In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been off the path for a few days, and will likely continue to be for a few more days. I invite you to enjoy some of the rest of the journoblogosphere in the meantime.

Mark Briggs of the Tacoma News-Tribune posted some information to the Poynter Online News listserv about the success of their efforts in blogging. His tips were good enough that I asked him if I could post them here. So:

• Launch a blog that caters to the most popular content on your site (for us, like a lot of newspapers near NFL cities, it’s the pro football team) with a reporter who “gets it” and devotes the time and energy it takes to build a critical mass. (espn.com was so impressed they hired him away from us last year)
• Launch other blogs that follow the same formula: content areas that readers are already interested in staffed by reporters who are willing to make it work (we also have some blogs that serve our transparency mission that don’t drive a lot of page views).
• Promote the blogs in print and publish blog items in the newspaper with refers to the blog.

The Seahawks blog still drives much of our monthly page-view total (about 50%) but we’re having success with many others now (restaurants, crime, prep sports, real estate, politics).

Btw, Briggs is the author of Journalism 2.0, a book that’s pretty good at introducing multimedia. I’m using it in the multimedia journalism class I’ll be teaching in the fall.

According to StatCounter, this blog rolled over the 100,000 visitor count within the last hour. The 100,000th visit was from someone at Berry College, as best I can tell.

Thanks to all who continue to stop by.

Rich Cameron (who doesn’t post nearly enough) writes about the latest round of “online-only” discussions going on among California community colleges. His take is reasoned, balanced, and accurate. I encourage you to go read it.

We’re still a long way from the point where an online-only student news source will be the dominant format for news on campus. In the meantime, I’m currently enamored of “reverse publishing” - putting things up on the web, then repackaging for print publication. It’s the opposite of the way many college news sites operate, but the industry is moving more and more to this format. Students should be trained for that type of copy flow.

Speaking as someone who doesn’t have a TV and no cable (you should have seen the local cable company salesperson when I told them I don’t have a TV!), this would be a nightmare (WARNING: It should go without saying that this is South Park)

I’ve found that over the last few days, as the students work through their assignments,  I’ve been fielding a lot of questions along the lines of “what should a word count be for my online articles”. Reflecting on this I understand it’s a reasonable question but I’ve found it a frustrating one.

My reply has been that word counts are for essays, dead trees and lazy people.

Now, let me just say that I don’t think that any of the students who ask that  question are lazy or stupid (or a dead tree!).  The thing that frustrates me is that it seems to me an old media way of quantifying the value, weight or merit of an article - 150 words = NIB. 2000 words = feature etc.

- Andy Dickinson

heh.

via Mark Hamilton

UPDATE: fixed URL.

The Knight Digital Media Center starts a new blog today: News Leadership 3.0.

Welcome to News Leadership 3.0, a place where newsroom leaders discuss the challenges and opportunities of transforming their news organizations and their staffs into adaptive, multi-platform engines of journalism and information.

This blog will focus on the leadership, newsroom culture and ways of organizing newsrooms to create engaging and relevant journalism across multiple platforms. We’ll report on the opportunities and challenges that newsroom executives and online news leaders face as they chart new strategies and foster innovation in a digital news era.

It’s in the RSS reader. I have to admit that apart from Jack Lail, Rob Curley and John Robinson, most of my blog reading material is not from upper management types. Maybe this forum will be a place for them to engage the troops and each other.

Nicholas Carr puts out a call for student journalists to participate in an online forum sponsored by Encyclopedia Britannica entitled: “Are newspapers doomed? (Do we care?)” (Britannica should be asking “are encyclopedia’s doomed?” - ed.)

Of particular note, Britannica is soliciting the participation of student journalists. If you write for a college paper and would like to be part of the discussion, shoot an email to the Britannica at this address: blogs [at] eb.com. You can find a few more details here.

The discussion just started here. Jump in if you’ve got the time.

h/t Jack Lail

Alfred Hermida highlights a relevant part of the State of the News Media report:

A site restricted to its own content takes on the character of a cul de sac street with yellow “No Outlet” sign, reducing its value to the user. “Search has become the predominant … paradigm,” an influential market research report circulating throughout the industry reads. That means every page of a website — even one containing a single story — is its own front page. And each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged” by user news sites, sent in e-mails, or appearing in searches.

and says:

This means that news becomes a journey, rather than a destination. The smart news outlets realise this and seek to take on a new role, as a central hub in someone’s journey through a network of links.

Or, as I said earlier, the Internet is a river, it’s not a well.

Interestingly, I heard this mentioned several years ago by James Brady at a convergence conference. He noted how much Washingtonpost.com traffic came through search engines, or through individual pages, and yet editors continued to fight for prime real estate on the home page. Even on a tiny blog like this one, I notice more and more traffic coming from search and RSS readers. People looking for relevant content. Something we have, or we point them toward.