Today’s tip was spotted in a recent article by Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review, “Keeping Your Job in Journalism.” While the article is aimed at instructing journalists on how to keep their jobs in an era of downsizing and transition-of-the-business-model chaos, one recommendation helps not only the individual journalist, but his or her news company.
Niles urges reporters to promote their content to people most likely to value it. As an example, a beat reporter covering higher education might keep a mailing list of bloggers covering the topic, and e-mail them alerts about new articles he’s published. Continued
In yesterday’s tip I mentioned Herb Caen, the popular columnist who was such a huge part, for so many years, in making the San Francisco Chronicle the top newspaper in town. After Caen died in 1997, the Chronicle was less interesting a paper to many readers in the Bay Area. The paper has had some good columnists since, but none that matched Caen’s celebrity.
Thought Caen won a Pulitzer Prize for his column, it wasn’t exactly “serious journalism.” You read Caen’s daily column for entertaining tidbits about life in “Baghdad By the Bay.” What he wrote about came from letters (yes, the paper kind) and phone calls to him, and from his encounters with San Franciscans and friends on the streets and at parties. No one has quite matched him yet, but I think with the Internet there’s hope that more Herb Caens are on the way. Continued
Here’s a little bonus tip (since I normally just post once a day here). It’s a video interview I just spotted by Beet.TV with NYTimes.com senior VP and general manager Vivian Schiller about why her website has seen such a dramatic growth in usage. Of course, the removal of TimesSelect, which put some premium content behind a pay wall, has a lot to do with it. But Schiller also cites some new forms of web content that are proving popular.
It’s becoming common nowadays for news organizations to put their videos on Youtube (e.g., NYTimes.com). That’s a smart thing, since it’s increasingly important to reach people with your content wherever they may be. They’re not always going to visit you at your website, but they’re increasingly spending time on social networks and social-media sites like Youtube. So meet them there.
Something that news organizations often miss, however, is sharing their photos on photo-sharing services. Just as you might have a strategy of sharing your videos on Youtube to reach that audience, you also should be feeding your news photos out to sites like Flickr. Continued
In an earlier item I mentioned how some corporate web content management systems lag behind open-source platforms in some ways. One thing I often notice with websites of major news organizations using proprietary CMS’s is that they lack “subscribe to comments” features — which is a common feature on many blogs and websites using open-source platforms, since there are plug-ins available to add this. (This website, built on Wordpress, features subscribe to comments, using a plug-in.)
In 
It’s becoming common nowadays for news organizations to put their videos on 
