George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

We created onMason as the solution. The site is a WordPressMU platform for anyone with an @gmu.edu e-mail to sign up and get their own yoursite.onmason.com WordPress site. Each site comes with built-in mobile compatibility, SEO optimization, a Creative Commons license and a ton of themes and plug-ins. In addition, users can friend each other from the backend and set up their blog as a Facebook app. The user base has been growing very quickly, especially with professors using Scholarpress tools to run class sites. We’re in the midst of upgrading all our plug-ins so that they are 2.8 compatible, but we’re going to be re-rolling out a bunch of great features, including the ability to see a feed of all the blogs on the site and parse it down by tags.

There’s a lot of great potential there for crowd-sourcing events by having users blog about them and mark posts with a tag. We hope to provide the many Mason students already out there creating content and posting media with one home where they can get together, use the best tools, and provide their own view on Mason.

Right now, our focus is making sure everything is working, however, we’re looking at a number of monetization strategies for the site. We can set up ads that only display to non-users on every onmason.com site. We’ve also got the tools to set it up so certain plug-ins or expanded space is only available with a premium membership. Another possibility is providing local advertisers with the option to get their own sponsored  onMason site, I think that the opportunity to interact with students in a small hyper-local network like onMason would be a valuable one.

The advantage of this tool is that we can converge student-created content into our own. We also use onMason as a platform to host a number of our outlet sites, allowing our official front to join in with that community.

Mason Votes

Mason Votes was a community-backed project that the Office of Student Media launched for the national presidential election in 2008. The site allowed us to cover news with tools our office hadn’t used before. The original site was based on WordPress and had a static front page, in order to get the site up quickly. It integrated with Google Calendar, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.

We were able to use a number of very cool tools over the course of the election. We covered the debates with CoverItLive chats and streamed live events using Livestream. We were able to make all our content, on both the site and social media, searchable using Lijit.

We found two great ways to pull traffic into the site. The first was through co-sponsoring community events. We worked with the College Republicans and College Democrats, various offices and other student groups to bring their events to the forefront in exchange for having a presence at those events. This came into play with live tweets and photos from student-run events, as well as with the live chats that played alongside video of the debates.

The second way we drove traffic was by putting everything under a Creative Commons license. Our articles were out on the web for people to use and our photographers photos were on Flickr and the people who used them (including Wikipedia) linked back to our presence.

The site continued to cover student and state elections and was moved to onMason and redesigned. It now has a Facebook app that lets people display the latest stories on their front page.

Connect2Mason

Last school year our Drupal-based convergence site Connect2Mason was redesigned and upgraded. The new site features a more dynamic front page and integrates in advertising and classifieds.

Connect2Mason’s role is to converge content from all the various student media outlets at GMU. They pull in podcasts from our radio station WGMU, video from our cable station MCN, text and photos from the student newspaper Broadside and enhance it with their own content and breaking news coverage.

Connect2Mason reporters use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to post and broadcast content. The site is able to showcase the best of what student media produce.

We’re now redesigning the website with a more modern, less blog look. Our group is using Google Code to create requirements documents, track bugs and issues, and coordinate our activity. We’re making sure to do testing and really drill down on our requirements for version 3.0 of Connect2Mason.

Social Media

Our goal is to be the face of George Mason on social media, especially when it comes to Twitter, and we’re constantly garnering feedback and expanding our presence. My team runs 12 Twitter accounts along with their own personal identities. We have one for each of our major websites, news feeds for each  area where George Mason has a campus, and three accounts that pull from Twitter and other feeds to advertise local jobs. None of the job feed accounts would have even happened if it wasn’t for our regular interaction with our Twitter audience. At the end of the last school year I asked the people following the@FairfaxVANews account what they were interested in seeing us provide and a number of students looking towards graduation suggested the idea of a local job wire.

We feel like a big part of our role when it comes to Twitter is helping Mason students and faculty find each other, not just listen to us broadcast our own work. We created a Twitter directory that anyone could add to so that Mason users could list themselves and find each other. When the function came out, we created Twitter lists, so that people could follow all the orgs, offices, staff or students with a single click. We also monitor for mentions of GMU and engage interested high school students, professors and both grad and undergrad students. We also try to interact with the local community outside of the University’s boundaries, sending representatives to social media meetups and the recent DC Twestival.

We’ve found that this level of interaction allows us to push our content farther and get feedback. Not only that, but because we are out there talking to students, they sometimes come to us with tips that turn into new stories.

Overall tools

For Twitter, we’ve been using CoTweet and Seesmic Desktop to share access to the various Twitter accounts, follow mentions and engage our community.

The WPBook plugin allows any onMason user to make their site headlines a Facebook app.

We’re transitioning some of the older advertising over, but soon all of our graphic and text ads will be administrated by our OpenX ad server. OpenX provides a free ad server which we installed and run ourselves. It provides all the tools to set up and administrate ad campaigns on multiple sites.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Technology Manager in the Office of Student Media at George Mason University. He can be reached at azuckers@gmu.edu.

Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm

Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:

Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.

Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.

Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.

If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.

Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.

Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.

Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.

Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.

Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.

A Fan Box widget fixed that problem. And it can do the same for you.

What is a Fan Box?

I first saw a Fan Box in use with the launch of StudLife.com and immediately knew I had to use it too. It’s a minimally customizable widget that you can throw into the sidebar or footer of your website.

The upper portion of the box lists the name of your page, shows thumbnails of current fans, a stream of your updates and gives visitors the option of becoming a fan straight from your Web site. Of course, all these options are customizable. If you don’t want to show your fans, for example, you don’t have to.

I love this tool because it makes it so much easier for your fans to engage with you on Facebook. Let’s face it: people are generally lazy. They won’t take the extra effort to hunt you down on Facebook and become a fan. But if you put it in their faces, there’s no reason for them not to.

Since installing one of these handy boxes on the sidebar of mustangdaily.net on July 14, we’ve gotten 60 more fans. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, that’s a 71% increase that happened in six weeks. It took 7 months for us to get the first 85 fans.

People are finally starting to interact with our content, suggest story ideas, ask questions about articles that prompt further reporting and even just say, “Good job, thanks for interacting with us!”

The point: people will engage if you make it easy.

Before you install it

To put a Fan Box on your page, you of course need to first have a Facebook Fan page — not a group. A fan page can be better utilized than a group because it functions just like any other profile.

The best part is that any status updates you make on the fan page will be sent out to all your fans’ newsfeeds, just like any other status update. This gives users the ability to respond to links and updates you post. A group is static and incapable of this. And groups don’t come with a cool fan box.

A few tips for your Fan Page:

• Update it often. Although this can mean linking it with an RSS feed or with your Twitter updates, the best Facebook pages have custom updates.
• Interact with your readers. If people have questions or respond to your links, write back to them or tweet their comments to encourage others to add their own. I’ve found that just getting one person to comment will be a catalyst for at least a few others to chime in.
• Don’t overwhelm your fans. Facebook isn’t Twitter; update often, but not too often. Posting 10 updates a day might annoy your fans and cause them to block your updates from appearing on their newsfeed.
• Make it personal. You’re representing your organization’s brand, but that doesn’t mean have you have to sound like a PR machine. Things like “Hey, Happy Monday! Anyone have ideas for our story meeting today?” make your page feel approachable. One thing I do is make it clear that our page is not the Mustang Daily page, but the page for editors of the Mustang Daily to interact with readers, so it’s clear that it’s OK if we have some personality in our updates.

Installing the Fan Box

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably ready to get that handy tool on your site.

Facebook makes the installation really easy — it’s basically a matter of checking a few boxes and copying the code.

Step 1: Go to your Facebook fan page. Beneath your profile image, click “Add Fan Box to your site.”

Step 2: Customize your options. You can show your stream, show fan thumbnails, or simply embed “become a fan” without any of the other bells and whistles.

Step 3: Paste the code where you want it to appear. If you’re using WordPress, you can paste that code as a text widget.

Facebook’s developer wiki explains a few advanced options for manipulating the code to change height, width, number of fans that appear, etc.

You’ll also notice that there’s an option to use a “live stream” box which is similar to what CNN used during the presidential inauguration and Michael Jackson’s funeral. (I have yet to use this tool, so perhaps that will be another blog post.)

If you’ve used a Facebook Fan Box or if you have any other advice for maintaining a fan page, let us know in the comments!

• Facebook news application source code open to college news sites – NewsCloud has open sourced a Facebook application specifically for student news organizations. The application reportedly incentivizes activity around the news org’s content through a point system and rewards.
• TWiT 197: Steal This Diploma – Jeff Jarvis joins Leo Leporte for a discussion on newspaper collusion, Google Wave, and education.
• How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing – Detailed, enlightening essay on how the web has changed writing formats.
• The Daily Tar Heel’s new social media policy – Sara Gregory, incoming Managing Editor for Online, lays out the DTH’s remarkably open and earnest social media policies for the coming year.

Around the network

Conversation on the forum was light this week with Daniel asking about different styles of navigation. Joey quickly replied with:

My point: think about nav bars from the user’s perspective. I’d propose http://newser.com as a good example of a newsorg nav bar.

• It’s dynamic: content changes based on what the top stories are.
• It links off to topic pages. Only the most timely and relevant topic pages are easily accessible.
• You can still get to the traditional sections if you really want to navigate that way.

Max Cutler also offered his opinion,

In my experience/opinion, the reality is that that most college news orgs publish about the same limited set of topics repeatedly, and that’s why the section model can make some sense. That’s not to say that tags shouldn’t be used; they definitely should, and virtually all college news sites could do a better job of integrating tags into their navigation and exploration flow.

On the wiki this week, Daniel edited the Edit Flow Page with the latest info on the project.

The best way to get traffic to your site is from links, and if your Facebook page is used correctly it can bring a great amount of traffic to your site.

Here are my top 10 ways to make sure that your Facebook Page doesn’t get overlooked:

1. Use RSS Feeds. It will be a great load off your shoulders to know that every time a new article is put up on your site, it will appear automatically on your Facebook Page. You can bring RSS feeds to your page by do adding Applications in the edit area of your page. The one I recommend is Simply RSS. It’s quite reliable and does the job well.

2. Use the Status Feature. Since the redesign, Facebook now has given Pages the opportunity to update their Fans without having to flood them (the old Facebook page’s version of statuses that went into their own separate inbox which often became overwhelming). Since the newest version of Pages include statuses, you can update your fans that will appear in their News Feed, which will make your publication’s Facebook page that much more visible than before.

3. Update Your Fans. The feature from the old version of Facebook pages can still be effective, so don’t overlook it. Some Facebook users have a tendency to ignore updates when they are sent to them but not all. Updates also allow you longer form communication with your Fans.

4. Use multimedia to make your Facebook a mini website. Consider putting the main slideshows and videos you put on your Web site onto your Facebook Page too. This content can then enter your Fans’ News Feeds. The NY Times’ Facebook Page is a good examples of this.

5. Make sure your digits are current. This seems like a no-brainer but think about how quickly info can become irrelevant when information is not updated. If you list your editors on your page, make sure the editors names and information are up-to-date.

6. Include Contact Info. In addition to the typical info, like phone number and address that Facebook asks when you start a page, how about also having someone on the page info on who should be contacted if a fan has a tip?

7. Be human. Transparency is all the rage these days, so why not use your Facebook Page as a means to get with the game. Just got out of an editorial meeting? Update your fans about it in your status: “The Whit just had a really productive meeting about how we’re going to better cover X” People enjoy getting what is an inside view of your inner workings. You’d be surprised at how quickly your Facebook Page will be more active once Fans realize there is a human behind it all.

8. Start Conversations. This goes back to the whole “being a human” thing. When people leave comments or explain how they enjoyed a particular piece, respond! People like to know that this isn’t just some page you started just so you can “seem cool with the kids.” Make sure you mean it.

9. Have Favorite Pages. Most likely the pages your publication will favorite will either be other papers or companies that you’re affiliated with that help you do your jobs better. Good! Let your Fans know who you’re connected with and plus, once you favorite them, chances are they’ll favorite yours.

10. Link! This should go without saying but make sure that the possibilities are endless for visitors of your Facebook page to reach your Web site. Use photos, video, articles, anything; just make sure that they are getting a teaser for the fuller version of a great product they can get on your Web site.

We have a new core team member: Emily Kostic!

Emily, whose title will be editorial associate, will work on the CoPress blog and This Week in CoPress podcast.

One of her ideas is to the make the podcast more participatory, possibly by using BlogTalkRadio, recording live shows and allowing listeners to “call in” with questions and comments. This idea goes along nicely with Daniel’s goal of making the podcasts more like a discussion than an interview.

Some background on Emily:

Emily is a junior studying journalism at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She currently serves as the managing editor and Web editor for The Whit. In her role, Emily led the staff in incorporating more multimedia tools after The Whit transitioned to WordPress as CoPress’s first client. Outside of journalism, Emily enjoys traveling and listening to music.

From her experience at The Whit to her awesome blog, we’ve known for awhile that Emily would make a great addition to the team and we’re thrilled to have her on board.

And, just to leave a teaser, we’re looking to add another new team member in the next couple months. Stay tuned…

E-mail Emily at emily [at] copress [dot] org or follow her on Twitter: @emilykostic.

I’d like to propose a simple rule:

Tags should never contain a proper noun.

This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.

Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.

Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.

• Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
• You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
• The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
• There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.

What should be tagged

Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data.

For example: If you take a picture of three friends at Disneyland, you don’t need to tag it, “Larry, Moe, Curly, Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, Magic Kingdom.” Instead tag it, “Outside, Group Picture, Portrait, Silly.”

The former list you’d easily put into a half decent caption. The latter would likely never actually be written anywhere else.

Try building a tag library that contains names and places is nearly impossible. How can you ever possibly account for everyone/thing that you could ever need? Stick to concepts and generalizations.

It’s a good rule

There are, of course, exceptions. If a proper noun becomes a concept onto itself, then it likely belongs in you tagging scheme. For example, during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, people were tagging their tweets on Twitter with #mumbai. Yes, a city name is a proper noun, but as a concept, #mumbai was the best common way to describe what was going on.

SImilarly, if you’re writing a article about social networking, then “Twitter,” is a good tag to include. As the service has become so popular that it has a host of meta-information out there.

Let me boil the rule down for you Twitter users. When you go to tag your next blog post, photo, video, github project, or any other piece of data online, ask yourself: “Would this tag make a good #hashtag on a post?”

CORRECTION: This post initially used the term “pronoun” instead of “proper noun,” as intended. All references in the headline, text and URL have since been corrected.

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged.

Look at me! Please?

Part of the problem with blogs is that they have developed a stigma among the public — very similar to the way journalists used to feel. Therefore, getting your audience to click to a new area of your site that doesn’t necessarily have the latest “news” can be a challenge.

Case in point: at The Daily Orange, we’ve recently relaunched our Sports Blog network. The sports department has not only taken to the whole blogging experience, but they’ve really embraced the platform as a way of publishing a ton fantastic content that just does not fit into normal news articles. See this great video post example.

The issue here is that the blog network receives relatively few visits when compared to the main site. It also suffers heavily in the search rankings because it doesn’t have the Google juice of dailyorange.com.

Possible Solutions

What follows is a summary list of ideas that we’ve been brainstorming at The Daily Orange for getting our content noticed online. I’ve expanded it a bit to serve a general purpose audience.

Write for your niche audience. Don’t worry about entertaining the “average” viewer. Blogs are for the folk who want to know all there is to know about a singular topic. It is important to include your personal voice. The occasional post to let your readers see a “behind the scenes” view generates a lot of loyalty.

College Publisher users will note that there is no blogging system built into the platform. The best way (read: only way) to make up for this is to run a separate blogging platform. The problem with this is that, as a separate website, you loose all the previously mentioned Google Juice that your main site has gained. There are ways to help with this: 

• Link to the blog in the main navigation bar of the College Publisher site
• Put a tease for the blog (including links to the most recent posts) on the front page of the main website (this can easily be done with a widget)
• Link back to the main site on the blog
• Mention relevant blog articles in main news articles (with links, of course!)

Adopt Facebook. Love it or hate it, Facebook is the best platform to reach college students online. Positive steps include:

• Start a Facebook Page for your blog or news organization, and be sure the videos and blog posts auto-post to that page
• Have someone in charge of that page! You can rotate the responsibility if you like, but just as it’s important for your blog to have constant content so that it feels live, your Facebook page needs to have the same tender lovin’ care. All it takes is getting the status update changed a few times a week, or just sending out a message every week pointing people to a good blog post
• Be sure that all your relevant content reposts to your Facebook Page. This includes blog posts, videos and news articles. It’s also a good idea to link to content that you don’t generate. (Do what you do best, link to the rest.)
• Send out messages to your fans. Topics could include: a contest to ask for photos of some theme of the week (mid-terms, craziest fan costume, etc). Promise to run the top photo on the blog and in the print edition. You can also send out breaking news alerts via Facebook; the truth is that you’ll probably get more viewers on Facebook than on your main site.

Get on Twitter. If your newsroom is low on Twitter acceptance scale, (we’re at stage 1 at The Daily Orange), believe me when I tell you that will not, and can’t last. Twitter has proven on three separate occasions (Mumbai, Plane crash in Denver, Plane crash in the Hudson) that it’s a valuable news source. Welcome to the future.

More importantly, Twitter is a hot-bed of early adopters right now. Want to get noticed? Want Poynter,Romenesko, CICM, and others to recognize your work? Twitter is a great medium for that.

Twitter is much like your Facebook profile: it must be personable. This takes someone deciding to truly use the tool. Shoveling links on to it, is poor form, and really doesn’t encourage people to follow. @latimes and @missoulianphoto do a fantastic job of using Twitter. Check ‘em out if you wanna see how it’s done.

If you don’t want to manage accounts at Twitter and Facebook and [enter social network site here] check out Ping.fm. They can help make a lot of the status updating automatic.

You’ve got great content, now be great bloggers. No matter how you feel about it as a medium, blogging is going be here for quite sometime, and it’s got it’s own rules and culture associated with it.

Linking is key.

I’ll go ahead and write that again so that you don’t miss it:

Linking is key.

You’ve got to fill up the glass of Google Juice with links. Bloggers figured this out a long time ago, it’s why we’ve got things like blogrolls and Technorati. Some of the best ways of getting noticed are to start commenting on other related blogs. Say something relevant (“nice post” doesn’t count) and perhaps point them back to one of your own blog posts.

If your local city paper covers the same content, leaving a comment there can make the local community aware of the fact that you even exist.

Generating a conversation between blogs is beneficial for both parties, and serves the audience by inciting conversation. It’s a win for all involved (not to mention, good journalism).

credit: New York Times

Visuals are not optional. People like pretty pictures. If your blog is pure text, you stand the risk of looking very user-unfriendly. You’ve got a photo department – use ‘em.

Oh, and shooting video is cool too. A 3 minute recording of two reporters wrapping up a sporting event is easy, it’s something they do anyway, and will give a ‘behind the scenes view’ that your viewers will enjoy.

Ideas?

This has by no means been a comprehensive list of ways to get your content noticed, but at 1,200 words, I figure we’d better call it quits. If however, you’ve got a strategy you’ve used to get your blog readership up, please share in the comments.

edited by: Daniel Bachhuber

update: Feb 7, 2009: added iBlade image.