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The secret to a successful online guerrilla marketing campaign?
By Robert Niles: So what's the secret to building huge traffic for your news and information website, without having to pay for a huge promotion staff and advertising budget?
Obviously, you need a guerrilla marketing campaign, one that encourages people to spread the word about your site, making it a viral sensation. But how can you motivate people to do that promotional work for you?
I'll share the secret to successful guerrilla marketing online in a moment. But first, I want to assure you that journalists can make money online by running their own websites. Reporters such as Rafat Ali and Josh Marshall have gotten plenty of notice for their successes, but I've also found many other publishers, through forums such WebmasterWorld, who are making a more modest, but still comfortable, living from their own websites.
Journalists looking to the Web as an option for extending their careers following a newsroom layoff won't get by on their reporting skills alone. Quality of content, unfortunately, does not determine who makes an adequate income online. Traffic does. And you need a lot of traffic to build a commercially successful website.
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Focus on 'what,' not 'where,' in planning your journalism career
By Geneva Overholser: So you want to do journalism but are worried about all the change hitting the craft?
Do what digital pioneer and entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder has done: "I always tried to be about what I get to do rather than where I get to do it."
But the economic models just aren't working for newspapers online, lamented one student attending USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director's Forum.
Not true, said Osder, fresh off consulting work with Tina Brown's just-launched "The Daily Beast" Plenty of people are making plenty of money online. (As if in confirmation, David Westphal, Annenberg's executive in residence, noted that McClatchy right now makes more money online than it costs to pay all the editors and publishers in the company.)
Here's how to think about it, Osder told the group:
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Steven Smith departs and the question arises: Who should lead newspapers' online transformation?
By David Westphal: Do newspaper editors have a special obligation to stay in their depleted newsrooms and continue the fight, even as staff cuts threaten to shrink legacy news-gathering operations? Or will newspapers and their Web sites be better served by new leadership that's less wedded to the past and more inclined to see the future as hopeful?
This was the topic of a lively conversation among some journalism faculty last week at USC Annenberg, following Steve A. Smith's decision to resign as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Smith's announcement (followed by the same-day exit of assistant managing editor Carla Savalli) was deeply felt here because of his pioneering involvement in digital transformation, here at the Knight Digital Media Center as well as at Spokane. But Smith told Michele McLellan last week that he could not stomach an additional, 25 percent cut to his news staff. The journalism thats important to me is no longer possible, he told McLellan.
There can't have been too many editors who haven't wondered the same thing, and asked themselves whether it's best for them to stay or to go.
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Newspapers need to learn that great online communities should not be dictatorships
By Robert Niles: I had a conversation yesterday with a former colleague, who, like many online journalists, is trying to steer his newspaper toward a more Web-savvy future. As we were wrapping up, he mentioned that he had to go to a meeting of his paper's "standards and practices" committee.
The what? I asked.
"Yeah, we have a standards and practices committee," he said. "We're supposed to figure out policies about managing user-generated content, hyperlinking and stuff like that."
Why don't you just crowdsource that? I asked.
He rolled his eyes, said "I know," then proceeded to detail some of the reasons why the paper's old guard had shot down his proposal to do just that. The reasons boiled down to two: 1) We don't trust outsiders to know what we ought to be doing, so 2) we're not comfortable letting "outsiders" influence decisions about internal operations.
What a wasted opportunity. What better way to help readers feel part of a community with the paper than to ask those readers to help craft the community's rules?
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Reading, 'riting... and revenue? Online publishing changes the 'three Rs' for college students
By Larry Atkins: Sure, algebra, chemistry and English composition are important. But the most important basic skill and task that should be a prerequisite to graduating college is that students should create their own professional websites.
In today's changing high-tech job market, students should be developing their own professional websites and blogs while they are in college and even high school. In addition to theoretical and analytical courses, colleges should teach real-world practical skills such as constructing a website. Schools should teach students that the Internet is more than a social networking tool or a way to research papers and projects.
I teach Journalism at Temple University and Arcadia University. At the beginning of each semester, I'm surprised at the small number of students who have developed their own professional-style websites. Everyone is on Facebook or MySpace, but only five or so of the approximately 400 students that I've taught over the last five years had their own website, which featured their writing samples, articles, or other work. I now emphasize to all my students that developing their own professional website while in college can be an effective marketing tool and a great way to get internships, part-time jobs, full-time jobs, exposure, and extra cash.
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