by on December 22, 2011 6 Comments

Introducing ExpertEngine

Journalistics has launched a new service called ExpertEngine. ExpertEngine will help journalists (eventually) quickly (and anonymously) search for, find and contact experts for the stories they are working on. Before I give you the full scoop (and the sign-up info), here’s a quick story about why we – a blog about journalism and PR – decided to create ExpertEngine.

One of the best and worst things about working with start ups, particularly if you’re entrepreneurial like myself, is you inevitably find yourself wanting to do your own thing again. As some of you know, I majored in public relations and journalism at Utica College of Syracuse University. It’s one of the few colleges that combines instruction for journalism and PR – so since college, I’ve learned about both sides of the fence. I’ve always thought of starting a business related to PR/journalism – but not a service business like I did with my agency, but rather a product business.

Somewhere in the midst of Web 2.0, but before the social media craze, I started thinking to myself, “There has to be an idea I can take to market that PR people will love?” PR is hard work… how can I make it easier? What problem that hasn’t been solved yet? Surely there is an outdated or overpriced service that could be updated for the 2000s? I mean, what independent PR professional can afford $5K a year (at the time) for a media database? I ultimately settled on creating a FREE media database. You know, Vocus/Cision meets Wikipedia? If you ever read Wikinomics, you know there are plenty of examples of peer production and mass collaboration successes out there – I was sure it would work if I built it. I did start to build it, but then… [Read more...]

Filed Under: announcements, media relations, online journalism Tagged With: , , ,
by on January 25, 2011 6 Comments

Make Your Content SMO Happy

I first learned about SEO in my editing class at University of Florida. I didn’t pay attention. Not because I wasn’t interested, but more than likely I was either suffering a slight hangover from the previous night or was too enthralled with the daily sudoku in our student newspaper. Don’t judge me: I was a college student and that’s just what we did.

Granted, I probably should have paid a little more attention to that class, considering 6 years later, SEO is part of my chosen profession. Regardless, I never really stopped learning, and now, I like the actual learning part better. (Students, please don’t take this as another reason not to pay attention in class.) Whereas in college, learning was the primary objective but not always what I wanted to do, now, all I want to do is know what’s happening.  Facebook and Twitter make that easy to do. I’m always scouring the Internet for anything new and noteworthy that’s going on in Web marketing.  Recently, that buzz word has been SMO, social media optimization. [Read more...]

Filed Under: online journalism, social media Tagged With: ,
by on October 15, 2010 26 Comments

The Top 25 U.S. Newspapers by Website Traffic

Following up on my last post about how newspapers stack up online, I wanted to explore whether or not the newspapers with the largest circulation also have the most website traffic? If you look at the total unique visitors to each newspaper’s website over the past 12 months (as estimated by Compete.com), the top five U.S. newspapers remain the same – though using this measure, USA Today does climb into the top spot.

Does offline popularity translate into online popularity? It would appear so at first glance. When you remove the limitations of physical distribution, some newspapers expand their influence online. Here are the top 25 U.S. newspapers ranked by total unique monthly visitors for the past 12 months:

  1. USA Today - 239,425,560
  2. The New York Times - 217,513,400
  3. The Wall Street Journal – 122,397,004
  4. The Los Angeles Times - 94,889,543
  5. The Washington Post – 9,1758,837
  6. New York Daily News – 82,225,690
  7. The San Francisco Chronicle – 46,696,844
  8. The New York Post – 45,903,055
  9. The Chicago Tribune – 33,230,030
  10. The Star-Ledger – 31,836,326
  11. The San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and The Oakland Tribune - 28,391,971 (combined)
  12. Chicago Sun-Times – 27,351,047
  13. Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News - 23,797,570
  14. The Houston Chronicle – 23,203,975
  15. The Dallas Morning News - 22,858,507
  16. Seattle Times – 21,878,532
  17. The Arizona Republic – 20,598,071
  18. The StarTribune – 20,537,048
  19. The Denver Post - 20,058,704
  20. The Plain Dealer – 18,755,471
  21. The Oregonian - 17,421,959
  22. The Detroit Free Press – 15,522,009
  23. The Tampa Tribune – 13,280,440
  24. Newsday - 11,443,807
  25. San Diego Union-Tribune – 10,928,313

While traffic is a good measure of a newspaper’s reach online, it’s not necessarily a direct correlation to how much authority a newspaper has. A better measure of online authority is Google PageRank – which I’ll explore further in my next post.

Image Credit: U-g-g-B-o-y-(Photograph-World-Sense)

Filed Under: online journalism Tagged With: ,
by on October 14, 2010 3 Comments

Facebook Media Page Just for Journalists

Journalists need social media, but probably not as much as social media needs journalists. Journalists — in any shape or fashion — have always been, and will continue to be, the disseminators of news. Journalists are the storytellers, the connectors between people to information. Social media has just become the best way to do that.

While everyone can have a blog, not everyone knows how to write. Even less people know how to report. And while everyone can have a Facebook or Twitter account, we also can’t expect everyone to be experts in social media, even if there are few steadfast rules to help people use Facebook and Twitter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: journalism, journalistics, online journalism, reporting, social media Tagged With: ,
by on August 24, 2010 20 Comments

Can Twitter Make You a Better Editor?

You have anywhere from three to ten seconds to capture and hold someone’s attention in a conversation. On Twitter, you have 140 characters. Realistically, you have about one second if you consider the number of Twitter users (100 million+) and the number of tweets per second (1,000–4,000, pending on the current events). The point? If you don’t have a snazzy lede (am I old school for still spelling it that way?) you’re never going to get clicked.

So, tweeters got smarter. They saw what worked and what didn’t. They found ways to cut out the unnecessary info and focus on only the good stuff. They jazzed up their call to action. Basically, they became editors — and good ones at that (some of them, at least). Self-editing and style guidelines are now more important than ever because people can easily get content somewhere else. While Strunk and White never imagined a need for a well-defined Elements of Twitter Style, it does beg one question: Can Twitter make you a better editor? [Read more...]

Filed Under: journalism, online journalism, social media, twitter, writing Tagged With: , ,
by on December 1, 2009 10 Comments

Is Twitter the New Wire Service?

Much of the news we get from local papers originates from wire services. This is the end result of multiple studies conducted over the past couple of years, a few of which are summarized in this excellent post by Nikki Usher on OJR: The Online Journalism Review. Newspapers often get the credit for being the originators of news in local markets, but upon further investigation, a majority of that content comes from wire services. Journalists at local papers serve as filters of wire content and determine which stories to run. [Read more...]

Filed Under: journalism, online journalism Tagged With: ,
by on October 27, 2009 Leave a Comment

Newspapers’ Shift to Digital Too Slow?

The Media Management Center, Northwestern Univeristy, recently published “Life Beyond Print: Newspaper Journalists’ Digital Appetite” which found almost half of today’s newspaper journalists think their newsroom’s transition to digital is moving too slowly. Most newspaper journalists have warmed to the idea that news will be primarily delivered online and via mobile devices, rather than print, for the remainder of their careers. Whatever the reason for newspapers being slow to adapt to digital delivery, it’s clear journalist resistance isn’t the source.

According to the study which included almost 3,800 people in a cross-section of newspaper newsrooms, America’s journalists want a faster shift from print to digital delivery of news. Many of the journalists interviewed reported being heavily involved in digital activities in their personal lives and would devote more effort to dgital products at work. Only 20% of journalists like things the way they have always been. [Read more...]

Filed Under: journalism business models, online journalism Tagged With: ,
by on July 30, 2009 47 Comments

A Look at How People Share Content on the Web

We all know it’s good to share, right? Silicon Alley Insider recently shared some information with us on How People Share Content on the Web. The article took a look at some recent data released by AddToAny, a company that develops widgets that enable users to share content across various social media and other Web communication channels. It should come as no surprise that Facebook (24%), email (11.1%), and Twitter (10.8%) are among the most popular methods for sharing content on the Web today. This is significant information for any Web publisher or other organization that seeks to provide content for its users to share across the Web.

I think this information continues to support the argument that organizations need to open up more of their content for users. As you shift from free to paid content business models, you reduce the potential for information to be shared across all these channels. It’s clear that we’re in a sharing economy today when it comes to information. Unlike a child that’s overly protective of his or her toys, it appears that most of us grown ups are comfortable with sharing. If you take a closer look at the data from AddToAny, you’ll also see that social bookmarking and user-generated news sites like Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are also among the top sources for sharing information online. If you’re not using a widget like AddToAny or Sociable (which we use on Journalistics), you could be missing a huge opportunity to share your content with a much larger audience. [Read more...]

Filed Under: online journalism Tagged With:
by on June 4, 2009 1 Comment

New Startup Newsy.com Delivers More Perspective With News Coverage

Newsy looks pretty cool, but that’s just one perspective. This new online news site combines multiple sources of information to try to present a more fair and balanced view of the news. More perspectives. They gather news coverage from around the world and present an objective view of each story. You know, like real journalists are supposed to do?

Newsy is a new business model for journalism, operating on the assumption that most of the content we are exposed to is repetitive or revolving around a single perspective. Just flip through the channels on your TV set and you’ll get many different perspectives. Even the weather people on our local stations have a different idea of what it’s going to be like tomorrow. And then there’s the issue of what the rest of the world thinks about a story outside the U.S. I’m thinking more about global issues here than the weather. [Read more...]

Filed Under: journalism business models, online journalism Tagged With: ,