David Cohn interviews Scott Karp, the bright mind behind Publish2, a link aggregating system for journalists. Listen to the interview, and find a way to use Publish2 in your newsroom. Note: As Dave mentions, Karp is another proponent of link journalism. Read this post to understand some of what he’s talking about. Longtime readers of this blog should recognize a recurrent theme: the power of links.

h/t Jack Lail

Opening post from the Online News Association conference. Heard from Hilary Schneider, VP at Yahoo!. Notes from her speech below the fold:

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E-media tidbits follows up on the impact of Facebook with college media. Take a look. We’ve written about this before here. For all our Facebook coverage, click here.

A couple of weeks ago, Howard Owens posted a list (!) of eight historic mistakes the newspaper industry made. It’s a good list, not just because it highlights some of the missteps the news industry has made, but also how prevalent some of these mistakes are, even now. Before you continue reading, I’d suggest you head on over to Howard’s blog and read his comments and suggestions.

I’m going to point out some college media-specific questions you should be asking about these mistakes. Mainly, are you *still* guilty of making them, even today? If so, why? And, more importantly, how can you get past these things.

• Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging.
  I’ve been following weblogs since 2001, and have co-written two academic papers and written a chapter for a forthcoming book about weblogging. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it does mean that I’ve heard most every complaint journalists have made about weblogs. Despite those complaints, weblogs have proven resilient and popular. Howard is right that the failure of newspapers to embrace the weblogging format has been a significant shortcoming, fostering an “us vs. them” mentality - journalists vs. the unwashed masses. Instead of fighting the platform, find ways to involve your student media into “blog-like” activities on the web site.
• Failure to protect vertical categories, especially auto and real estate, by building robust, content-centric, user-centric vertical sites.
  For college media, this translates to vertical categories that are important to students - entertainment, college sports, and apartment and dining guides. If you don’t do it online, someone else will. I know we don’t all have the vast resources of major media conglomerates, but we do have the advantage of knowing our audiences (I hope!). Use that advantage to develop your offerings in “verticals” (gad, I hate that word!).
• The failure to invest in search.
  The issue here isn’t so much a problem with news sites that are on College Publisher, but more for sites that have their own content management systems. Search is important for your site, as it brings in readers who ordinarily wouldn’t find your content. If you think your search is adequate, try this experiment: Take a topic that was controversial on your campus two or three years ago and enter a search term in Google (i.e., “tuition increase at Vanderbilt University”) and see where your media outlet shows up in the search results.
• It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences read, take it or leave it.
  If you think your online audience is passive, you’ve missed the boat. College media needs to figure out ways to involve the audience in the online news site, to develop “sticky” features, and also respond to the audience when legitimate questions arise about coverage. See also: shovelware.
• The newspaper web operations that did discover how to get five percent or more of newspaper revenue from up sells and forced buys should have been reinvesting that money in online operations, instead of trying to juice the bottom line.
  For college media, the key takeaway from this is that you should be selling more online, even devoting ad staff to online only sales days or something. Upsells (adding web onto print buys) are fine for many, but if we don’t figure out how to turn up more pure web ad dollars, we’re missing a part of the puzzle. And when you get those ad dollars, use them to invest in multimedia equipment or training for your staff, don’t just throw it into the general operating budget.
• Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push, so simply dumping each days edition of the newspaper online seemed like a good idea.
  “Shovelware” as it’s called is still a major part of online operations on student media web sites. That’s changing, but it’s a slow process. Creating a rich experience for your online news site means more than taking the stories from the day’s paper and putting it into a CMS. You’ve heard it here before, but I’ll say it again: the web editor should be on par with the print managing editor in your organizational structure. Editors should expect and demand “extras” on major stories - extras that will be available online only (links, documents, audio, video, slideshows, etc.).
• Newspaper sites have long suffered from a lack of utility.
  I’ve seen numerous sites that are difficult to navigate, where content goes to die. If your student web site hasn’t had any usability testing done, that’s a good place to start. Get some random students, professors and staff to spend some time surfing through your site. Observe their interactions and ask them what works, what’s confusing, and what makes no sense at all. This is a simple version of usability testing, but it will reveal a lot about how you might be frustrating your audience. You wouldn’t do this with your printed edition, why do it online?

Any other mistakes you see? Drop them in the comments.

A week ago, I e-mailed the College Media Advisers listserv asking if any student media outlets are using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace to promote their web presence. At a conference in Washington, D.C. last year, one adviser mentioned that they were using Facebook, and I couldn’t remember who it was who mentioned it (my apologies again for the memory lapse).

Why use social networks? Good question. Answer: Your readers are already there, and they tend to get their news from social networks, rather than traditional media. I’ve seen it myself in classes, when students log on to their Facebook or MySpace profiles in breaks, or before class begins. Now, there’s data to back up the idea that the target demographic for college media is on social networks. (Disclaimer: I have both a Facebook profile and a MySpace profile, along with about 20 other social media profiles)

Rebecca McKinnon mentions a few reasons to join Facebook for established journalists. And Mark Glaser (as usual) has an excellent rundown of the social networking phenomenon. Also, if you’re in the sociological frame of mind, you’d do well to read danah boyd’s excellent write-up about the socioeconomic segregation between MySpace and Facebook, which would suggest that student media should have a presence on both platforms.

So I e-mailed some questions to the respondents to my earlier query to see how they’re using social media sites for their student media. Rather than try to condense comments down into short bites of information, I’m including all three responses I received to my e-mail query - from Vanderbilt, Florida Atlantic, and Wichita State U. - below the fold. If your student media is on Facebook or MySpace, drop a comment, and let us know your experience.

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My new boss at Eastern Illinois University, James Tidwell, sent this link to faculty a couple of weeks ago, and it’s something that comes up often on the CMA listserv, so I figured it was worth a few words.

Al Tompkins at Poynter does the heavy lifting and talks to a couple of legal eagles about the wisdom of user comments on news sites. Read here: Assessing Legal Risks and Guidelines for Online Sites. There’s some additional info in a sidebar about some major news org comment policies here: Dealing with comments, a few interesting approaches.

The key takeaway is that newspapers are not shielded from lawsuits through unmoderated comments (Oh, don’t we wish!) - anyone can file a lawsuit. But the law is developing in such a way that news organizations that don’t moderate comments prior to posting are in a better position to defend themselves against such frivilous lawsuits.

This fits with what I’ve always maintained - newspapers online are different than newspapers in print. The Communications Decency Act (at least the part that wasn’t overturned by the Supreme Court) shields online sites from liability for material in ways that are not the same as those afforded traditional publishers. And until Congress revisits that law - or a court significantly disagrees with it - this is a paradox newspaper online sites will have to live with.

And finally, there is this exchange:

If newsrooms do allow public comment, what would you recommend as rules of engagement for the public to follow?

Harvey: Although the following is not provided as legal advice — the reader should consult counsel of his/her choosing in this area — among the considerations to be taken into account [is] the need for the newsroom to impose robust “terms of service” on all posters. Posters should be informed that they are responsible for their own postings. The newsroom should consider advising readers that the newsroom does not control or monitor what third parties post, and that readers occasionally may find comments on the site to be offensive or possibly inaccurate. Readers should be informed that responsibility for the posting lies with the poster himself/herself and not with the newsroom or its affiliated sites.

Korpady: Adopt and include in the access agreement with bloggers a “notice and take down” policy reserving the right to refuse to post or to restrict access to defamatory or infringing speech.

Adopt and include in the access agreement with bloggers an agreement not to post defamatory, infringing or other harmful content.

And be aware that the blogging community is very jealous of its unfettered right to speak and has on a number of recent occasion “mobbed” an Internet service provider that took down clearly infringing content (e.g., Digg.com). You may be caught, without a remedy, between a defamed person and the defaming blogger or between the owner of a copyrighted work and the infringing blogger that posted it.

I’ve long been on record supporting Steve Yelvington’s take: Throw the bums out. Establish some community standards and make them readily apparent on your site. Allow people to report those who break the standards, and then ban those people from participating. I call it “passive moderation” - you allow everyone to play at first, but if someone decides to be an a-hole, then you pull their privileges.

It’s a lot easier than wholesale moderation, where your editors stand between comments and the web site at every turn. If you have a story that gets over 290 comments (look at the comments for this post about Dale Earnhardt Jr. joining Hendrick Motorsports to see an example), what are you going to do? Better to practice passive moderation than full-on moderation.

Facebook will never be the same.

It’s been a busy few weeks for the Zuck’ and his crew. First Facebook rolled out Marketplace, adding a Craigslist-like classifieds feature to the entire network. Talk about trouble for your local sales. Then, after much anticipation of such a move, Facebook publicly announced the launch of Facebook Platform.

As I’ve said elsewhere on the Internet, Facebook execs will either grow to love this day or wish it never happened.

For those of you wondering what exactly this means, it’s almost impossible to tell. The jist of the technical news is that Facebook is now allowing developers (anyone with a Facebook account, really) to develop “programs” that users can load into their Facebook profiles. This allows developers to fully integrate their tools into the site, and in turn users’ profiles.

Oh, there’s major money-making potential here for businesses. But what about news outlets? What about college newspapers fighting against Facebook for attention?

Will this “trash up” user profiles like MySpace add-ons do? Will it turn Facebook too commerical for students looking to merely “hang out.” After all, this is still the a social networking space … right?

Who will be the first college media outlet to utilize this feature? I’m eager to see what the creative minds develop …

Len Witt did an IM interview with Jay Rosen about newassignment.net’s Assignment Zero. Check it out. Short synopsis: it’s an experiment, and they are learning as they go. But there’s clearly room for this sort of thing.

There are people who want to play. They include people from many parts of the world. If you can figure out the right size thing to ask of them, and post it, then this model may work.

Hello from New York …

At least one group of my peers has banded together to fight the apathy for using the Web (and the lack of student-based social interaction at these conventions.)

Uh, Bryan … I think we have some competition! (more…)

Lisa Williams of Placeblogger dropped a comment in an earlier post that somehow got caught by Akismet. But her point is such that I want to promote it to full post status:

Hey, one thing I’ve been thinking: Placeblogs offer a really unparallelled way for journalism students to get clips. Many allow contributions without even needing to pitch anybody. Pick a story, write it, hit enter.

Oh, and for style points:
– respond to all comments on your story
– if you didn’t get any, reflect on why (maybe it’s that most people don’t feel like a traditionally written newspaper story is a prompt to conversation. Hint: Just asking a question at the end doesn’t work. Humor does work).
– Take bad cellphone camera pictures. Take decent digital camera pictures. Add them as a slideshow. Invite others to add their photos.
– Figure out how to shoot and edit short videos, embed a YouTube clip.
– Do the whole story as a podcast.
– Add it to your list of clips.
– Lather, rinse, repeat!

If you’ve never heard of a “placeblog” before, check out this explanation. I think Lisa has a good idea. Placeblogs can be an effective way to learn the ropes of community engagement - working with people who aren’t “Big J” journalists to gather stories and build an audience. Unlike a blog that you start yourself (like this one), placeblogs already have a niche that they are trying to fill. You can practice your storytelling craft and try out new media techniques as well. And that experience will prove valuable on the job hunt, or the entrepreneurial path to your own placeblog.

Thanks, Lisa!