Writing Hurts

We all know I’m a twitter addict (as are many of you), so it shouldn’t be surprising that I follow the twitter status blog fairly religiously.

Today, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, wrote on the blog today that IM support, which has been gone for months now, won’t be back any time soon. That’s going to disappoint plenty of people, but it’s not such a bad thing. First of all, it’s been gone for months already, second of all, what good is IM support if the system itself is shaky? Twitter went through some really rough growth spurts earlier this year, with many people threatening to leave for good because of spotty connection and the seemingly omnipresent fail whale. They’ve gotten better. Not perfect, but much much better. It would really be a shame to lose that for IM support.

But more importantly, Williams’ entry makes Twitter more transparent. Web 2.0 and social media are supposed to be about transparency and connecting with users, after all, and saying you’re going to do something you have no intention of actually doing is a great way to alienate your user base.

It’s dangerous to not give your users what they want, but it’s much more dangerous to lie to them.

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?

I was pretty surprised by a commercial on the Olympics by shoe-makers Crocs. The site invited users to upload videos about the shoes saying why they loved — or hated — the shoes.

The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.

There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?

And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.

There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai

The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.

So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?

There was some flap a couple of weeks ago when news/gossip site Gawker suggested that newspapers stop allowing comments.

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.

New Jersey’s Star-Ledger is starting a webcast. Some analysis from Jeff Jarivs of it can be found here

He likes it a lot, but others are at best indifferent. I fall firmly in the second camp, and I’ve helped to start a webcast for a newspaper once. More than a year ago, this was the Next Big Thing. Places like the Roanoke Times led the curve with them, and won all kinds of awards.

But, as mentioned in the comments, the Times’ webcast is dead. It didn’t get traction with viewers or advertisers, only getting a few hundred hits per episode. Maybe the paper isn’t big enough, with a circulation of about 100,000.

Or maybe there’s a bigger issue: Webcasts don’t work for newspapers.

It doesn’t matter if they’re well-produced or just ape TV news, it’s the wrong format. Daily casts like rocketboom.com worked (when they did) because they had a fresh, funny take on the news delivered by a recognizable personality.

But this post about the death of Roanoke’s webcast also brings up a good point: people don’t go on the Web to have stories bundled together, they go online to pick out interesting stories.

That’s where video shines: one-topic, short videos. If you’re good and can build an audience, that will drive much more traffic than a Webcast ever will.