Mindy McAdams adds value to my post on aggregation

I highly recommend that you read Mindy McAdams’ post about aggregation and curation.

The post cites (and praises — thanks, Mindy!) my blog post last year on aggregation guidelines.

I said aggregators should link (Mindy did), attribute (ditto) and add value (certainly, especially with three strong examples). Excellent aggregation by Mindy. One indication that this aggregation is good journalism and not theft: I feel honored, not ripped off.

Aggregation and curation in journalism (with big HT to @stevebuttry) – http://t.co/xWbql818Sr

— Mindy McAdams (@macloo) September 7, 2013

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Twitter for Newsrooms: helpful but disappointing

I don’t have time to write a thorough analysis of the new Twitter for Newsrooms guide that Twitter published yesterday for journalists, but I’ll share some initial observations.

The guide is helpful. It promotes Twitter’s Advanced Search, and it always surprises me how many journalists don’t know how to search to find tweets about the topics they are reporting on. The guide encourages journalists to use Topsy for archival search, which I had forgotten about (Twitter Search doesn’t go back more than about a week). The guide is worth a look, especially if you aren’t using Twitter much, and probably has a few helpful tips if you’re experienced with Twitter.

But frankly, I was disappointed with Twitter’s guide. It strikes me as more promotional than helpful (when being more helpful would actually be better promotion, especially with as tough a crowd as journalists). The guide promises “more to come,” which is good, because it’s light on tips for crowdsourcing, covering breaking news, verification and discussion of ethical issues. This should become a place for sharing case studies of how journalists use Twitter.

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How the crowd can save your career

The crowd can save your journalism career.

I encourage any journalist to read Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton’s message to last week’s WAN/IFRA International Newsroom Summit: How The Crowd Saved Our Company. (I also encourage media executives to read John’s message, but I’m writing here about individual journalists seeking career success in a time of great upheaval.)

I want to suggest how individual journalists can learn from the JRC experience that John shared. I won’t belabor what John said about how the newspaper model is broken and can’t be fixed. I’ve said that plenty of times myself, and if you’re still in denial about that, you’re not ready for the rest of his message or mine. John concluded that discussion with this important point:

You don’t transform from broken.

You don’t tinker or tweak.

You start again anew and build from the ground up.

John was providing advice for his fellow executives for building their organizations from the ground up. I’ll focus on advice for the journalist hoping to make yourself a valuable asset for such a starting-anew organization.

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Digital storytelling and mobile strategy

Update: I’ve added some digital storytelling links to the end of this post (more to come).

Update: Thanks to Steve Klein for curating today’s digital storytelling examples provided by my tweeps. And thanks to Mindy McAdams (I lost count of how many examples she provided) and others who responded with examples. I will be blogging more on this topic, with links to examples in the blog and sorted by topic. But right now I am unwinding in the canyons of southern Utah.

Update: The workshop is over. Thanks to all who shared examples. I will update later with links to the examples, but you should be able to see most of them on the Twitter hashtag or the liveblog replay.

I’m leading a workshop today on digital storytelling and mobile strategy for a meeting of editors of Pioneer Newspapers.

I will be asking on Twitter for examples of different types of digital stories, using the hashtag #digitalstory. I will be collecting those examples in this liveblog:

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Digital media offer varied writing tools and opportunities

I’ll be speaking today to Steve Klein‘s “Writing Across Media” class at George Mason University.

I’ve written lots about traditional writing in the style of newspaper stories and those styles and issues remain important. But digital tools and platforms present a broad range of challenges and opportunities for writers, which I will focus on here and in my presentation to the class. The best way to learn each of these writing techniques is to practice it. I will offer a few tips and link to some helps (I appreciate other links, if you can offer them in the comments). Some good places to learn about writing for different media are Mindy McAdams’ blog or Mark Briggs’ books. Some digital writing tools and types I will encourage the students to study and try:

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Bloggers share lots of advice

In my early days as a journalism trainer, I made my mark by compiling helpful handouts. I thought I had a lot of good ideas on the topics I trained on and I compiled tip sheets that people told me they found helpful.

That approach (and sharing those handouts liberally online at No Train, No Gain) built my reputation in the journalism training field more than anything I did. So when I decided to do a blogging workshop this week, my first inclination was to develop a handout with all my tips and advice on blogging. I could have done that and almost did, but two things held me back:

• I’m not that experienced at blogging and still learning a lot myself. I feared that my own advice might be too shallow and obvious (though I’m amazed at how often people express gratitude for advice that I consider obvious, so I will include some of mine).

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