New ways of reporting: introducing the latest MMJ masterclass

We've concentrated a good deal in MMJ Masterclasses on how to reach out to new audiences with the effective use of a wide range of social media.

Why did we put such an emphasis on that?

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The goal was always to find new readers who won’t get to know of you through conventional, old-media means but who, once they do discover you, will appreciate – and maybe even pay for - what you are doing back on your branded websites.

Once they are on those branded websites, we want to really impress them – and this masterclass is about how to impress those visitors and convert them into regular users. You'll find it in full here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/1484

We look at how to make that website as effective as it can be at turning casual visitors into committed and regular consumers of our content.

So here are the things I’m going to focus on…

They are all, really, attempts to answer the same question: how best do we create, collate, curate and structure rich content for the web?

I’ve got three answers, or possible answers, to that question. They are: something called the Digital Media Pyramid, something else called topic pages and, finally a new take on the much-derided blog called beat blogging.

I’ve been talking with Ben Davis, lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Mass Media at Rutgers university in New Jersey.

Ben has thought as deeply, and written as perceptively, as anyone about the inadequacy of the inverted pyramid inherited from traditional media.

The Digital Media Pyramid

He’s come up with what he calls the Digital Media Pyramid, an approach that takes the old who, what, when etc, and turns it on its head – literally, as he has developed an upright rather than inverted pyramid.

He’s tried to invent something that fits the modern online journalism world, where much of our reporting involves gathering material from other sources, and where we must present stills, audio, video and social media alongside text.

We’ll be taking an in-depth look at the Digital Media Pyramid, and trying it out.

The Topic Page

I also want to look at long-form journalism through topic pages.

It was always the received wisdom that we couldn’t do long on the web.

That view is changing, with significant efforts to invent a long form – topic pages - that will work online.

A form which, rather than turning our new audiences off, will actually give them what they want – perhaps what they never knew they wanted until they came upon it: depth, breadth, authority, but in a way that presents weighty issues, dense analysis, in a way that works online.

Jeff Jarvis, journalism prof at CUNY in New York, sees the article as no longer being the main building block of journalism. He says its place has been taken by the topic page: “The topic page that covers a story as an ongoing process rather than as a finished product.”

The topic page being a place where, rather than just the latest shallow dip into a big story, you get that story in all its depth and complexity – the deep end not the shallow end of traditional online news content.

The Beat Blog

Finally, there is the re-imagining of the blog - long derided, perfectly fairly, as a lame version of the newspaper column.

The BBC’s Robert Peston (among others) has an approach to blogging, the Beat Blog, that puts it at the heart of everything he does.

Dazzling examples of layer reporting

Then there is what Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, has been saying about how you can layer reporting between the different platforms at our disposal.

He says: “Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media.”

He’s come up with a list of journalists who are pioneers in this field, and we take a close look at what they are doing to see what we can learn from them.

Further reading

If you’ve been a subscriber to Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide over the 12 months since its launch you might have seen a series of linked masterclasses which went through the logic of finding new audiences, and the techniques to employ when attempting that.

If you want to check out the previous posts in this area they are:

Web 3.0 and Social Media http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/299

How to master Facebook and Twitter http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/441

Search (and everything else) is going social http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/524

Going mobile http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/633

And what comes next…

This masterclass is also linked thematically with the three that follow it:

Masterclass 23: Location-based content for local journalism

Masterclass 24: Curating user-generated content

Masterclass 25: Real-time reporting. How social media can be used to cover breaking stories

Projects

I'd like to invite you to try the new reporting techniques outlined in this masterclass for yourself.

As you work your way through the modules you'll find enough information on the Digital Media Pyramid, on topic pages and beat blogs to introduce them into your reporting.

There are projects at the end of each module with suggestions for what you might do.

Let me know how you get on; use the contact buttons or the comment facilities at any of the MMJ platforms listed here

Next: The Digital Media Pyramid

New ways of creating, structuring and presenting content online

Communicators put a lot of effort these days into reaching out to new audiences.

We work hard on developing our social media presences. We do our best to find those audiences through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest. 

Our goal is that, by reaching out like this, we will engage with audiences that are less likely to find our print and online products, our TV and radio shows, our books and DVDs, through conventional means.

So, naturally, a lot of the focus among multimedia journalists who’d like to have a job tomorrow is to create content that works on these various social media platforms.

But, as journalists, we also need to pay as much attention as we can to what we are going to offer those new audiences, if and when we attract them back to our branded websites and print products.

What should we be doing there to clinch the deal? To get them to engage with us as regular readers and contributors?

That’s what I’ll be focusing on in the next MMJ masterclass, which will go live on February 26 but which I wanted to preview here with a few of the thoughts behind what I’ll be doing.

If you’ve been a subscriber to Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide over the 12 months since its launch you might have seen a series of linked masterclasses which went through the logic of finding new audiences, and the techniques to employ when attempting that.

The story so far...

What we’ll look at in Masterclass 22 is the other half that equation.

If you want to check out the previous posts in this area they are:

Web 3.0 and Social Media http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/299

How to master Facebook and Twitter http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/441

Search (and everything else) is going social http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/524

Going mobile http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/633

So this next masterclass will be all about what we should be doing on our websites to hook that proportion of the new audience, the part that values us and what we do best: depth, breadth, richness, authority.

So here are the things I’m going to focus on.

They are all, really, atempts to answer the same question: how best do we create, and structure, rich content for the web?

I’ve been talking with Ben Davis, lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Mass Media at Rutgers.

Ben has thought as deeply, and written as perceptively, as anyone about the inadequacy of the inverted pyramid inherited from traditional media.

The Digital Media Pyramid

He’s come up with what he calls the Digital Media Pyramid, an approach that takes the old who, what, when etc, and turns it on it’s head – literally, as he has developed an upright rather than inverted pyramid.

He says of it: “The Digital Media Pyramid addresses the demands of today's journalists who could be writing a television, radio or print story and nearly simultaneously be required to re-purpose their work for a digital Internet audience.

“The Digital Media Pyramid does not replace the analogue-based Inverted Pyramid. It simply enhances it by bringing it into a 21st century digitally dominated information universe. The Digital Media Pyramid also commands an immediate understanding and seeks to come up with a formula of where multimedia, links and other staples of online journalism fit in to our storytelling.”

We’ll be taking an in-depth look at that.

I also want to look at long-form journalism. It was always the received wisdom that we didn’t do long on the web.

That view is changing, with significant efforts to invent a long form that will work online. Which, rather than turning our new audiences off, will actually give them what they want – perhaps what they never knew they wanted until they came upon it: depth, breadth, authority, but in a way that presents weighty issues, dense analysis, in a way that works online.

So there’s the Google Living Stories project, a co-production with newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post that didn’t entirely come off but which began to give us a template for how long form might work.

The Topic Page

Also fascinating in this area is Jeff Jarvis on Topic Pages. Jeff, journalism prof at CUNY, sees the article as no longer being the main building block of journalism, saying its place has been taken by the topic page::“The topic page that covers a story as an ongoing process rather than as a finished product.”

The topic page being a place where, rather than just the latest shallow dip into a big story, you get that story in all its depth and complexity – the deep end not the shallow end of traditional online news content.

Finally, there is the re-imagining of the blog - long derided, perfectly fairly, as a lame version of the newspaper column.

The Beat Blog

The BBC’s Robert Peston (among others) has an approach to blogging, the Beat Blog, that puts his blog at the heart of everything he does.

Then there is what Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, has been saying about the potential of running, linked blogs, with “the most specialist material in the blog (linked to yet more specialist source material on the web – and the most general material in newsprint.)

He goes on: “Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media.”

So what I hope to do is draw the strands in all of the above, and more, together. To build these thoughts into a new strategy for creating, structuring and presenting online content.

And after all that...

Here are some of the other topics we’ll tackle in MMJ over the spring:

Masterclass 23: Location-based content for local journalism

How to build applications on a range of emerging platforms

Masterclass 24: Curating user-generated content

How to cover a major story by blending your own material with that from other professional and citizen journalists

Masterclass 25: Real-time reporting

How social media can be used to cover breaking stories

How to build a journalism business: free interactive course

Yoodoo is a free, interactive learning website that takes you through the whole process of deciding what your business should be, testing and refining your concept.
They do it with short videos and quizzes, taking you through 40 steps to hone your ideas. It’s an impressive free programme that gives you all the material you’d normally expect to pay for in a business manual or ebook.
You could use it to go through the steps that entrepreneurial journalism students at City University New York complete as they begin a business (details here) but while Cuny is about starting the business, Yoodoo goes further along the path and looks at running it as well.
In addition to identifying your product or service and finding your customers, it deals with the nitty gritty of budgeting, sales, marketing, accounting, costs and break-even, Vat, employment law, finding offices and much more.
I’ve taken the course. Here’s a video taster of what they put me through, in a segment about web marketing, and how I got on.

Working on your elevator pitch

You'll find a full outline of how to create that all-important elevator pitch, and your own journalism business, in Masterclass 12 of Multimedia journalism: A Practical Guide here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/711

Today's essential reading for journalists

Every journalist needs quick access to their most important sources of information.

One of the most effective ways of ensuring you don’t miss anything is to set up feeds from those key sites, individuals and publications from which you get the most news, information and ideas.

I’ve bundled the RSS feeds that I find most valuable into a combined feed. It appears to the right of this post.

You’ll want to make your own, tailored to the work that you do. Actually, you may well want several, focusing on different subjects.

If you are following Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide and are a journalism student, you will want a feed for each of the publications you are creating as part of your course, and  for any reporting beats you have been assigned.

My beat is multimedia journalism and I suggest that, if you want to keep up to speed with developments in the media, it should be one of your beats too. So you might find my feed useful as a starting point. You can preview it by going here, and then subscribe if you find it useful.

There are 17 feeds in my bundle. Not all of them post every day, but some of them post several times a day. I have set up this bundle to give me what has been posted just that day, hence it’s called Today’s Essential Reading.

Here’s what I value each of them for

10,000 Words

This is one of my top three sources on innovation and learning. I like it because, in the words of 10,000 Words, it is: “a resource for journalists and web and technology enthusiasts to learn the tools that are shaping digital journalism. The site offers examples, resources, and tutorials of both new and established technologies used to enhance journalism.”

Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis is journalism professor at City University of New York, one of the very best educators, and another of my top three. He understands better than just about anyone how multimedia and social media affect journalism. He’s also very good on entrepreneurial journalism and much more besides.

Dan Blank

Dan Blank specialises in B2B and is way in the lead on how this sector can keep up with web developments and cope with profound challenges to survival. He offers great, detailed advice in long posts on, for example, optimising the use of Twitter and Facebook, and the future of magazines. He completes my top three.

I also have three most-trusted sources of news about journalism:

Roy Greenslade

Jon Slattery

Journalism.co.uk

The latter is also invaluable for tips on new developments in multimedia and how to learn about and use them

I could easily add the also-excellent Press Gazette and Holdthefrontpage to this list. Check them out, you might prefer them.

The rest of my 17 have their own specialisms

Adam Sherk

Expert information on developments in social media

Currybet.net

Martin Belham’s blog. He’s part of the Guardian’s web development team and is very good on newspapers and the future of news and information online

Cybersoc.com

Robin Hamman devises, implements and manages social media projects, particularly within broadcasting. He posts daily clusters of links to posts on a wide range of topics. A recent post covered geotagging, coping with negative feedback on social media sites, community management, new tools for journalists, and paywalls, among others. A great way to survey a lot of potential leads swiftly.

Innovations in Newspapers

Does as it says.

Internet marketing and Social Media Connections

Good on social media and internet marketing. Publishers have to get much better at marketing themselves through social media, and thereby reaching out to new audiences, and this blog covers this area well.

Martin Stabe

Martin Stabe’s the online editor of Retail Week magazine. He posts a daily bundle of links to things he has spotted across the media.

OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Part of the Knight Digital Media Centre , which “is dedicated to helping good journalists and good journalism succeed in the 21st century” through training. So it helps the working journalist get better, by keeping them abreast of developments and demonstrating how they can be used.

Paid Content UK

Covers “the UK’s digital economy” under headings including digital Britain, newspapers and the BBC.

Reinventing the newsroom

Explores the challenges faced by newspapers in the digital age

TechCruch Europe

Is “a blog covering Web 2.0 and mobile start-ups” edited by Mike Butcher.

How do you make a bundle?

I did it in Google Reader. If you have found other software that does good bundles, feel free to share by adding a comment.