Innovation in College Media

Scott Karp Interview by David Cohn

Bryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:31:56 +0000

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

Audio ethics

Jim Killam — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:52:03 +0000

An interesting ethical question came up this morning when one of our reporters interviewed the university president. The reporter used a digital voice recorder, and of course asked permission to record the interview. At the end, he asked the president if he minded the Northern Star putting part of the interview online as an audio file. The president declined, and said he would have spoken differently had he known the interview might be put on the Web.

So the question is, are “print” reporters legally or ethically obligated to tell a source exactly how an audio recording might be used? My gut reaction is yes, ethically, because we’re still at a stage in journalism where if a reporter is not from a TV station or radio station, sources expect to see only a print version of the story. I’m interested in hearing other thoughts on this, though.

Light blogging notice

Bryan — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:25:41 +0000

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.

XML - an update

Brad Arendt — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:50:05 +0000

It has been a while since I wrote on XML. I’ve been pouring over material and thought I would put some new information out as well as ask for some feedback.

First, I need to make clear XML is a markup language, not programming language. It won’t “do” anything. Rather, it is a way to tag your content - words or pictures. So you can’t program XML to display a web page or interact with some database. You would use XML to tag the information for display on a web page or to identify information from a database but not actually to program anything.

How do you “create” XML? (more…)

SEO strategies

Bryan — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:15:13 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Update: Mindy McAdams comments more on the headline strategy.

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser offers up a list of tips for increasing search engine traffic to your web site. If you’re not familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this is a pretty decent place to start.

A couple of Glaser’s points stick out for college media: Links and headlines.

Links

As Glaser (and countless others, including myself) notes, hyperlinks increase your search engine “weight.” That’s a good reason to link to other stories within your site, and also out to other authoritative sources as often as possible. Glaser quotes Kevin Anderson of the Guardian UK:

“One of the things that drives Google rank is links, both internal and external,” said Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the Guardian. “Blogging is all about linking, although any good web journalism should be. When I’m being honest, as a journalist and blogger, I’ll admit that blogs have higher Google rank than sites with similar traffic based on the high level of linking…It’s one of those slightly counter-intuitive things that traditional journalists and media managers don’t seem to understand. Linking is not only good web journalism, it’s also good for SEO, hence site visibility.”

Headlines

Web headlines should focus on keywords at the beginning of the head, Glaser writes. Search engines place more emphasis on keywords that appear there. This means fewer cryptic, tabloid-esque headlines, but greater visibility for your content. In short, it’s okay to be cool in print, but give us the straight head on the web.

Too often, web headlines are just the print headline copied and pasted (”shovelheads”?) into the CMS. Allowing web producers to rewrite the heads for the web site helps your SEO and it also gives them valuable training in writing headlines on their own.