring more people to your site or publication.
• The Understanding and Context Role. Why should the best bloggers get to have all the fun? The best journalists should become the best bloggers. I know many really, really smart reporters and editors. These people should have blogs, and they should serve readers better by taking the news of the day and putting it in context, combing articles for the tidbits that need to be weaved together to make a bigger whole, and explaining what it all means.
• The Conversation Leader Role. Already, our news reports start a lot of conversations with our without our consent. The conversation-starter role should become explicit in our job descriptions. Once started, we should guide it. We should thank and encourage the good contributors, and depreciate the bad contributors We should highlight the smartest things people say. We should provide our own insights and supplemental knowledge to any conversation we find. We should be full participants, not just the lurking overlords of top-down media.
• The Aggregator Role. We should aggressively gather data related to the communities we serve. We should make sure that anything that is knowable about a community we serve is findable through resources we provide. While in the Guide/Filter Role we might provide pointers, in the Aggregator Role, we make data available and let people find it for themselves. This is a role that serves the long tail of information, because we never know what other individuals might find useful, important or necessary.
• The Straight News Role. We cannot, even if we wanted to, and should not, cede our professional responsibilities to uncover news. We must know about everything important going on in the communities that we serve, and we should strive to be the first to tell our communities about the important news of the moment (note: no longer of the day, but of the moment). We must still be out in our communities gathering facts and organizing them in a way that is relevant and useful and then reporting the most important facts to our communities.

Previously: Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands

It’s pretty cool to see so many people jumping on board with Wired Journalists.

There’s a positive energy behind it that gets beyond any worries about a dying industry, the struggle to keep up or hand wringing about who is or isn’t doing what?  The people signing up seem real eager to learn or to help others.

I like what Zac Echola said about the site in his post:

We’re done talking doom and gloom. We’re done making lists of what we should do to better serve our audiences. We’re going to start checking off items. We will better serve our audiences.
We want you to join us.

Like I said, a positive energy.

WiredJournalists.com is starting to feel like a petition drive — people joining together to say, “I believe in the future of journalism, and I believe that future is wired.”

Come join the fun.

For journalists just starting down the path of transforming their careers and doing the hard work of saving journalism … there is now WiredJournalists.com, the social networking site where journalists help journalists get all this technology stuff and understand it’s import and impact on society and media.

Nice list of digital journalism all stars have already joined, ready to help, along with some people just getting started.

Here’s the mission statement:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

At WiredJournalists.com we are all teachers and we are all students. We help each other and learn together. Those who know more should help those who know less. Those with questions should never be afraid to ask them.

We don’t set standards. We encourage you to set your own, but we don’t judge each other’s work based on a-priori, Big-J Journalism approaches.

We believe modern journalism is about self-reliance and a “just do it” attitude. We want to see you learn how to get things done quickly without prejudice over quality or worries about what other journalists might think.

The skills you learn at WiredJournalists.com should help you either serve your community better — whether your publishers and editors recognize the value or not — ­ or enable you to work independently as a self-contained, fully equipped modern journalist.

Pass the link around to your non-wired colleagues.  All of them.

Who needs day-time soap operas when you have journalism in California to follow.

Between Crazy Wendy and tribulations at the Times, there is plenty of entertainment in the Sunshine State.

This week’s big news is the “force out” of LAT executive editor Jim O’Shea.

O’Shea reportedly told Tribune Co. employees,

One thing I want put on the record, though, is that I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country. That system is at the core of my disagreements with David. I think the current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists….

WTF?

I mean, what the hell does that mean?

Look up “voodoo economics.” Does that really describe the supposed strangling of the Times through staff reductions?

And if you believe journalists are creative and resourceful, don’t you trust that if cuts are made, they will figure out a way to make it work?

I’m not passing judgment on anything related to Mr. O’Shea’s situation, just saying — WTF does he mean? His statement on its face is utter non-sense.

I don’t think these quotes should be skimmed over or passed on without a little examination. They resonate with a nice journalistic militarism, but they sound more like self-justifying rhetoric than anything helpful.

UPDATE: Howard Weaver addresses O’Shea’s one-percent solution. My additional comment would be: It seems like O’Shea forgot he was running a local newspaper.

UPDATE II:  What he said — Jack Lail.  Newsrooms today need leadership. Jim O’Shea didn’t provide it.

TechCrunch has posted an interesting chart showing the fast growing web sites.

Take out the porn, and what you have are blogs, social networks, video and UGC sites.  Some of the fastest growing encompass  one or more of those content strategies.

There’s not a traditional media site in the bunch. Even the government (weather.gov) is kicking MSM’s butt.

Your audience is drifting away, MSM.

Is this where I get to say, “I told you so”?

Whenever I write about the need for journalists to start blogging in order to really get online journalism, some journosaur pops up with some snark about blogging and how journalism hasn’t changed because of the Web.

That so misses the point.

Colin Mulvany now gets it. He has discovered how blogging is really different from just slapping repurposed print content on the web and calling it journalism.

I will be honest with you, until I started this blog, I barely understood the concept myself. I was shocked by how many people Mastering Multimedia has reached in such a short amount of time. But what really opened my eyes was how people are finding this blog. RSS feeds, tags, Google Reader, blog rolls, and links from other social networks. It’s about sharing. It’s about a conversation. It’s about Web 2.0.

I now understand. I have been a producer of web content for years on a creaky CMS that only partially takes advantage of the Web 2.0 tools available on any WordPress blog. I just didn’t see the big picture of why this is important for all of us in the newspaper industry to grasp. If I didn’t get it, then how will my non-blogging co-workers, who are already apprehensive about change, ever understand?

If you haven’t already, my advice is to get an education in Web 2.0. Start a blog. Feed it. Share it. Our very survival as an industry will be predicated on how well we interface with this expanding social networking universe.

Sorry for the blogging triumphalism, but I’ve been saying this for like two years now.

If you want to understand where journalism is going, start blogging. There is simply no other way. And if you don’t believe me, start blogging. I won’t believe your alternative view until you do, because until you do, you have no credibility to snark at blogs. Sorry, you just don’t get it otherwise.

Now, if we can just work on Colin’s adherence to Big-J journalism “storytelling” instead of just connecting with video, making video that fits the conversation, then we’ll have a hell of a break through.

(via Mindy McAdams).

UPDATE:  Must-read post from Scott Karp, who articulates very well why journalists need to learn self-publishing tools.

Many people referred to my MBO post as a “challenge.” That wasn’t a challenge. It was just a task list with a reward. Here’s a challenge:

Make your focus your audience. Try to figure out what readers want, not just what you think they want.

For the individual reporter: Make a three year commitment not to submit any story you report or write to any journalism contest. Insist that no editor submit any story you write to any contest. At the same time, collect every reader praise you get and track them. Make it your goal to get at least 4 reader praises per month. The praise can come through a phone call, in person, e-mail or story comment. In months that you make goal, give yourself a treat — it might be a night out at the movies, a nice dinner, a concert or whatever makes you happy but you don’t already do regularly for yourself (or your significant other). When you don’t make goal, deny yourself that treat. If you make goal three consecutive months, increase the goal by a reasonable amount.

For editors: Ban your staff from submitting articles to award contests. Start collecting reader praise. Every week, post the number of reader praises on a prominent bulletin board in the newsroom. Encourage editors and reporters to forward praise to you so you can count it (if the praise didn’t come in written form, require specifics on the nature and source of the praise). Track that number every week and graph it. When praise comes in written form, post the best of the praise. Do not give gold stars or bonus checks for praise. Don’t make it an individual contest. But do thank every staff member who forwards praise to you. Though, you should encourage reporters to do the individual measurement on their own.

BTW: Praise can be for stories, blog posts or video — any kind of journalism, no matter where it first appears or what format.

It can’t be from sources or subjects.

Don’t count complaints. Complainers about stories often have agendas, or are just zealots with an anti-media bias.

Or develop your own reader satisfaction index. The goal is to focus on the reader, the audience.

I can already hear the objections — you’re dumbing down journalism by aiming for the lowest common denominator, you’re ambulance chasing and taking journalism from the context of serving the public good.

Bunk.

It’s a false dichotomy to say there are only two kinds of journalism — the “holy temple of serving the civic good” journalism and the ambulance-chasing journalism. There are all kinds of journalism. Your job is to figure out what kind audiences really want.

Related Posts:

• Review: Discovering the News, by Michael Schudson
• Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands

When ever I write about the need for journalists to learn new tools — such as blogging or DIY video — there’s a few hearty souls who pop up and say, “It’s not about the technology. It’s about the journalism.”

Those people are absolutely right. It’s not about the technology. Where they might be wrong is, it is not necessarily about the journalism.

What they should really say is, “It’s not about the technology. It’s about the audience.”

The audience decides what journalism they want. They always have. For background on this, see my review of Discovering the News.

Successful publishers of the past figured out what audiences wanted and gave it to them.

Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer became wealthy and built successful publishing empires by giving audiences the kind of journalism they wanted.

Even as journalists at the start of the 2oth Century began to take a greater role in defining their profession, they still had to write and report what people would buy.

What journalists mean by “journalism” today isn’t what journalists meant when they spoke of “journalism” in 1830, 1880 or 1910. It was only during the radical changes in society following World War I that the word objectivity entered the lexicon and modern journalism began to take shape.

It may merely be a coincidence, but interestingly, as journalism became more of a profession and less of trade in the 1930s, newspaper household penetration began to decline.

Real circulation losses didn’t start until the 1970s, at the apex of the rise of investigative journalism and the birth of the Woodstein era.

Is it possible that professional journalism, for all its pretense to serving society, has really been out of touch with its readership?

Is it possible that for the past four decades, journalists have produced stories to impress other journalists (aka, win awards), not please readers?

The funny thing is, Mr. Reporter, when is the last time the guy in the other cubicle picked up a paper and read one of your stories, or you one of his?

It doesn’t often happen, does it?

Now, for the first time, our audience can fight back. They can post comments, publish blogs, produce videos, and report the news themselves. Society is changing, but many journalist hide behind the notion that “technology does not change journalism.”

If society changes journalism, however, what happens to the journalist, or the newspaper, that doesn’t change to meet the new needs and demands?

If a brand of journalism doesn’t fit with the society it purports to serve, is it really serving that society?

Shouldn’t we be listening to our audience so we can figure out what they want from us?

Journalism — what constitutes a story, the guiding principals and mores of editors and reporters — hasn’t changed much in my lifetime. It’s easy to think that the attitudes, aptitudes and priorities of journalists have been much the same all the way back to Gutenberg.

Of course, people who have studied journalism history know that’s not true.

We don’t spend a lot of time talking about our profession’s history, even though history might teach us a good deal about today.

A great place to start the discussion is a book I just read called Discovering the News by Michael Schudson.

Schudson’s book is thirty years old, but it covers the major changes in journalism through the Watergate era.

The primary theme of the book is that journalism has evolved in response to changes in society.

Schudson’s story begins in the 1820s, when the dominate newspapers where either organs of political partisans or served the interests of the business class. They sold for six cents per edition, but required annual subscriptions. This meant only the wealthiest Americans could afford a newspaper. Few papers sold more than 2,000 copies per day.

In the 1830s, the penny press arrived. Some might think it was technology (steam-driven cylinder presses) that drove the advent of the penny press, but it was really the rising tide of a middle class in America, and a greater sense of democratic rule over gentry rule (voting was now open to more than just land owners). The penny press met the demand for news (something the six-penny papers didn’t have) by reporting actual events, such as murder trials, rather than just political editorials.

The publishers, such as James Gorden Bennett and Horace Greeley, cranked out a lot of news, and a lot of advertising, to a middle class, trained by the six-penny papers, to see newspaper subscriptions as a status symbol. They sold a lot more newspapers.

The papers were not necessarily non-partisan, and while the reporting was informational, it wasn’t necessarily without an agenda, and they were certainly sensational.

By the 1880s, the New York papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst took sensationalism to new levels. While the journalist of the day would believe their reporting was truthful, they were not beyond withholding information to shape a story. Consider the career of Richard Harding Davis and his role in reporting the Spanish boarding the Olivette. Davis didn’t quit Hearst not because Davis didn’t support the publisher’s position, but because the particular fictionalization wasn’t his fictionalization. Davis merely withheld facts. Hearst invented new ones.

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the success of Pulitzer and Hearst to Yellow Journalism. At a time when New York first became a commuter city, and a city of immigrants in need of illustrated papers and simple language, Pulitzer and Hearst met the need.

It wasn’t until Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times in 1896 that a more non-partisan, less sensational style of journalism began to take hold. Ochs’ style of journalism came along at a time when observational science was beginning to shape cultural attitudes and realism was the leading trend in art and literature. Again, Ochs was meeting the needs of a changing society, not driving innovation in news coverage.

Prior to World War I, the word “objectivity” was not part of a journalist’s lexicon. Reporting was expected to be factual, but objective was not a common news value.

With the unraveling of the world after the Great War, up through the Great Depression, people began to question democratic institution and market forces, and the very idea that facts could be considered neutral came into question. Objectivity became a counter weight to the questionable judgment of individuals, not just in journalism, but in law, social sciences and art, as well.

Walter Lippman and others began to call for and define a greater professionalism in journalism. Schools were founded and awards created. It was in this environment that interpretive reporting — putting the news in context — first gained currency.

During World War II, the U.S. government entered, for the first time, into organized attempts to control the news flow. Press agents were hired and press conferences became widespread. Reporters lost access to government officials. The relationship between press and White House changed radically in the post War years.

The rise of McCarthysm, the Bay of Pigs and the start of the war in Vietnam were all events that helped create within society a greater sense that the U.S. government, now no longer easily accessible, was not always worthy of trust. For the first time, the press began to take on a watch dog role and investigative reporting was born.

This trend reached its apex with Watergate.

The way I read the book, prior to the 20th Century, publishers (not reporters and editors) reacted to changes in society where they saw business opportunities. As the 20th Century has progressed, and journalism has become more of a profession rather than a trade, journalists have had a great say in what constitutes professionalism, but there is still a good deal of reaction to society, rather than journalists simply changing the terms of their jobs.

And now, society is apparently going through its largest upheaval, especially in terms of how it interacts with media, since at least the 1960s, if not the earliest parts of the 2oth Century.

If that’s the case, should today’s journalist react with “we should keep doing what we’ve always been doing” attitude, or figure out how journalism needs to change to meet new demands and new needs?

I have yet to hear of a newspaper improving its revenue or audience growth by offering free classified ads.

The San Diego Union-Tribune tried it int 2005.

Now the U-T is further trimming staff.

“Not since the merger of the Union and Tribune over 15 years ago have we faced such wrenching changes,” he (CEO Gene Bell) wrote. “At the same time, never in our history have we faced revenue losses as dramatic as those of the last 12 months.”

Observation: The U-T offered free classifieds  and that did not stem the tide of revenue loses.

I’m not trying to draw a direct connection, just saying … it didn’t help.

The only time I’ve ever heard of an MSM newspaper offering free classifieds and using it to win market share was in Arkansas when Walter Hussman took the Democrat from second-tier player into only game in town.

There might be a very scary lesson about the inability of a market leader’s inability to use disruptive strategy to beat other disruptive players.

What worked for Hussman to beat a bigger paper, may not work for a market leader like the leading metro in town to beat Craigslist and other free-classified sites.

If that’s true, then sustaining innovations (which most newspapers have been pursuing in the recruitment ad space for a decade) may be the only way to go.

Just thinking out loud.

I’ve had a couple of reporters contact me to say they had already done things on the list, but were inspired to do more, including Stephanie.

One reporter has legitimately (no prior wiredness and included supervisor on e-mail to me) taken up the objectives (no blog yet).

And this Roving Reporter blog just appeared from an unnamed journalist at at daily in Mass.  Said reporter is also new to Twitter, judging from a note at the bottom of the blog.

Mark Glaser has a good post up summarizing the various positions and approaches media companies are taking to user participation.

“I think quality is more important than quantity,” Landman said. “You have to create a space where the conversation is the kind of conversation that appeals to the people in your world. There are places where the conversation gets really ugly and people don’t go to the New York Times to get yelled at.”

Mark was kind enough to include a couple of words from me.

We’ve discussed before that journalists need to get an RSS reader and read it.

Over on Back Channel, I offer a list of ten RSS feeds that should be in your feed reader.  I didn’t post it here, because the list isn’t intended to be just for journalists, but for anybody who values being a well-rounded person, which we would hope would apply to all journalists.

That post I did about an MBO program for journalists led to an invitation from the American Press Institute to lead a discussion about becoming a wired journalist.

It’s part of a session on Innovations in Storytelling in Reston, VA, Jan. 21-24.  I’ll be there on the 23rd.

Hey, Mr. Reporter, you like your job, right?

You do realize, don’t you, that its advertising that pays your salary, right?

And newspaper advertising is getting hammered.

Online news sites, however, well, there is some revenue growth and opportunity there, isn’t there? It’s just not enough, necessarily, to save your job … yet.

What if you could help online revenue grow?

No, I don’t mean you should go out and sell advertising. What I mean is you should help your web site get more traffic.

If your newspaper.com revenue is based on CPM or CPC models, traffic equals revenue.

There are at least five simple things (and none of them require a huge time commitment once started) you can do to help your site grow traffic. All of them are ethical, both from an SEO perspective and an SPJ perspective.

1. Start a blog. Yeah, I know, I’m always saying journalists should start a blog (interestingly, 27 percent of them have), but this time the advice isn’t about doing something to learn web culture, it’s to help your site’s SEO. To be useful, your blog can’t just be a link farm to your site. You need to do real blogging, the kind of blogging other bloggers will link to, so you build good SEO credibility. When you do, you can use your blog to deep link to your own stories and to your favorite stories of your colleagues. Google loves blogs. Blogging is great SEO.
2. Join social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Now, you should NOT just throw up a link to every story you do — only your best stuff. You should build a network and use that network to drive traffic to your best work. Nick Belardes at KERO in Bakersfield uses MySpace a lot to promote his work.
3. Use social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us and reddit. Bookmark interesting things you find on the web for your own benefit, but also bookmark your best stories. With proper tagging, others will find your links.
4. Get into Digg and/or Mixx, or similar sites. To be effective, you have to Digg more than your own work. You need to find good stuff on the web, Digg it, and build a reputation for finding good stuff. You should also Digg your best stuff. Digg, especially, has powerful SEO juice, so even one Digg can help your story get more traffic.
5. Make vlogs about your best stories and upload them to YouTube and other social video sites. You don’t need to make fancy productions. You just need a web cam and something to say — if you have a Macbook, for example, you can shoot your video with Quick Capture with no software or extra equipment and upload it to YouTube quickly and easily. A good title and keywords, and you’re giving your story some good SEO.

These SEO ideas are just a few of the things every reporter could do to help his or her site grow traffic, and thereby help the site grow revenue. Imagine if half the people in your newsroom cared deeply enough about their jobs to get this involved, what it would mean for traffic and revenue?

This post inspired by the SMARTS marketing video.