The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles recently delivered a speech in Singapore on the modern newsroom's challenges.

He advocates using technological understanding to build a social network to drive audience and revenue --- a basic view of almost every news manager these days --- but provides a good guide on how to get there.

Some of his ideas:

1. Get to know major bloggers in the community.
2. Get to know those blogging on your major beats.
3. Keep a list of Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers.
4. Use mathematicians to understand who in your community is most influential.

On those four points, our newsroom scores four for four. We have connections with the bloggers, the specialists, the big Tweeters and with NowPublic.com to create an annual influencers list.
 
 
The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles has an exhaustive list of advice for today's newsroom managers. It largely amounts to: Get with the program.

Niles continues to see a lag between the technology and the media leader. He believes it's only a matter of time before newspapers outside the U.S. suffer what they have inside the country, so he has delivered a speech in Singapore and delivered notes from it online.

Among his prescriptions:

1. Management should consume technology.
2. Require everyone to blog and have social media accounts.
3. Managers should Skype and chat instead of sending memos or talking on the phone.
4. Managers should build their communities by blogging.

Niles concludes: "Ultimately, however, the larger goal here is to get managers comfortable with, and conversant in, online communications technology.

"This comfort can't be outsourced or delegated. As news communication businesses shift from print to online, their managers must become as comfortable and conversant in online communication as they were with the printed word. Otherwise, their leaders are reduced to followers, and their businesses run adrift."
 
 
The Online News Association conference in San Francisco heard from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams today on how the microblogging network works with journalism.

Williams describes Tweets as "clues" in the journalistic process, praises its use as source-searching and research and "taking data and sifting the signal from the noise."

But he says it has only scratched the surface in what it can do for people. Its main goal is to find relevance for its users. He promises new list services to help curate content from participants on topics of interest.

Williams also discussed the balance between anonymity and trust on Twitter (the former useful in sensitive news situations, the latter necessary to build authenticity). He said Twitter is working on reputation systems to help build that trust.
 
 

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post writes one of those on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hand reviews of the effectiveness of Twitter within journalism for the American Journalism Review.

He ponders the implications for the craft of the micro-blogging, messaging service and boils it down to two key questions: is there a business model within Twitter? Does it have staying power?

Before he does so, though, he seems to get a positive message from a variety of journalists and their managers about the tool Twitter is and he accepts it can be a serious method of gathering and distributing.

Like others, he finds it very noisy and hard to filter. But his principal conclusion is that it's likely helpful, just not in wide use yet.

 
 

John Battelle's Searchblog generates some of the most erudite reading on the development of social media, so his 2009 predictions are significant markers.

His 14 points, 13 of them not self-directed, offer some terrific insight into the next stages. Among them:

1. Google will lose market share but its stock will rise.
2. Yahoo and AOL will merge and Microsoft will buy the search business from the merged entity.
3. The online media space will be hit hard.
4. Apple will hit the ceiling.
5. Agencies and publishers will adopt each other's roles.

It's not doing justice to list the ideas this way. Better to read the post here.

 
 

It has been one year since I started www.themediamanager.com. Time for some reflection on what it has taught and changed in me.

1. Only opinions attract opinion. My blog suffered repeatedly when I wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t take a stand. When I evaluated (instead of echoed) positions or research, user comments increased. Still, my overall reticence yielded a poor traffic-to-comment ratio. Learning: You have to add value and that often means staking ground.

2. Consumers crave a greater understanding of the craft, its methods and policies from the corner office, the newsroom floor, and the industry itself. The more I explained intricacies of news management, the more I acquired a community. Learning: Transparency + accessibility = engagement. Engagement = credibility.

3. For every lonely crank there are crowds of the wise and constructive. I spent far too much time attending to sour voices and not enough time cultivating good contributors for the discussions I wanted. Learning: Thick skin is in for 2009.

4. Asking lame questions through the blog --- as in, “What do you think?” --- isn’t useful in the least. If you’re going to be challenged, you have to first challenge someone. Garbage in, garbage out, so garbage ask, garbage answer. Learning: Seeking participation is a contact sport.

5. Giving credit where it’s due is a virtue online because your community feels respected, encouraged and understood. In the link economy, everyone wins when we acknowledge. Learning: There are six billion people on the planet. A few of them are bound to have better ideas than I do. I need to get over that.

I came away with a few warm and fuzzies from 2008. The Web-first newsroom is in full bloom and doesn’t undermine the legacy newsroom --- they perform different roles. Blogging is becoming the new first draft of history and may become a newsroom's backbone one day soon. Twitter helps us find people we never knew about and build audiences that want to know about us. I like that newsrooms appear wedded to continual training, because experience matters. We need a further nudge to understand social media, a new and larger mobile device to read and view electronically, and a firmer grasp on audio in journalism.

My permanent asterisk here: These views are personal. They do not necessarily represent my employer’s. Please don’t attach them --- or attack them --- as indicative of my newsroom’s or owner’s policy or belief.



 
 

ReadWriteWeb has assembled a list of predictions from its cohort, and some of the ideas for 2009 are surprising.

Among them:
1. A single sign-in system.
2. Google will lose market share and consolidate its services.
3. Corporate blogs will come of age.
4. Tip'd could be a daily destination.
5. Blog posts will become more interactive.
6. Uber blogs that combine streams into one will explode.

Tomorrow I'll weigh in with some much less exotic ideas for newsrooms in 2009.

 
DA25E68FDEC14EAFA7B2A27D26C48058