Comm 361: Grant Paulsen

Chapter 11: Building a Digital Audience for News

The final chapter of Briggs’ text got readers started with the fundamentals of building an audience online. Briggs’ tips for doing so included the following ideas:

-Tracking your content
-Web analytics
-Search engine optimization
-Effective headline writing for the Web
-Distribution through social media Keep reading →

Chapter 10: Managing News as a Conversation

I’ve become accustomed to journalists who prefer news as a lecture. That seems to be the way of broadcasting the news today. But that wasn’t always the case, and according to Briggs — that’s not the way delivering news should, or will, be conducted in the future.

Some of the best news anchors of all-time had conversations with their viewers. Briggs mentions Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite as conversationalists. Story-tellers who enjoyed conversing with people who were not talking back. It’s what made them special.

Briggs cites “social networking” as the best new-school way of delivering news through conversation. He wrote that, “Social media represents a new way to connect with people and communicate information. Reporters and journalists always need to do that.” Keep reading →

Chapter 6: Visual Storytelling with Photographs

“Are we using 1,000 words, where a picture should be?”  – Matt Thompson.

The age-old adage has been used for decades: A picture is worth 1,000 words. But in online writing and when writing for the web, that cliche couldn’t be more accurate. Pictures are immensely powerful. And they should be used where they fit.

On page 142, Briggs makes the point that in most circumstances, pictures are a better way to express points than words. He compares journalism without photographs to “writing without verbs.” Keep reading →

Important terms from the third chapter:

Crowdsourcing: The internet allows enthusiastic communities to come together and provide the value for a given Web site. Crowd-sourcing focuses that community power on a specific project and demonstrates how a group of committed individuals can outperform a small group of experienced (and paid) professionals.

Open-source reporting: “Open source” refers to design, development and distribution “offering practical accessibility to a product’s source. Applying this concept to journalism means using transparency in reporting in order to provide a benefit to your audience and possibly acquire benefits from your audience.

Pro-am journalism: The most unfiltered form of collaborative journalism allows the audience to publish directly to the same platform, or Web site, that professional journalists use to publish their new. Keep reading →

Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown may have won a seat that has been blue for decades, but that doesn’t mean his party should anticipate more of the same during the 2010 midterm elections.

That’s the belief of Chris Cillizza, anyway.

Chris Cillizza on PBS

Cillizza, who covers the White House for the Washington Post in print and online, and who authors “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post, joined C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully on Tuesday afternoon to talk about Brown’s upset victory. Keep reading →

One day after delivering his first State of the Union Address, President Obama was on the receiving end of a ringing endorsement from one of the Democratic Party’s foremost minds.

Bob Shrum, a renowned political consultant who has advised four losing presidential campaigns, was impressed with the President’s inaugural end-of-year address.

“Obama was colloquial without being pedestrian,” Shrum, 66, told C-SPAN’s Steve Scully. “That’s a tough line not to cross.” Keep reading →

 Chapter 5: Going Mobile

Cell phones are so much more than just a form of communication these days. As Briggs points out in the book, they are often used as a news-gathering device (which was the case when Cristiano Ronaldo wrecked his Ferrari).  

Nicola Dowling was the first reporter on the scene after Ronaldo’s crash. She didn’t have an expensive camera or a producer with her. Just a legal pad and a phone. But she was still able to disseminate images of the accident and provide footage. You see, phones allow us to be our own reporters (CNN has become a leader on this front).   Keep reading →

Chapter 9: Data-Driven Journalism and Digitizing Your Life

Reading this chapter makes me feel like I am not getting the most out of the internet. I suddenly feel like I am over-looking a lot of the technology at my disposal.

The one thing I will give myself credit for is that I do a great job organizing my e-mail (which is Briggs’ first section of the chapter). But I have never used any of the “productivity tools” that are listed.

In relating Briggs’ data-driven journalism section to our class’ purpose, I think the best way for us to use this information in our blogs will be through tables. Keep reading →

Chapter 4: Microblogging: Write Small, Think Big

Briggs links the popularity of blogging to what makes ‘Twitter’ work. We all want to have opinions, and we all want our opinions disseminated. But people don’t want to read lengthy text.

The author’s advice is to say whatever you want, but say it with few words. The smaller the paragraph, the smaller the sentence and the smaller the entry – the better the chance that somebody reads it all the way through.

The most popular form of micro-blogging is Twitter. (This seems like an appropriate time to provide a shameless plug. Follow me on Twitter @granthpaulsen). Keep reading →

Chapter 2: Advanced Blogging

I wish Briggs would have just laid out a bunch of web-writing techniques in a colloquial, no-nonsense kind of way. But he didn’t. The closest he got was to give the 3 characteristics of a good blog, in bullet form.

He defines a blog as: (A) A frequently updated site with entries displayed from newest to oldest.  (B)  Each post has a headline and a body. Most entries include links to other sites on the Web, and many contain photos. (C) It contains a link for comments that lets readers post their thoughts on what the blogger is writing about.

One thing I didn’t realize was that blogs became particularly popular after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Keep reading →