Author Archives: Matt

May 3, 2011 | 5:27 PM | By

Three Ps of a great Web headline

It can be hard to overstate how much of a difference headlines make on the Web. A great headline can be the single difference between a story that spreads and one that sinks.

A headline is a sales pitch. It’s often your post’s single best emissary to the world. After you finish a post, it’s worth taking five minutes to come up with a solid headline, rather than going with the first description that comes to mind.

I’ve written a few times about what makes for a good headline – focus on implications, not events; numbering is narrative. I even drummed up a list of words that can make for particularly compelling headlines. But I’ve seen a number of groaners around the network, and I couldn’t take it any longer.

I wanted to give you three things to keep in mind when you compose your headlines: parsability, promises and proper nouns. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice
April 4, 2011 | 6:09 PM | By

19 ways to get the word out

Back when I was advising the Argo editors on characteristics to look for in making their hires, I described the self-promotional impulse of great bloggers this way:

Great bloggers work with a perpetual sense of the post-publication life of a post. After something gets published, people check it out, they comment on it, they pass it around. Or they don’t, which we finally have the tools to determine.

So bloggers design their posts to move. They craft strong headlines, they spread the word through their social networks, they dip in to comment threads, they pay attention to metrics. They work to develop a genuine sense of their community and its predilections, and they adjust accordingly.

But here’s the rub: truly great bloggers lead just as much as they follow. They use their mastery of their crowd to guide its attention, to find ways to hook you into engaging with things you might not otherwise try. This is how Ezra Klein gets his community to indulge him in a discussion of actuarial values.

In blogging, self-promotion is nearly indistinct from interaction and engagement. In its worst incarnations, this means you’re always trying to push your stuff. It’s smarmy and exhausting. But at its best, the self-promotional impulse comes from the same foundation that powers all excellent reporting: great listening. You’re paying attention to the crowd around your beat, picking up on their curiosities and using those to inform your reporting, and bringing your work to folks’ attention when it matches their interests.

With these principles in mind, I’ve been keeping a scorecard of all the Argo-bloggers’ promotion techniques, grading each site on 19 different factors. Here they are:

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, marketing, passion
February 16, 2011 | 9:28 PM | By

Geek tip: Google Chart Wizard

A pie chart displaying how often users returned to one of the Argo sites over the past month.

Ezra Klein does this thing sometimes where he builds a post out of a single chart or graph. And he titles the post, brilliantly, “The [giant complicated social phenomenon] in one graph.” Here’s a good example: “The last 30 years of the job market in one graph.”

The headline is a wonderful come-on. Who doesn’t want to understand something complicated in one graph? But it’s a little deceptive, of course; typically the graphs themselves need to be parsed and explained, so the reality is more like “The last 30 years of the job market in one graph (with a few hundred words of explanation).” But it’s effective. Just having a strong, informative visual helps provide the motivation to engage with a nuanced point.

The moral of this story: Don’t knock the power of a simple infographic to provide the visual that compels users to read your post.

States I've lived in. Darker blue means I lived there longer.

And the point of this post: The other day, Wes reminded me of a terrific tool to help you make simple, pretty infographics of your own – Google Chart Wizard.

All of the Argo-bloggers have made posts that hinged on a key statistic or data-nugget that just begged to be illustrated with a pie chart or bar chart. Here’s one from yesterday on On Campus, for example. Google Chart Wizard saves you from having to run Excel to make these simple infographics.

There are many, many types of charts available – from standard pie, bar and line charts to Venn diagrams and “Google-o-meters.” I’m not going to go into detail here. Just go play with the shiny toy, and teach me something in one graph.

FILED UNDER: Practice, geek tips
January 10, 2011 | 6:43 PM | By

Track mentions of your site with Google Alerts

How to tell when someone on the Web has linked to or mentioned your site? Let me introduce you to a tool that has long been a favorite of the Webby: Google Alerts.

The premise is simple – type in a Google query, and you’ll receive an e-mail with any new results from that query. You can specify whether you want results from across all of Google’s properties, or whether you want to limit the search to Web results, News results, Realtime results or another domain. You can adjust how often you want the alert to arrive – once a day, once a week, or as new results are indexed.

All of Google’s basic and advanced search operators work. That means if you want to be notified whenever someone links to your site, you can use the query link:http://yoururl.com. If your alert is returning a lot of noisy results, exclude irrelevant keywords with a minus sign. If you want to search a specific site, you can use the operator site:http://siteyouwanttosearch.com.

To search the CNN website for any mentions of NPR that don’t mention Juan Williams, for example, I’d use this query:

site:cnn.com npr -"Juan Williams"

Today, that query would have brought me this CNN iReport story. And soon, hopefully it will bring many more things.

Here, again, is the link to Google Alerts. Have fun, go mad. Use the operators. And if you ever need to adjust an alert, here’s where you do that.

FILED UNDER: Practice, geek tips, marketing
December 15, 2010 | 7:19 PM | By

12 tips for using CoverItLive

My CoverItLive console during a recent live blog.

For me, CoverItLive is like the ultimate social reporter’s notebook – my observations and takeaways from an event, mashed up with those of the crowd. But it’s pretty robust software, and there are a lot of different ways to use it well.

These 12 tips – ordered roughly by when in the liveblogging process they apply – embody how I’ve come to think about using CoverItLive. I hope they give you a helpful starting point. Use the software often, and you’ll develop your own approach.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, CoverItLive, liveblogging
December 6, 2010 | 6:58 PM | By

Why I love live-blogging

The first time I live-blogged as a reporter was five-and-a-half years ago, when I was covering a solar energy conference for FresnoBee.com. Almost instantly, live-blogging became one of my favorite ways of engaging with an event, and I’ve only grown to love it more and more since then.

“I ended up producing much more material for the site, and learning a lot more than I would have otherwise.”
Before I discovered live-blogging, I brought what you might call a story-focused approach to the events I was assigned to cover. That meant I’d go into the event looking for an angle I could start to report early on, searching for quotes and occurrences that supported my angle and mostly filtering out everything else. Under this model, if I decided early on that the story I’d sussed out was “Fresno solar companies criticize city bidding process,” that’s the story I’d report. I’d listen for moments that tied in to that narrative.

Live-blogging changed the equation. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, Clay Shirky, community, liveblogging
November 29, 2010 | 5:27 PM | By

Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs 2010

My coblogger Robin is a contributor to Bygone Bureau’s list of 2010′s Best New Blogs. No Argo blogs grace the list (we’re only [almost] three months old! Patience, patience!), but then again, no news blogs made the cut at all. For the most part, the participants selected blogs that shine in wit, style and concept, not really reporting or news judgment. The newcomer Robin selected as his favorite – Mediagazer – is an exception. But the list as a whole features some terrific talent, a great look at the non-newsblogging world.

FILED UNDER: In the Media
November 22, 2010 | 4:33 PM | By

5 ways to prep for away time from your blog

Va-cay!

Thanksgiving’s coming up, and I suspect many of the Argo bloggers will be taking the full weekend off to enjoy the holiday with their friends and fams. This is fine – traffic tends to be light on holidays, as folks are spending their time gorging themselves and watching movies and football. But it’s worth not letting your blog go completely dark, especially as mobile audiences hunger for new posts even during our traditional downtimes.

To keep the blogs from going dark, here are five ways to prepare when you know you’re not going to be in your seat: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, digression, guest-bloggers
November 21, 2010 | 10:49 AM | By

PubCamp Live-Blogging

I’m at Public Media Camp 2010, a two-day unconference for folks interested in (as you might be able to guess) public media. I’m going to dive right in and give you a taste of the conversation from the room and Twitter as the day goes on. Enjoy!


Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: liveblogging