Category Archives: Content

How To Write Timely Articles That People Will Share

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I’ve stumbled upon many a media website days, months and even years after the article has been published only to think, “hey this would have been funny or helpful or interesting back when it first came out”. So why didn’t I find the article back then? What went wrong?

• Awful article timing
• Awful article title
• Awful article URL

Awful Article Timing:

I write a fishing blog and if I don’t write about fish stocking or an upcoming fishing contest several days before the event (on the blog and on Facebook), I may as well not even write about it. People want to read relevantly timed articles and SHARE those articles.  Who wants to read and share OLD content?  Look at the top articles on Reddit right now. Are they newer articles?  Yes they are.  Look at what’s trending on Twitter right now. Are they newer articles and news stories? Yes they are. Is today a holiday? People will be searching for the holiday so go ahead and write about fishing a Royal caddis fly on the day of the royal wedding. Very punny.

Great Article Timing:

1. The news is covering a hurricane that hit nearby?  Write an article about how low pressure systems affect fish behavior and how fishermen can capitalize on it. (note. if the hurricane hit the lake you write about, then don’t write this article, you will look like a jerk. Instead write about how people can help clean up or volunteer.  Still relevant.)
2. The state is stocking a million fish in a lake you cover?  Write an article about the event days before so they are prepared to get out there and fish.

Awful Article Title:

1. Fishing Before and After Bad Weather (bad. doesn’t reference the actual news event everyone is buzzing about)
2.How Low Pressure Systems Affect Fish Behavior and How Fishermen Can Capitalize on it (bad. too wordy.)

Great Article Title:

1. Fishing Before and After a Hurricane (good. references the hurricane.)
2. Fish Behavior and Fishing Low Pressure Systems (good. indirectly references the hurricane.)

Awful Article URL vs Great Article URL:

Generally speaking, you can turn a great title into a great URL by just making all the words lowercase and chaining the words together with dashes. Keep it short and loaded with keywords.

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So there you have it. A super-simple primer on writing timely web articles that will get shared and get you traffic.

Write this down on a post-it note and stick it to your computer screen:

1. What’s the biggest news story today? Is today a holiday? Can you put a spin on it for your area of focus?  Write that article.

2. What’s the most shared article today on facebook / twitter / reddit?   Can you put a spin on it for your area of focus?  Write that article.

3. Write a kick ass article title AND url.

4. Make it easy to share and share it.

5. Stay on top of your website analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.

6. Repeat every day.

Not Exactly the 4th Estate

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A TechCrunch intern( under the age of 18) was found to have accepted a MacBook Air in exchange for a blog post – He got fired.

Here’s TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington, “On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.”

1.  I’m stunned that TechCrunch, one of the most influential and widely read blogs in the world would allow someone so young to create content for the site.

2.  I’m glad they fired him and deleted his content.

3.  One of the comments tips you off  to the fired intern’s  identity but he’s a minor so I’ll let you figure it out on your own.

4.  Another commentor links to an insightful article by Mark Cuban who breaks down the legality of “unpaid” internships. (tl;dr they’re illegal if your work benefits the company in any way).

5.  I’m now much more skeptical of some blog content. If there is more than one author on a blog site, I want to be directed to the bio of the author when I click on the author’s name, not to a list of all their other blog posts.  Seeking Alpha is one example of a good author link (for full disclosure I am a contributor to that site).

When I interview Don Carli about sustainability in news media a while back we had the following exchange, which is relevant.

RI- Will people still care where they get their news from?

DC- I don’t think people care so much about where their news comes from, but journalism… yes I believe they still care. Anyone can make news and anyone can report it, but journalism is different and that difference matters. For example, Twitter is fast becoming one the most important source of breaking news, but it isn’t journalism. I think a robust Fourth Estate capable of independent investigative journalism is essential. The first tenet of sustainability is having a political system that secures effective participation of its citizens in decision making. That is the role served by journalists and the media channels that deliver and store their content. …full article

Anyone can make news. ps i could use a new car ; )

Non-newspaper site dealing with inappropriate comments

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The tech blog Engadget has temporarily turned off commenting for a bit “until things cool down”.  Apparently the tone in the comments section has been completely out of control the last few days, it  “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable”.

The comments section dust up started when certain Engadget regulars became offended over this spoof article (Do you Hate Apple News?) which pretty much mocks readers for whining about reading too much Apple news.

Engadget is doing some cleaning during their down time right now banning trolls and spammers. But will it be enough?  What’s to prevent those people from coming back again? Remember when Kurt Greenbaum took it upon himself to police a vulgar post at the St. Louis Post Dispatch?  The internet can get ugly real quick.

Is it all the readers’ fault?  Maybe Engadet didn’t have to provoke their readers.  And how the heck can a baker’s dozen or so readers shut down the entire Engadget comments section.  Yikes!  I’m trying to think of what PRINT newspapers do and if there is one takeaway from how they handle input from the public it is that they attempt to tune it out and work above it.   Having said that, I really like metafilter’s solution ($5 lifetime membership), which, through the “broken window theory” builds a sense of community and increases self policing.

Personally I let akismet catch everything it thinks is spam / junk and I read through the posted comments to ensure they are legit. Then again Engadget gets 1.5million visitors per month and metaprinter is lucky to get 1.5thousand :(

Metaprinter Giveaway Winners Announced / What I Learned

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A number of people have asked me to write some reflections on running The Metaprinter Giveaway this past week.

Winners:

4Gig iPod – Jeff Emsweller. Jeff spent 22 year in the journalism field, starting as a photographer for the Rushville (IN) Republican newspaper. At Rushville he served as sports editor, assistant editor and then was named editor of the Batesville (IN) Herald Tribune. Jeff also served as editor of the Greensburg (IN) Daily News and then as Publisher of Greensburg, Rushville and Batesville.

Jeff has won numerous state and national awards from writing, photography and layout and in 1989, he was honored to have a fire photo submitted and considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Although he did not win, he still treasures the documentation received regarding that nomination.
Jeff is presently the marketing manager for an auto body repair shop with two locations in Southeastern Indiana. “My passion remains for the newspaper industry”.

1Gig iPod - H. J. Mann. H. J. is the Vice President of Financial services sales Firethorn LLC, a Qualcomm company. H. J. has 15 years of experience in technology and business development. He has held leadership roles in leading organizations such as Acxiom, Epsilon, and DoubleClick. H. J. lives in Dallas with his wife and daughter.  Thank you Robert!  www.firethornmobile.com

$20 Amazon.com Gift Certificate – Maikel Neris.  Maikel is a 27 years old Brazilian web designer and WordPress developer. Thanks for the prize!  www.maikelneris.com.br

Results:

Over the course of the 4 days we ran our giveaway there were 39 on site entries (and a total of 108 entries via twitter, linkedin, and email.  But those don’t count.  Sorry).  RSS subscriber numbers remained unchanged over the week (in a normal week it goes up by a handful) however site visits were up ~5%. Pageviews up ~10%. Pages per visit up ~5%. and Bounce rate fell ~11%.

The week wasn’t a massive success in terms of driving traffic – however that wasn’t my overall goal. The main thing that I wanted to do over the week was to add to the sense of community on the site – to have some fun – to get a few lurkers participating and to thank readers for being a part of Metaprinter. In this regard the week was a big success with many first time comments and a lot of thank you emails from readers who seemed to enjoy it.

Thanks again!  Any Ideas for the Next Giveaway?

Newspaper Publishers – Disallow:/

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Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It

Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.

For more on this:

User-agent: *
The asterisk (*) or wildcard represents a special value and means any robot.

Disallow:
The Disallow: line without a / (forward slash) tells the robots that they can index the entire site. Continue reading →

Using Alexa and Wordle To Improve News Site Performance

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Is your newspaper doing what you think it’s doing?  Lets say you operate in New Jersey and run NJ.com.  That site pans itself as “everything NJ”.  Does this hold up looking at the data?

ALEXA:
I did the breakdown for you below.  Click the field you want to change for your publication.  We’re using my home state of NJ so we’re using the following:

Top > News > Newspapers > Regional > United States > New Jersey

We find out that there are 44 newspaper websites in this category and they are listed by popularity below.  I show the first 5 as an example.  Clicking the title goes to the Alexa data, clicking the url goes to the site. Continue reading →

WashingtonPost.com Membership Wall

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Has anyone else noticed the membership wall that the Washington Post website Washingtonpost.com has erected?  Visit the site, click ANY headline or navigation link and you are redirected to the page below.  It wasn’t always like this and I don’t like it at all.  Every time I just click off, and visit NYTimes.com or some other news site where the info is still free.

If I really want to see a particular article I can back into it by copying and pasting the article title into Google news and then clicking through the search result.  This works for WSJ paid content too which makes me wonder if these large publisher have an agreement with Google, but at the same time are angry about it.

What has been your experience on their site?  I remember being able to read national headlines without logging in.  So while others are going to paywalls, The Washington Post is moving to a membership wall? Maybe just for the time being. I’m hoping this is an experiment that will transform into something better.  I will never create an account and then log in to any newspaper’s website just to read one article and I suspect that others will not either.

UPDATED ON APRIL 9-2009

Why are they doing this?  When newspaper websites do what the washingtonpost site is doing, they are looking for ways to behaviorally target their readers and charge higher CPM’s to their advertisers. Continue reading →

Stewart Goes Back to Fart Noises, Cramer Removes “Expert” from Title

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Jon Stewart ends the interview by challenging Jim Cramer to remove words “financial expert and In Cramer We Trust” from his show. He also suggest that Cramer gets “back to fundamentals of reporting” so that he (Jon Stewart) can get back to making “fart noises and funny faces for a living! Cramer agrees, and they shake hands on it. Will it be so?

I think what we are seeing from this particular feud are two things:
1- The beginning of a class war between the rich and powerful VS. everyone else.
2- A wider realization that the internet paradigm is real and affecting how people learn things, exchange ideas, and broadcast those ideas.  If traditional media does not step up and show the “everyone else” category from point 1 that they are relevant and trustworthy, expect their value (to readers and advertisers) to continue to plummet.

Paywall? Copyrights? Meet The New Elvis

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Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship -from 43Folders

“Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And,
eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman,
and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed
from Legal down to A&R.”

He’s probably right, but it’s also a little sad.

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism – Blogging for Journalists Best Practices

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Show Name: Blogging for Journalists: Best Practices from SreeTips.com
Date / Length: 2/7/2008 3:30 PM – 1 hr

Tips and advice for print and TV journalists who are now blogging. Topics: Basics of blogging; how to get started; building traffic; building your blog’s brand; making money; taking it to the next level. SPEAKERS: Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School professor and dean of student affairs & WNBC-TV tech reporter AND David Kohn, Baltimore Sun’s health and science reporter [blogging at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/maryland/doctor/blog/ ]

Prof. Sree Sreenivasan | sree@sree.net
Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
Technology reporter, WNBC-TV and WNBC.com
http://www.sree.net | http://www.sreetips.com

Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!

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Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!

New York, NY, January 12, 2009—Thirteen winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards have been announced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

WFAA-TV, Dallas, Byron Harris & Brett Shipp
Money for Nothing, A Passing Offense, The Buried and the Dead

ABC News, Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger
Nightline, The Other War: Afghanistan

All Things Considered, NPR, Melissa Block & Robert Siegel
Coverage of the Chengdu Earthquake

California Newsreel, San Francisco, & Vital Pictures, Boston
Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? on PBS

Chicago Public Radio, PRI, NPR, Alex Blumberg & Adam Davidson
This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money

CNN & Christiane Amanpour
God’s Warriors

Current TV & Christof Putzel
From Russia with Hate

HBO, Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang
Cinemax Reel Life: The Blood of Yingzhou District

NPR & Laura Sullivan
All Things Considered: Sexual Abuse of Native American Women

Oregon Public Broadcasting
The Silent Invasion

Safari Media, ITVS, Chris Sheridan & Patty Kim
Independent Lens, Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story on PBS

WJLA-TV, Washington, DC, & Roberta Baskin
Drilling for Dollars: Children’s Dentistry Investigation

WTVT-TV, Tampa, & Doug Smith
Small Town Justice

Quality journalism and investigative reporting without newspapers? Yes, it can happen. More info about the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia awards

Targeted Newspapers Outperforming Overall Newspaper Industry

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This brief article focuses on Daily Circulation for performance analysis. The Circulation Figures come from annual ABC reports from 2004 to 2008.

Industry targeted business and finance newspapers – IBD, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times are outperforming the industry. All three grew print circulation in the last 3 years and all three are focused on delivering specific financial information to their readers. (note, IBD and FT are off this chart both having USA circulation figures of about 150,000 daily) Continue reading →