Why should journalists and media organizations take note of Pinterest? Simple. Women love it.

In case you’ve been under a rock, Pinterest is an online pinboard for expressing yourself by pinning photos of things you like on virtual bulletin boards. It was developed back in 2009.  But in the last few months it has become the latest social media darling. It seems like every time I’m on Twitter I come across another story about Pinterest. For example, bloggers are writing about how to use it for business or even for news.

Women love Pinterest

According to Tech Crunch, Pinterest has more than 10.4 million registered users, including 2 million daily Facebook users. A graph from Inside Network’s AppData shows a 30-day increase in Pinterest members that displays a strong spike. Most of the users are women.

Why should this matter to journalists or news organizations? Women readers have proved illusive to traditional news organizations for decades, despite the fact that females make roughly 80 percent of the buying decisions in America. In today’s challenging transition for journalism, news organization cannot afford to lose a single reader — male or female — especially ones coveted by advertisers.

As I wrote on this blog back in 2009, news organizations’ migration to the web has largely failed to attract female readers despite the fact that women are online as much or more than men. My post then explained that news efforts to woo women largely focuses on treating issues important to women as features (not news), expecting women to appreciate the same topics and format that men do, or trivializing subjects women care about if men don’t see them as relevant.

Will embracing Pinterest reverse this trend? Probably not. But what it will do is put a news brand where lots of potential readers are and give them an experience they enjoy.

People use Pinterest essentially in the same way as they’d use a physical bulletin board. For example, people might pin pictures of furniture they like to jog their own memories when they redecorate. Others use it to list quotes they love or pictures they enjoy. Anything that’s visual is fair game.

People can follow others on Pinterest if they like what they post. They also can repin posts, which is similar to retweeting on Twitter. Repining is to take the content another has shared and share it with your followers as a means of affirming the original sharer. Pinterest is so new that users notice — and feel kind of pleased — when someone repins their stuff. They also can like things others have shared, a la Facebook.

How could a news organization use Pinterest

To me, this offers potential for local news organizations as a tool to engage — particularly with women.

I’d suggest local news organizations start by  doing a local story about Pinterest. Who is using in their community? The news organization could create its own Pinterest account and search for local pinners to use as sources in this story — and beyond.  Need a local woman to interview for a story about kitchen makeover? Find her on Pinterest. She probably has pinned all the things she wants in her own makeover. Need women with children to interview for a story? Search on Pinterest. Wonder how men are using Pinterest? Find them there.

Start their own “What (insert name of your community) People Love” pinboard on the news organization’s account and repin pictures and quotes from people in their community onto that board. The news organization can open up the site to allow others to pin to it, creating a way to engage directly with community members.

Once news organizations got started, I suspect interest would grow, and news staffers would likely come up with even better ways to use Pinterest. Mind you, I’m suggesting Pinterest is part of a comprehensive engagement effort, not the only tool in the box.

News with a dose of relationship

What I suspect appeals to women about Pinterest is the sharing. Pinning something is a way to say: Here is what I like, and I want to tell you because that bonds us. And if you like it, too, even better. I have found a kindred spirit. This may not be an impulse all people have, but 10 million and growing is a sizable swath of people.

In essence, Pinterest could give news organizations a way to “give women news with a dose of relationship,” as I advised in 2009 on this blog.

Certainly, it is true that fashion, decorating, and crafts predominate on Pinterest. None of these topics necessarily fit the standard definition of news. But, as I wrote in October on this blog, perhaps news organizations need to redefine what they consider news to include “what people share.” In addition, what I find so attractive about Pinterest for news organizations is that we do not quite yet know its potential. All we know is this: Women like it. Lots of them.

Already, some women are using Pinterest as a political activism tool. For example, consider this pinboard lambasting Rush Limbaugh for calling a law student a “slut” for supporting President Barack Obama’s new policy on contraceptive coverage. This board created a spot for women to like the pinboard much as they’d like a Facebook status or show even more support by repining it or following the board. If Pinterest continues to be used this way, it offers a virtual way for women — or anyone — to protest, share opinions, talk about issue. Gee, that sounds a lot like news to me.

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I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate.

In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now, journalists need to imagine what is is like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ.

An example illustrates my point. Recently, my family and I were driving back from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about half-way through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip, when suddenly traffic stopped.

Read the rest of the post at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

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Today I’m again handing my blog over to veteran journalist Amber Smith, a friend and former colleague of mine at The Post-Standard in Syracuse. In her free time, she blogs about dementia at DementiAwareness. She offers Part 2 of how old-time journalism relates to  the changing world of media.

As a veteran-journalist-but-newbie-blogger, I’m learning something new every day.
Yesterday I wrote about some of the axioms journalists sort of lived by as I was working my way through the ranks.  

Today, I’m exploring some of the common newspaper practices that I believe journalist bloggers, writing in an online world, would do well to follow. (Plus a couple I believe they can safely ignore.)

See if you agree:
 
Inverted pyramid. (KEEP)
Long drilled into journalism students, the inverted pyramid (pertinent information at the top of the story and least important at the bottom) is a style that I find even more important online. Blog readers of today, like newspaper readers of yesterday, have short attention spans, so they must be hooked in the lead of your article. Unless your subject lends itself to a lengthy narrative style, readers won’t stay with you if they believe they have to spend too much time for the information they seek.
 
Most of the posts on my blog, DementiAwareness  follow an inverted pyramid style. I don’t think this makes them boring. I think it makes them easy to read and useful, and helps give it a newsy “voice.”
 
5 W’s and the H. (KEEP)
If you’re trying to communicate, it makes sense to answer all of the basic questions: the who, what, when, where, why and how. Leave your readers with questions, and they will search elsewhere—away from your blog. Of course the answers to these basic questions can be answered in a skillfully written way. No need to quash creativity for fill-in-the-blanks. Although, just as in newsprint, when writing about an upcoming event, nothing beats a little “fact box” containing the particulars.
 
Background paragraphs. (TOSS)
Including paragraphs of background material, for the benefit of readers who were unfamiliar with the subject, can take up several column inches in a newspaper. Blogging journalists have a wonderful, wonderful tool called “links” at their disposal. If you’ve covered the subject previously, link to your work. It saves you time and space, and readers who need to be brought up to speed on the subject can easily do that with a click.
 
Whenever I write about frontotemporal dementia, the type my father has, I link to an early post in which I explained what this is. 
 
Newsworthiness. (KEEP)
General circulation newspapers and their online equivalents strive to be pretty much all things to all people. With few exceptions, they have not tried to specialize in areas beyond local news coverage. Reporters on specialty beats (such as religion, education, health, environment) have spent entire careers pitching stories to editors who challenge the news value: Who does it affect? What is the impact? Why should we devote newshole to that? Essentially: Who cares?
 
Blogging journalists with focused blogs can easily answer that question. Choose a rich niche, and you’ll never lack for something to write about. Connect with a dedicated audience, and you’ll always know exactly who cares.
 
Yes, any journalist worth his or her salt could cover anything, but I recommend choosing a subject for your blog that’s important to you. Even if you do not practice “advocacy journalism,” the passion you carry in your heart for your subject matter will come across. In addition, your genuine interest will guide you to the best stories — helping to keep your blog relevant and newsworthy.
 
Projects. (KEEP)
 In some newsrooms, the reporters who are perched highest in the pecking order are reporters on “projects teams.” They’re not bothered with daily reporting responsibilities. They concentrate on longer-term assignments, bigger stories with bigger impacts. When times were flush, even small newsrooms tried to afford projects; today, formal teams are a luxury found only in the most fortunate newsrooms. So reporters — many of whom work in newsrooms that struggle to do more with less — are left to chisel away at that big story only after their regular work is done.
 
This is sort of what journalist bloggers do, in practice. We chisel away. Our blogs are works in progress. Instead of reporting on a subject, saving up notes, writing chunks to be part of a big story, our blogs are the story. Our blogs are our project. And we may not realize the body of work we create, one post at a time, has a way of telling a bigger story.

A concept that gets bandied about a great deal is that news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.”  I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by this concept, but it doesn’t have a clear definition.

Last week, I encountered a situation that clearly illustrates what I think it means for a news organization to help its readers/viewers make sense of the world.

At 5:30 a.m. on day, I got a text message from one of  my local television stations alerting me that my kids’ school was closed because of an impending snowstorm. This was a valuable bit of information. Getting it by text was incredibly convenient. My phone buzzed on my bedside table, alerting me to the text.  I didn’t even have to get out of bed. I turned off my alarm and slept in, a rare luxury in my frenetic life.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The legacy press or the traditional media or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days has one main challenge for 2010. And it’s not finding a new business model, although, of course, that’s important, too.

But the main challenge has nothing to do with business plans. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.

While the news media’s woes come from lagging ad rates and content that’s scooped up (or stolen, depending on your perspective) by aggregrators, these are all symptoms of the main problem. The true problem for the media is an inability to imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

I can hardly believe it has been more than a year since I started this blog. Back in those early days, I had hardly any readers. I was writing for myself, but bit by bit some of you started to read. I thank all of you for that. I appreciate your comments, your interest in what I have to say, and your ideas for the transformation of journalism. I hope to see you around the blogosphere in 2010.

Here are the 10 posts from Save the Media that you made popular in the past year:

1. 10 “journalism rules” you can break on your blog. This one raised the biggest buzz of anything I’ve written. Some liked it. Others didn’t. But it is safe to say this post got a lot of people thinking, which is always a good move in my book.

2. How Journalism Can Change. The credit for this one goes to my former Post-Standard colleague, Amber Smith. She blogs about health and fitness.

3. Top Twitter told for journalists. How to use Twitter as a journalistic tool, not just for telling people what you had for lunch.

4. A journalist’s guide to the ethics of social media. Is ethical social media use an oxymoron? I think not. I explain that ethics in social media are just like ethics anywhere else. Right is right.

5. Is blogging journalism? Yes and no. Blogging, I write is a tool, like newsprint or airwaves. Blogging can certainly be used for journalism, but not every blog is journalism.

6. The “hyperinterest” approach to news. What’s hyperinterest? It’s tailored to the niche. It’s specific to the audience.

7. Twitter etiquette, style rules for 2010. My take on the rules of Twitter.

8. How journalists can use Facebook.  Facebook is fun, but it’s also useful as a reporting, crowd-sourcing and community-building tool. Here’s how.

9. More on newspapers social media rules. This was about the ongoing hub-bub about The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal coming up with rules for how their staff use social media.

10. So what’s journalism? Folks on Twitter and yours truly tried to come up with a definition in today’s changing media climate.

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I heard the news about Editor & Publisher closing as I hear many things these days – through Twitter. Patrick Thornton (jiconoclast) tweeted: “Does anything better symbolize the state of print media right now than the closure of E&P? Yes things are very bad.” At first, I hoped his tweet didn’t mean what I knew it meant. But a quick search of Twitter yielded proof. Yes, E&P had told its staff Thursday that it was shutting down its print and online operation.

This shook me even more than when Gourmet announced its closure a while back. (By the way,  I found about a Gourmet’s death on Twitter, too.)

I read E&P almost religiously in my early years as a journalist. The magazine had a bright purple cover back then. I’d pretty much devour it when it arrived in my mailbox. As time went on, I didn’t renew my subscription. I’m not sure why.

The thing is I enjoyed E&P’s articles. I appreciated the reporting. In fact, in the last few years, its Web site became one of regular online haunts to find out what’s going on in the news business. Sometimes, I’d head to the E&P Web page myself, but more often I’d be drawn there by a well-worded tweet or a blog post from someone whose opinion I valued.

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Over the past several months, much has been said about transparency being the new objectivity in journalism. As news organizations figure out whether they’ll use social media, and, if so, how they’ll use it, the phrase has been popping up more and more in the blogosphere.

I agree with that sentiment to a point, and I support the idea of transparency whole-heartedly. But at the risk of sounding like the glutton who wants her proverbial cake and to eat it, too, I ask: Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we aim for both objectivity and transparency?

Objectivity is unattainable in my mind unless robots begin to replace journalists (and even then, there’s still the opinions of the humans programming the robots.)  But I think it’s a goal worth shooting for. Journalists should, I believe, try with all their might to show all sides (not just two) of a story,  to be fair, to be accurate, to hold their own opinions in check in the telling. Even viewpoints we disagree with should get the airing of open discourse.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

My occasional series  “What the Heck do You Do on Twitter?” is picking up some steam. Here’s the latest. But first, be sure to read the whole series, especially if you’re new to Twitter.

And if you’d like to be featured, e-mail me at savethemedia@yahoo.com or direct message me on Twitter.

Here is what Laura-Grisselle Aguayo, 20, a junior magazine journalism major at Syracuse University, has to say about how she uses Twitter:

How long have you been on Twitter? I have been for about 2 months now.

Why did you get started? I first started my account because it was required for my NEW 305 class, but I also saw that my roommate was interested in getting an account so the decision was easier because I wasn’t making an account by myself.

Did it end up being different than you expected? It is very different than I expected. I thought that Twitter was just a way to let people know what you were doing on a daily basis, but it is much more than that. You can post links to interesting articles, communicate with other users, and retweet interesting things others are saying. I find out a lot about the news and what’s going in my community through Twitter.

How much time do you spent on Twitter daily? How many days a week do you log on? I probably spend about an hour everyday. I log on every day, even though I don’t tweet everyday.

What is the primary reason you use Twitter? I like to check up on the news through Twitter as well as some of my favorite celebrities, magazines and friends. I like to see the trending topics and see what others are talking about most, and I feel like I keep up with the news better than reading a newspaper or watching the news because the top stories just pop up on my home page.

The news comes to me instead of me going to it. Also, what my friends say is important to me. They post music and links that might interest me too since they are part of my peer group. It helps me keep up with music and entertainment trends.

Do you mainly follow people you know in the face-to-face world, strangers, or a little bit of both?Anything else you like to add about your Twitter use? I follow both people I know face-to-face and strangers but not random people. Just celebrities that are of interest to me. I keep my tweets private just to have a sense of security on the Web, but some celebrities tweet about my favorite music and TV shows, so I can keep up with them that way.

I also follow news sources and magazines, which help me keep up with the top news and magazine trends without always having to buy the magazine. Before I started using Twitter, I thought it was just for ego-centric people who wanted people to know what they were doing at all times. Now I look at it as a tool to connect with others and keep up with the world around me in a quick and accessible way. The 140-character limit makes sure people keep their thoughts to the point, which is great for a society that is always on the go.

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