SlideShare: a niche social site that extends your reach

Update: Now the #twutorial slides are on SlideShare’s “most popular” page, with more than 14,000 views.

SlideShare ranks way behind Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and lots of other social tools in the social media pecking order. But some slides I posted there last week (above) got more views than all but one blog post I ever wrote. And a slide show I posted last year got more views than any blog post I ever wrote.

My experience with SlideShare shows how even second-tier or third-tier social tools offer important engagement opportunities that journalists, educators and trainers should keep in mind.

I am as likely as anyone to make fun of PowerPoint presentations. I’m more likely to be annoyed by someone who reads his slides to me than I am to remember a speaker’s slide presentation. I’ve never browsed SlideShare myself to look at others’ slides and I seldom browse very far into a deck when I find one online with a blog post or linked to from a tweet or Facebook update. I’m not the audience of SlideShare, but I certainly am a user.

I believe in results. And SlideShare metrics show that slides work for some people. So I keep using slides in my workshops and SlideShare keeps showing those slides to far more people than my workshops reach (my 130 presentations and other documents have more than 220,000 views on SlideShare).

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Don’t let obstacles become excuses (republished from 2005)

Since I wrote yesterday about overcoming obstacles, I thought this would be a good time to republish this post from my Training Tracks blog at the American Press Institute. I think it’s the first time where I discussed this in writing, though I know I have repeated the point in writing and speaking many time. It’s one of the principles of journalism practice that I believe most strongly.

I edited lightly to update, adding a few links, but have not checked the links I published at the time to see if they are still active, though I think I should leave them in either way. This was published originally Aug. 16, 2005. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed with the writing; I tried to tie two points together and probably should have addressed them separately. But this is an archival post, not a rewrite.

The post refers to some other posts about computer-assisted reporting. I will republish those posts soon. The post refers to a comment by Iqbal Tamimi on one of those posts. Because the original post is no longer online, I can no longer find the full comment.

I figured I was done writing about journalists and computers for a while after three posts on the subject in a month’s time. But then I heard Sree Sreenivasan. And then Iqbal Tamimi wrote me. So I’m addressing the topic one more time.

I’ve read Sree’s “Web Tips” columns for a few years now. He wrote once about the “No Train, No Gain” web site that I help Dolf Els run along with some other newsroom trainers. After Sree interviewed me for that column, we’ve kept in occasional touch by e-mail and we finally met in June, when I spoke at a conference of the South Asian Journalists Association, of which Sree is a founder. I finally heard Sree train journalists last week at API’s seminar for news editors and copy desk chiefs.

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Generations in the Desert: A response from one who’s wandering

My friend Sree Sreenivasan made me cringe when he referred to me as a “digital media expert” in his review of TBD‘s launch.

The truth is that I’m still fumbling around in TBD’s content management system. The digital natives I work with could sit through one or two sessions of CMS training and take off in a sprint. I need time to stumble around, make mistakes, ask questions, have someone show me how to do something a second or third time. But when I received CMS training, I was busy preparing for the launch and our previews for the news media (blog post on that experience coming soon). I didn’t have much time for practicing what I’d just learned. And my colleagues were so busy testing the CMS and fixing bugs that I didn’t want to slow them down to answer the old guy’s questions. Some expert, huh?

The reason I am confessing how old I feel at times in my youthful newsroom instead of boasting about how these whippersnappers help keep me young (thankfully, they often do) is that one of the brightest young whippersnappers in journalism has just written one of the smartest things I’ve seen about the generational divide in the news business. Before you finish reading this, read Generations in the Desert by DigiDave (David Cohn). This is a response to Dave, so this will make more sense if you read him first, even though I will quote a long passage:

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Resources for journalists using Twitter

Journalism professor Julie Posetti has compiled a helpful analysis of the use of Twitter by political journalists in Australia, The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtags and Australian Political Journalism.

I highly recommend reading it and will deliberately not quote or summarize it extensively here because you should just read it. I will. though, note her summary of the various ways political journalists in Australia are using Twitter:

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