Practice

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RECENT POSTS

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
October 15, 2010 | 1:00 PM | By

Four takes on a poll: a case study in the use of voice

How you express yourself has implications for how users react.

In yesterday’s Argo webinar on voice, opinion and objectivity, we discussed several blog posts, asking two main questions:

  1. Where does the post fall on a scale from “straight” (written in a non-controversial, just-the-facts style) to “assertive” (clearly making or assuming an argument)?
  2. What effects might that choice have on users’ reactions to the post?

We kicked off the discussion by examining four approaches to the same story.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg released the results of a poll of likely voters in this November’s midterm elections. Posts about polls are almost perfect for our purposes, because it’s possible to read so much into them. There’s no “objective” reading of a poll – there are the banner top-line findings, then all sorts of murky findings that are subject to vastly varying interpretations. Any of the findings you choose to emphasize can reveal your particular biases, preferences, and interests. Here are four different treatments, along with my analysis of their effects: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, analysis, Ed Morrissey, ethics, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Marc Ambinder, style
October 13, 2010 | 6:11 PM | By

NiemanLab highlights Argo’s link roundup tool

Marc and I spoke with NiemanLab’s Laura McGann recently about Argo’s spiffy link roundup tool. Here’s an excerpt from Laura’s thoughtful take on the tool, and the process that led to it:

The roundup is a longstanding staple of the blogosphere, an expected post for loyal readers who want a rundown of the best new stuff around the web on a given topic. But can a staple still have room for innovation? Over at Argo Network, the new blog network at NPR, the leadership team is giving it a shot on the back end. They’ve designed a workflow that makes it easier for their bloggers to cull through links and produce a roundup post. The result: a simpler process for the blogger, and added benefit for the reader. It’s no technological revolution, but an example of the kind of small improvement that can make it easier to share work with the audience.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

FILED UNDER: Practice, link roundup
October 13, 2010 | 5:50 PM | By

Voice, opinion and objectivity: An Argo webinar

I had a nuanced conversation today with the Argo bloggers and NPR’s Mark Memmott about the effects of different ways of couching perspectives and information. I’m posting the slides and a teensy bit of summary here now, with more context to come later.

Quick summary: I opened the conversation by saying that I didn’t intend to use the word “objectivity” much in relation to the conversation. To the extent I use the term, I talk about it as an ideal applied to a method, rather than to particular material. (I wouldn’t say a particular post is “objective,” but I might say a journalist pursued information in a rigorous, objective fashion.) I’ve taken inspiration on this point from Rosenstiel and Kovach’s Elements of Journalism, which clarified the distinction:

The call for journalists to adopt objectivity was an appeal for them to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, analysis, Dan Gillmor, Elements of Journalism, ethics, Ezra Klein, style
October 7, 2010 | 4:47 PM | By

The thrill and peril of the one-night stand

The other day, a comment thread on CommonHealth totally lit up. CommonHealth blogger Carey Goldberg had posted a quick breaking-news item announcing the recall of several batches of the popular baby formula Similac. Carey wisely included a link and a phone number for parents to check whether they had one of the contaminated products. But as you might expect, the Similac site and the recall hotline were quickly deluged, and hundreds of freaked-out parents had no way to tell if their formula was affected.

So they took to the CommonHealth comments. Carey’s quick post became a phenom. It quickly garnered tens of thousands of views and more than 200 responses, with many parents posting lot numbers for the affected batches of Similac.

And then, just as quickly as they arrived, the rush of visitors was gone. Poring over the logs after the initial rush of traffic, it seems as though most of the visitors came from Google News, which must have flagged the post high up in its cluster of stories about the recall.

This is what I call “one-night-stand traffic” – intoxicating yet unsatisfying, over almost as soon as it begins. You can get hooked on that sudden rush, and many news sites do, tailoring their content to appeal to the Diggs and Drudges of the Web. But for a network of sites that are all about fostering engagement, what can we take away from these episodes? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, community, metrips
September 3, 2010 | 4:42 PM | By

Gnoming for followers on Twitter

My co-blogger Tim writes and tweets about the history and future of media. If that sounds broad, I should clarify that Tim is very good. He’s one of the most well-read people I know and he’s got dizzying pattern recognition. The word my also-brilliant other-co-blogger Robin most often uses to describe Tim’s work is “magisterial.”

Tim has a good sense of others in the Webosphere who share some of his particular fascinations and obsessions, and he found that several of those folks weren’t following him. So, to remedy this, he asked them to. And here’s how that played out: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, community, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Twitter
August 30, 2010 | 5:58 PM | By

Sourcing images: best practices and best sources

There's a whole universe of images out there, but you have to be mindful. (Courtesy of NASA.gov)

We consistently hear from the Argo-bloggers that the most difficult part of blogging is the visual component – telling your stories in pictures as well as words. It’s hard even before we get to the many legal and ethical pitfalls that most folks haven’t been trained on how to avoid. But we also know how incredibly valuable images are for storytelling, comprehension, punctuation, humor, delight and many, many other things. So each blogger has to figure out a strategy for acquiring and using images. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, photography, visual journalism
August 24, 2010 | 5:45 PM | By

The art of the link roundup

The Roundup: The world's most exciting ride. (Benimoto / Flickr)

As I mentioned the other day, a link roundup is a tried-and-true way for a blogger to start the morning. (Or end the day – for the most prolific bloggers, the link roundup is an opportunity to highlight all the good links they didn’t get to write about that day.)

Just as editors of yore would begin their days by reading the morning papers, a trip through your RSS feeds and social news feeds is an impeccable morning habit to cultivate, a great way to get the gears turning and the juices flowing. Almost by definition, the roundup is breezy, quick and casual – Ezra Klein’s momentous Wonkbook being the exception that proves the rule. But it too has its technique. So as you compile your daily curation, keep these points in mind: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, Theory, aggregation, Ben Smith, Bess Levin, Ernie Silverman, link roundup, pace, style
August 11, 2010 | 6:36 PM | By

Geek tip: The ultimate shortcut enabler

I’m going to let you in on something that I use all the time, which I’d estimate has saved me hours in the years I’ve been using it. The 7-minute screencast below is my introduction to a tool called YubNub, which has the potential to make many things easier for you, from searching Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed imagery to searching your own sites.

At first, this may seem like a lot to remember. But I use this multiple times a day, and it’s made me a lot faster at using the Web.

Here’s a link to instructions on how to install YubNub in your browser. Below the break, my 10 favorite YubNub commands. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, geek tips, shortcuts
August 10, 2010 | 1:46 PM | By

A quick tip on hyperlinks

Looking at the Argo blogs, I’ve noticed a wide range of hyperlinking styles. My suspicion is that none of the Argo-bloggers have given a whole lot of thought to their hyperlinking strategy, but it’s a small thing that can make a big difference in the readability and scannability of a post. So here’s a quick rule-of-thumb:

Link what you’d like to emphasize. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, style