Online Journalism Blog

Mark Stencel’s journalism career began around 1995 where he worked at the Washington Post for 12 years (9 focusing in online things), The News & Observer in Raleigh, NC. He currently works for NPR (National Public Radio), has been there for just under 2 years and is the digital managing editor.

NPR is a non-profit organization, so money comes mainly from individual donations. It is very news-centralized and one of the largest, most-consumed news organizations in North America with around 20-30 million listeners. They are being challenged, though, by people who are in their offices not wanting to listen to NPR.org or the radio.

NPR has used the iPhone and Android markets to expand to listeners through those capabilities. NPR staff also take pictures for their website which show you pictures. The radio’s job is to paint that picture for the listener.

It is very difficult to work with three mediums (radio, text, video) so NPR typically just does text and radio.

Historically, NPR has produced great audio. Now, they have also added great text to their capabilities.

Don’t cover events, cover implications.

At the Post, he tried to bring talk radio into text form through interactivity with the audience.

On NPR’s Facebook page, they take stories that never got huge amounts of views on their site and add them onto their Facebook page so it can receive more views.

Twitter is also a very dynamic form of social media for NPR. Andy Carvin and others tweet some stories for their followers and turned the reporting process inside-out to show everyone how it’s done.

These social mediums are great ways to tell people what is going on air soon. It also helps show how interactive the hosts are.

NPR’s job is to cover news and break it in every possible way whether its on the radio, blogging, etc.

Mark Potts, creator of Washingtonpost.com, showed us how journalism works without using the typical inverted pyramid, who/what/when/where/why style.

He showed us how good Wikipedia can be, despite its reputation.

He also showed us how Facebook was used as a storytelling device as well as Storify.

How to get the audience involved:

• Crowdsourcing (at both local and hyperlocal levels)
• Comments
• Facebook

When creating a blog, know what you do and do it best.

People who blog do it to be an authority in their community and to be respected for their passionate dedication rather than for money. These same people want their audience to become passionate and care.

The blogs tell people what is going on in that specific community that is not being covered by anyone else.

• Computational journalism: Using the computer to tell stories
• API: Giving people ability to create data tables

As a Twitter user, Potts surprisingly felt that it was not a useful tool except for publicity. When he posts a new blog on his site, he will post that URL on his Twitter and gets many hits from that.

The most important technological tool for journalists in the last five years?

The cell phone.

With social media, the super fast speed can be both an advantage and a disadvantage because some people are struggling to keep up with the need to publish as soon as possible and multiple times throughout the day instead of having one deadline.

It also exposes laziness because journalists may not have the pride in their work to get it right the firs time instead of doing it lazily and waiting for their editor to fix the mistakes.

Newspapers are struggling to realize that there are websites with better writing to give the same information that they give the day after.

Living in a “river of news,” it is important for each person to individually be able to filter their own news.

With the world turning to the internet, NBC Washington takes their television content and puts it on their website.

The sooner you get stories out on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. the more people will acknowledge you as a consistently good reporter. Thus, you will receive more traffic and gain attention. You want to be the first to say that you broke the story and knew about it before anyone else.

Important thought:

The good, basic journalistic reporting is the start to anything. You need to ask the best questions to get the best answers for a unique story.

Connecting with the audience is good to build a relationship with viewers and interact to gain attention. Pat Collins does a great job of this, taking 20 minutes out of every day to answer questions from his audience via the internet.

NBC Washington takes plenty of videos from people in the area to collaborate with them and share information. With videos, people love raw footage rather than someone anchoring the video segment.

Jakob Nielsen brings about quite an interesting topic with the world turning to their mobile phones for nearly everything nowadays. Although this change is happening, people won’t be able to comprehend as much on their phone screens as they would on a computer.

The reasons are simple:

• Slower downloads
• No mouse for an easy selection
• Small screens, especially when compared to a computer screen
• Application UI’s lack consistency

“It’s much harder to understand complicated information when you’re reading through a peephole.”

I love this quote. It’s so true!

After an analysis that Nielsen did of Facebook‘s privacy policy featuring text that only people with at least one year of university education would find easy to read, the results were obvious:

• Desktop screen: 39.18% comprehension score
• Mobile screen: 18.93% comprehension score

In order for a text to be considered easy to read, the score must be above 60%, so even the desktop screen comprehension was only 2/3 of the desired amount.

This brings up all-important questions:

What makes mobile reading harder?

Why is it approximately twice as hard to understand complicated content when reading on the smaller screen?

The smaller screen.

1. Because users see less at any given time than they would on a computer screen.
2. Because users must move around the page more, needing to scroll around different pages rather than seeing it all right in front of them on a normal computer screen.

That’s why mobile reading is more difficult.

Track all that you publish

Productivity is a key factor for managers when tracking a reporters’ ability to break news,  publish at a good rate, and gain an audience.

What to track:

• Total news stories per day
• News stories by topic or section
• Total blog posts per day
• Blog posts by specific blog
• Slide shows per week
• Video stories per week
• Podcasts or other audio stories
• News updates
• Breaking news e-mail alerts
• SMS or other mobile news alerts
• E-mail newsletters that are not sent automatically
• Twitter, Facebook or other social network posts
• User-generated content

A web-based spreadsheet is the best way to track all of these.

Track your audience

• Use web analytics software

Wed analytics: The software and mechanisms to track web site traffic

Identify key data points

• Pageviews
• Visits and unique visitors compared
• Engagement and referrers

Search engine optimization

• Spiders and robots
• Indexing
• Queries

Use SEO to grow your audience

• Content is king
• Linking is queen

Make sure your links make sense

• Title tags
• HTML meta tags

Make good headlines better

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords
2. Use conversational language
3. Don’t be afraid to inject a little attitude

Target specific social media distribution channels

• Blogs
• Flickr, YouTube, etc.
• Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Digg, reddit, Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.

“It’s like you’re in this big room with a bunch of people you like, and you’re yelling at the crowd and the crowd is listening and talking back to you.”

Microblogging is a new type of journalism with less words and more links to other web sites, videos and photos that you want to share.

Why is microblogging becoming so popular?

1. Easy publishing
2. Easy  consuming

With the quick and easy publishes, people are connected through microblogs such as Twitter. There’s only one rule you need to follow when inside the microblogging world:

Keep it short!

Twitter only allows 140 characters for the publisher to get their point across to their followers. Facebook, another microblogging service, is similar to Twitter, where one can update their status on what they are doing at that particular moment.

The only difference is that Facebook is mainly used for friends and family, while Twitter is mainly used for following your favorite bloggers, writers, celebrities, etc.

Reasons why microblogging has become so important:

• Emergence as an important tool
• Effective medium for breaking news
• Crowdsourcing and building community
• Marketing and building your brand\

It has really brought an enormous amount of importance to people’s everyday lives in order to stay up-to-date 24/7.

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