Workshops on community engagement, beat blogging, Digital First workflow and metrics

I will be leading workshops this week for Digital First journalists in Connecticut. You are welcome to watch them by livestream.

The schedule and topics (all times are Eastern time, all sessions lasting roughly 90 minutes):

• Community engagement, 4:30 p.m. today (Monday), yes starting very soon. You can watch the livestream and ask questions on a live chat.
• Digital First workflow, noon Tuesday (watch the livestream and ask questions on a live chat).
• Beat blogging, 3 p.m. Tuesday (watch the livestream and ask questions on a live chat).
• Introduction to Metrics, 4 p.m. Wednesday (watch the livestream and ask questions on a live chat).

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My 2008 post: Google doesn’t fear outbound links; neither should you

This is a blog post I wrote March 5, 2008, on my Training Tracks blog at the American Press Institute. The original is no longer online, but I’m resurrecting this because Elaine Clisham referred to it on Twitter yesterday, prompting my post this morning about why linking is good journalism. I have not checked the links to see if they are still good. Given the topic, I think I should leave them in this piece either way.

Some questions about journalism innovation stump me. This one didn’t.

A person who’s trying to help journalists move into the digital world was trying to persuade some newspaper editors and writers to “build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can’t meet the need.” The editors were appalled and asked for “hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea.”

You want hard data? Here’s some hard data: Google.

This need by too many journalists and newspaper executives to control how our audience spends their time is laughable except that it’s so maddening. Our users control how they spend their time. They always did and they always will. We need to give them value and links have value.

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4 reasons why linking is good journalism; 2 reasons why linking is good business

I was traveling yesterday, so I came in late to a discussion about outbound links. A tweet from Elaine Clisham brought the discussion to my attention:

You guys! @stevebuttry wrote about outbound linking like *six* years ago! The fact we're still talking about this is exactly the problem.—
Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) February 27, 2012

Actually, it was about four years ago, I think. But thanks for remembering, Elaine. Alas, that blog post for the American Press Institute, where Elaine and I were colleagues, is no longer available online. I will try to find it somewhere and resurrect it for archival purposes. (Update: I found and reposted my 2008 post: Google doesn’t fear outbound links; neither should you.) I don’t have time to pull in all the tweets of a really long Twitter discussion, but Mathew Ingram curated some of them in a blog post asking, “Is linking polite, or is it a core value of journalism?“, prompted by MG Siegler’s rant about the Wall Street Journal’s refusal to link when he beat them on a story for TechCrunch.

If you’re interested in the discussion that followed that post, check yesterday’s tweets by Mathew, Charles Arthur and Caitlin Fitzsimmons and this 2010 post by Jonathan Stray. Update: A comment below points out this piece by Felix Salmon that covers linking and attribution at length. I don’t agree with it all, but it’s well argued and reasonable.

This tweet from Fitzsimmons seems representative of the linking-is-just-a-courtesy viewpoint:

Its different if you verify information yourself, something journos usually do and bloggers sometimes do. Then it's merely courteous to link—
Caitlin Fitzsimmons (@niltiac) February 27, 2012

My contribution will be these four reasons why linking is good journalism (which may somewhat echo Jonathan’s and Mathew’s posts, because they are both right):

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A workshop on engaging your community

I will be leading a workshop today for Digital First journalists in Connecticut on engaging the community. I will cover many of the points in this 2011 blog post. Here are the slides I will use (though it’s going to be a free-flowing discussion, so I may not get to them all and may use some out of order):

 

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A workshop on leading a Digital First newsroom

I will be leading a workshop today for Digital First Connecticut editors on leading a Digital First newsroom. We will discuss many of the points I made in the Dec. 22 blog post linked above. Here are my slides for the workshop, which will largely be an open discussion addressing the challenges these editors are facing.

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