Story Review

For someone who has never worked in the newspaper industry, I know a fair bit about it. This is largely because I often talk to people from that sector and our talks often focus on the problems they are facing and their hopes for the future.

There are two things on which there seems to be an overwhelming consensus. One is that newspapers are in trouble. The other is that, in order to survive, newspapers must engage with their communities. I have no problem with the first proposition. There is a lot of evidence that it is true. The second one, however, is a bit problematic.

I can’t really imagine how engaging with the community will save a newspaper. More worryingly, I don’t get the feeling that all the advocates of community engagement can.

Don’t get me wrong. If we are talking strictly about journalism, then I cannot imagine a better way for a newspaper to serve its community than by being part of it. But that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about saving newspapers, not journalism; and their problem is a business problem: they don’t make enough money.

How could engaging with your community bring you more profit? So far I have been offered two very different explanations.

The first one says that the value of engaging with the community is in the increased recognition of your brand. If you specialise in dogs, say, and engage with the dog-loving community and use your resources to help them organise dog shows and are also the company that runs the dog-mating website for the region, then you could also sell collars and offer premium dog-related services to that community. And people will buy your goods and services because they trust you.

So far so good. But once you have established yourself as the top brand for all things dog in your community, what will keep you doing the newspaper bit? Surely, from a business standpoint, it will totally make sense for you to ditch the newspaper and concentrate on events, collars and mating sites. As I said, this is not about saving journalism, it’s about saving the newspaper. Only, this does not seem to do that. Yes, the company behind the newspaper survives; the newspaper itself, however, is gone. Then why not shut it down right now, set up a Facebook group and engage with the community from there. It will be much cheaper and as effective.

The second explanations makes more sense. A niche newspaper, it goes, such as a local publication, runs the risk that as it moves online it faces new competitors and may lose its audience to them. We are talking here about really niche publications (a local paper aimed at the business community in town, say) who typically have a handful of readers and cannot afford to lose any of them. Such companies might want to engage with their community in a bid to keep those readers loyal and make sure they won’t flee to a competitor (and competitors can be anyone from Google to a LinkedIn group).

This theory I like much better. But it is not without its flaws. For one, it only seems to apply for small niche newspapers. If you are the New York Times and have tens of millions of readers on your website, then is it realistic to think those millions can be seen as a community? I think communities are smaller, more intimate affairs. Moreover, even if you can describe your audience as a community and even if you manage to turn them into regular visitors to your website, will that be enough? Online advertising does not bring in as much money per reader as print advertising, so keeping people around won’t save your newspaper. You will have to grow your audience as well; now how do you do that?

Again, these views come from an outsider to the industry and can be perfectly wrong. If you disagree, I’d love to see your comments.

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Image by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker.

Do you use a Twitter client? Have you set it up to filter your messages? I do.

But is that completely ok? If you go through the Twitter how-tos that abound, one of the things you are absolutely sure to encounter is that on this social network one follows people who are interesting to them. So if you follow 200 people and they are all interesting to you, why would you need to filter some of them out?

Maybe it depends on the filters you apply. For instance, you could filter your Twitter stream for messages containing specific keywords that are of interest to you. Whereas those 200 people all have something interesting to say, they do not always only say interesting stuff. That’s alright then.

The reason I feel queasy about filtering my tweets is that I don’t actually pay as much attention to the keywords. There are several people whose tweets I don’t want to miss and they go into my “friends” group on Tweetdeck. Then there are about 20-30 other people who I find interesting and they go into another group. I also have columns with my @ replies and direct messages. And that is about all the Twitter messages I can handle.

The question is then why do I follow 200 people. Well, I genuinely believe that most of them are very interesting people. It’s just I can’t get to grips with the volume of their collective interestingness.

Unsure whether I was being right or just silly, I put a poll up on ask500people . Here’s what people had to say:

stevematthewson – Twitter in its pure form is a simple chronology, not always a useful way of navigating something. Filtering different friends, types of friends, argument threads etc is not much different to using categories on a blog, is it. If I chose to subscribe to different RSS themes off the same website, it doesn’t mean that the information is less important to me does it?

AlisonLDP – I don’t filter other than to put my ‘local’ followers together so I can track their questions to me more easily. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy the randomness of my Twitter stream; right now I’ve got everyone from an expectant dad who’s wife is in the labour ward to a discussion on suicide, to myriad links (including yours). I may not read them all but their all worth my attention to decide whether I want to peruse them further or not. Twitter is like wading through a river for me; it’s there to be jumped in and enjoyed. If people annoy me, or I find I’m just not interested in their tweets (and I’m not saying their boring, just not relevant to me) then I unfollow.

JonathanDeamer – It can be “wrong”, as in the case of people who follow thousands in order to get followed back, but then don’t actually pay any attention to all those that follow as they’re filtering via Tweetdeck etc.

But filtering can simply be a case of being actually being *more* interested in what those you follow are saying. I know I don’t want to miss out on tweets from any of my “real life” friends, so I filter them in Tweetdeck. Similarly, I have a filter to group all music industry people together, so I can refer to this when necessary (eg. work) or follow conversation on a topic as it develops, without getting distracted by people tweeting on other topics.

jodygodoy – Just started using twitter and until this question I had been wondering how people followed several hundreds! At this point if I really want to see what friends are saying I can click on their timeline, but it sounds like filtering will make it easier as I follow more people.

Using Twitter for customer relations is something we sort of all know can be done yet is often overlooked in various “guides”. A cursory glance across the Twitter how-tos on page one of Google results for the question how to use the microblogging social network shows none of them mentions that option.

I have received great customer support via Twitter and am slightly surprised this potential use of the tool does not get as much hype as others. Here’s what I’m talking about:

And that was not the first time. This blog post explains how the guys at Rypple helped me out when I had a problem with a bug on their website.

And Sam Shepherd has shown this can work at news organisations as well.

http://tinyurl.com/dbuygd

http://cli.gs/v3R7XE

http://cli.gs/PstAHt

Watch Mark’s blog for the promised post.

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They are all worth following: @journalismnews, @markmedia, @samshepherd and @joannageary.

You can also follow me: @dilyan_damyanov.

I know the Super Bowl is old news now, but I’ve been itching to blog about this incredible piece of interactive journalism by the New York Times’ Matthew Bloch and Shan Carter.

As the caption states, this “map shows the location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related [DD:Twitter] messages”. Sounds simple and even a bit boring, but is instead almost unbelievably cool and fascinating. I have yet to meet the person whose jaw does not drop when they first realise what the real effect of this interactive graphic is.

In essence, it’s just words from geo-tagged tweets placed on a map. But because the authors have also chosen to highlight the frequency of each word by making it bigger if it is more commonly mentioned, what we get is something that really feels like a cheering crowd watching sport’s biggest event for the season (according to Americans, that is). We can even feel how the tension rises as the game draws to an end and can almost imagine the fans shouting the names of Fitzgerald and Holmes during the dramatic finish.

Of course, the Super Bowl is not only a sporting but also a great marketing event and sure enough, we’ve got tweets from people talking about ads. It is amazing how passionate people can get about advertising. The universal support for Hulu, the free online video service, is especially noticeable.

VERDICT

Originality: 5 (out of 5)

We are not sure if Bloch and Carter knew what they were going to end up with when they first hatched the idea, but it just smacks of pure creative genius.

Presentation: 5 (out of 5)

Simple, slick and compelling. The idea to express word frequency by a larger font works out incredibly well.

Journalistic value: 5 (out of 5)

This is the best example we have come across so far of the media being just a facilitator in a discussion that goes on in the community. Barring the headline, the caption and the menus, all of the content is user-generated. The newspaper plays a role in the background, by making it all possible through its superior technological expertise and resources.

Overall: 5 (out of 5)

Outstanding.

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Thanks to Eric Ulken (@eulken) who pointed me to this interactive map.

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