Once in place, you’ll be able to get a few articles (unannounced number yet) for free each month but will have to pay a flat fee to get more content after you hit that wall.
Times’ executives have not answered some key questions yet, including the price that the public is going to be asked to pay. Also unanswered is what is the overarching goal: to protect the print product (by creating a barrier to reading the content online, driving people to print) or to boost revenue for online (which is quite a gamble).
Those goals are fraught with peril and nowhere near guaranteed for success. I’m sure a lot of publishers are glad that a player as big as the Times is jumping first.
What do you think? Are you a frequent nytimes.com reader? Will you pay to keep that up in 2011?
The media landscape continues to change, but that doesn’t mean it’s a fight-to-the-death between Old Media and New Media.
TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters took Old Media to task for not being quick enough to report the Michael Jackson’s death, saying new media entities TMZ and Twitter get it, and Old Media essentially is too slow to be relevant anymore. In the comments, there is a mini-war going on, with some people siding with the Chicago Tribune, which says Old Media did the “heavy lifting” in confirming Jackson’s death, and others saying that Twitter and TMZ is all we need anymore.
Instead of asking who will win, why not ask this: Why can’t Old Media and New Media get along?
Old Media should stop pretending like new ways of information aren’t important. Whether Old Media likes it or not, people are getting their news in new ways. The Old Media does need to move quicker. Ask any editor at any newspaper, and he or she will tell you the newsroom needs to always be moving quicker to get news out. Old Media needs New Media for various reasons, not the least of which being that people increasingly are turning to New Media outlets exclusively to get their news.
Meanwhile, New Media needs Old Media, too. Twitter can run rampant with rumors (including a widespread, though false, rumor that actor Jeff Goldblum had died). Old Media is good at doing some “heavy lifting” when it comes to verifying information. Some New Media outlets are good at that, too, but this is the Old Media’s forté.
There’s no reason for this to be a battle. If Old Media is in the New Media world and doing it right, the two can live together harmoniously.
The social media space can be tough to navigate at times. You’ll probably be called out at one point or another — assuming you’re doing your job right — in public.
This is why before you put your news organization out there, it’s good to have a game plan. It’s not only enough to figure out who will be the front man for your newspaper, Web site or broadcast site in social media, you must first figure out:
- Voice
- Content
- How to interact
- Touch points across your organization
Voice
Determining one’s editorial voice is key. Whether your tone on the air or in print can be playful or serious, it’s a one-way broadcast. An organization’s official voice is usually that: official. In the social media space, however, you’ll be having conversations with folks, so having a more relaxed, conversational tone is important.
One thing that you may want to think about doing is creating a persona. Bill Adee and I did it for our friend, Colonel Tribune, and it helped tremendously.
The biggest question you should ask yourself: If your news organization were a person, who would it be? What kind of food would it eat? What kind of music would it listen to? Where would it live? What kinds of stories are most relevant?
Content
Basically, you need to figure out what, when and how your audience likes its content. For instance, if you’re running a Twitter profile for a news broadcaster in Los Angeles, perhaps you set up a separate feed for local traffic alerts. If you run a national site about D.C. politics, you won’t give your followers weather updates. Right?
Basically, instead of providing news, you want to be as helpful as you can be. Instead of thinking of a story in terms of this:
“Big crash on expressway x. Expect delays.”
Think of it like this:
“There’s a crash on expressway x. Here are some alternate routes.”
The emphasis isn’t the news, per se. 99% of social media is figuring out a way to help someone else. This is a good way to do it.
It’s as simple as that, but once you establish yourself in one — or several — areas, feel free to stretch yourself a bit. Post a link from elsewhere on the Web. Re-Tweet some folks. Do something to keep your friends coming back for more.
How to interact
Previously, I said your editorial voice must be informal. Your interactions must be as well. But your role may be more than just editorial. Do you:
- Plan to post links to your content? Obviously.
- Plan on posting links to outside content? Perhaps.
- Have a plan if someone asks you a question? You should.
- Have a plan for when someone gives you a suggestion? This leads me to…
Touch points across your organization
This is a bit of an aside, but think of this scenario: Say someone gives you a hot news tip via Facebook. Who do you give it to? A reporter? An editor? Do you check it out yourself?
This is something to have on paper before you get started in the social space. It’s always good to have contacts throughout your organization, just in case something inspires you. Want to create a promo for your Facebook page? Have someone in your marketing or creative services department at your disposal. Got a news tip? Have an editor you can work with. Has someone suggested a site improvement? You should know someone in the technology department.
It’s important to have something concrete to refer to as you delve into the social media space. Whether you’re a day in, a week in or six months down the road, just having something on paper will help you evaluate your progress.
Tuesday afternoon, someone previously unknown to the Twitter world, Jennifer Preston, jumped into the fray with this tweet:“Hi, I’m the NYT’s new social media editor. More details later. How should @nytimes be using Twitter?”
Quite an introduction not only as the new social media editor, but also to Twitter. Her question drew a swift response.
The Times, which is nearing 1 million followers of its main Twitter account as of this blog post’s publishing, is one of the last big media accounts to send out an RSS feed of stories on Twitter.
We at Old Media New Tricks offer congratulations to her on the new job, and an answer to her question:
Interact with your followers, and follow them. The Times account only follows Times employees right now and does not respond to followers. There’s a reason this is called “social” media. Yes, there are 1 million people who are following the account. That’s because of the Times‘ well-earned brand name recognition and excellence in reporting.
Want to get with the times, Times? Treat those 1 million followers to an interactive experience on Twitter. Answer their questions. Retweet their posts. If Ashton Kutcher can do it with even more followers, then the Times can do it, too.
On Old Media, New Tricks, we’ve helped you grow the digital connection with your audience through niche news sites, closely moderated comment boards, Twitter and other tools out there.
But once you get your audience, what can you do with them? Here are a couple of ideas:
1. If you get a tip as a result of your social media efforts, acknowledge your audience in the stories themselves. If you say you got a tip via Twitter, link to that person’s profile. You should not relinquish any opportunity to say “thank you.”
2. Create a forum for people to answer each other’s questions about a breaking news item. For instance, if there’s a large teacher’s strike, set up a forum for teachers to not only talk with each other, but with students and parents as well.
Forums also:
- Create a place, possibly, for your reporters to interact with potential sources
- Create a place for your audience to ask your reporters questions. Sometimes, these questions and/or tips could turn into stories. Of course, you thank the audience member for the idea or question that turned into a story.
- Create a place for your audience to answer each other’s questions.
- If the conversation is good, you’ll find that you may get a few new registered users as a direct result of your forums.
3. After the story runs its cycle, it could be worth reaching out to your followers — especially if the story was local — and ask for input. Ask them:
- Did they like your coverage?
- What did your readers find most useful?
- How can you improve?
Remember, as my friend Jason Falls says, your participation will be a key component in making your social media efforts successful.
At this time, if you find you’re in the good graces of your followers, it could be a good time to ask them to register for your site, sign up for your e-newsletters, text alerts and the like. Bring them into your fold, and you may find it’s fairly easy to make a buck or two along the way. Tell them that their involvement not only helps you make a case for your continued presence on the social Web, but it in fact helps fund your future social media projects.
Why? Because you’ll find it just may.
Do you have any ideas on how to build community around breaking news? Post them as comments, and we’ll shoot them down — kidding — or we may include them in future posts. We’ll probably have a couple of more posts about this particular topic.
Traveling to different newsrooms is a big part of my job, and no two newsrooms are completely alike.
I’m an evangelist not just for social media tools, but getting newsrooms and news organizations to interact with readers at a very basic level. Some folks — many of whom are full-time bloggers — are naturally good at it, but when it comes to reporters, many don’t even want to engage readers on the “Comments” section of their stories.
This post will help guide you through this very act. There are a few things to remember, however:
1. Responding to comments is part of your job. Period.
2. Do not judge your readership based on a few bad apples. If you’re a reporter, don’t give up on your digital audience after a couple of crap comments. They’re probably anonymous, anyway.
3. There is no such thing as a one-comment story. If there’s one comment, there are two: the first comment and your response. Once you reach five comments or so, you don’t need to respond to everyone, but it’s good to continue to be a part of the conversation.
Here’s when you absolutely must respond to a reader:
- When a reader has a question about your story. Sometimes, through no fault of anyone’s, there are details that are edited out or just not addressed at all. If a reporter can provide an extra bit of information, it’s incumbent upon them to do it. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with leaving a reader happy.
- If someone bashes you. Sometimes comment boards can spiral out of control, especially when a reader bashes you, but if you respond to an angry reader, it cuts them off at the knees and may ultimately win them over. If the commenter responds, and you have their e-mail address, answer them privately.
- When you feel you have to keep your conversation and comment strings on point. If your comment board allows for threaded comments, this may be a non-issue; however, sometimes the conversation just takes an unexpected turn. Don’t be afraid to jump in and keep folks on track.
Sometimes the conversation can just spiral out of control. Here’s when I think it’s OK to ban a commenter:
- When one of your readers bashes another. Keep folks polite, and they’ll keep coming back.
It may be good to sit down with your site producers and editors to create a clear set of rules — Terms of Service, if you will — for your site. This way, if you ban someone, they’ll know exactly why. Just don’t go ban-happy.
Steward the conversation, and acknowledge your good readers/commenters. If you do, you have a real chance of building community around your blog or beat.
When do you think it’s OK — and not OK — to respond to comments? What’s your rule of thumb?
I came up with this idea as a way to show off all the good work that Texans are doing, and to strengthen the newspaper’s relationship with the community. The Statesman, mainly through Twitter, has built a good reputation in the social media community.
We asked for nominations from the public (through Twitter), which brought in 125 nominees. The 25 winners were chosen by me, @omarg and @broylesa.
Be sure to check out the list of winners and their social media efforts. There’s no question that there are some real social media rock stars in Texas.
The awards show, which was at the new Ballet Austin building in downtown Austin, included a cocktail party with a pianist (so we could hear each other talk) and was catered & sponsored by Opal Divine’s restaurant and Sweet Leaf Tea. We then moved into the ballet’s performance area where we had an auditorium and stage to hand out trophies and say a little about each winner.
We named an overall winner during Sunday’s event. The big winner is Michelle Greer, who is a tireless proponent of using social media for social good.
About 140 people attended the party, and everyone seemed to have a great time. The positive feedback from the party attendees was amazing. You can see the attendees’ Twitter stream here.
The New York Times today launched “Times Extra,” which is an alternate front page that links to stories that are NOT produced by the Times.
In the past few months, more and more mainstream media outlets have warmed up to the idea of linking to material outside their own sites. This in effect could turn old media, which is used to being the source of news, into news aggregators, at least sort of like the Drudge Report. The idea behind it is that although you jettison your readers off to other material, they will keep coming back to your site because you are a one-stop shop.
The Dallas Morning News has also waded into this by hand-picking opinion pieces from around the Web and posting them on their opinion page. The material is posted along side their own work — they often even play up material from outside the Morning News above their own.
It makes for a much better user experience, and it is likely to make their opinion page a destination site for people who are looking for smartly chosen opinion pieces from around the Web.
If you maintain a hand-chosen Twitter account (as opposed to dumping RSS onto Twitter) for your news organization, you should also link to outside material. Colonel Tribune and the @statesman do it as a matter of practice. Why not be the place to go to for news, no matter where it comes from?
By new media standards, old media has been very slow to pick up on this idea. Even the Times, which is ahead of most mainstream media in trying Times Extra, isn’t making it the regular home page — users have to click on a tab to get to it. (To find it, click on “Try our extra home page” tab near the top of the paper’s standard home page).
The open exchange of links is what drives information on most of the Web, outside of mainstream media. We doubt this idea will still be embraced at least right away by all in the old media — after all, it is hard for some to believe that sending folks away from your site is a good thing. It’s hard to argue with the numbers, though …
The following is data from Nielsen Online on the top 30 sites in the “News” category based on February 2008 traffic. This data takes into account U.S. home and work Internet usage, and it shows both unique visitors to each brand or channel and sessions per person. For more information about the sourcing of this data, please visit www.netratings.com.
Brand or channel; sessions per person; unique audience (000)
1. drudgereport.com; 19.9; 3,445
2. Daily Kos; 8.9; 1,204
3. Fox News Digital Network; 8.3; 10,177
4. CNN Digital Network; 7.9; 37,181
5. AOL News; 7.7; 21,119
6. Yahoo! News; 7.4; 35,274
7. MSNBC Digital Network; 6.4; 34,013
8. ksl.com; 6.0; 796
9. Breitbart.com; 5.3; 2,674
10. Google News; 5.3; 12,050
11. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division; 5.1; 13,998
Sometimes, smaller organizations are able to embrace change quicker because of the lack of red tape. At the same time, working as a Web editor at a small paper has its own challenges.
Romanski joined the newspaper business just over four years ago. She says that some of her coworkers are “fond of saying I haven’t had time to become ‘jaded’ yet, which is fine with me.” She says journalism is “in her blood” — her parents worked in everything from radio, to newspapers, to television.
Official position at the paper:
I am the Web Editor for the Grand Island Independent in Nebraska.
What are your unofficial roles?
Social Media Advocate is the big unofficial one right now. I also back up our videographer by producing and editing video when needed. I’m also working on becoming a sort of liaison between our online department and the newsroom.
What is the culture like at a smaller paper when it comes to change?
I can’t speak for all small papers, just my own. I’d classify it as “wary” of change. “Fairly resistant” would be another way, because it has been somewhat of a challenge to coax people to try something they might regard as just a fad (I’m thinking of Twitter in this instance.)
What has been your most effective tool for instigating change?
I was very excited to talk to everyone in the newsroom about tools like Twitter and Cover it Live. I was invited to talk to them at a meeting about these tools. Instead, I spent almost the whole meeting defending the tools and hearing, “We have no time.” That’s the usual argument.
What I am discovering is that I just have to keep talking about it. I can’t force them to try Twitter. I can’t make them interact with readers if they’re dead-set against it. But when I’m sitting in the morning budget meetings, I can ask them for stories I should tweet for the paper’s Twitter feed. I can ask my boss to add our Twitter follower count to the weekly manager’s notes the whole plant receives. If I hear a reporter coming in working on something breaking, I tell them they should tweet it — or ask if I can tweet it. If I hear something cool on Twitter, or hear about a big breaking story on Twitter, I make sure everyone in my vicinity knows the info came from Twitter. If I make it sound like an everyday part of my own job, I figure eventually it will get absorbed. They’ll get curious.
To sum up, I just don’t shut up about these tools. It worked this way when we were struggling to get some bloggers in-house to put on our site. It just wasn’t happening. So, a couple of us in Online began our own. I started blogging about TV I was watching, and my coworker began a music blog. We pimped them online where ever possible, and we started getting a little traffic. Our sports guys would blog occasionally, but once we put together a page that linked to the blogs we had, it began to grow. Our blog section is still small, but it’s better than having none, and we have grown to include several community blogs.
Tell us about some of the new tools you’ve used and what success you have found:
My two big success stories have been the liveblogging tool from Cover it Live and Twitter. I discovered Cover It Live while looking through one of my favorite sites, wiredjournalists.com. I checked it out and loved it immediately. I couldn’t wait for a chance to use it. The chance came when we had to launch a redesign of our Web site. I decided to open up a liveblog/chat and talk to the readers as they checked out the new site.
They gave us invaluable feedback which allowed us to find bugs quickly and fix them, streamline our navigation for readers who were having difficulty and most of all it gave us *and the readers* immediacy. They loved it, and so did we.
We next used Cover It Live when we ran a six-week music tournament to find Central Nebraska’s favorite song. We held weekly chats with the four guys responsible for coming up with the bracket. It was another hit.
Finally, we recently had a fairly big story break when a large group of Somalian Muslims walked off their jobs and marched to city hall to protest their inability to pray at the appointed times during their holy month. This was a controversial story for days, and I opened a liveblog and invited our readers to talk to us about it. It was so busy that I couldn’t close the chat until nearly midnight, and I had to reopen it the next day.
With Twitter, I had been using it personally for a long time when I decided to open a feed for the paper. That was in November of 2007. Initially, I set it up with an RSS feed spitting out our headlines automatically every so often. Some readers liked it, but our follower list didn’t grow very quickly.
I did, and could not be more thrilled with the results. We had 95 followers at the end of August. We have more than 350 now, and it grows every day.
Is there a tough learning curve for you? How do you keep up with all the changes?
I’m a fairly quick learner and throwing myself into learning a new tool or program is fun for me. I do my best to keep up by following industry news and blogs (don’t ask how many RSS feeds I have in my Google reader. it’s frightening), follow a whole lot of smart, talented people on Twitter, and one of the best things I ever did was join wiredjournalists.com.
What’s on the horizon for The Independent? What do you think needs to be done?
We have a lot of ideas for liveblogging - setting one up with the top state sports reporters and let Nebraska Cornhusker fans chat with these guys for 30 minutes before or after a game is one idea we’re kicking around. Weekly chats, liveblogging events, we’ll always put one up when a big story breaks.
As for what needs to be done … we have to embrace the Web more than we do.
What three things would you tell small and mid-sized news operations to do immediately to increase their social media presence?
1. Start a Twitter feed for your paper, manually tweet headlines, use Twitter Search to find people in your area and start following them, and finally, interact with your followers.
2. Sign up with Cover it Live and find a reason to start holding live chats.
3. Join WiredJournalists.com
Thank you, Stephanie, for doing this. You give great advice for any news organization.
You can contact her on Twitter, of course, at @stephromanski.
If you’ve managed a community that allows commenting or hosts other types of user-generated content, you’ve seen it. Behind the shield of a screen name, the ugliest parts of society sometimes is on full display: racism.
Recently, community managers across the country have had to decide whether to zap or keep comments about Barack Obama that could be considered racist, but the issue comes up often in online communities.
There are no hard rules on this. Each community manager (and organization) has to take a lot of these on a case-by-case basis.
Here are three guidelines that we offer, but we’re interested in hearing how you’ve dealt with this:
1. If there is an clear racist word or phrase in the content, the material is toast, the user is banned and you move on with your life.
2. If the user walks the line by using code words, it’s a little muddier. You might be misreading the author’s intent. Often, it helps to grab a coworker and show him or her the material. Usually, though, your first instinct is the correct one. If you decide you have a racist on your hands using code words, warn or ban the user.
3. If the user is not clearly being racist, but you might be sensitive to a topic (e.g., the person is against illegal immigration strongly, and you see that as being racist because of your own stance), try to get a second — or even a third — opinion. As a community manager, it is still your right to nix any material, but if you come down too hard on the offender, you’ll lose credibility within your community. A heavy handed manager can kill a community.
If you’re a community manager, how far do you let people push the envelope?
