So you’ve found a video on YouTube that you’d like to use on your Web site or you’re interested in writing a story about. What are the ethical considerations and how do you decide if it’s worth covering? What are your legal responsibilities from accepting video from a user? Leah Betancourt, the digital community manager at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has all of those answers in this post.
Category: Link topic
Steve Yelvington has posted some easy practical advice on how to build a healthy community around your online news product. He gives advice on both how to change your Web site and how to change your newsroom mentality.
Alan Mutter explains how just looking at unique visitors or page views for your Web content isn’t enough. It might be enough, he says, to show your advertisers how many views their ads are getting, but it’s not enough if you’re trying to figure out how much money you might make selling your content.
This article summarizes the current health of community journalism, but also says that there are problems that wise publishers need to pay attention to. One of those issues is competition. The author notes that community newspapers frequently point out that they have no competition. But, he correctly notes, to say that there are no other newspapers does not mean that there is no competition. The article also has a good discussion of the decline of classified ads under competition from Craigslist. Be sure also to check out the Associated Press article that’s cited several times in this article.
Google has posted a video on YouTube that outlines some best practices for publishers who are trying to perform better on Google News. If you haven’t checked to see if you’re showing up on Google News, you might want to. The search engine sends more than a billion clicks a year to news sites. If you’re already on Google News, then you might want to check out this video with some tips on how to perform better. And don’t worry, despite the insider terms and tech speak, there is some simple, easy-to-use advice in there.
In a Q&A with an online digital marketing journal, BusinessWeek’s John Byrne elaborates on some of the company’s user engagement efforts, many of which would carry over well to community newspapers. He talks about how BusinessWeek leverages readers’ knowledge in creative ways from crowdsourcing questions to guest columns.
Check out this article in PaidContent. It surveys some newspapers who are charging for online content, including the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen. Here’s a quote: “The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75 percent of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5 percent); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions.”
In less than a year, M.E. Sprengelmeyer has gone from being the Washington correspondent at the Rocky Mountain News — covering everything from 9/11 to the war in Iraq — to owning a community newspaper in a small New Mexico town. He writes about his experience on the Save the News blog, and about his optimism about the state of community journalism. “Think of a community newspaper as a bronze statue in the town square,” he writes. “Everybody in town can look up and see that it’s there.”
Successful managers are always looking for ideas. And sometimes, they find great ideas in articles – or from people – that they don’t always agree with. That’s why I want you to read Steve Outing’s piece on making online profits. There may be some things that don’t apply to you; there may be things you don’t think you can do right now; and there may be a few things you just disagree with you. But Steve gives 12 ideas, and I’ll bet that there are one or two that will work for you. It’s worth checking out.
A what, you ask? My newspaper needs a Facebook strategy? Yes, you do. And the fact that you do is symptomatic of the changes that are engulfing today’s community journalism. This article will take only a few minutes to read, but it overviews the issue, including some ideas on monetizing your Facebook presence.