Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

News organizations: Think like your readers

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 [...]

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Top Save the Media posts in 2011

It’s that time of year again. A time to reflect back and look forward. I think it’s also a good time to review what posts from Save the Media captured the most attention — and traffic in the past year. Here are the top posts on Save the Media in 2011, based on pageviews. (Feel [...]

Friday, March 4th, 2011

A journalist’s guide to the Twitter #hashtag

Sure enough, when I talk to a journalist who has just started on Twitter, inevitably the question will come up: What’s the tic tac toe thing all about? Welcome to the hashtag. The hashtag is simply adding a keyword with the pound sign or hash (#), which does look a bit like a tic-tac-toe board, to a [...]

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Twitter for journalists, part two

In the early days of this blog, I wrote about how journalists can use Twitter on the job. This is an update. Many of the same suggestions remain important, although I believe that Twitter’s potential benefit for journalists is even greater now than when I wrote that early post. I believe Twitter is useful — quite [...]

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

CommSpace launches for media professors, students, researchers

Here are some interesting links from around the blogosphere and tips about tools that I thought you might find useful. Enjoy. CommSpace: A new social network just for media/journalism/communications professors, students, and researchers has launched! It’s run by Sage Publications, and I’m one of four students working with Sage to get the word out about [...]

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

News readers are driven by need for information, not loyalty to a brand

The Pew Research Center released an interesting study last week that offers some sobering — although not surprising — insights for the news business. Researchers examined top news stories in the mainstream press as well as what news got traction on blogs, Twitter and YouTube. A main finding was that what’s hot on social media [...]

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Five Twitter etiquette rules you should never (ever) break

I offered a list of Twitter etiquette tips for journalists — or anyone — a while back, and it got quite a buzz around the Twitterverse. Here’s round two: My updated list of what not to do on Twitter. 1. Don’t send an automated welcome direct message. I am not a fan of automated anything on [...]

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Battling Sears in the era of social media

Well, readers. I feel a bit like Jeff Jarvis or Heather Armstrong today. Both of them are high-profile bloggers, who had customer-service nightmares that they took to the blogosphere and won. Jarvis, is a City University of New York journalism professor who blogs at BuzzMachine and had a heck of a time with a Dell [...]

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Save the Media’s top posts of 2009

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 [...]

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Twitter etiquette, style rules for 2010

Twitter turns 4 in the new year, so I think it’s old enough to learn some manners. Here are my suggestions for Twitter etiquette and style as we head into 2010.  I’m sure I’ve missed some ideas, so feel free to add in the comments. To tweet or to twitter: I think it has been well-established [...]