COMM 361-001: Online Journalism

“Journalism needs to find new benefits from new marketing strategies and measurement tactics.”

Briggs’ last chapter in JournalismNext focuses in on “the fundamentals of building an audience online”:

• Tracking one’s content
• Web analysts
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Effective headline writing for the Web
• Distribution through social media

Our author begins by pointing out that “management consultants will tell you that ‘what gets measured gets changed,'” but that “in recent years some have also said ‘what gets measured gets done.'”

As a result, “newsrooms now track and measure everything they do.”

Tracking everything that one publishes (and setting benchmarks on a case-by-case basis) is crucial, but tracking one’s audience (using Web analytics softwares such as Google Analytics.

Briggs then dives into the main functions of SEO for journalists:

• Spiders and robots
• Indexing
• Queries

When writing effective headlines:

• Make sure to write it for both online readers — readers and robots
• Make good headlines better by improving keywords, trying to use more conversational language and not being afraid to inject a little attitude

Overall, in this last chapter, I took out a lot of information that I felt should be remembered as well as information that I found interesting (SEO functions).

“The socialization of news is clearly the right direction for journalism,” begins Briggs in his tenth chapter of JournalismNext.

This chapter explores the idea of news being a conversation, rather than “a lecture,” and how conversing through social networking can add to one’s story.

“Three areas of evolution suggest a brighter future for comments on news stories:

• The technology is getting better
• Newsrooms are accepting more responsibility
• The commenters are expecting more from each other.”

When commenting on the necessity to make news a conversation (rather than a lecture), Briggs acknowledges that “while the primary motivation for offering social tools on news sites [is] to stay technologically relevant, the reward goes beyond giving the audience a chance to play, too.”

Briggs even throws in some statistics about social bookmarking and advertising, given by a Bivings Group report which can be found here.

Some other major benefits Briggs mentions for news being a conversation include:

• Providing transparency on the reporting process
• Enable an immediate feedback loop
• Spread awareness of news coverage through word-of-mouth marketing

Overall, although one always runs the risk of “potential headaches [from] offensive anonymous posts,” by including user/reader interactivity, “the benefit earned through a constructive and collaborative relationship between journalists and their audience is well worth the effort.”

Briggs also discusses how to build and manage an online community through making news participatory and collaborating with one’s community. Then, he explains how to keep conversations accurate and ethical by setting guidelines for participants, monitoring offensive posts, knowing one’s legal responsibilities and correcting errors.

“Social media, used correctly, connects journalists and reporters to people and information.”

This may be the first chapter in which I couldn’t agree more with every point raised.