Rupert Murdoch recently accused Google of stealing content from the News Corp. news outlets and even went as far as threatening to pull all News Corp.’s content from all Google indexes. Although protecting their revenue stream is important for big corporations like News Corp., it is a big mistake to think that the free availability of news content is damaging. Internet news directories like Google News offer student news publications an opportunity to tap new markets and reach new audiences.

I believe that exposure is very valuable for any news organization, and that as a news organization you have to be wherever your audience is. As college newspapers, we are usually serving a relatively small geographic area with our news organizations. But does this mean that only people in this particular area would be interested in what we report? Of course not! Now that almost any college newspaper has an online presence, it is time to start reaching out beyond these geographically confined areas and reach new audiences that we otherwise could access.

What if I told you that your newspaper stories could be on the news stands right next to stories from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? Google News offers you this opportunity. The way that Google news organizes their content is by grouping sources around a certain topic or story.

For example, If your news organization is covering a popular topic that a lot of people are searching for at that particular time, your content can float to the top of the Google News directory. This generally means a huge increase in traffic to your site. At the small college newspaper I work for, we have seen increases from our regular average of about 50 to a 100 pageviews on an article to over 1500 views. Although this definitely does not happen to all articles, if there is likely to be an interest in the story outside of your “target area,” chances are that Google News will drive a lot of traffic to these articles.

And these are not just passive visitors that peek at your article for a while and then leave. User engagement can be very high, especially if you make it easy for your visitors to comment on stories, without having to go through a lengthy sign up process first (take a look at Disqus for example).

So how do you include your content in the Google News directory? It is very straightforward, although there are some things to pay attention to in order to make optimum use of the Google News features. The first step is to submit your site for consideration to Google. It is not entirely clear on what criteria Google News accepts new sources, but generally if your site is not a single-author blog, you have a good chance of being included.

Google has some excellent documentation on what the optimum configuration is to get your content indexed properly and quickly by the Google spider. Here are the most important:

• Use unique and permanent URLs, each article needs its own URL and the content should continually be able to be accessed through this URL
• Use a 3 (or more) digit number in the URL of the page
• The Google indexing bot does not follow links in Flash content, so if you, for example, use a Flash content slider you will need to provide an HTML alternative
• Frames on your site can cause problems for indexing content properly
• If your content is behind a registration wall, you need to set up an exception for Google indexing bots

The indexing of news stories is usually pretty quick (content shows up within the hour), but to expedite the process Google suggests to use News Sitemaps, which allows the indexing bots to index your content quicker and more accurately. Instructions on how to do this are provided by Google in the Getting Started section. If you are running a WordPress site, WP Engineer has specific instructions for you to get this working.

Once you have everything set up, keep an eye on your analytics software and you will start noticing certain topics and articles getting a lot of views through Google News. The people that come in through Google News might not necessarily be readers who regularly come back to your site (which is why you need to make it easy for people to participate), but they can create a more diverse readership on your site and can increase engagement, liven up discussions and create new advertising and monetizing opportunities.

For smaller news sources like college newspapers, Google News is a great opportunity to get stories out into the world and read by more interested people. By leveraging simple tools like these and engaging your, audience you can take your website to a whole new level.

Wim Mulder is the Web Editor at The Keystone in Kutztown, Pennsylvania and an international student from the Netherlands in the Electronic Media Masters program at Kutztown University.

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!

The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

From there I’ll draft up a more detailed list of the sessions involved and who will be leading them. Keep reading for a list of what I’m hoping to cover!

What will be covered

A lot of the material will depend upon who participates, so if you see something in the list below that you’re an expert in then let us know in the forum. Below is a rough list of what we’ve come up with thus far:

• Navigation menus
• Creating category/topical landing pages
• Creating a radical homepage design that focuses on the community’s social activity
• Incorporating a wiki into the site
• Incorporating a forum into a site
• All about typography (how do you create a consistent feel?)
• Article pages (where do you put ads? serif or sans-serif?)
• Working with CSS3 techniques and how they can help you

These will be more than just how-to sessions though. When we cover navigation menus, we will spend time critiquing the existing menus of everyone involved so that you can get a feel for what others like or dislike about you existing design.

In addition to the involvement of student developers around the country, we’re planning on having a few professionals join the camp too.

Sign up

The schedule for these sessions is tentatively set to begin on May 28th and to run every week through early to mid-July. This will give all involved a half dozen tips, tricks, and opinions to take with them as they finish their design projects throughout the rest of the summer.

Made it all the way through that and still interested? There are two things you need to do. First, sign up for the entire series via our online form. Second, RSVP for the first session on Facebook. Depending on the interest, we may have double up sessions or limit the number of participants.

Get ready for a fun summer of happy designing!

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway.

3. Video editing

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. After capturing about 3.5 hours of raw footage in Final Cut Pro, it took approximately three all-night sessions between three people to cut the interviews into short clips for the web. The average length of each clip was 1-2 minutes, with no clip longer than 5 minutes. We intentionally kept the clips short and to the point, catering to the attention span of most web users.

Once exported, the clips were uploaded to Vimeo along with some basic metadata (professor and subject in the title, pull quote in the description). We chose Vimeo for their high video playback quality and because they have one of the cleanest embedded players around.

Around the same time we were cranking out video clips, I got started with designing the page layout.

4. Layout and design

I always begin my web design process with some sketches on paper. My first thought was to build something like a mindmap, grouping clips by topic and sub-topic in a nonlinear format.

But the information might be too hard to find that way. So we came up with a dashboard of sorts at the top of the page that would let users jump to the sections they’re interested in, using simple anchor links.

At this point, I usually open up Photoshop and start playing around with graphics, because once I have a banner in place, the rest of the page’s design and color scheme tends to fall into place.

The layout itself was hand-coded in CSS and HTML, using a single-column WordPress page template as the base. All editing was done from the WordPress admin panel, with copious amounts of page previews and refreshing to test the design before it went live.

5. Putting it all together

The final stage of the project was to plug all the videos into the page layout. This turned out to be easier said than done, as we ended up with more video clips than we knew what to do with.

Ultimately, we came up with a decidedly low-tech solution to organizing the 70+ clips into the proper categories and questions: cutting up little strips of paper, writing a clip’s title on each one, and moving them around on a table until every clip had a home in the final presentation.

From there, it was simply a matter of going from section to section, copying the embed codes from Vimeo into the source code and adding thumbnails and pull quotes.

We used the Shadowbox JS plugin, which supports multiple types of media, to achieve the lightbox effect for launching videos.

A note on usability

In the project’s initial release, the thumbnails were actually embedded videos that could be played on the page without needing to launch a full-size version. Vimeo’s elegantly designed video embed options made this possible, and we all agreed that this was a very cool thing to include.

Unfortunately, within hours after launch, we received reports that our feature was causing browsers to freeze up on slower computers. Loading dozens of embedded videos on one page was too resource-intensive for a large percentage of our audience, so we had to scale back to simple image thumbnails.

Lesson learned: usability and accessibility always trumps coolness factor. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for any multimedia journalism project on the web.

When section editors tell me they don’t think their copy desk is ready for Web duties, I know how they feel, too. I know because I’ve felt the same way at one point or another in the past couple years. My background is primarily in copy editing, and I’ve made the move to the online side of our paper only in the past year. In that time, we shifted our Web uploading duties to our copy desk. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s a start.

The old system vs. the new one

We used to have one person come in late at night and upload the entire issue shovelware-style: no links, no related stories attached, no Web-first mindset.

Now, copy editors upload stories one at a time after they’ve been edited.

It’s not a perfect system and it’s not necessarily built to accommodate a 24-hour news cycle, but it’s an improvement. When most of your staff is in class during the day, it’s tough to keep the site fresh during the day, but we’re working toward that goal.

What I learned

I won’t pretend we’re perfect, but here’s some bits of wisdom I’ve picked up during our transition:

Quit making excuses

This is Rule No. 1, and it’s one that took my a while to get over. If you’re waiting for the ideal time to make the switch, you’ll be waiting forever. Take Nike’s advice and just do it.

Make a illustrated step-by-step guide

The more detailed, the better. If you’ve worked in WordPress or another CMS before, learning a new system can be easy-peasy. But I’m guessing this will be a first for more than a few of your copy deskers, so make things as painless as possible: Include screen caps with each step so they can see what to click and where to type.

I’ll admit, It’s not exactly fun to put together this kind of a guide, but multiple staff members have told me they like to have ours on hand as a reference. One who’d never worked on our site even used it as his only guide to upload a story while I was in class and no one else was around to help him. The copy editors who I’ve trained keep it in front of them as they upload stories, too, so it looks like it’s getting used.

Keep section heads in the loop

Let your higher-ups know that copy editors may be a bit slower at getting to their normal duties while they get the hang of things. No matter how much you prepare them, this is going to happen. Just ask your staff to be patient.

Getting people to show up for training can be half the battle

I’ll admit: Only 40 percent of the desk actually showed up for our mandatory training. That meant I had to do one-on-one training with the other 60 percent throughout the week. (Read: Inefficient use of time.) Advertise your mandatory training like crazy.

Show copy editors the benefits of these new duties

Internship recruiters want applicants with Web skills, and that’s exactly what this shift in duties will teach them. They should be playing this up on their resume.

A recent post by Mindy McAdams (@macloo) and a year-old classic post by CoPress member Greg Linch (@greglinch) both highlight the need for journalists to have a diverse skillset. And if you’ve worked in one CMS, it’s much easier to learn another. If it’s between you and another internship applicant, you never know when your Web skills might just give you the edge. That rationale can be a good morale-booster if your staff feels a little hesitant or overwhelmed.

Nothing will ever go off without a hitch – and that’s A-OK

When you alter your newsroom’s copy flow, try to avoid any foreseeable problems, but realize some will pop up nevertheless. Each night will be a learning process, so relax and enjoy the adventure.

An unexpected perk: Better Web headlines

Our copy desk was already writing Web-only headlines, but they weren’t very SEO-friendly. Training sessions and handouts didn’t seem to do the trick.

What did, I found out, was giving them complete ownership: They were the ones writing those headlines and they were the ones actually putting them on the stories.

I did give them a short list of pointers:

1. Be specific and use keywords.
2. Kill the cute stuff. (Search engines don’t grasp puns, plays on words, etc.)
3. Be clear and concise.

So how about you? Do you have any tips from when your news organization consolidated editing duties? What problems have you run into? Comment away!

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.