I found out this week that the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder is leaving to head up the White House reporting team at National Journal. I haven’t given Ambinder much love on this blog yet, but he employs several techniques I think any blogger could really learn from. More on that later. For now, I wanted to pass along five of his posts on journalism – with a special focus on bias, perspective and analysis – that I thought were particularly valuable: Continue reading
Theory
RECENT POSTS
A blogger’s morning ritual: 5 points to keep in mind
One of the more dismal feelings any writer can have is that sense of waking up to an empty page that demands to be filled with thoughts. When you write daily and in public, that sensation is particularly acute. Fortunately, you have a wonderfully useful tool to avert that possibility: the precious morning ritual. Continue reading
Piping fresh Nick Denton memo
Get it while it’s hot. You know I can’t resist Denton’s monthly memo to his Gawker staff bloggers. A highlight:
Kevin Purdy’s highly informative story about the effects of caffeine on the brain in Lifehacker was the breakout story of July. And the reader interest in the piece highlights — do we really need a reminder? — the draw of the explanation. There’s too much news on the web; and way too little explanation. Fully a quarter of the top stories are straight how-tos or otherwise helpful or informative.
Man. I would never have thought Nick Denton would be one of the loudest voices making my beloved Future of Context argument.
The Top 5 things I like about The Atlantic’s ‘What I read’
By now, no doubt, you are well versed with Matt’s mantra… wait for it… package, repackage, repeat!
One of the many ways to get there is the regular series – which can then also provide fodder to be repackaged in a ‘list’ or ‘tips’ post down the road.
I wanted to highlight one example of that that works for me at The Atlantic.
The Atlantic Wire runs a series called, “What I read,” which is exactly as it sounds. Here is how they describe it:
How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.
The latest post is a Q&A with NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen. Not only is it a good example of packaging content (which it can then repackage in any number of ways), but I thought it might be instructive for our bloggers to see how Rosen handles his information stream.
As accomplished journalists maybe you’ve already found a sweet spot in your information management. But it’s something most people struggle with as the streams continue to multiply and get noisier. And as a beat blogger now, you may find your methods need updating. And fortunately, the tools keep getting better.
Rosen points out that his first read in the morning is Twitter. Then it’s off to the industry blogs and aggregators. I couldn’t agree more. If you have a tightly focused Twitter list, you’ll find much more relevant content there, to start your day with, then you will by scanning your local paper or the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal. Since you’ve had to set up a Twitter Times account to feed your blog’s right rail, hopefully you find some utility in it yourself as well.
So, here are the Top 5 things I find alluring about The Atlantic Wire series:
1.) As a blogger, the formula makes it fairly easy to produce
2.) Other people are doing the heavy lifting (you get to play editor instead of tortured writer)
3.) They’ve tapped interesting people who can ostensibly help your friend the reader with their wisdom.
4.) The series can be repeated
5.) The series can be packaged and repackaged.
After you visit Rosen’s, ‘What I Read’, check out Clay Shirky and Ezra Klein’s daily routine. Then tell us, what do you read?
Follow-up: The new journalistic value
I wanted to call your attention to an online conversation I’ve been participating in that I think is especially salient to the work of our Argo-bloggers.
A few years ago, I wrote a post called “The Attention Deficit: The need for timeless journalism.” The central idea/question of that post was this:
Journalism can now exist outside of time. The only reason we’re constrained to promoting news on a minutely, hourly, daily or weekly basis is because we’ve inherited that notion from media that really do operate in fixed time cycles. But we now have the potential to signal importance on whatever scale you might imagine — the most important stories of the year, of the decade, of the moment.
What are the most important issues facing this community at this time? What would our sites look like if we asked ourselves that question? What would our journalism look like?
This week, Megan Garber of the Nieman Journalism Lab asked, “What if we had a news outlet exclusively focused on follow-up journalism?”
What if we had an outlet dedicated to continuity journalism — a news organization whose sole purpose was to follow up on stories whose sheer magnitude precludes them from ongoing treatment by our existing media outlets? What if we took thePolitiFact model — a niche outfit dedicated not to a particular topic or region, but to a particular practice — and applied it to following up on facts, rather than checking them? What if we had an outlet dedicated to reporting, aggregating, and analyzing stories that deserve our sustained attention — a team of reporters and researchers and analysts and engagement experts whose entire professional existence is focused on keeping those deserving stories alive in the world?
In the comments, I linked to my earlier post, causing Megan to follow up today with this:
In our current approach to news, ideas and connections and continuities — context, more generally — often become subsidiary to “now” itself. Newness trumps all, to occasionally devastating effect. There’s an economic reason for that, sure (the core of it being that audiences like nowness just as much as journalists). But we also now have tools that invite an intriguing possibility: new taxonomies of time. We have Twitter’s real-time news flow. We have Wikipedia’s wide-angle perspective. We have, above all, the web itself, a platform that’s proven extraordinarily good at balancing urgency with memory. We’d do well to make more of it — if for no other reason than the fact that, as Thompson puts it, “a journalism unfettered by time would align much more closely with timeless reality.”
And now I’ll give you one more quote from an article that wasn’t a part of this conversation at all. I think this particular quote is quite salient to this thread (and not just because – as you know – I’m an Ezra Klein fanboy):
Klein is explicit on this point, outlining a role for journalists that sounds as much like teaching as reporting. “I think that we as a profession need to become more comfortable with repetition,” he says. “What is newest is often not what is most helpful for readers.” A case in point: when explaining why legislation is bottled up in Congress, Klein routinely discusses the skyrocketing use of Senate filibusters—a recent and consequential change in the rules of politics that nonetheless doesn’t count as “news” on most days.
For now, I encourage you to read all four of these entries; I’m not going to expand on these posts too much. You’re probably beginning to get my point. But, in keeping with the theme, expect me to follow up on this.
Dark secrets of the online overlords video
I tend to gesticulate a lot.
View more presentations from Matthew Thompson.
Dark secret of blogging #8: Illustrate everything.
Huffington Post screenshot.
Marinate, for a moment, in the glorious ugliness of the Huffington Post. I’d say that HuffPo’s been more successful than any other news site before it in adapting the sensibility of the tabloid newspaper to the Web. Drudge led the way here, but HuffPo has nearly perfected its imitation of the irresistible pull of those sensational supermarket scandal rags, screaming at you with their blaring, saucy headlines, daring you not to look.
A key element of HuffPo’s success is its use of images. Eyetracking research has consistently shown that people tend to fixate on faces as they scan content online and in print. So as you scroll down any HuffPo section front, you’ll find the page brimming with faces and other compelling images, tugging your attention away from the left-hand column of text towards the grab bag of stories on the right.
You’ll find this emphasis on imagery in most of the highest-trafficked corners of the Web, and it’s no coincidence. Knowing this, we built our Argo sites with a pretty aggressive emphasis on promoting quality visual journalism.
Lest you think a particular subject is too abstract or boring to be well-illustrated, consider the story of Roadguy. Roadguy was Jim Foti, a copy editor colleague of mine at the Minneapolis Star Tribune who spent months telling everyone on the Web staff (including me) that he wanted to start a blog. About Twin Cities transportation and infrastructure.
At the time, StarTribune.com suffered from a glut of blogs. Over the previous few years, you couldn’t sneeze without accidentally starting a Strib blog. Many of these blogs were poorly tended, as you might expect. So the last thing we were looking for was another idea for a blog. I mean, maybe a traffic blog could fly – traffic stories were a reliable source of, er, traffic for the site – but a blog about transportation and infrastructure? Eyes glazed over at the very thought.
A widely-ignored sign, courtesy of Roadguy.
Nonetheless, Jim’s persistence eventually won him a blog. And it turned out Jim had a vision. He’d illustrate the vagaries of Twin Cities transportation policy and infrastructure planning with a steady stream of cameraphone shots of the effects of those policies out in the real world. Regular features such as the Department of Widely-Ignored Signs (see photo at right) brought readers coming back again and again.
Transportation and infrastructure, imagined the right way, is actually a gold mine of terrific visuals. If you think your topic is tough to illustrate, consider the plight of Lifehacker, which has to routinely come up with images to enliven subjects like productivity-boosting and time management, or Mint, whose blog features an image alongside every single post on personal finance.
But even if you can visualize what types of visuals might suit a topic, you face a more daunting question – how do you acquire them? I’m working on writing up guidelines for the Argo-bloggers on how to acquire and use images, so more on that subject later.
Blogger-rhythms: How to pace yourself
Picking up where yesterday’s post left off, I want to talk about the blogger’s pattern. This is where Robin’s insights about stock and flow really come into play. I think the most essential rhythmic prowess great bloggers develop is the ability to balance these two types of content.
We often talk about finding a rhythm, as though it’s something that’ll happen to you, or something you’ll discover. Just as often, I tend to think a good, sustainable, audience-rewarding pace truly is developed - planned, practiced and polished. Marathon runners don’t “find” their race-winning strides – they set goals and work towards them.
I think a helpful way to approach that goal-setting is by setting goals and organizing workflow on a daily cycle, a weekly cycle, and for the medium-to-long term. I’ll talk about each of these.
The daily cycle
Image courtesy of Flickr user Socceraholic.
There are a couple things to keep in mind about planning for the daily rhythm of the blog:
First, you never want to start your day with an empty slate. Knowing that you’ll start off with a daily link roundup every morning is one easy way to get your engine going. It’s also important to augment that with something meaty, ready to polish and post shortly after your computer wakes up. Previously, I shared Ernest Hemingway’s trick of writing some of his best material late in the day and stopping just as he was on a roll. I think it’s a great idea to end each afternoon by completing 90 percent of a post you’ll finish and publish in the morning. I also think it’s smart to head into each week knowing the original, enterprise pieces you intend to publish each day, news permitting.
Second, make sure you’re addressing each of your overlapping communities with something every day. Remember when I wrote about planning content around your audience needs? To continue the example I laid out in that post, let’s say your topic reaches (1) an audience of people employed in relevant industries, (2) a law/policy audience, (3) a scientific/scholarly audience, and (4) a lay audience mostly interested in the cultural impact of the subject. Make sure that each day, you’re offering at least one post of interest to each audience. You’ve got many types of posts you can employ to hit that target. Switch ‘em up.
Lastly, strive to publish an attention-getter at least once a day. This is a post that you think will be spread around your community, original reporting and cogent analysis that will hook in a broader audience, garnering links on Twitter and Facebook and commentary from other sites. We’re actually building content promotion positions for these featured posts into the site. Lists and guides and explainers will be some of your best friends here, as will any scoops you can develop or news you can break. This will tie into your weekly planning (and it will take planning).
The weekly cycle
Image courtesy of Flickr user Wild_Honey_Pie☂
Set aside some time every week to plan for the following week. This is when you can develop ideas for those attention-getters that will earn you regular exposure to a wider and wider potential crowd. As you plan your banner ideas for each week, think about how to hook different segments of your community. For example, in a typical week, you might plan on developing two featured posts for your business audience, a couple for your law/policy and academic audiences, and another few explainers or analyses or stories that bring in the lay audience.
Of course, the cycles of a particular beat are likely to intersect with your content planning at the weekly level. There are probably regular meetings, briefings, newsletters or document releases that relate to your beat, so you can set up the appropriate live-chats and follow-up posts as necessary.
From week to week, different stories are going to really seize the attention of your crowd, and it’s important to pursue these doggedly and elevate the level of attention you pay them (to whatever degree makes journalistic sense). Sometimes you’ll know when these are coming down the pike (e.g. your legislature is set to vote on a hot-button law). But often, these types of stories are tied to the news – so you can’t necessarily plan for specific stories to take root, but you can be attuned to them when they appear. Make sure to keep them front-and-center for the week, if not longer, altering your weekly content planning if necessary to report new dimensions to the story, write some authoritative explainers and guides, and query your crowd for their insights.
At least once a week, you should be aiming to develop an attention-getter post that can really shine. Don’t neglect your ability to set an agenda and follow up on it. If you think a post is going to make a splash, follow it up early and often with posts that add dimension and enlarge the story. Find ways to relate the story to each of your audiences with different posts.
The medium- to long-term
Image courtesy of Flickr user CIMMYT.
Your daily and weekly planning for the site will keep it flowing, but what will really make it sing is the arc – the long-term vision that will tell your readers you’re taking them somewhere. You’re not just writing a blog, you’re writing something like a book. It’s important not to lose site of that.
Think about the long-term rhythm of your site. How often are you making a splash on your topic? On a monthly or semi-monthly basis, you should be thinking about how to create the solid, informative, high-level content that will get maximum pickup in your community – your equivalents of the Sunday A1 front-pager. We chose topics for Argo that would be “locally focused, but nationally resonant.” I expect that “national resonance” to be strongest in your long-term planning, where your biggest, most important pieces are conceived and developed.
They say long-form narrative doesn’t work well on the Web, but there are a number of ways to deliver big Web stories that will be popular: comprehensive guides to hot-button issues, deep investigative narratives, analytical pieces that lay out a major trend or idea, crowdsourced packages of the most influential people in the topical domain. The key is to imagine the final packages in advance, then break them down into components you can produce as part of your daily workflow. You recognize this advice: package, repackage, repeat.
Done well, the daily rhythm of your blog feeds your long-term strategy, and your long-term planning drives your daily activity. Invariably, though, you’ll find yourself wrapped up in day-to-day matters, devoting less and less attention to the longer-term stuff. That’s OK. I promise not to let you stray too far from the bigger picture.
Blogger-rhythms: how to develop your blog’s pace
STOP: Before you read this post, I’d like to ask you to read my co-blogger Robin’s mini-treatise on the concept of “stock and flow.”
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Maurese Polizio.
OK, now that you’re back, let’s talk about the rhythm of the blog.
I like to think about this rhythm in two dimensions: 1) audience patterns and 2) blogger patterns. I’ll talk about them in that order:
I. Audience patterns
Any Web editor with an eye on her stats knows that there are ebbs and flows in her users’ attention. Digital news editors tend to see a prominent spike first thing in the morning, as their users are rising for work and getting booted up for the day, another spike toward the lunch hour, perhaps a mild crest in the mid-afternoon, and some post-work, early-evening traffic to cap off the day. Widen the lens a bit, and you find that traffic tends to surge during the work week and settle over the weekends.
I’ve heard evidence that these patterns are evening out a little as people’s Web reading habits migrate to phones and other devices, allowing them to sneak in some surfing while they’re waiting in line for a mid-morning coffee or waiting for dinner to cook. Also, Twitter and Facebook are often up in the background as folks work at their computers, making it likelier than ever that a post might go viral in the middle of the day. And these patterns shift, of course, according to the location, focus and demographic of the site. Traffic to the arts and entertainment site I launched in Minnesota started to rise as the weekend drew closer, often hitting its peak on Friday in the late afternoon.
Whatever the rhythm of your crowd might be, you’ll discover that one exists, and it’s typically a good idea to accommodate that rhythm, to some extent. On newsier blogs, it’s standard practice to try to have some good meaty posts ready to go when your first users fire up the site in the morning – typically including a morning link roundup. Many bloggers indulge their crowd’s loopier side as the lunch hour approaches, posting fun YouTube videos or opening up threads for free discussion. In the afternoon, people often surf around for quick, digestible info-nuggets, an impulse bloggers often satisfy with more quick-hit content – following up a morning link with an excerpt and some additional insight, writing a few grafs on an interesting news development that day, calling to the crowd to share information that will be processed into a post later in the week, etc.
What’s important is to pay attention. Once you start to acquire an audience, observe their appetites. Note times and days when you achieve reactions you like. Test out earlier and earlier post times for a morning link roundup and see if you detect an uptick worth shifting your day.
Coming tomorrow: The blogger’s pattern.
Building a network
Image courtesy of Flickr user formula photo.
Like any beat reporter, a beat-blogger’s social network – her universe of sources, colleagues and other contacts – is a vital component of her work. On the Web, this network becomes more explicit, more public and even more immensely valuable. And for Argo, it composes a key part of the scaffolding the blogger should build at the outset of her pursuit.
I’d start with Twitter. It’s one of the fastest, most effective mechanisms for encountering news and links around a topic, and it has the potential to be a key driver of engagement with the site. A valuable Twitter feed will be filled with voices from every corner of the beat – key organizations, experts, activists, officials, reporters and others. I’d use Twitter lists to help organize these accounts into the roles they occupy. Well before the site is launched, the blogger can also interact with her network on Twitter, setting aside a little time every day to discover and share the best links on her subject. It should be a goal to build a robust Twitter following by launch, and the best way to do that is by consistently sharing interesting, useful links and commentary.
Then I’d move on to Google Reader (or another RSS reader) and set up my feeds, pulling in links from the various subdomains on the beat. I like to organize my feeds both by subject and priority – my “rock stars” folder is the first one I check every morning. Anyway, I’ll post about RSS management tactics later. The point is – a blogger’s feed reader should be the ultimate beat-focused newspaper, a daily gold mine of information for the truly topic-obsessed. Set it up early and keep it well-groomed.
In addition to RSS feeds from some sites, there might be other places on the Web – especially discussion forums – that it makes more sense to visit than subscribe to. A custom start page offers a convenient way to navigate to these sites daily or weekly.
Given that imagery will be such an important element of our sites, I’d also look for people on sites such as Flickr and YouTube creating work that we might want to use on our sites. I’d recommend doing a Creative Commons search for tags related to the topic on Flickr and contact photographers producing compelling work licensed for reuse, complimenting them on their photography and asking how they prefer to be credited if we reuse any of their images.
Depending on the beat, a range of other social network possibilities might come into play. Are there robust Facebook groups related to the topic? Mailing lists? Ning networks?
None of this stuff allows us to set-it-and-forget-it. RSS subscriptions, Twitter accounts and other social outputs have to be maintained over time. But we can take the first, most important steps early in the life of the beat.