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12:18 am
February 18, 2009 |
Daniel Bachhuber
| | | | | Admin | posts 102 |
| | What strategies do you have for bridging the print/digital divide? What are some ways to drive the print readers to your online product? In the past couple of weeks, we've heard from Melinda Bardon about embedding QR codes alongside articles. With a mobile phone application that used the QR code to pull up the article, I really think you could drive a lot more conversation around the articles (if they were conversation-worthy, at least). If QR codes were too advanced, you could also print short URLs to articles so that the reader could tear out the URL for commenting later. One more thought: I think more student newspapers should take to printing a selection of the intelligent comments in the daily paper. These would probably be of greater interest than wire stories, and could drive more participation on the website. What ideas do you have? | |
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11:06 am
February 18, 2009 |
joey
| | Silicon Valley | | | Admin | posts 39 |
| | I like your idea of using short URLs in the print edition. I wish there was a plugin for [enter your favorite CMS here] that would generate a short URL and a 'pretty permalink' for every page. That would mean SEO friendly URLs and print friendly URLs that use your own market friendly domain name. One thing that The Daily Orange does is publish a 'best of' blog post every week on the start page of the paper. | |
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11:31 am
February 18, 2009 |
jcmyers
| | | | | New Member | posts 2 |
| | I'm interested in the idea of short URLs. A couple of ideas: - TinyURL has a really simple API, which we use in our site when we send out the top story over Twitter every production night.
- For the Django users out there (apologies to all of you out there on other systems, but this is the one I know), it'd be pretty trivial to add another line in the URLconf for shorter URLs.
- Something like (r'^a-(?P<id>\d+)/$', 'path.to.views.short_article_url'), with the short_article_url(id) view simply redirecting the visitor to the article's actual page (both for ease of further linking and to keep the search engines from thinking you're trying to spam them by publishing the same content under two different addresses).
As for the 'best of' thing Joey mentioned, we do something similar: On page 2 of every issue (semiweekly), we have a list of the five articles that got the most pageviews online since the previous issue came out. Pretty simple–just have someone (in our case, the online content editor) check Analytics or whatever similar package you're using. It also forces us to have at least a brief look at what our visitors are actually looking at, which is always nice. |
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12:01 pm
February 18, 2009 |
Andrew Spittle
| | Walla Walla, WA | | | Moderator | posts 49 |
| | I like the ideas of short urls and the "best of" blog. One thing that we're working on adding at least for sports events is a higher number of photos. While the print edition might just run with one photo of the basketball game in it it'll contain a reference to the photo gallery of the game that's online. It's simple, but it's the most I've really been able to convince the print people of so far. The idea of incorporating student comments into the print edition is also great. I think that this could be really useful especially if it was on an article that was a continuing topic. | Andrew – andrew@copress.org – CoPress Hosting Director – http://www.andrewspittle.net |
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4:35 pm
February 18, 2009 |
Daniel Bachhuber
| | | | | Admin | posts 102 |
| | @joey and all, Google Apps also has a short link generator that is pretty easy to use (there's a bookmarklet) and allows you to generate the url before the article is published (if you have to go to print before pub'ing to the website). I think one potential advantage of including the short url in the paper would be that you could track adoption rate. If they're using a unique URL, you'd be able to see where they're coming from. Does the "best of" blog post cover the top articles in the paper? I'm not entirely clear as to what you're referencing… | |
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12:45 pm
February 19, 2009 |
John Luetke
| | Milwaukee, WI | | | Member | posts 4 |
| | Our paper's graphic design department came up with a set of icons that denote an print article having more content online, such as a slideshow, video, podcast, etc. Google Analytics showed us that once we started printing these icons, visits to our website increased, especially to said articles. | John Luetke | Interactive Director, Marquette Student Media | http://marquettestudentmedia.org |
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12:17 am
February 20, 2009 |
jowe
| | Millersville, PA | | | Member | posts 9 |
| | Haha some of these ideas are exactly what I have been thinking as well… I just did a quick survey of the section editors to get feedback. I think that QR codes are the way of twitter… it's cool, but no one is going to use them/it as far as readers go. We use these cool, cutting-edge things, but our readers aren't all like us. That's the main reason I'm pushing simpler things. The big thing I pushed out thus far this semester (and I did it in about 10 seconds) was integration with facebook. I think this is a no-brainer for any college media site. For our site (WordPress based), there are a few plugin's available, but there is also a nice guide on how to add Facebook Connect to any site at Mashable. How it works: users come to the site to comment, and can login with facebook. They allow the site to access their info (like an application would). They comment, and it appears in their news feed. How cool is that? Now, I'm still figuring out the news feed part (I'm using the official plugin from the Facebook Developers Wiki), but this seems like a great way to generate comments. One way we try to engage readers that hasn't been mentioned is a weekly poll. It's easy, simple for users, and relevant. For me, it seems like a no-brainer. | Webmaster
TheSnapper.com
Running on WordPress 2.7 |
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11:48 am
February 20, 2009 |
Mo Jangda
| | Toronto, ON | | | Member | posts 35 |
| | @jowe: you've hit the nail right on the head. It's really important to tailor yor web services to your core demographic. Sure it's nice to incorporate Twitter, Digg, etc, etc. into your site, but if they students that read your paper aren't on board with those services, then there's really no point. And this is where Facebook comes out the winner. I'd say majority (note: not all) of college/university students are using the site, so finding ways to integrate with it is essential. We had huge success a year and a half ago by simply adding a "Share on Facebook" button to every online article. Initially it was only really used by newspaper staff to share their work with friends, but it drove lots of traffic to the site, and soon we saw others starting to do so as well. Other basic things to consider with Facebook include setting up a Fan Page, and adding apps such as an RSS Importer to pull in your RSS feeds to the page. Facebook Connect also provides a lot of interesting opportunities but it's still in its infancy and I don't think that the average Facebook user understands the concept yet. Those I've talked to about it, think that it's a very cool idea, but weren't aware of it until I brought it to their attention. Beyond that, I think the digital space should be used for everything that you can't in the print edition for: mp3 recordings of interviews, videos of events, additional (colour) photos, etc. Printing of comments is something we've done in the past, but we've been told to be cautious against by our lawyers (Canada has funny rules), mainly due to anonymity. And finally, I think blogs can play a key role. If your newspaper has regular columnists, set them up with their own online space, so that they can contribute additional thoughts and ideas, and get their existing following to the web. As for short URLs, I think we really need to be careful with this tool. The main concern I have is one of basic usability: make sure users know where links are taking them. Short links obscenely violate this. It also opens the door to phishing tactics (eg: both Facebook and ow.ly keep on their own domain and just show the resulting page in an iFrame <- bad!). If short links are the only way to go, then I think a safer option is to build/host your a short url generator on your own domain (ie: http://yournewspaper.org/goto/e34qq). | |
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3:18 am
February 23, 2009 |
Diego Remus
| | São Paulo/Brazil | | | Member | posts 3 |
| | How come someone dare not concerning that all printed news is processed digitally? So, what divide other than… I really think there´s a big issue behind this subject: power derives from the posssession of the means of production. For mass media, it means they are already feeding from digital/virtual universe but still make a living from (say) selling pieces of paper. And they complain that it´s much more worthy and (effective) than selling pieces of screen. You see, they get it wrong because it´s their business model, their gatekeeping and newsmaking background. Jimi Hendrix already used to say so many years ago: "the blues is much more than the technalities behind the notes". So, it´s very positive that we go after "geek instruction", but we please do not mistake the device from the structure. By the way, anyone read BOlter & Grusin´s "Remeditation – understanig new media"? And Steven Johnson´s "Interface Culture"? That´s the much of tech enough to even have a real revolution, in a meaning that would scare the most conservative. Maybe there´s gotta be more and more like theprintedblog.com for "news farmers" to see how to dance (not to play). We gotta care about the cultural divide! You´d better dare you can have most people learning to live through the web (the web is a web of people, at first). It REALLY is possible. There really ARE ways to do it. I became so happy sooner today when I saw this community and how news college students are so much in the path of doing it! Long ago, economist Joseph Shumpeter wrote in 1942 that the "creative destruction" is the fundamental fact in capitalism. And it´s beyond tech, it´s about living together, doing things together. Maybe you get insight reading Fritjof Capra´s "Uncommon wisdom" and "Hidden Connections". Boa sorte! Feel free to contact! | Diego Remus,
a freemium networkaholic wikinomist
at http://migre.me/33. |
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8:24 pm
March 2, 2009 |
Daniel Bachhuber
| | | | | Admin | posts 102 |
| | I know this discussion is supposed to be over, but I came across this great list of URL shorteners with APIs that I thought other people might be interested in. It'd make it easier than building your own. | |
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