Updated: Be sure to check the links at bottom of post to other voices on this issue.

This is an open letter to the Dow Jones and Co. in response to the rules it released to its staff at The Wall Street Journal and its other publications on how to use — or not use — Twitter and Facebook and other social media.

Dear Dow Jones Wall Street Journal and Co.:

I understand that these newfangled social media sites fly in the face of many of our traditional journalistic ideas. In fact, that’s one of the values in my mind to social media — it allows journalists to connect with their readers, sources and potential readers in ways they never could before. I’m saddened by many of your rules, and I feel these rules could lead your publication to miss out on many of the benefits of social media.

Let me explain rule by rule, based on the list published online by Editor and Publisher. In the interest of clarity, I’ll put the rules in bold and my reaction in italics.

Never misrepresent yourself using a false name when you’re acting on behalf of your Dow Jones publication or service. When soliciting information from readers and interview subjects you must identify yourself as a reporter for the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch and be tonally neutral in your questions. This one seems fine to me. Reporters shouldn’t pretend to be someone else in any situation, including when using social media. So far, so good.

Base all comments posted in your role as a Dow Jones employee in the facts, drawing from and citing your reporting when appropriate. Sharing your personal opinions, as well as expressing partisan political views, whether on Dow Jones sites or on the larger Web, could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones. Agree with the first sentence; journalists should base observations on fact. But prohibiting staffers from sharing any personal opinion really limits their ability to use social networks. The idea of social media is to connect with others and connect as a full human being, with a personality. I can see how expressing a political point of view or an opinion on a news story one is writing would be a problem. But any personal opinion? That sentences your staffers to be the most boring people on Twitter or Facebook. Twitter is basically virtual chit-chat; to chat you must express some time of opinion.

Don’t recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work. Sorry, can’t agree with this one. Sure, you shouldn’t use social media to promote a personal agenda, but creating any type of conversation about topics in the news encourages a free flow of ideas that can only be good for journalism. I say more the ideas, the better.

Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex. Well, I wouldn’t recommend friending confidential sources because that could open the gates to the source no longer being confidential. But most sources aren’t confidential. Friending sources can enrich your social media experience by giving you an easy way to find out what they think, what stories they’d like to see your publication write and to understand how they see the world. All that will help you serve your readers better and expand your readership. If the worry is the competition might steal your sources, so be it. Openness fosters conversation, and that will help your publication to understand your readers better. Why risk losing that amazing benefit of social media? Plus, your competition is likely on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, so they’ll get the benefits that you’ve lost. This is no bash on editors; certainly they should be involved in the social media aspect of reporters’ jobs. But if you make a process like using social media too cumbersome, no one will use it.

Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited. OK, I agree that Twitter isn’t the place to explain that your editor re-wrote your lead on deadline and made it wrong or that you didn’t have time to fully understand a report you were writing about so your story was inaccurate. In fact, in general bashing people or decisions of your employer on Twitter is a bad idea. But this hard-and-fast rule would prohibit reporters from helping readers understand the newspaper better, and increasing readers’ understanding can only be a good thing. For example, my newspaper recently started a special section on its Web site just for readers of some of the suburbs we cover.  A reader  who lives in aother part of town asked me on Twitter when this neat new stuff would be coming to his community. I was able to explain to him in a positive way that if the project works,  his town may get it, too. Isn’t that better than leaving a reader angry because he feels his community is being excluded for no reason?

Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted. Again, I see the kernel of truth. You don’t want to tip off the competition or share secrets. But wouldn’t readers feel more connected to your product, which is meant to serve them, if they were included a bit. The Baltimore Sun, for example, live-streams its daily news meetings. I don’t live in Baltimore, but I found it fascinating that they consider readers part of the team in a sense, rather than an “other” who should be feared.  Sure, there’s a need for caution on certain topics, but involving readers when appropriate can pay off by bridging the traditional gap some readers feel from the almighty journalists.

Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage. Agree with the first part — bashing anyone, particularly colleagues or competitors, is just bad form. But what’s wrong with promoting your coverage. One of the great benefits of Twitter, Facebook, other social media is you can link to your blog or story and let others who might be interested know about it. It seems without that ability social media becomes somewhat pointless, and you limit your audience to those who already read you or happened upon you in a Google search.

Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem. Can’t argue with this one. Again, bad form.

Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach. No problem with this one either, although to me this depends a lot on one’s beat. If you cover health, sure, you don’t want to suggest, as Vice President Joe Biden did, that people should stay out of crowded spaces, such as planes or subways, for fear of the swine flu. But I cover parenting and often offer advice on topics, such as play date etiquette. I think it bolsters my relationship with my readers and portrays me as a real person, just like them. Even less personal beats could be fair game for making suggestions to readers. Might the traffic reporter tweet the best route home to avoid construction delays? Or couldn’t the books writer post a link on Facebook to her favorites tomes.  Again, be cautious and smart, but not afraid.

All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting. To me, this depends on your definition of controversial. That’s so broad, it could cover almost anything. News by its nature is controversial. I’m not against editing here, but I do think that blogs particularly need to be immediate. It seems this might clog-up the works, but maybe the WSJ has so many editors that this wouldn’t bog them down.  Good conversations about how to handle controversial or sensitive subjects are always a plus in my book, but I also believe a publication should have a large dose of trust in the judgment of its staffers or why did you hire them?

Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending. Glad you added that part about “common sense,” but really how can you not mix business and pleasure on Twitter. It’s a conversation. People follow you because they like you or they’re interested in your topic area. If you want to connect with people on Twitter you need to come across as a human being, who jokes around, who tweets a favorite song, who complains about the weather. Nobody wants to follow a robot. And that’s not connecting; that’s broadcasting. I’d say 90 percent of my tweets are work-related (tweeting a blog post or story or link from my newspaper’s Web site), but the rest are just life (sitting at my son’s Little League game in the rain; wow, I’m starving, can’t wait for lunch). Does that hurt me as a journalist? I don’t think so. I think it helps my readers know me, and that can only be a good thing.

WSJ, See you on Twitter (or not).

What do you think of the WSJ rules? Have I missed something — or missed the mark? Post a comment. (And if you like what you’re reading, subscribe.)

Edit: 9:56 p.m. May 13. A reader on Twitter noted that I should have addressed my letter to Dow Jones and Co., not The Wall Street Journal and Co. Good, point, so I’ve changed it. I also tweaked the first graph to reflect the reader’s concern. Did keep my headline the same, though, because in the discussions of the “rules” on Twitter today it seems many are calling the rules “The Wall Street Journal rules.” The Wall Street Journal is the flagship people associate with Dow Jones. Plus, that’s how Editor and Publisher describes the rules, so I think the average reader identifies them with WSJ.

Edit: 8:01p.m. May 14: More on the “rules”:

• Jeff Jarvis:  WSJ rules are “missing the point” of social media.
• Steve Buttry:  Comments on the rules and offers links to others who have had their say as well; explained he had consulted with WSJ on social media; and posted a response from WSJ to his earlier post. All of this is great reading.
• Mathew Ingram:  “The idea that you can maintain a strict division between the personal and professional just doesn’t jibe with the way social networks (or human beings) operate.”
• Patrick Thronton:  “The Journal appears to be operating in the same top-down, slow, patriarchal manner of newspapers of old, instead of the open and nimble ethos of social media.”  He suggests a good list of how social media should be used.

Here are some short-takes of  journalism-related finds from around the blogosophere:

Targeted traffic: In some ways the old days of ignorance were bliss. You wrote a story. You assumed people read it. You were happy. Now, thanks to stats on blogs and online stories, you can find out how many (or few) people are reading your piece.

That can bring you down; or you can use that information. Sure, you want numbers. More is better than less. But most of all, you want value.

Lee Rowley, an Internet marketer, copywriter, published author and pro-blogger, writes on Thou Shall Blog that the key is targeted traffic — not just traffic. He says to make your blog profitable, you want readers really interested in your niche, who will put your information to use and spread the word about your blog. He offers some great suggestions on how to get this traffic, including participating in forums in your niche and being consistent about writing about your topic.

What’s hyperlocal, really? It’s one of those buzzwords in journalism today: hyperlocal. It’s the intensely local coverage that community newspapers have been providing readers for decades, but that bigger city dailies do less well. But it’s on the Web.  Many news sites are trying it, with mixed results. Many discussions among journalists ends up noting the failure of the Washington Post’s hyperlocal effort.

But Richard M. Anderson, a publisher serving four Maine communities, has made hyperlocal pay, according to his post on Reflections of a Newsosaur. How did he do it? He writes that his  hyperlocal Web sites are generated as much as a fifth of his ad revenue. Wow!

The key, writes Anderson:

“Professional journalists report news as it happens on the website. Weekly, this news is contextualized, analyzed and printed in the newspaper. Citizens and businesses post timely news and information online and many of their posts also appear in the paper. And two-thirds of our web sites’ front pages are filled with citizen and business posts.”

Now, on the lighter side …

What will save newspapers? Who among us in the news business doesn’t need to laugh at our industry once in a while, especially amid the frequent lay offs, pay cuts and buyout offers. This video made me chuckle. Hope it will you give you a laugh, too.

And kudos to MaryAnn Chick Whiteside’s Inside Out blog for alerting me to it. Warning: It’s a bit “inappropriate,” as my 6-year-old told me as she listened while we watched it.

I haven’t done short takes in a while, so here are some interesting finds from around the blogosphere:

The value of small talk: Steve Yelvington has the best explanation I’ve read so far for the value of social media. He compares the gabbing over Twitter, for example, that so many find banal to the glad-handed chit-chat of business meetings. He says, “Small talk is a mechanism for opening channels of communication. It’s a tool for establishing social/conversational norms and overcoming our inbred distrust of anyone outside the tribe.” Exactly. And that, my friends, is one of the big values of connecting through social media. I find it interesting that the same people who know how to “work a room” in the “real world” feel they have no time to do so in the virtual one.

What’ s killing newspapers? Patrick Thornton at The Journalism Iconoclast makes a compelling argument that complacency is. He argues that instead of being leaders with that newfangled Internet, newspapers ended up as followers, trying frantically to catch up.

“When you look at industries that ultimately fail, it’s because their leaders never thought a new technology or a new way of producing a product could come along,” he writes. What I like the most about his message it he offers hope:  “We can change the course of the future if we cast aside defeatism and complacency.” It’s worth a read.

The role of newspapers: Laura Walker offers a list of nine reasons teachers should use Twitter that are important because all nine apply not just to teachers, but to everyone. What I found most compelling about her post is how she, a nonjournalist, uses Twitter as a news gatherer.

She notes that “sitting down with a newspaper is not a luxury” she has time to enjoy everyday. So she follows smart people on Twitter who tweet her links to the latest in her areas of interest. Now we in the newspaper field can balk as we have for decades … “Well, gosh darn, she should read a newspaper.”

But that won’t matter. Here is a smart, educated woman who finds she can discover her own information sources. News organizations can be among those sources, or not. What we can’t do is change how she — and millions like her — want their information.

What should j-schools teach? Ben LaMothe at Web Publishist has an interesting post about what journalism schools should be teaching these days. He’s responding to an Editor & Publisher article by Seth Porges, who argues J-schools are “top-loading course loads with classes on coding and production” and possibly scaring less-technically inclined students away. LaMothe notes, well, I think, that it’s a shame so many journalists know so little computer technology, coding, production.

Both articles are worth a read. My two cents: I think J-schools need to teach it all –  how to tell story, how to get the mother of a murder victim to open up, how to spot government waste in documents, how to write quickly and well as well as basic html coding, how to produce and embed video, how to  figure out how to use a new Web application, etc.

I know too many journalists who don’t know how to upload a photo and have no desire to learn. As LaMothe notes, “The Web won’t just… stop. We should assume that the integration of journalism and the Web is in its infancy. Massive change is still on the horizon. As a journalist you need to be able to react to that.”

How to use Twitter: Finally, if you’re not on Twitter yet, get on it. Read my tips on how to get started and the best tools for journalists part one and two. And read a great overview of Twitter by  Ron Jones, of Search Engine Watch, and his valuable follow-up lesson. No excuses. You can’t say we didn’t explain it.

Overheard on Twitter: The best of recent days in the Twitterverse:

• @ambersmith “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I am frightened of the old ones.” –John Cage, composer, 1912-1992

• @jayrosen_nyu Jarvis to newspaper publishers: You blew it. http://is.gd/rcXD Danny Sullivan is equally scathing http://is.gd/r9fe Both are worth reading.

• @NiemanLab Minneapolis Star Tribune staffers debut “Save the Strib,” advocating their paper’s value and seeking buyers http://tr.im/ikwv

• @timwindsor “You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee… but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy?” http://is.gd/qYOG

A colleague of mine asked today: “Is blogging  journalism?”

She was helping her step-daughter write an essay, an assignment for a college ethics course. Two co-workers and I jumped in to answer the question to help my colleague assist her step-daughter.

I found the question compelling because it goes to the very heart of this battle between the old journalism and the new journalism. (The wired versus the tired, some people more clever than me call it.) So many journalists today seem to have intense anger  directed at blogs, which they see as a looming enemy that is trying to corrupt journalism.

But, in my opinion, blogging isn’t the threat to journalism — fear of change is. As Charles Darwin explains:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

(By the way, I wish I could take credit for knowing that quote. I can’t. I culled it from a blog comment on the Nieman Journalism Lab and verified it at Think.Exist.com.)

My answer to my colleague and to you is: “No, blogging isn’t journalism.”

Blogging is no more journalism than e-mail, Twitter or even newspapers or TV stations are journalism. They are tools — ways to disseminate information, ways to help people connect with their world.

In a PressThink post from 2004 that  rings true today, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen describes bloggers as “speakers and writers of their own invention, at large in the public square. They’re participating in the great game of influence called public opinion. And they’re developing, mostly through labors of love, what I’ve called an extremely democratic media tool.”

Using that definition, which I like, blogging isn’t journalism, but journalists can blog. In fact, as a tool, blogging is particularly suited to journalism because it can help journalists connect and understand their readers better.

I believe the blogosphere is big enough to include journalist bloggers — now dubbed beatbloggers — nonjournalists, quasi-journalists, the proverbial guy sitting in his basement typing in his pajamas. I don’t fear the blog.

What I fear is the fear of change. What I fear is the fear of an open debate about the evolution of journalism. What I fear is journalists missing out on a bright future because they can’t imagine a world that is different than the one they know.

That’s what makes my blood run cold.

The way we practice journalism today is far from how it was practiced 200 years ago. A Wall Street Journal book review of “Scandal & Civility” explains that the American press of the 1790s stoked the flames of the post-revolutionary age with its bitter battles between emerging political parties. The press in those days was passionately partisan and mean-spirited, Marcus Daniels’ book contends.

I bring this history up not because I am not suggesting that we revert to the journalism of the early days of our nation. I bring this up not because I advocate we abandon the principles of today’s journalism and play ” fast and free with details”  — a phrase I borrow from one of my commenters — in the blogosphere.

I bring this up to make the point that the only constant is change. Journalism 50 years from now will be different than it is today in the same way that journalism 50 years ago was different than it was in the 1700s.

We can accept and embrace change and be part of the forces that shape what journalism evolves into. Or we can dig in our heels and insist that journalism never change, though it has been evolving for centuries.

Blogging has changed journalism, but it is not journalism. Blogging has given people, regular folks, a voice they didn’t really have in traditional media, or that they had in only a limited way.

Blogging is a medium, which has routines, the normal way of doing things that are evolving right now. In the same way news writing is less formal than academic writing, blogging is less formal than news writing. (And microblogs like Twitter are less formal than blogging.)

Blogging is a tool — one of many — that can help journalists and writers of all types connect with readers, communicate information and help people make sense of our increasingly complicated world. Blogging won’t solve everything, and in five, 10 or 20 years or sooner, something may replace it. And, hopefully, journalists will embrace the “something else,” too.

What do you think?

– Gina

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I’ve come across some new Twitter tools that I’ve found useful as a journalist, so I’ve decided to compile a new post of my favorite tools for Twitter. (Read my earlier list of favorite Twitter tools here.)

Blip.fm: A colleague of mine, @LauraTRyan, turned me on to this  great tool. It allows you to search for a song for free and tweet the song. The tweet contains a little musical note to indicate to readers that it’s a musical tweet. They click the link, and hear the song you picked. Fun, fun, fun. (You do have to create an account to use Blip, but it’s free.) Here’s an example.

Twitoria: Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you may find you’re following a bunch of people who never or seldom tweet. This isn’t a bad thing, but at a certain point, Twitter will cut you off from following new people if the ratio between followers and people you’re following gets out of whack. Plus, if someone never tweets, really, why follow them? This tool can help.  You type in your Twitter name and find out how long it has been since people you follow have tweeted (a month, a week, never). I used it recently to weed out the folks who I was following who never tweeted.

Back Tweets: This is a great tool to find out who is tweeting your blog. You type in your URL, hit return, and you’ll get a list of every time your blog’s URL is tweeted, who tweeted it and what was said about it. What’s great about this is you can see which of your posts are tickling your readers’ fancy enough that they tweet them, thereby, potentially gaining a larger audience for your blog. This can help you know what interests your audience and who is following what you say on Twitter closely enough to retweet it.

Future Tweets:  This tool has become one of my favorites. It allows you to schedule a tweet for tomorrow, next week, two months from now. Now, I know some Twitter purists will say scheduling defeats the spontaneity of tweeting. Generally, I’d agree. I wouldn’t use this a lot. But it is very useful sparingly. It’s great if you’re writing a post late at night and want to tweet it, but know much of your audience won’t be on Twitter at the time. So you schedule for 9 a.m. (You can adjust for time zones.) It also is helpful if you’re trying to hit different time zones. I generally tweet the most at 8:30 a.m. EST, but I can schedule later in the day to hit my Twitter friends  in California.

Retweetist: This tool helps you find out who is retweeting you. (Retweeting is when someone else repeats your tweets, crediting you, presumably because he or she felt your tweet was worthy. It helps you widen your influence on Twitter and could help boost your blog traffic if you tweet your blog. Here’s how to retweet. ) To use Retweetist, click on the “people” tab and then enter your Twitter name without the @. Click enter, and you’ll get a list of the number of retweets by day you’ve had for the past 30 days. It also lists what the retweets were. ( One caution: I find this is sometimes behind, so if you check it midday it might not reflect tweets from that morning. There seems to be a delay, but it catches up eventually.) You can also find out the 100 people who get retweeted the most; good folks to follow.

Search.Twitter.com: Love this. It’s basically a way to search by topic through Twitter. I generally put in my Twitter name at least once a day to see what comes up. Sometimes, I’ll find someone has tweeted about me, and I didn’t realize it. Or someone has retweeted one of my tweets. I try to dash off a thank you through Twitter’s @reply function. (@reply is just Twitter parlance for responding to one person individually.) This tool is also useful if you’re blogging on a particular topic and want to find other blogs that have posted on that topic to link to. I find it more useful than a Google search because it helps you find blogs, rather than news stories.

What’s your favorite Twitter tool and how do you use it?

– Gina

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s recent announcement that it’s ceasing publication of a newspaper — and going online only — is sad because of the jobs and lives impacted and what it means for the future of journalism.

But I’m hoping the P-I’s online experiment can help us all learn a bit more about the revolution happening in journalism today.

Twenty editorial and 20 advertising employees will staff the online-only  P-I. The P-I will continue to showcase  content from 150 or so reader bloggers  and link off site to content partners and competitors.

BeatBlogging.org has an informative interview with Monica Guzman, a P-I blogger who is staying on. (Ink-Drained Kvetch also weighs in on some insightful commentary on the the P-I.)

Here’s what I think the rest of us in journalism can learn from the P-I experiment, based on Guzman interview. (We’ll have to see how the reality measures up.)

• Don’t let technology fear hold you back. Guzman acknowledges that not all the 20 editorial employees have the Web skills they’ll need for an online-only operation. “Does anyone have all the necessary Web skills to thrive on the Web?” she asks. Great point. Some journalists seem to view computer skills like math (“That’s why I went to j-school because I didn’t want to take advanced math classes.”) For our industry to flourish, we need to get over that. We need to learn to teach ourselves computer skills. The Web is a wealth of information. Need to know how to edit video, Google it and find a Webcast someone did. We need to be plugged into the Web’s technology scene to find new applications to help us do our jobs.
• The content has to change: Guzman notes that what the online-only P-I will become isn’t really known. But what is certain? It won’t just be print on the Web. “Since the P-I site is in large part an experiment, innovation and new thinking will, I think, not only be tolerated but encouraged,” she says. I hope so, at the P-I and at newspapers across the nation. Journalists are creative people by and large, but in a crisis upper-level managers tend to tighten the reins and restrict innovation. That’s a mistake. Reporters and editors need to try stuff, play around, make mistakes — “throw the spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks,” as one editor told me. And they can’t do that if they need to go through three layers of management to get the OK. Why? Because they just won’t bother.
• The relationship with readers has to change: Guzman hedges a bit when asked about the role of social media and two-way communication with readers. That’s understandable; she’s not in charge, and everything is new. She hopes for a fuller engagement with readers, more beatblogging, more social media experimentation as well as columns from people in the spotlight. All good. What we can learn is: Don’t just keep doing same old, same old. Change. Please.
• Bloggers need to know their stats: Guzman notes that knowing the real-time data from her blog helped her as a blogger and hopes online-only staffers will get that benefit, too. So do I.  I think it really cripples your ability to reach your audience if you don’t have access to your stats regularly, which is common at some newspapers. You can’t find out what types of post really resonates with readers, which posts got read the most, which post fell flat, whether your readers frequent you on Monday or Fridays. (The folks who need to know them aren’t just high-level managers; it’s the bloggers themselves. And not just a snapshot of stats every six months; to really understand your trends, you need to have daily access.) Joel Kramer explains that stats are vital at the MinnPost, a nonprofit journalism enterprise: “It makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn’t, while remaining true to our mission.” Exactly. We don’t want our stats to govern us — if we did that, we just run porn and sports on our newspaper Web sites and call it a day. But we should be responsive to what readers want.

I’m looking forward to seeing if the Seattle P-I’s experiment lives up to these ideas. I hope it will.

– Gina

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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.

Dear readers,

I switched to self-hosting this blog the week, and in the process it seems I lost some comments and few other things.

Please know I did not delete you comments. I would never do that!

Bear with me during the transition, as I improve this blog!

Things will be back to normal soon. I hope. In fact, better than normal.

And please note: My URL will stay the same, savethemedia.com, and if you read this blog through a feed or e-mail subscription, that should still work. Please e-mail at savethemedia@yahoo.com if you have any problems.

Soon after I started my parenting blog, a smart colleague of mine tipped me off to Technorati.com. I quickly fell in love.

Here’s why:

Technorati is a site that offers both blog ranking and a search engine, but the really cool thing is it lets you find out immediately who is linking to your blog. (Technorati calls each link a blog interaction.)

That’s important for two main reasons:

1. You’re  wise to check out the blogs of those bloggers who thought your blog was good enough (or bad enough) to link to. By linking to you, that blogger is helping you gain traffic by introducing your blog to his or her readers. It’s likely you’ll want to read this person’s blog or link back to it. It’s the beginning of a spiral that can get your blog noticed. The first thing I do when I find a blog has linked to me is check it out. Perhaps I’ll comment, send the blogger a thank you or put that blog on my list of “read everyday” blogs.
2. The more links you get the better it is in the terms of your “Googlebility” — it increases the likelihood that your blog will come up higher on the page in a Google search.

Now, you bloggers may be thinking: “I can find out who is linking to me from my own blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type.” That’s true if you’re blogging on your own. But if, like me, you are blogging for a newspaper, you may not have the same access to your stats as you would if you were blogging solo. (And, while veteran bloggers may know about Technorati and other such services, a lot of newbie journalist bloggers likely don’t.)

Technorati gives you a really valuable ability to know who is linking to you. (You can also find out how many interactions any blog has just by copying the URL of the blog into the “search the blogosphere” space. I’m nosy, and love checking out the interactions of other blogs.)

But Technorati can do more for your blog than that.

Get Authority

If you join for free, you get to set up a profile, and you can “claim your blog.” Basically this is just giving Technorati the right to index you blog, and it enables your blog to be listed in Technorati’s blog directory. Technorati gives your blog an authority,  based on the number of blogs linking to it in the last six months. The higher the number, the better,  according to Technorati’s Weblog. Note, though, that authority is based on the number of blogs linking to you, not the number of times they link. So if the same blog links to you 100 times in six months, it still counts as only one link toward your authority.

If you’re a numbers’ junkie like me, you just like to watch your blog’s authority go up. It’s a thrill to see “no authority” move to 1 and then keep going.

Get ranked

Technorati also gives you a ranking of how far you are from the highest authority blog, which would be ranked #1. The smaller your ranking, the better. Again, this is neat to know because it gives you a sense of where you fit in the whole blogosphere, not just your slice of the world.

Find out stuff

Technorati is a search engine, so once you claim your blog, your blog is listed there. If you use good keywords when you claim your blog, readers looking for a blog on your topic could come upon it. You can also search for blogs this way.

Technorati the lists the top 100 blogs, which is a great resource, especially if you’re looking to read the best-read blogs in your niche. You also can search for the most popular blogs in various categories. Or you can read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which is a five-part report on blogging that every blogger should read.

Get organized

You can also use your Technorati page to organize the blogs you like to read by “favoriting them.” Then you can just go one place and find your favorites, and be able to see who is linking to your favorites and whether your favorite’s authority is going up. (or down.) So if you like this blog, for example, feel free to Favorite it.

More to know

Pinging: For Technorati to index your blog properly, you need to ping each of your posts. That just means your blog lets Technorati know, “Hey, this blog just posted.” You can set up your blog to ping automatically or you can manually ping here and get directions on how to make sure your blog is pinging.

But why does Technorati Authority matter?

Six Pixels of Separation points out that checking on a blog’s authority is a way to assess that blog and how connected it is. But Unique-Frequency makes a valid point that Technorati doesn’t differentiate between links: If a heavily trafficked blog links to your blog, it doesn’t do any more for your authority than if a beginning blog does. (But I would point out that if a heavily trafficked blog links to your blog, you’ll gain a lot more in residual traffic from that link than you will from one from a less popular site.)

My take: For me and my blogs, we use Technorati. It’s not a perfect measure of a blog’s success, but what really is. I’m of the mind that bloggers who want to gain traffic need to do everything than can to do so. So if Technorati only helps a little bit, so be it; it’s better than nothing. Add up a lot of little bits, and they can make a big impact. Plus, it’s just fun.

So I guess that’s enough of my totally unpaid commercial for Technorati. Now, get out there and claim your blog.

– Gina

Your first step is to name your new blog. This can actually be tough for journalists, who are trained to come up with catchy headlines that have double meanings or use irony or nuance. That’s all part of the discipline. Problem is, those type of names don’t work great as blog names.

Here’s why. You want people who would be interested in your blog to find it. One of the best ways they can find your blog is through a Google search. But people don’t type in “Word to the Wise” when they are look for a blog about books; they type in books or reading. Likewise, they don’t search for police information by typing in “Cop Shop” or “The Fuzz.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t be clever. You just want to be clever with the right words.

How do you know what those words are? Think of your target audience; figure out what they might type into Google if they were looking for a blog like yours; the words you come up with are your “keywords.” It’s a good idea to use at least one of those words in your blog name.

Use of keywords in your blog name relates to search-engine optimization, which is just a fancy word for thinking like Google.  (I’ll get into SEO more in a later post because it’s a very important concept.)

Now, you may be thinking: “I know some great blogs that don’t follow this rule.” Of course, some bloggers are just amazing or lucky or so good that the name doesn’t matter. But if you’re working for a newspaper and your job is to make your blog popular, why hamper yourself? If you’re blogging for fun on your own and don’t care about traffic, then the name doesn’t matter at all.

I didn’t know any of this with my first blog, which I started 19 months ago. I named it Family Life because I wanted to be inclusive of moms and dads.  If I had it to do over again, I would have put Mom or Mommy in the name because my primary audience is moms, and I suspect they search using “mom” more often than “family.”  But now my blog is known by its name, so I wouldn’t change it.

I was thinking like a journalist, not like Google.

With this blog, I purposely put media and save in the title because those seem to be words that would come up in a search that might lead someone to my blog.  (I originally wanted savejournalism or savenewspapers, but they were taken.)

Once you have two or three potential blog names, plug them into Google and see what comes up. See if searching for your possible name yields sites similar to what you want yours to be. Also, make sure someone else doesn’t have a name that’s really similar. Once you start your blog, you want your blog name to be unique. Also, your blog name will become part of the URL of your blog. (How that works will depend on the blogging platform your newspaper uses.)

Settle on a title, and now you’ve made your first step to becoming a blogger.

In my next blog post, I’ll discuss how Widgetboxes and Technorati can be important tools for journalist bloggers.

– Gina