Why journalists need to build personal social networks now and for the future
Hey! Did you read my prior post on how journalists should market themselves as a brand? If not, you may want to read it first, because it serves as a foundation for this post.
By now you should’ve read this list of objectives for the non-wired journalist created by new-media guru Howard Owens — especially if you aren’t a so-called “wired” journalist.
Essentially, Owens says you need to get off your duff and start participating in this whole Web 2.0 world that newspapers desperately need to get involved with. This includes using Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr and start blogging.
Frankly, it’s nothing new. In fact, it’s what journalists should already be doing. This isn’t just about being hip or getting familiar with the rapid-fire pace of web technologies, it’s about actually helping you secure your future in journalism.
Owens likes to focus on the skills aspect of knowing how to use these utilities. I’m going to tell you that you’re going to want these skills not because it makes you more marketable to employers or makes you the tech-savvy reporter in the newsroom, but that you’re going to need them in the evolving financial model newspapers might one day enforce.
What is this financial model, you might ask? Here’s a hint: take a look at the new pay system implemented throughout the Gawker Media blog network owned by Nick Denton. In a nutshell, writers get paid a base salary, but another big part of their paycheck will come in the form of bonuses based on the traffic their posts receive.
In other words, you’re only as good as your page views.
Before the Internet, measuring the readership of newspapers was pretty tough, and to some degree really just mathematical guesswork. How many people actually browsed the pages of a daily paper can’t be accurately determined in any sort of precise fashion, let alone know what’s being read or ignored. Tracking this data is downright impossible.
But enter page views, where each article can be measured a lot more accurately and has infinite audience potential. (Yes, I know there’s a great deal of debate in the web analytics community about traffic measured in page views, uniques, visitors, etc., but that’s largely beside the point here.) Now, journalists can be held accountable for the stories they’re producing. And they can be rewarded — and consequently punished — accordingly for bringing more eyeballs, and thus more advertising dollars, to the newspaper.
I know what you’re thinking: “But Gawker’s just a bunch of blogs that don’t barely does any original reporting. What they do online as a blog can’t be translated to what we — original content producers — do on a regular basis.” Not so fast. You might want to check out this roundtable discussion held by PRESSTIME about the future of newspapers and what several innovators would do if they could start the newspaper model over from scratch. A very bleak future was given to us by Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix.net:
Q: With online news often described as a commodity product, where does traditional newspaper content fit?
Tolles: I don’t think you’re going to have the same kind of stories that you’d have in traditional papers. Your site should have 100 stories a day, not six. Journalists are going to have to work longer, harder and for less money. Think about blogs—you’re going to have to write 12 stories a day at $25 a pop. But you can change your standards a bit—you could make fact-checking an option and brand it. It’s not expected on the Web any more.
Tolles’ comments struck a nerve, to say the least. But from a business standpoint, you can see why this is attractive to CEOs looking at the bottom line.
What’s to keep newspapers from switching their traditional model to a new one? Especially a more financially viable one that increases output for a 24/7 online model that lets them turn full-time employees into freelancers competing against each other for output and page views.
We’re already seeing the rise of mobile journalists, or mo-jos, through companies like Gannett. If the emerging revenue generator is the Internet, that means that page views needs to increase, meaning the output of journalists needs to increase. The easiest way is to make journalists responsible for their paychecks and earn their keep. Tying this into traffic is an easy way to create incentives and also create an efficient accounting system.
So, what does this all mean then? How does this tie into knowing about Web 2.0 skills and utilities? And how does this tie back into building your byline as a brand and needing to market yourself?
If you’re paycheck is going to tied — in whole, or in part — to page views, you’re going to need a way to build traffic for yourself on your work. The best way to do that is to leverage those Web 2.0 skills into building your own personal social network that you can use to drive traffic to your work.
As you build up your brand, you should also be building out your social network of people that will track your byline through Google Alerts or RSS feeds. You’ll want to enlist their help to Digg up your stories. You’re going to want to have a vast network of sources via MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to call upon for story leads or ideas while simultaneously using those to alert your friends you have new stories posted.
Gradually, you can use your social network to market your quality content in a variety of forms — blogging, photos, video, etc. — and drive all that attention back toward your newspaper’s site to get you that bonus check.
And it’s a two-way street, too. To build this social network, you’ll have to give as much as you take. It’ll involve you actively participating and interacting with others through these technologies to get them excited about promoting your work.
On a sidenote: I’m not quite sure how I feel about the idea of paying reporters based on page views. As Pro Blogger points out there’s lots of different pay structures out there for bloggers. Any one of these could be applied, however, at the end of the day the revenue of the blog is still tied to traffic. Financially, you’re still held to what the masses value through their clicks.
While I think that a lot of this makes sense, it doesn’t address any ideas of “quality” work that takes longer to do and might not reward important investigative journalism that’s often done at great financial cost to a newspaper.
But, then again, we all know that you shouldn’t enter journalism because of the money, right? And we’re seeing less and less investigative journalism being done these days in favor of doing upbeat, soft-news coverage that I think is being pushed upon newspapers by publishers that don’t quite understand what the hyperlocal concept is really about.
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