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.

That’s excellent advice for the individual. I’d also suggest that it’s good for the company, so much so that company leaders should require that (or at least strongly encourage it) from reporters.

In today’s media-crowded world, no newspaper or TV news show can exist as an island, hoping online users come for a visit. It’s important for journalists at mainstream news organizations to reach out in order to get picked up elsewhere online.

Niles explains:

“Most established news organizations remain clueless about how to promote their work in the social medium of the Internet. Make it your personal responsibility to do better with your work. … Build a list of readers and sources to message whenever you publish a new piece. Facebook and other social networks provide an easy way to start with this. Just create a page and invite readers and sources to become your ‘friends.’

“Give readers easy-to-use tools to forward and share your work. Link to other sources and politely invite other writers and sites that cover your beat to link to you, from time to time.

“When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, a few fellow online editors would hit Google to find discussion boards and fan sites covering people and movies the entertainment section was featuring the next day. We’d e-mail those webmasters links to our stories even before they’d hit the front page of latimes.com. And we often found that those sites sent those stories more traffic than other pages on the Times’ website did.”

Excellent advice. A social media strategy can bring in significant traffic to your website.

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.

So for today’s tip, I’d like to encourage local newspapers to create modern-day Herb Caens. Today’s local-happenings and -rumors columnists will be better equipped than Caen was, I think, for getting the pulse of the town. A popular Caen-like columnist will be inundated with tips and rumors via e-mail. He/she will, just as Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub does, track the many local bloggers and establish relationships with them. He/she will monitor local online discussion boards looking for tips. There are so many potential online sources nowadays for a Caen-inspired columnist to dig up new local tidbits.

Today’s Herb Caens will be promoted grandly in print and online, and perhaps do video or podcasts. With a significant marketing campaign, Caen-like celebrity is possible. And so will come online user traffic and ad revenues.

Pardon me for getting nostalgic for a moment, but I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 1993, and part of that time was spent as a copy editor on the features desk. So I was one of the crew who edited Caen’s daily column, which was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter; his assistant keyed it into the paper’s computers before sending it to us for editing. I’m fairly sure that Herb wouldn’t know what to make of all the technology that’s invaded newspapers in the last decade. I doubt he’d be using it.

But Caen is relevant today. Someone just needs to do a more modern version of him.

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. Especially when a big news story breaks, many online users now know to go to the photo sites to see images — mostly from amateurs. But pro journalism outfits also should be in on this.

At my previous company (driven by user content), we wrote a script that automatically put photos submitted to our sites on Flickr, tagged with our website name and with links back to our site. A nice number of people discovered us on Flickr, then became users. Here’s an example of photos on Flickr fed from YourClimbing.com. (My business partner and I shut down the company last year, so the feed has been shut off.)

This strikes me as one of those “no-brainer” ideas. Yet few news companies do it yet.

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.)

This is important functionality for any news website; if yours doesn’t already have it, I urge you to consider adding subscribe to comments. It’s simply a great way to keep conversations going. When a user participates in a comment thread attached to an article or other content, he has the option to subscribe to the thread and receive notices when other people respond or participate in the thread.

Indeed, to me it’s annoying when this option isn’t available on a site. Unless I remember to check back, follow-up responses to my own that may be relevant to me — or directed squarely at me — are invisible.

But best serving the user isn’t the only reason to add subscribe to comments. Comment threads can become much longer when subscribe-to-comments is available. Ergo, significant traffic gains.

Of course, there are some cautions:

• Make it super easy for a user to turn off e-mail alerts. If a thread gets too busy, a subscribed user could become annoyed by an onslaught of comment alerts.
• Make a daily digest of alerts available as an option. Then on a busy comment thread, a user will just get one notification a day.
• If yours is a site where comment threads routinely get extremely long, subscribe-to-comments is still a good thing. But you have to design alerts such that a user won’t sign up and then get 100 e-mails in the next 24 hours. Some sort of “governor” that automatically kicks into digest mode after 5 alerts are sent within 24 hours, for example, might work.