Reader questions answered

Via email:

“As Alt-weeklies are moving towards the web, what do job descriptions for editorial-side web editors look like? Web editor being different from IT guy or webmaster/ programmer but an actual editorial role?”

Good question!

What is a web editor?

In the broadest terms, a web editor is responsible, just like a section editor, for the content of an alt’s website.

The key difference between an IT person/webmaster and a web editor is journalistic decision making. A web editor might perform production-related tasks, such as resizing and cropping images, but they should also take on a number of editorial roles.

What does a web editor do?

The boundaries of responsibility between print and web editors vary from institution to institution, but the duties of a web editor might include:

• Uploading stories to the website, or overseeing the folks who do
• Making decisions about the play of content on the site - what stories are given prominence on the homepage or section fronts (Ideally, these decisions are made independent of where stories are printed in the traditional print sections)
• Being a part of redesign teams and new product launches
• Monitoring and moderating comment forums and other user-generated content
• Working with writers, designers, and photographers to create web content, which could range from additional stories and photo galleries to video features
• Being a resource for best-practices web content, helping editorial staffs to learn new skills
• Making “in the heat of the moment” editorial decisions, such as when advertisers demand stories be removed from the site, or writers want to fix a mistake without adding an editors’ note.
  

  How should you handle making corrections to content that’s published online? Check our Editorial Policy.

• Planning, assigning, and editing web content
• Monitoring traffic stats (metrics) to give editorial folks insight into their web reading audience

What skills should a web editor have?

Ideally, a web editor should be comfortable with the web. Experience with blogs, social networking (MySpace, Facebook), popular web applications and a general knowledge of web users’ behavior are all desired, as well as a working knowledge of basic HTML, Photoshop, and content management systems (CMS). A strong sense of journalism ethics and the ability to think critically about emerging technologies are especially valuable.

But the great news is that anyone who is dedicated and hard working can pick this stuff up rather fast.

How can a new web editor improve their skills?

• Read! - this blog and others devoted to online journalism are great places to start - check our links section for recommended reading.
• Network! - Attend as many learning opportunities as possible, and be sure to stay in touch with your new friends so you can pick their brains.
• Experiment! - Teach yourself new technologies in trial batches. Whenever I stumble on a new technology or website, it stays top-of-mind until I find some way to use it. The more you engage with websites and their functionality, the more you will learn, and the more ideas you can steal.
• Watch! - Be a ‘trend sponge’ - pay attention to media trends that work, and think critically about how they can be altered to help your website.

  and of course …

• Question! - Ask lots and lots of questions - of each other via listservs, and emails, and certainly of web.aan.org!

A good read: Further Notes on the New Journalism Skillset

Have anything to add?

What is the role of web editor at your paper?

When Cute Site Names Go Wrong OR Why You Should Test Your Ideas with Broad Demographic Audiences

HuffingtonPost.com debuted a redesign earlier this week that incorporates a “Digg”-esque feature, where logged-in members can vote on stories, indicating if one is of interest to them. The most popular stories appear in a special section of the site.

This model works very well on websites; users like to know what others are reading.

But HuffingtonPost.com chose an unfortunate name for this new feature: “Huff It” (huffit.huffingtonpost.com).

“Huffing” is slang for inhaling intoxicants like glue, paint or aerosol products. Gasoline, lighter fluid, and paint thinner are other common items that get “huffed.” [wiki]

This unfortunately renders much of the new functionality on HuffingtonPost.com rather humorous: “Register or sign in below to start huffing!”

Screenshots

Take Home Message

Cutesy abbreviations for site functionality can confuse readers. In a worst-case scenario, you may unintentionally be incorporating slang into your redesign. Testing your designs out with a broad demographic group is one way to make sure this doesn’t happen to your latest site feature.

More web.aan.org on Arianna Huffington

Illustration by Ben Millen, arcticsounds.com

It’s a nerdy, populist idea: folks in the audience of a lecture often know just as much as the speaker, so why not have everyone contribute? It’s called an unconference [wiki], and the idea is to democratize the convention experience.

AAN will experiment with an UNconference by hosting a special, free-wheeling session on “Blogging for Journalists,” during the 2007 Convention in Portland, OR.

I’ll guide the session along with an outline of topics, soliciting best practices contributions from UNconference attendees, and - of course, blogging the results on the community convention blog at Portland2007.AAN.org. Later, I’ll work the results of the UNconference into a session on Blogging for Journalists I’ll be leading for the 2007 batch of Poynter College Fellows. [I was a Reading & Writing Fellow in ‘04].

Interested in attending? Pop over to the convention blog at portland2007.AAN.org, where this is cross-posted and let me know what timeframe works for you.

[This post is the second in a series on Redesigning AltWeeklies.com]

One of the first steps in any redesign project should be identifying who your users are. From there, you assess what the needs of your users are. As you proceed with your project, these groups will give you a framework for testing your design - does it meet User A’s needs?

Many folks will create demographic or pyschographic [wiki] profiles to use when beginning a design project.

As AltWeeklies.com has a wide range of content but a singular goal - getting folks to click on links to read stories on our member papers’ sites - I decided to draw up behavioral profiles, which outline the different ways that folks can interact with our site. Since these are behavioral profiles, individuals can shift between the groups at will - and our long-term goal is to convert as many of our site’s casual users into addicts. I did not treat RSS-users as separate entities, reasoning that people access sites via RSS in similar consumption patterns to browser-based readers.

I used past surveys of user behavior, in conjunction with anecdotal user feedback, site metrics/statistics and accrued knowledge about web behavior to create these profiles.

Behavioral User Groups for AltWeeklies.com Readers

Addict

Addicted to our site, the Addict visits on a regular basis and reads all updated material.

Proto(typical)

The proto(typical) user pulls up our site along with other staples (cnn.com, gmail.com, etc.) throughout the course of the workday. This user considers us a destination for news and remembers the brand AltWeeklies.com.

Binge

The binge user finds our site in the course of research, and devours archival content in pursuit of topical interest (environment, gay+lesbian news, political coverage). Ideally, the binge user will be converted into a proto user (loyal to site brand) or a snail user (newsletter recipient with occasional clickthru).

Media

The Media user is a media professional who uses AltWeeklies.com as a barometer to check on industry trends. (Considered separate from the Purchaser in Group Two).

Snail/ Passive

The snail user receives our newsletter content, but only occasionally clicks thru to read stories of interest.

Linked

The linked user visits our site via a random link on the web, and immediately clicks thru to read an article without engaging with our brand.

It should be noted that AltWeeklies.com teasers on other sites offer links to publications via redirects; i.e. we garner a click via the redirect, but users do not visit our site. This is changing!

Google

A Google user finds our site via search, and immediately clicks thru to read an article without engaging with our brand.

Of course, readers are not the only users of AltWeeklies.com - story-sharing, the initial focus of the site, is still a site function.

Overview of Behavior for AltWeeklies.com Purchasers

A section editor or editor in chief, the purchaser is a motivated buyer who is seeking stories to fit specific criteria for a specific purpose. We assume that purchases happen on a ’seek’ vs. ‘find’ basis.

• Purchasing Criteria: ‘Section’ of content (news vs. music), Topic (Metallica review), Word count, Publication, Author
• Purchasing Motivation: Last minute hole in editorial content, scheduling content to cover for a staffer’s absence, accompaniment to locally-produced content

Step One was identifying our users - next will be identifying their needs and goals - without identifying solutions, which will come later in the design process.

What do you think? Did I miss a user group? Are there other ways people use the site that I have not thought of?

More on Redesigning AltWeeklies.com

Here at AAN, we’re taking on a redesign of AltWeeklies.com, the Webby-nominated aggregate site featuring the best reporting and arts and entertainment coverage from our members in the U.S. and Canada.

I’ve decided to blog the redesign process here at web.aan.org - to get valuable feedback from readers, and to share the work that we’re doing in the hopes that it might serve as inspiration for redesigns elsewhere.

Step One: Figure Out What You Got and Where You Wanna Go

AltWeeklies.com poses a unique challenge for redesign. The site launched in Summer 2004 as a story-sharing site. The idea was simple in concept - member papers will post articles that they think others might be interested in purchasing. Web forms will automate the purchase, and search tools will make it easier to find content that will work for your paper.

But there were a few bumps in the road - staff-starved alts just didn’t have the time to flll out the form to post links to their material, and in many cases, it was easier to pick up the phone to purchase a story than use the site.

When Senior Editor Jon Whiten joined AAN in January 2006, he began adding lots of stories; rotating top stories in the sections, and highlighting newsworthy articles at the top of the site. Soon it became clear - AltWeeklies.com was a good story sharing site, but it could be a great site for readers to find alternative news and arts coverage.

So, what did we have?

• Human-edited aggregation site, featuring links to the best content in alts.
• Site design optimized for story-purchasing.
• Production process consisting of databasing fields related to the purchase of articles.

Where did we wanna go?

• Destination site for finding alternative news and arts coverage; a one-stop-shop that will drive traffic to our members’ sites, and help them create brand awareness beyond the local or regional level.
• Site design optimized for readers to find content that interests them, while maintaining and improving the ‘members only’ tools that allow editors to purchase stories.
• Streamlined production process that minimizes tedious cutting and pasting work, and only databasing relevant fields.

That’s a very condensed version of the process I used to figure out ‘where we were’ and ‘where we wanna go’ - but having those condensed goals in front of us will serve as barometers during the design process to gauge how well our efforts match up to our users’ needs.

[This post is the first in a series on Redesigning AltWeeklies.com, which can be read in full at web.aan.org/content/redesigning_altweeklies]

Treat your audience the way you’d like to be treated: identify yourself and your biases clearly.

The comments in the post Creating A Space for Community Conversation sparked this post.

One of the many great questions in the comments was:

Should staffers be required to use their real names when commenting on their paper’s articles?

Yes - all staffers should be required to use their real names.

A modified version of the Golden Rule is a simple ethical guideline: Treat your audience as you would like to be treated.

For the most part, we’d like to discourage our users from coming on our site, assuming fake names, and posting comments they don’t necessarily believe in, just to start controversy. Those people are called trolls, and they are disliked because they make it harder for people to have conversations.

It goes without saying that reporters are required to use their real names when commenting on a story; the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal fired a reporter in 2006 for commenting anonymously on his own work to ’set the record straight,’ and the L.A. Times reassigned Michael Hiltzik for posting anonymous comments on a District Attorney’s blog. Hiltzik was reprimanded for violating the Times‘ ethics guidelines, which state: “Staff members must not misrepresent themselves and must not conceal their affiliation with The Times.”

But what about other employees of the paper? What rules apply to them? And what of the question posed by Matt Writt in the comments of Creating A Space for Community Conversation?

I’ve taken it upon myself to create an alter ego who posts comments, often with the intention of stirring up a debate. […] Since I’m not a writer, our readers wouldn’t recognize my real name even if I were to post comments as Matt Writt. Therefore, what harm is there in using a pseudonym? In other words, my real name is just as anonymous as my fake name. And unless my alter ego is either relentless in stirring debate or inconsistent in positions taken on issues, how would this anonymity engender mistrust?

Matt brings up an complicated point - let’s take it back to the Golden Rule. Would we want our audience to come onto our site and comment on a story without revealing that their brother is featured in it? Or that their PR office represents the restaurant that they are praising lavishly?

We certainly can’t stop a commenter from hiding their affiliations, but we can encourage transparency by practicing it ourselves. Creating a community where folks feel comfortable acknowledging their differences and discussing them in a constructive fashion is hard work - and leading by example is an easy way to set the community standard for behavior.

Matt works for the paper; an obvious bias. Given the small staff of alt-papers, it’s likely that he might be friendly with the reporter whose work he is commenting on - friendly with the section editor, copy editor, editorial designer. He might even know the subjects of the article, or patronize some businesses mentioned. These biases are transparent only when he identifies himself as an employee of the paper.

And on a legal note: Matt may not be bound by the ethical responsibilities of a journalist, but as an employee of the paper, the comments he leaves on the site could be legally construed as part of his job duties, which would leave the paper liable for anything he says on the site - whether he uses his own name or not.

[A note on personal transparency: I identify myself as LauraFries.com on this blog, which is the name I use whenever writing on the Internet. The blurb about me on the ‘About the Author’ page on this blog (accessible via the ‘About’ page or the footer navigation) links to my personal blog, with more than ample documentation of my own biases. I adhere to our Editorial Policy stringently.]

The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Facebook has moved into classifieds with the launch of Marketplace. Reactions vary from horror “Another nail in the coffin for newspapers!” to complacence.

But how many of these writers are active users of Facebook?

For what it’s worth, I’m a social networking junkie, a newspaper nerd and a journalist - and I think Facebook Marketplace is something that alts should watch very, very carefully.

Overview of Facebook Marketplace

Traditional Classifieds Categories

Facebook Marketplace offers traditional Classifieds sections, geared towards a younger audience: For Sale (Books, Furniture, Tickets, Electronics, Other), Housing and Jobs. As to be expected from the demographics of the site users, ‘Housing’ skews towards rentals and shared rooms - not too many 3 story brownstones for sale.

Cost and accessibility

Registered users can post ads for free, and you cannot peruse the ads unless you are a logged-in, registered member. Facebook is based around local networks - based on a city, workplace, school or region. You can browse other networks, but you cannot post in a network you do not belong to.

Integrated Functionality

Facebook is an extremely well-thought out site, and classifieds ads are accessible in multiple places throughout the site, increasing utility for users.

The homepage of Facebook features a News Feed - a list of updates from all of the friends in your network. Classifieds ads that your friends post show up here, as well as on their profiles. Browsing the Marketplace, you have access to standard FB tools - so you can check out the profile of the seller or email them; send the posting to a pal, or post it to your own profile with a short note (e.g. “Someone ought to buy this futon, it’s wicked cheap!”)

The end result? It’s much easier to stumble across an ad that interests you than on a traditional online source of classifieds such as a newspaper.

Why Facebook Could Eat Market Share

Local & Trusted Network

Over time, the usefulness of Craigslist has diminished, with spammers repeating job posts, and overseas contractors answering ads for local employment. But Facebook carefully restricts who can join the site. At present, it’s impossible to post an ad in multiple networks (although the NYTimes reports this might be a later, paid option) - which means the majority of ad content will be genuine. And although the networks on FB are admittedly limited to your geographic/work/school region, I don’t see this as a disadvantage. As a wired 20-something, I just need one roommate, or one person to buy my car. I would rather do business with someone who I can check out digitally, versus the dealing with the relatively anonymous responses you’d generally get with a traditional ad.

Strict Community Policing and Verification

Facebook has a stringent policy of protecting it’s users from spammers, and ‘fake’ profiles for companies or porn stars are not allowed. A few weeks ago, I was temporarily banned from the site for sending the same message to over 10 users. I’ve since been reinstated, but I learned the hard way - FB takes spamming seriously.

Marketplace ads are no less strictly policed. I spotted a mean “Jane Doe is a Whore”-esque post on Marketplace, and tagged it as ‘Targeting an Individual’. I’d bet money that the poster’s account will be temporarily or permanently disabled. For users who have invested lots of time in building their friends list, uploading pictures, and joining groups, getting banned is a powerful disincentive to abusing the classifieds system.

Ease of Use

Facebook is slick, easy to use, and integrates all of its functionality so seamlessly that it’s comparable to a Mac, with behemoth MySpace as serving as the metaphorical clunky, buggy PC cousin. FB is smart about creating useful peripherals, such as Javascript browser pop-ups that allow you to post a news article to your profile, or iPhoto integration that allows you to upload images from your Mac - so smart, methinks, that their foray into classifieds will no doubt be accompanied by other user tools that make selling and buying easier.

Small Scale Transactions

With few exceptions, classifieds transactions tend to be small scale. It’s my opinion that users will appreciate the ability to conduct these small-scale business deals in a platform they are already spending their time using, versus creating additional accounts or seeking out another classifieds vendor.

What are your thoughts?

Lots of folks disagree with me, and think that FB Marketplace is no big deal. What’s your take on it?

Or, How to Have User-Generated Content on Your Site that Facilitates Conversation and Won’t Get You Fired

It’s a question that lots of papers are struggling with - “I want to include comments and other user-generated content on my site, but I don’t want a bunch of trolls arguing, and I don’t want to get sued.”

Super Quick Non-binding Legal Overview

Your organization is considered the publisher of any *content* that is published on your site as an article - whether written by your staff or the public - and you are liable for its content, just as if you had printed it in the paper.

Generally, you are not liable for *comments* left on your site. However, if a staffer leaves a comment, and doing so can reasonably be construed as a part of their job duties, you *might* be liable. If you *edit* a comment in any way, you are responsible for the remainder of the comment’s content. And, if your organization has a specific comments policy (i.e. “No racism allowed!”) and it fails to remove a comment that violates this policy in a reasonable timeframe, you might be liable for this failure to act.

Whew.

So … legal mojo aside, how do you create a space for conversations?

Step 1: Four Cs of Creating Community Conversation

Take out a piece of paper and jot down your answers to these questions.

Community

Who are the community members you expect to contribute content? Think about your web product - is it your entire site, or a stand-alone venture like a blog? Does your entire town have something to say, or just the music fans? And who are the listeners - the ‘lurkers’ who might never contribute, but might be faithful readers?

Conflict

What kind of conflict can you imagine this audience having? How will the content on your site contribute to conflict? For example, a forum about welfare reform will attract a different type of conversation than one about the best spot in town to get sushi.

Constructive Corraling

How can you steer your community away from conflict and towards conversation? Will your community behave itself if they are all identified by their real names? Is comment moderation the answer (not publishing comments until they have been approved by a human editor)? Or will a free-wheeling “we’ll take it down if it gets really bad” approach work for your community?

Calculate Risks and Benefits

Your ‘constructive corraling’ solution will have pros and cons. Weigh them in context of your staffing realities.

• If you require folks to use their real names as a moderation device, will that prevent them from trash talking? How can you verify this?
• If you decide to moderate comments, do you have the staffing ability to review comments in real time? (A comment moderated a week later does not facilitate conversation).
• If you decide to just let the content fly, what are you risking?

Step 2: Experiment

We’re putting together a community blog for the upcoming 2007 AAN Convention at Portland2007.AAN.org. Inspired by the community blog for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, this blog will allow any conference attendee to post an ‘article’ - which AAN will be legally liable for. Here’s how we handled the content challenge.

Example: Community Blog at Portland2007.AAN.org

Community: Our community consists of employees of AAN papers, associate members like cartoonists and software vendors, and folks who are interested in alternative media. Our listeners consist of, well, everyone - but especially folks with a beef against specific papers or individuals.

Conflict: An industry characterized by mergers, buyouts and staffing changes is full of potential sources of conflict.

Constructive Corraling: Folks might be willing to say nasty stuff anonymously, but I am making the assumption that if they are only allowed to publish using their real names, that will curtail much of the trash talking. (Hopefully?) Our constructive corraling mechanism was to moderate identity creation - that is, only allowing folks with verifiable identities to post on the blog. To create a user account, a potential author must submit a valid, verifiable email address associated with an AAN-member paper - no ihatemyoldboss@gmail.com.

Calculate Risks and Benefits: Of course, verifying an email address requires a human editor - and even the fastest editor isn’t as fast as the instant gratification of a computer. We balanced the annoying wait time against the potential pitfalls, and decided it was worth it.

So, our experimental solution to creating a space for community conversation is to require folks to use their real identities - hoping that’ll force ‘em to play nice.

Step 3: Listen and Adjust

No matter how well thought out your solution is, it’s important to realize that you are herding cats. Listen to your users - what they think about your technical setup, what they think about the conversations that happen on the site, and more importantly, to the conversations themselves.

In that spirit, what do you think of the technical solution? Have we played the 4 Cs of Creating Community Conversation correctly? What tactics have you tried?

Hitwise, an online marketing firm, released a study earlier this month on online trends in Top US News Media for the period from March 2006 - March 2007.

Among their findings?

Online video is huge - the number of folks leaving a News site and heading to a video site rose by 196 percent, especially when a news story involved user-generated video content.

Why is this important to alt papers?

I’ll argue that the rise in folks leaving news sites for video sites is a very pressing issue for newspapers - it represents not only a major traffic leak, but a decline in credibility for a news organization.

In the age of YouTube, folks want to see things for themselves - and newspapers that publish a story without including relevant video footage are leaving out a major component of the story. In moments, a user can Google “David Hasselhoff drunk,” - and instantly get sucked into the instant-gratification world of YouTube. Will they return to your site to read your columnist’s insightfully snarky analysis of the cultural event - or will they watch the related spoof videos?

How do I plug this traffic gap and keep users on my site?

Thanks to a dubious business decision on the part of video-sharing sites, the solution is simple … cut and paste.

I’ve included allegedly-drunken footage of David Hasselhoff above - if you’re interested, you can watch it here, without leaving the site.

Including the footage on my site - even though it is branded with another site’s logo - allows me to capture any traffic gains by folks who might discuss the footage in comments below, instead of on another site where they might find the video.

The traffic leak of folks leaving newspaper sites for video sites illustrates one of the central tenants of this blog - that if newspaper sites want to succeed, they will have to invest more energy into creating well rounded and comprehensive web content - optimized for the web experience, instead of a 1/2 page of newsprint and a 600 word editorial hole.

Other findings of interest in the Hitwise report include …

• Market share of visits to the top 10 News sites declined 2.3 percent
• Search engines and news aggregators were the leading sources of traffic to News sites - increasing by 29.7 percent for ‘print’ media sites.
• Traffic to celebrity gossip sites rose expontentially.
  
• Local news aggregator Topix.net saw a rise in market share of 81 percent - with above average representation in rural areas.

• Digg did not yet serve as a major source of upstream traffic to News sites.

(This study is by no means comprehensive - it focused on the Top 10 News and Media sites, including Yahoo! and Google News, and papers like USA Today and the New York Times.)

Link via The IndiePub Blog

Are you in the midst of a site redesign, and feeling a little stuck? Or does just contemplating your site give you a headache, since you don’t know a server from a spambot?

I recommend checking out J-Learning.org, a simple site with accessible, step-by-step instructions for launching a community journalism site. A project of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, J-Learning.org offers advice along every step of a journalism site, from explaining domain names to basic video tips.

The site also links to Mark Brigg’s blog [of The (Tacoma) News Tribune] — which focuses on teaching journalists digital skills. [Disclosure: I met Briggs at a Poynter conference in 2005 and found him to be very smart.]