Save the Media

Today’s short takes focus on a common theme: improving journalism. Enjoy.

Improving newspaper Web sites: Scooping the News offers five tips for make newspaper Web sites better: communicate with readers, link out, display readers’ comments prominently; explain more about the writers behind the stories and blogs; and don’t worry so much about design.

I really like the idea of telling readers more about the writers — not just a quick bio, but their background, personal data. That kind of background information is important in the blogosphere; it should be important on news Web sites. Also, I believe that while a well-designed Web site is important, worrying about every little design detail is meaningless if the content stinks.

How to improve journalism in three questions: Jackie Hai at Convergence Commons attended the  Journalism That Matters conference hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., earlier this month and offered three blogs posts about what Poynter folks told her could help journalism. Each question has a video answer. (Neat format, I thought.) Here they are:

1. “How have new tools and technologies enhanced your ability to report and perform the traditions of journalism?”
2. “What do you think is the role of the journalist in the new network of information and community of users we’re moving toward?”
3. (Disclosure alert: Jackie asked for possible questions on Twitter, and this one came from me.) “If they could give only one piece of advice to journalist/journalist students in today’s media climate, what would it be?”

Editing the Web: New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen vividly explains in a Los Angeles Times story how he uses Twitter to sort through the “noise” on the Web by digesting tweets of the 550 journalists, analyst and news outlets he follows on Twitter:  “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network. It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

I love this concept, and I think it has potential for some many aspects of journalism. A growing part of journalists’ jobs, I believe, will be helping readers sort through the ever-growing body of voices and information on the Web. I’ve noticed blogs start to run “best tweets of the week” posts. Newspapers have always strived to give readers the hot stories of that day. But what if they were plugged in enough to applications, such as Twitter, to be almost a search engine for readers. They find the buzz, so readers don’t have to.

Who is talking about you? Old Media New Tricks highlighted a Twitter tool that I find very useful for newspaper Web sites. It’s called Back Tweets, and it helps you find out who is tweeting links from your newspaper’s Web site or blogs.

Other sites, such as Retweetist, will tell you if your tweet has been retweeted. Back Tweets tells you who is tweeting your site as well as retweeting you or other staffers.

To me, that’s valuable because if readers are taking it upon themselves to tweet your news story or blog post, wow. You’ve made it. You’ve reached them with something so important to them that they want to share it with people they care about. In that way, readers become part of promoting the newspaper’s Web site, and the newspaper becomes part of the readers’ existing network.