Excellent tips on how newsrooms can use pinboards to share content and engage with the community. Buttry says, “when people are spending as much time with a social tool as they do with Pinterest, you should seek to have them spend some of that time with you.”
Here’s an interesting study from URL shortener Bit.ly. Some of the highlights:
Twitter
“For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.”
Facebook
Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
The American Journalism Review recently published a feature story about how journalists are leaving their jobs in newsrooms to build their own new media startups. Carl Straumsheim wrote in the article published last May 2 that “a growing number (of journalists) are taking the skills learned in the newsroom and their personal brands to launch online startups.”
The article features several journalists who gave up their newsroom jobs to start their own new media companies.
“These journalists are regional experts, international correspondents and investigative reporters looking for editorial freedom―and the Internet lowers the entry barrier for them to fill gaps in the media landscape with aggregators, consumer databases and hyperlocal sites,” the article said.
The article resonates strongly with me because my wife and I now run our own new media startup after years of just talking about. Marlen quit her job in 2011 to focus on our new media projects and months after she left, we realized that it was something we should have done a long time ago.
Great advice in this post, particularly about using open source platforms and freebies. By going open source, not only do you save on cost, you are most likely to get a superior product — at least in things that matter like content management systems (CMS). If you want to put up a website right now, the best CMS options are WordPress and Drupal, which are both open source and free. You do have to take the time to learn to use, set up and customize these things.
Initial result of the next eyetracking study from Poynter.
Great tips on security risks of mobile technology. The guide was written by MobileActive.org for activists, human rights defenders, and journalists.
Great advice from current journalists compiled by The Guardian for future journalists. Among my favorite points are:
1) Learning to report on the fly by Hannah Waldram. Perhaps the biggest mind shift for print journalists is the concept of multi-channel and multi-media reporting. You’re no longer just covering for print, you’re breaking the news on your or your news site’s blog, Twitter account and even Facebook page.
2.) The importance of community journalism. This is especially in a country like the Philippines where people are Cebuanos first, Ilonggos first, Davaoeño first and Filipino second.
3.) Experiment. Don’t be afraid to play around with tools, many of which are free, to tell news stories in new ways.
4.) Learn to code. To be a competent digital journalist, you should learn basic technical skills such as HTML coding and content management system handling.
Good read on Ben Lowy, a photojournalist who has been pushing for cellphone photography.
Last week marked a generational milestone: Encyclopedia Britannica announced it would no longer be printing encyclopedias after 244 years. The company said it would focus on its digital product but will keep selling the 32-volume set until its current stock of 4,000 sets runs out.
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. president Jorge Cauz told Reuters, “The print edition became more difficult to maintain and wasn’t the best physical element to deliver the quality of our database and the quality of our editorial.”
Matt Farina
END OF PRINT. Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer produce printed editions of its encyclopedia. (Creative commons photo by Miyagisan in Flickr)
Encyclopedia Britannica has a storied digital past.
In the mid-1970s, the company uploaded text and illustrations of the encyclopedia’s 15th edition to a computerized publishing system to simplify annual revisions. In 1981, Britannica published the first digital encyclopedia with its text-only version for LexisNexis users.
In 1989, Britannica introduced an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM and in 1994, it set up Britannica Online, the first encyclopedia on the Internet.
