Save the Media

Time for some short-takes, my version of cool stuff you should read from around the journo/techie blogosphere:

Measuring your site’s value: With all the tools available to measure the worth of  your blog or news site, it can get confusing. Are page views more important than unique visitors? Would you rather have fewer visitors who spend more time on your site or more who spend less time? What about the traffic burst your get if a VIP tweets your post? Does that help you long term?

All good questions without easy answers. Like many things on the Web, the answer is: It depends.

Brian Cubbison (full disclosure a friend and former colleague) makes a good argument on his new Future News Blog that a time spent on the site metric doesn’t tell the whole story of a site’s worth.  Cubbison notes that the very way we use online media can impact — or corrupt — what this metric is measuring. Good read.

Dear journalism students: Ryan Sholin has some great tips for student journalists. The first among them is both simple and vital: Blog. I require my news writing students to blog not because they are likely to make money off blogging. But because blogging is part of the new journalism. You get better at things as you do regularly, and one of the best ways to learn is by doing. What the future of journalism will look like, none of us really knows.  So it makes sense to be prepared on all fronts.

Blogging is personal: One of the aspects of blogging that many in the traditional journalism world can’t seem to embrace is that blogging is personal. It’s not a news story. It’s not meant to be a news story, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.

The traditional distance that journalists put between themselves and the readers didn’t guarantee their stories were more fair or objective or balanced. But in some cases it made the news seem more disconnected from the reader.

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse writes a powerful  post about the connection between blogger and reader. Now Rowse is a super-star, but even I can attest on my lowly blog here that I felt that kind of connection with some of you, my readers. And, honestly, that’s nothing like what I felt writing traditional news stories for 20 years.

What would Newmark do? Interesting interview on InternetNews with Craig Newmark, the founder of the wildly popular Craigslist. He asserts that people are relying “more and more on critics they trust and their friends” for information. The message for newspapers in that, Newmark says, is they must gain readers’ trust.  “I would say that trust is the new black,” he says in the piece.

Catch the Wave: OK, so you get that Google Wave invite but then what. I’m among the many folks who are thrilled to be on Google Wave but don’t yet quite know what the heck to do on it. Robert Quigley,  of New Media, Old Tricks,  is light-years ahead of me and explains how he used Google Wave to discuss the news. Cool stuff. Much to learn. Suggest you read it and another piece by Quigley explaining potential journalistic uses of Wave.

And if you’re on Google Wave and know how to add me as a contact, please do so. Want to start connecting!

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