Dear neglected blog readers, I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring you. But I do have some tidbits that are worth a read:

Q and A with Steve Buttry: Brian Cubbison features an interview with Buttry on his blog this week that’s truly worth a read. (Full disclosure, Brian is a friend and former colleague; Buttry is a “virtual” friend.)  Buttry is a former newspaperman who is now director of community engagement for Allbritton Communications, the owners of Politico. Buttry explains in the piece his ideas about connecting communities and why he left  newspapers. The interview really resonates with me, and I think it would with others who have grappled with the same issues. As Buttry explains about his decision to leave newspapers: 

It wasn’t a point; it was a process. I knew it long before I admitted it, even to myself, and there were several stages of realization. I was frustrated by the timid, tentative response throughout the industry to the powerful and specific call for transformation. … I knew I needed to get out, and I didn’t expect to find a good opportunity in the newspaper industry.

Give us some context, please: J-prof Jeremy Littau has a powerful piece on how much of the traditional media failed readers in coverage of the recently approved health-care plan. His point is the media focused too much on the horse-race aspects of the issue (who is against it; who is for it; which side will will) versus the content. The result is a public that’s still confused about what was approved.

I agree. I’ve observed quite a bit of confusion about what the health-care plan contains among friends — both real and virtual.  My own mother even called me at one point in a panic about the alleged (and untrue) death panels in the plan.  

Sure, you can argue that it’s up to people to ferret out the truth, so if they are confused, it’s their own fault. I don’t buy that.  I believe it’s an important job of the news media to inform the public about what’s going on in government.  Some news web sites offered cool approaches to explaining what the plan means, but much was too little too late. People were already confused or felt the plan was too complex to understand. I found some  of the best reporting on the proposal after it was passed, and that shouldn’t be the case.

This isn’t unique to health care. I’d argue the same thing happened with the same-sex marriage initiative in New York state and, quite honestly, the Obama-McCain campaign.

 I think news organizations sell readers short with this approach. People need substance and context, not just snippets of news telling which side is ahead. I’m not saying to ignore the politics but expand, offer more. I’d suggest the news organizations that learn to do context well will be the ones that survive.

Update:  WikiCity, a hyperlocal site that I’ve written about before, has some news. The company announced this week it is teaming up with the Wahoo (Nebraska) Newspaper, according to a news release. WikiCity, which started in late 2008 and launched publicly last summer, is a bit like  CitySearch with its telephone-book-like listings of restaurants and businesses, but it lets readers update their community’s pages, giving a bit of a  Wikipedia feel. 

The Omaha World-Herald announced in October that it had purchased WikiCity, and the Wahoo Newspaper is part of the World-Herald family. The idea is WikiCity will give the Wahoo Newspaper another tool to connect with its readers. The plan is for more of these type of relationships, according to an e-mail from Pat Lazure, WikiCity founder and now president of the World Interactive Group, which runs WikiCity.

Get Delicious: Kevin Sablan, of Almighty Link, offers a thorough primer on how to make the most of the bookmarking site Delicious. Though some argue Delicious is passe, I use it a lot.  I use it as a storage spot for articles I want to save for a future blog post or just want to keep. Sablan’s use of Delicious goes way beyond that. He figured out a way to network through it. He also explains how to use one link to find more. Good stuff.

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Time for some short-takes of cool journalism-related stuff you should be reading around the blogosphere:

Social media goes mainstream: So finally, being on social media has stopped being gee whiz and started being, well, normal. Manish Mehtma sums this point up well in this Huffington Post blog item. He notes that this process of normalizing will allow the technology to fade into the background — so people focus on the relationships created, not the tool. True. For the news media, I think (I hope) this will mean more embracing of tools as tools — rather than writing about the fact that people use them. Kevin Sablan, of Almighty Link, puts it well:  “Tales of journalists using social media, and non-journalists committing acts of journalism using social tools, are starting to sound like stories of people using their telephones.” Amen.

Has social media changed us? Yes, for sure.  They naysayers say it’s turning our brains to mush, just as every technology since paper was feared to do. Advocates, like me, say social media is a tool that can be used for evil or good. Mike Laurie has a good list on Mashable of how social media has changed life for the better. Not sure I buy the one about social media helping kids be more literate. But I definitely agree social media has made news and political involvement more accessible to everyone, particularly young people. That’s a good thing.

FourSquare: I’ve just joined FourSquare. So far, not sure what I’ll use if for, but I think us journajunkies need to be knowledgeable about what’s out there — and the best way to gain knowledge is to try it. Lehigh University journalism professor Jeremy Littau has some interesting ideas on how to use FourSquare journalistically.  He suggests it could be a place where journalists can put news — like a business failing a health inspection — that now gets lost in a sea of information online and in print. It’s an interesting idea. FourSquare, from what I gather, is geographically based, which could make is useful, especially for local newspapers. It’s worth exploring.

The basics: In today’s constantly changing journalism world, the basics can get forgotten. Don’t let them. Bad writing is bad writing whether it’s on paper, online, on Twitter or on GoogleWave. Some good reminders of this point come from Steve and Emilie Davis, journalism profs at Syracuse University, on their new blog. Here is their take on cliches.

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Haven’t done short-takes for a while, so seems like it is time for my list of interesting stuff from around the blogosphere.

Great blogs: I love lists. I think they are a very useful way to convey a lot of information quickly in a format that’s easy to read.  Journalistics has compiled a great list of blogs about all things journalism — from citizen reporting to commentary to academia. Full disclosure: I’m humbled to have made the list, but even if I didn’t, I’d be linking to it and saving it as a delicious bookmark for future reference. You should, too.

Twitter list:  Have you started listing on Twitter yet? If not, you should. At the very least, it’s an easy way to keep track of the people you follow on Twitter by categorizing them into topics (journalists, academics, moms.) I find my lists are a good way to sort through the people I follow and to find smart new to follow from the lists of other people. Twitter lists also can be a powerful branding tool, Daniel Honigan writes on Old Media, New Tricks. Twitter lists can be part of building “reputational currency” on the Web, or as Honigan calls it: showing other people how well-rounded you are.

RSS feeds: I used to be one of those people who subscribed to blogs through e-mail, but that quickly became annoying. My inbox would fill with blogs I didn’t have time to read at that moment, so I would delete them. Then I discovered RSS. I have 67 blogs in my Google Reader right now, and I check the reader every few days or so. These are not the only blogs I read, mind you.  I’ve memorized the URL to the ones I’m really addicted to, so I don’t use a reader to get to them. But an RSS keeps everything there for me, so I can read it when I have time. To me, that’s one on the important factors in media today. Media should be tailored to fit the timen needs of  the reader of the message, not the sender of the message. Anyway, I know some say that RSS is passe, but I still find mine useful. Beat Blogging offers a thorough how-to for beginning RSS users with some examples of how journalists use RSS.

What not to cover:  Sometimes doing good journalism is about knowing what not to cover. That’s the point Jeremy Littau, a j-prof at Lehigh University, makes on his blog in a post about the Texas Tribune deciding not to cover the Fort Hood shooting. (I realize his post is from more than a month ago, but I think his point is timeless.)  The new journalism model, Littau writes, means: “You need to figure out what you are, then be who you are.” I agree. In a niche-dominated world, the old mass medium idea of serving everyone no longer makes sense. If you try to be something to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to no one. A niche needs to be narrow, specific, and meaningful to a highly interested but perhaps small group of readers. The value is in reading multiple niches.

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Here are some short-takes of interesting stuff about journalism and newspapers that I found around the blogosphere:

Social media rules: The buzz over how news organizations should use (or not use) social media surfaced last spring and then died down again only to come back with a vengeance in recent weeks. The blather gained more steam when a Washington Post editor closed his Twitter account after he feared his tweets violated his newspaper’s new social media policy.

My take: Puleeeze! Why is it that journalists don’t think they can manage to be both human and good at their jobs as so many people in other fields can be. The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram sums up the whole debate over social media rules well. Lehigh University J-prof Jeremy Littau offers some insight as well. And here is a list of how 82 companies handle the social media dilemma.

Five sentences to outlaw: Alison Gow at Headlines and Deadlines has a truly great post about five sentences that should be outlawed in newsrooms. The best (or worst?) takeaway is number 4: “It’s only the Web site” as in, “Who cares about posting the news on the Web first or creating an interactive chat or filming a video, it’s only the Web site.” Also some interesting fodder in the comments. Her post reminds me of mine from a while back, comparing old journalism to new journalism. Let’s move onto the news, please!

People pay for what has value: The Washington Post had a story recently about Jerry Capeci’s Gang Land Web site. Capeci wrote the Gang Land column for years, first for the New York Daily News and later the New York Sun. He put the column online and eventually left the paper. Last year, he decided to start charging a $5 subscription fee for his online column, and he’s making enough, the Post articles says, to make a living. I think this example raises two points relevant to online journalism: 

• One: As much as I’m against a paid-subscription model for online news in general, I think it can work in niche markets like this. People are willing to pay for something they believe has value.
• Two: Capeci wouldn’t reveal to the Post how much he makes, but even with subscriptions, it appears to be only enough to support one person (or one family). So news organizations: Beware, of being lulled into thinking online subscriptions will solve your problems. They won’t. Online subscriptions would never make enough to make up for the lost ad revenue, just as print subscriptions were only a portion of your revenue.

Twitter ads: The Austin American Statesman recently launched its first Twitter ads, according to a report in Editor & Publisher. The Statesman is selling Twitter ads on two of its 50 Twitter accounts, Statesman (13,843 followers) and Austin 360(10,098 followers). The ads are labeled as such and most offer a coupon or discount offer. Will this work? Who know. I think it has potential, especially because the Statesman has obviously put effort into boosting it’s Twitter followers. Niche ideas like this are the future, not closing your eyes and hoping the Internet and recession were just a bad dream. News organization may have to make money through multiple small projects like this, rather than the big honking print ads of days gone by.

I applaud the Statesman for trying this. Sitting around and say, “Oh, that won’t work” solves nothing. And if it fails, so what. Let’s all learn from it and improve next time. Trying things and then learning from the mistakes does. We need more of that in the journalism biz. As Thomas Edison said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”  So, Bravo, Statesman!

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