Save the Media

Today I’m handing my blog over to veteran journalist and blogger 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 some thoughtful lessons for journalists trying to navigate the changing world of media.
It’s a new world “out there” [...]

 I’d say the Syracuse BizBuzz Social Media Conference this week was a great success.
The buzz was about 325 people showed up. The whole experience was pretty exciting — to be around so many people who want to get more connected and engaged online.
A few hiccups, of course: WiFi was really spotty in the main conference [...]

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 [...]

Time for short-takes: interesting posts from my travels around the blogosphere.
Branding yourself: No, I’m not talking cattle branding here. I’m talking about branding yourself as a journalist, as in getting your name out there. Journalists today need to market themselves. People need to be able to find your name, your blog, your Linked-In profile as [...]

Some big news here at the Save the Media blog. Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab has asked me to throw some blog posts their way. I’m quite excited about it. The blog is a compilation of a variety of bloggers — one of whom now will be me — who write about the transformation in journalism, [...]

A few short-takes of interesting finds around the blogosphere. Hope you find them useful.
Be authentic: Sure, news organizations try to be authoritative, reliable and popular. But Ryan Sholin, director of news innovation at Publish2, writes at Invisible Inkling that authenticity is vital as news organizations try to engage their community in the social media world. [...]

A colleague and friend, Darren Sanefski, has started a new design blog, called Blogging Gestalt Design, and he was asking for some advice on how to get started, what to do on his blog, how to get it noticed.
I thought I’d answer him in the form of a blog post because his questions are ones [...]

Time for some short-takes, thoughtful ideas from across the blogosphere:
Media companies of the future: Chris Brogan, a new media marketing consultant, came up with his idea of what the next media company would look like, starting from scratch. I like his ideas, especially:

Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication [...]

First,  a personal note. Sorry, I haven’t been blogging for a while. I’ve been quite ill, with a suspected case of swine flu. (I say “suspected” because at least in my community, doctors are only giving the “swine flu” test to hospitalized patients, which, thankfully, I was not.) I am starting to feel better now. I [...]

Imagine a news Web site that’s a portal to everything people used to read in newspapers plus a bunch of things that newspapers were never able to provide. A cool idea, I think, but first it requires newspapers to embrace two provocative ideas:

The mass audience is dead.
The product of newspaper Web sites is not news.

No [...]