Writing Hurts

I blogged about the way we can use social media to help cover stories here.

The story itself is very simple, and the writing isn’t anything special. But I think it is a good example of what we can do, at least to start out.

And it taps into the ultra-local market, which is the place newspapers need to be.

So today was my first day on the job as Social Media Guide at The Gazette, and it was a good one. We now have a newsroom blog, to help making us more transparent.

I also posted on Wired Journalists, asking for some advice. I got one commenter; he suggested two things: twitter to send out updates and using Facebook.

We’re already using Twitter, and I think we do it pretty well, but I’m not sure how we can use Facebook well. I already have a profile, and The Gazette has a page. But what do we use it for? Do we turn it into a glorified RSS feed? A calendar for events? A place for people to talk about what we’re doing?

It’s not really ideal for any of those things, and we have better solutions for all of them anyway. So I’ll put it out there to my tens of readers. How should we be using Facebook?

As we at The Gazette are getting better about using Twitter to communicate with readers and each other, I’ve been thinking about more ways that reporters can use Twitter.

My feed went crazy for the past two weeks, with people sending out near-real-time reaction tweets to both political conventions. If you’re a political reporter and aren’t following those kind of people, you’re missing out on a real wealth of sources.

And even for local issues, it’s a great way to get reaction to big happenings. Simply ask a question to your local followers and they respond. You can gauge if the issue matters or not, and if it does, you can try to turn those followers into sources.

Don’t know where to find local people to follow? Try Twellow, a search engine that compiles where people are from.

Twitter is constantly evolving. How are you using it differently now than you were six months ago?

An interesting post on the Online Journalism Blog about the dangers of ignoring comments.

The lesson: You do so at your peril.

I’m not sure if this is a British thing or a newspaper thing. I don’t know many places that wouldn’t even bother to post such comments, though I do know many that would simply ignore it. Or, worse yet, not even bother to read it.

The commenters aren’t just addressing each other; sometimes they’re addressing us, as well. And maybe they’re wrong or biased. But maybe they’re right. It’s our responsibility to make sure we figure out which is the case, and if we’re wrong, we need to fix it quickly.

Otherwise, we could find ourselves making enemies.

Sally Witt talks about how important it is to stop worry about how good something is and just start doing it.

Talk about a lesson we all need to hear, but should have already learned. Media companies are often paralyzed because we hold up an ideal for our content that we can’t meet — at least not at first. When we the last time you were good at anything you’d only tried a few times?

Takeaway lesson: you’ll never be perfect at something you don’t try.

So what are you waiting for?

Allison Gow had a really good post about all the ways we can use Web 2.0 in our reporting, broken down in five steps.

Now if you did all of the parts of every step for every story, you’d be accused of not being productive enough. But I think reporters could learn a lot about the different ways to find and disseminate information, and there’s a lot of really great ideas in the post.

So what have you done to bring your reporting more into line with Web 2.0?