COMM 361-001: Online Journalism

Jon DeNunzio

User Engagement Editor Jon DeNunzio of the Washington Post

• Former Web Sports Editor
• Former Prep Sports Editor
• Didn’t major in journalism (Graduated from the University of Virginia in 1991)
• Went to the Washington Post in 1994

Integrating Social Media into Your Journalism:

In Nationals Park in summer 2009, DeNunzio worked with the Post to channel tweets from attendants at the Park onto a single Web site. The idea never really took off, but it’s a great idea nonetheless. Perhaps with a tweaked formula, it would’ve skyrocketed.

Another idea Denunzio incorporated into some Post stories includes adding a question at the end of some stories, asking readers to tweet their answers. For instance, “What happens when mean girls grow up?” This would work ridiculously well with my story on the football team! Being that George Mason has the largest head count of students than any other school in Virginia, this story, without a doubt, would blow up on Twitter.

The two big I’s of Internet are Immediacy and Interactivity.

WHY WE USE SOCIAL MEDIA:

• It’s where users are
• It allows us to build a relationship with users
• It helps our reporting

Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message.”

“No, it’s the social, the social media,” Denunzio said. He said that you don’t have to use social media in order to be social.

DeNunzio’s point, simply put: Be social with your users whenever you can.

• Use a poll (Twiigs.com, DeNunzio suggests, is totally worth it)
• Pay attention to comments
• Ask for ideas (AllOurIdeas.org)
• Ask for photos
• Host a debate
• Answer user questions
• Use the knowledge of the crowd

WHY HE’S TALKING ABOUT THIS:

• Come up with ideas to connect with users! It will put you ahead of the crowd.
• Because of the Internet and because of its interactivity, we must take advantage of the users on it.
• User engagement and data visualization are key nowadays. Do not underestimate or ignore them.
• Startupli.st

In his Washington Post article entitled “I Really Need You to Read This Article, Okay?“, Joel Achenbach writes about the popularity shift of newspapers as a means to get the news.

“Our future is on the Web,” he begins.

The term “newspaper journalism” used to resonate a sense “literary efforts [levitating] above the commercial fray,” but, according to Achenbach, no longer is this true. Nowadays, it’s all about page-views, about “eyeballs.”

“Marketing…may increasingly become part of the journalistic mix,” Achenbach writes.

But there is still respect for skill. Regardless of platform, “good writing remains good writing” and although “the Web tends to be a chattier place…it is still a place where readers appreciate a well-crafted sentence, a nuanced thought, a fully elucidated thesis and commentary undergirded by fact, honesty and a generosity of spirit.”

To quote the HBO series The Wire, it’s the same game as always — just more fierce.

At the end of the day, though, our readers aren’t unintelligent.

“The most-read stories online are often what we’d all agree are the best pieces of journalism…but page-views can also lead journalists away from what we do best,” Achenbach reminds us.

This article wasn’t necessarily eye-opening, but it was definitely an interesting and relatively amusing rant.

Achenbach maintains his own blog, Achenblog, quite regularly.

For my Media Pyramid, I put Facebook, word of mouth and Wikipedia for my most common methods to acquire news. Although they’re not the most effective ways to get news, they’re how I get the news in my everyday life, regardless. MSN, Google and CNN come in next — be it on the Internet on their respective websites or on the television for CNN. /Film, iMDB and Rotten Tomatoes help me get the news that I TRULY care about! And, lastly, the Washington Post and YouTube are rare supporters in my everlasting quest to get the news!