Hustle on earthquake story brings traffic from search and social

Kaitlyn Yeager

Hustle has always been important in journalism. Its importance has grown as news breaks quickly and search engines and social media bring traffic to the first media outlets to report a story.

Kaitlyn Yeager‘s hustle in quickly posting a story on tonight’s New England earthquake — and smartly making it easy for search engines to find it — brought more than 16,000 views to the story in just over the first couple hours.

After hearing about the swift success, I asked Kaitlyn, a member of the Digital First Media Connecticut breaking news team, to explain what she did and how. She responded in an email I have edited lightly:

Honestly, I think the biggest things were speed and search-engine optimization. Matt DeRienzo (DFM’s Connecticut Editor, who is from Maine, where the earthquake was centered) emailed that his Facebook friends were reporting it, and I clicked to Twitter and saw my feed blowing up.

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Getting started on Twitter: #twutorial advice for a friend

A friend who hasn’t used Twitter much asked some pretty basic questions that I thought might make a couple of #twutorial posts.

This post will focus on getting started using Twitter. Tomorrow I’ll cover event promotion.

I appreciate when people candidly ask for help, so I have edited my friend’s email to protect his identity. He was referred to a couple of specific event, but I have edited the references to make them more generic.

I’m afraid I’m one of those who has trouble grasping the concept of Twitter so I wonder if you’d take some time out to deal with challenged folks, such as me.

I have a personal twitter account but have contributed very little to it except to promote a journalism conference. Haven’t a clue if it registered with many because my followers number the fingers on my right hand. And maybe a few on my left hand.

I do follow a few tweets but infrequently. A couple of baseball players, some about the news biz. But it’s not convenient. I have to be sitting at my desktop and go through the steps to see the activity on my account. By then, I’ve lost interest. So, how do I see tweets in relatively real time? I do not have a smartphone (is that it?).

Besides my desktop, I have an android-based tablet (Iconia Acer) based on wifi, an iPod Touch (wifi), and a simple cellphone which I’m not keen about loading up with dataplans to see twitterers. Ergo, I have to work pretty hard at reading tweets. Is that the way it is?

So, that’s the basic situation I’m in.

Now, I want to set up an account for another event. It is coming to the time when we must start promotion. I think I know how to set up an account but if you could give me a “101” on doing that, I’d appreciate it. Then, how do I let all those editors, reporters, publishers know about my tweets. Do they find me? Do I find them? If so, how?

We’re in the process of modernizing the website and it will be equipped for twitter feeds but I’d like to get a head start on it.

Excellent questions, all. I’ll start with the Twitter 101, then do a separate post on event promotion.

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