Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter » internet

On ego searching, and why it matters

Rachel — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:21:51 +0000

Great post last week from Growing Your News Website about journalists responding to conversations that involve them, even when these conversations are taking place not on the MSM dot-com that employs them.

Great example: Erie Media-Go-Round mentions the Erie Times-News probably every other day. But ETN reporters never join the conversation. Sure, in this particular example the “conversation” might be a little, well, woolly–but ignoring commenters won’t make them go away. You know how someone will be swearing at the computerized IVR (“Say ‘billing’ if you have a question about your bill. Did you say ‘B&DSYH$#@?’ Say ‘yes’ to proceed”) and then suddenly become mollified when they hear a real person on the line? Comments on blogs work a little like that, too. Rail all you want at the Erie reporter because he’s not going to read this!…Then you totally freak them out by posting a polite (yet non-troll-feeding) response, and then maybe, in a perfect world, they’ll realize that you aren’t a pigheaded chumswilling a**hole and that maybe your words have some merit to them.

Anyway.

What Steve has to say is that basically it’s important to respond outside of your own news website–to refute incorrect information, to say “thanks” to someone who wrote something nice about you, to show you care about your community, and to build your brand. (Gloomy aside: Most newspapers are still struggling, for myriad reasons, to get reporters to respond to comments on THEIR OWN sites, so this idea may still be in “pipe dream” stages.) And what I didn’t know is that it’s incredibly easy to find out where these conversations are happening.

Every journalist should be using �ego trackers,� which are simply accounts that track articles and blog items that mention your name. I use Google Alerts and have it track my name; it delivers both news articles and blog items where I show up. There are plenty of websites that you can search on your name (Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Google News, Topix, etc.).

I just set up an alert for myself and was pleasantly surprised to find that an article I was sure was killed was actually live at Common Ground. How’s that for instant gratification? Plus, even though nobody’s written anything nasty about me yet, I’ll be prepared when it happens.

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For journos and webheads: Growing Your News Website

Rachel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:51:48 +0000

Last week I learned that the Watertown (NY) Daily Times, despite putting all its content online for free, is losing out to a competitor, NewZJunky.com. Howard Owens, awesome blogger and journalist, wrote “Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor � not even a TV station. NewsJunky.com has twice the traffic, and is growing faster, than the local daily�s news site.” [Source] And this is despite the fact that all NewZJunky has is a terrible (really) layout, and links to obits, public records, the police blotter, etc. So, if this is the future of journalism on the Internet, count me out. Ugh.

Enter Growing Your News Website, a blog launched last week by Steve Outing (media pioneer and E&P columnist). The idea is that every day, Steve or a guest blogger will post one tip–not news, but tips that can be implemented–for making money or increasing traffic on a news web site.

I’ve already added it to my blogroll. Wouldn’t it be great if this site took off?

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Hooray! ?????

Rachel — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:13:57 +0000

I am a fan of a new 20% project Google has rolled out: translation bots in Google Chat. Add a specific e-mail address to your buddy list (my bot of choice is en2ja@bot.talk.google.com) and if you send it a message, it will spit back a translation. This is a lot faster than Babelfish and what have you, and you can have a group chat open with multiple translation bots. This is hard to explain, but check the link and look at the screenshot.

This is a fantastic resource for anyone trying to learn a new language. As my interest in Japanese has recently been re-piqued, I think I’m going to be having a lot of chats with en2ja in the future.

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Tuesday’s Tools: Remember The Milk & Gmail

Rachel — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:57:01 +0000

Click to enlarge the screenshot. From Rememberthemilk.comOne more organization system: A Firefox plugin that integrates Remember the Milk, the online task-management service, and Gmail. It has some nifty features: You can automatically create tasks by adding tags to messages (for example: every mail tagged To Do can become a task with that e-mail’s subject line) or manually add them. It can listen to your Google Calendar and create tasks like “Mail present 4 days before Fred’s birthday” assuming Fred’s birthday is listed on your calendar. What it doesn’t do, is it doesn’t talk back to your calendar, though–and since I can’t function without a visual representation of what I’ve got going on, Google Calendar is still king in my world.

If someone could invent a way to combine Remember The Milk’s powers to manage non-time-sensitive tasks and Google Calendar for everything else, I’d be golden. Not even Things does this. Le sigh.

Anyway, get it here.

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30 places to find free online courses for writers

Rachel — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:44:31 +0000

Via Lifehacker, 10 places to get writing courses online including MIT, Utah State, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (more of a reference, less of a class repository, but whatever), and more.

Another free way to improve your writing: join a critique circle. I dabbled in a few through Meetup.com (just punch in your city/state and “writing” and you should get some results) and wasn’t impressed, but it’s all about finding a group with whom you work well. I took a fiction writing class in college three times because I knew the instructor was brilliant and that he’d bring amazing things out of the group. I think it’s harder to get this dynamic without an established leader/authority figure, but not impossible.

And last, courtesy of Freelance Writing Jobs, 20 more course offerings, with little overlap because this list includes courses that cost money.

I’m wary of online courses that cost upwards of $300, but I’m loath to make a snap judgment and say they are not worth it. Has anyone tried an online, paid course?

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Thoughts on The Root

Rachel — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:22:59 +0000

Well, The Root‘s been online now for two days, and though I’m not the target audience, I thought I’d go take a look at it.

My first thoughts are that I’m pretty impressed with the look of the thing. It’s supposed to be “Slate for black readers” yet looks nicer than Slate. (I’ve never been impressed with Slate’s weird pop-out Javascript navigation menu.)

I like that the “stuff” in the left column changes–sometimes it’s the top 5 stories, sometimes it’s a list of blogs, sometimes video. But oh–why do the blogs have to look so different? That’s a big negative.

The news content is pulled from other sources on the web, and opinions/blogs are written in-house. It seems to be a good mix of current events and commentary, but after such a short time I can’t be sure.

There are pictures on the Views (opinions) page, but News seems to be devoid of photos. And, come to think of it, why exile blogs to a separate section rather than allow them to mix with Views?

A plus for The Root is it looks like comments can be posted by anyone. And the blogroll to the left is great.

What do y’all think?

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What’s Needed in the Newsroom in 2008

Rachel — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:48:03 +0000

Via Romenesko:

Even at the college level, where you might expect all students to be on board with the notion of a digital-centric, publish-it-right-now, multi-media approach to news, I still run into budding journalists who cling to the hope of finding a traditional newspaper reporting job. Especially in the newspaper profession, the notion — outdated, in my view — that print still reigns supreme remains strong...

One thing that’s important in effecting cultural change in a newsroom is to get everyone involved in using new forms of digital media. Imagine if everyone in your news organization maintained a blog, an active page on Facebook, and participated in other innovative new media forms (e.g., Twitter). By actually living the digital life and embracing it (even if you’re forced to by your boss), you’ll better understand how the modern consumer interacts with media and news. [source]

Yikes. Full disclosure–I Facebook, but am growing more frustrated with it by the day. I deleted my Myspace, and I don’t Twitter. And I still like holding a paper paper. And am still clinging to the idea that “they” won’t “make” me take pictures or do video, because a visual person I ain’t.

But of course I know Steve Outing in this column is entirely correct. We’re all going to be dragged kicking, screaming, and clutching piles of newsprint into the Internet. Folk like me will have an easier time of it, but I’m still stubborn and I admit it.

Does anyone reading this Tweet? Can somebody explain the appeal, or is it just one of those fads destined to disappear?

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Why do we still “Mapquest” directions?

Rachel — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:43:48 +0000

Last month I wrote briefly about how “facebook” has become a verb. “To facebook someone” is equivalent of saying “to look up someone’s profile on Facebook.com.” This makes sense. To “google” is to perform an internet search (never mind that Google has its fingers in pretty much every business and software known to man). To “tweet” is to send out a message using Twitter (I really like this one–but it didn’t evolve naturally, like the others).

Recently I asked a hotel receptionist, about my age, for directions. She said, “Hold on, I’ll Mapquest them for you.” I got a printout from Google Maps.

Why do some words become commonplace and others don’t? I thought, since Mapquest was arguably the first working online map service (though once, many years ago, I requested directions to the mall and ended up on the other side of town in a residential neighborhood), its status as a pioneer made it an easy choice to describe the act of looking up directions on the Internet. But no, does anyone say “Let me Youtube this video” or “I Youtubed for hours last night”? And Youtube is arguably the best-known video site out there.

The word “Mapquest” is a syllable shorter than “Google Maps,” but again, there are lots of short ways to say “perform an Internet search for directions.” How about “I’ll map this in a second” or “I’ll get a map”?

So what gives?� Anyone tracking this, or have theories?

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Can blogs do journalism?

Rachel — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:52:54 +0000

Great post by Scott Carp over at Publishing 2.0 about Gawker’s search for a real live journalist.

Nick Denton, publisher/owner of Gawker Media (aka that one guy who’s supposedly raking in all that cash) , wrote this in the post advertising a managing editor opening: “We’re casting a wide net for candidates, beyond the clubby world of bloggers. Because Gawker is becoming a larger and more complex operation, and, frankly, a more traditional one.” And “It’s no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories.”

Whoa. As Karp points out, it’s a silly question to ask whether blogs can do journalism–after all, quality, not platform is what we’ve been told for years–and a blog “is just a content management system � revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free and easy for anyone � but at the end of the day still just a CMS.”

Anyway, this is a fascinating turn of events. If newspapers can’t or won’t embrace the Web, maybe Web folks will start embracing newspapers.

Or something.

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Anyone else still baffled by “w00t”?

Rachel — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:08:06 +0000

Earlier this month, visitors to M-W.com voted “w00t” the 2007 Word of the Year. I’ve been waiting to post this because I have been hoping that if I let enough time pass, this will sink in.

�Would w00t–which means, as the dictionary succinctly put it, “yay”–not be better served as the word of five years ago? Or more? A far better choice would have been the second word on this list, “facebook” (the verb). I have to wonder about who voted w00t into its place of honor–perhaps people who thought that w00t deserved recognition, even too late? Or people who didn’t realize that the word is no longer new or exciting?

Heck, even my blogging about the obsolescence of “w00t” is obsolete; almost a month after the fact is just late, late, late.

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