What do people who have never met you before think of you? What is your reputation like online; where stories you’ve written mix in with party pictures others have taken? How do you control the public’s perception of you as we move into a new era of digital communication?

This was the topic of a session I led at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida on June 29, 2007 for the 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists.

ACTIONS YOU MUST TAKE

• Buy your domain name
  

  (e.g. LauraFries.com). If it’s taken - figure out a variant for your branding.

• Pick your byline/brand and stick to it - across all social networks and websites.
  

  “I started blogging at Journerdism and linking my ‘network’ and brand as Will Sullivan and Journerdism. It took a long time, but eventually I rose in google ranks and now am the #1 spot, and peppered throughout the rest of the list.”

• Set up a portfolio site.
  

  This is a must. Even a Blogger-powered site is better than having no online presence at all. Keep it updated with a current version of your résumé, and an archive of all the work you’d like employers to see. Make sure you have clear, permanent contact information near the top of your site. Link heavily to online examples of your work and mentions of you in the press. Be the definitive resource on who you are professionally.

• Google yourself - and set up Google Alerts
  

  You wanna know what people are saying about you - set up a Google Alert with your name so you’ll always know.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Never Work Invisibly (Digital Resumes)

• Think permalink.
  

  My rrésumé is always at http://www.laurafries.com/about/resume, my worksamples are always at http://www.laurafries.com/about/work-samples/. This way, an employer who stumbles on the link *years* later will still have access to my most recent stuff.

• Create living résumés
  

  Update your résumé as you work, linking to your newest projects.
  ex. Laura Fries’ Worksamples

• Stymied? Ethical Quandry?
  

  If you’re doing high-level journalistic decision making - document it. Treat it as an opportunity to answer one of those dreaded interview questions on your own time. When the question comes up in real life, you’ll be able to answer cogently since you’ve thought through your answer - and you’ll be able to send the link out to the interviewer later as a followup. Even if you made the “wrong” decision, employers like to hire folks who can think.
  ex. Blogging the AltWeeklies.com Redesign; Sketches of AltWeeklies.com Redesign
  ex. Best of 2005 sketches & site mocks

• Have a great idea that you can’t implement?
  

  Story package not realistic on deadline? Editor kill your idea? Turn your idea into an “ideas for journalists” essay. Take the energy you could have wasted bitching at the bar, and use it to enhance your digital résumé. ex. “Podbop” for alt papers

• Count on websites failing
  

  Save hard copies of your work; re-post in full your story text, images, video. Newspapers do not respect permalinks - many archive or password protect your work. Never assume because you can link to something today that it will still be there when you want a potential employer to see it. Screenshots are your new best friend.

• But still, keep links to your work
  

  ClaimID is a great resource for aggregating links of your work.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: NetworkED, not Networking

• Maintain top-of-mind-presence
  

  What is this business card you hand me? The old-skool Rolodex is cool, but it doesn’t keep you in constant contact with folks. Interact where they are online and off.

• Create and use presences on multiple social networks to create top of mind presence
  

  Bill Couch added me as a friend on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Vimeo, LinkedIN, Flickr, and probably a few others I’m not remembering. When I interact on these networks, I’m likely to get updates on Bill’s work - maintaining top of mind presence or brand ubiquity.

• Meet people in real life - solidify acquaintances with digital connection.
  

  Go to unconferences, meetups, anything that will let you shake a hand with someone. Invite people to these events via your social networks.

• Think micro-contact
  

  Micro-contact makes it much easier to send the big email - “Have a job for me?”

  ex. I read this article I thought would interest you. I just wrote up something or other, what do you think of it? Or, the all powerful - I read about what you’re doing/what’s happening at your paper - followed by a pertinent question.

• Participate in forums
  

  Whatever your focus is - typography, photography, education reporting - find online communities of relevance to your work and participate in them. Build a name for yourself - create an audience for your work; create a communication loop between you and potential sources.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Be available

• Communicate permanent contact info
  

  Is that first job your last? Yeah, didn’t think so. Make sure people have a permanent way to get ahold of you.

• Email signatures - make ‘em work for ya.
  

  Give folks multiple means of contacting you.

• Volunteer for journalism organizations
  

  As a reporter/blogger for conventions, a judge in contest, an organizer of Meetups. You will meet people, learn skills, and get job offers.

• Don’t be afraid of non-paying opportunities
  

  Sometimes, the experience and connections you’d gain is worth more than a check.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Use your Journalistic Curiousity to Keep Learning Bout the Web

• Web users are fickle creatures
  

  Online communities shift rapidly to sites with better functionality (utility) for them. Pay attention to user trends; and figure out how you can incorporate the latest technology into your journalism. (Reading Laura’s Web Publishing blog is a great place to start; at Web.aan.org.)

DIGITAL ETIQUETTE

Digital is Forever: There are no right or wrong actions. You are simply establishing a brand/professional persona – make sure it helps get you to your goals.

• Communicate permanent contact information
• Don’t send editable documents like Word or InDesign files – only PDFs
• When emailing headshots, send reasonably sized files unless specifically asked for high-res (400 wide max, 72 dpi is a decent size). If possible, check out the context that the headshot will be running in, and size the image accordingly.
• Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to your advantage. Sites with a lot of traffic (like Poynter.org) will always show up, make sure your contact info is up to date on those.
• Email etiquette – Don’t ever send an attachment without a message; don’t ever send an email without a subject; don’t ever send an email without a signature line demarcating clear contact info; don’t send attachments without a file extension.
• Emails are forever. Be careful who you talk shit about; always be professional.
• Don’t assume that your sensitive content is safe. Drunk Facebook pictures and bitchy MySpace emails can find their way outside of the password-protect realm.

Credits

The following rad journalists and web nerds helped contribute to this session.
Will Sullivan – Journerdism.com Nerd in Chief – PalmBeachPost.com Interactive Projects Editor
Olivia Cobiskey – www.cobiskey.com, Sauk Valley Newspapers, staff writer
David Cohn - (digidave.org)
Steve Shanafelt - Arts & Entertainment Editor, MountainXPress
Albert Franquiz - Director of Radness- Miami Herald
Larry Clow - Journalist extraordinaire

Jessi Hempel of BusinessWeek writes in the introduction to this graphic:

Blogs. Podcasts. Video-sharing sites. Social networks. Here’s a word of advice for companies scrambling to become a part of these conversations. It’s not enough to build a hub in Second Life or create a profile on MySpace.com. It’s time to shift your focus away from trying out every high-tech platform that comes across your inbox. Instead, home in on your customers. Almost every demographic group you can think of is engrossed in the Web these days, and users are getting smarter about their tools. It won’t take long to find the consumers who care about what you’re doing—and tune in to what they’re doing.

The penetration of these online activities skews much as I’d expect across generational cohorts. Without any background on the underlying data that’s being displayed in the charts or how it was gathered, I’d hesitate to draw any sweeping conclusions. But I think the user groups outlined above (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives) are useful categorizations when thinking about how social groups interact online.

[View graphic full-size]

Arve Overland and Leo Chung of Overland Agency, Inc. gave an informative session called “How to Sell Your Website to Advertisers” during the 2007 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) Convention in Portland, Oregon.

Visit the 2007 AAN Convention blog at Portland2007.AAN.org for more on convention programming.

Overland and Chung walked the room through the job of a media buyer; the intermediary responsible for purchasing online ads to meet specific advertisers needs.

My background is editorial, so I found this an especially helpful approach for understanding media buyers and how alternative newspapers can structure their websites to deliver value to advertisers.

Understand the process of buying online ads from a professional media buyer’s perspective, and then use that understanding to guide smaller clients into lasting relationships.

A media buyer’s job is to deliver a certain numerical goal to their client - a certain number of pageviews for a promotional site, or a certain number of coupon-downloads. Online advertising is all about stats - everything is measured, nothing is guesswork.

It is all math.

The media buyer needs to deliver 1,500 coupon downloads to their client.

About 1 percent of your site audience will click through the ad to the promotional site featuring the coupon. About 3 percent of those folks will download the coupon (that’s called a site conversion rate). [These percentages are garnered from industry standards, and then tweaked accordingly.]

To get 1,500 coupon downloads, they’ll need 50,000 people to visit the promotional site with the coupon. And since only 1 percent of your audience will click through, they will need their ad to be seen 5 million times in order to deliver the promised 1,500 coupon downloads to their client.

So, they need their ad seen 5 million times. If you can deliver that amount of pageviews within the campaign timeframe (Chung and Overland stated an average campaign lasted an month or so), then the media buyer will spend their client’s money advertising on your site.

A media buyer wants to spend their money wisely, so they are willing to spend a little more for a targeted audience that is more likely to click through to their promotional site - great news for alts, who can deliver local audiences passionate about specific issues.

By creating sections of your website that feature deep-well interest content, you can garner targeted audiences that your sales reps can help connect with interested advertisers. Putting together an “environmental news” section, for example, would be a great way to appeal to advertisers trying to reach environmentally-minded consumers.

4 Keys to Successfully Selling Your Site

Slide 29, Overland & Chung presentation
1. Understand Your Advertiser/Buyer

• They need to maximize return and show results against quantifiable goals
• Go beyond selling inventory and “space” to selling solutions

2. Communicate Your Website’s Value

• Demonstrate your local, demographic and flexibility advantage
• Leverage your unique position to differentiate and deliver relevance

3. Plan by the Numbers

• Every dollar is accountable and ROI drives online advertising
• Use the ROI model to price your products; demand more for what converts higher and understand what is driving an advertiser’s price pressure

4. Measure Results to Drive Sucess

• Data is key to success during the campaign as well as for ongoing strategy and relationships
• Provide your advertisers with knowledge to improve their campaigns and results and they will come back

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Washington, DC, June 20, 2007

Pandemonium.

Lights flashing, a spiral of screaming, hysterical phone calls, a flash fire - combustible Columbia Heights - ignited.

It was a war zone, ground zero - not a neighborhood, not even anything physical - hate.rage.fear.heat, low hanging, oppressive smoldering chemicals, waiting for the spark, flash point fire.

I got off the metro at the Columbia Heights stop at around 8:30pm June 19, 2007.

The explosion was before me: complete chaos, nearly 25 cop cars, blocking 14th St. NW, lights blazing, satanic disco, and everywhere people screaming: into cell phones, at cops, at each other.

Sirens, screams, and DC’s inescapable heat.

Near me, a woman screamed the story into a phone; she was shaking, near hysterical: Two teenage girls had been fighting, the cops had arrived to bust things up, and then [allegedly] taken the arm of a bystander - a teenage girl, a ‘chile’ - and busted her head against a car and started roughing her up.

From there it had exploded; everyone screaming at everyone.

I whipped out my camera, shaky from the 4 hours of sleep I’d managed to snag on my way back from Portland, through Phoenix, Vegas and finally DC.

Get that the fuck out of here! Get on with yourself! Don’t point that at me! screamed one woman - I’m not! I’m taking pictures of the cops! ((I’m on your side! - I didn’t say - I’m press! - I didn’t say!!)) - Keep walking! Keep walking! she screamed, and I did, because I was tired, and this was not my fight.

I could have circulated, taking notes, more pictures, trying to get the story, but I knew she was right. The story was what that woman was screaming into her phone - not my transcription of it. People talk about citizen journalism, and they talk mostly of the elites - white soccer moms contributing play by plays of their children, pictures and videos galore; lawyers posting nuanced descriptions of the latest city council development.

But this - sweat, fear, alleged police brutality, raw emotion, a neighborhood terrorized by gunshots and intermittent police presence that now was as frightening as the drive-bys murdering 13 year olds - this is the stuff that “citizen journalism” should be made of, not yuppies posting restaurant reviews.

A search of Google News turns up nothing about last night - a terrifying night in Columbia Heights - my community message board has nothing.

Background on the Columbia Heights violence:

• Columbia Heights Shootings Cause Alarm, WashingtonPost.com
• Three Shot, One Killed, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• In Face of Losses, A Fight to Save Area, WashingtonPost.com
• ‘Ghetto sun’ burns bright, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• Teen Charged in Youth’s Slaying in ‘Shooting Melee’, WashingtonPost.com

The Washington Post has written some amazing pieces about Columbia Heights violence recently, but it’s impossible for one reporter to capture everything - and never with the intensity of last night, with women screaming the story into their phones and the muggy night air.

This is the story of the summer.

If I was the editor of a local publication, with reporters at my disposal, this is what I’d do.

I’d send my people out into the community for the summer. It would be their job to make friends with trusted community leaders, in the churches, community services, and schools. It would be their job to comb every source: every community newsletter, bulletin board, barber shop, church social and blog where citizens were spreading the news themselves. It would be the reporter’s job to earn trust and build sources.

From there, I’d ask them to deputize community voices - precocious writing students, the empassioned families of shooting victims. Give people the means of telling their own stories. Give people hope - that when something truly horrible happens in their community, that they have the means to document it; that [alleged] police brutality doesn’t begin and end with a rough shove onto sizzling summer concrete.

I’d set up easy ways for citizens to contribute their stories - a voice mail box where they could tell the story as it happened, an easy way to email the pictures that nearly everyone was snapping on their cell phones last night.

I’d have my reporters perform a number of roles - soliciting content from their community, while creating it themselves. Reporters would weave together pictures from the fight, combined with user-contributed audio accounts of the brawl, into slideshows for the website. They would interview community members while encouraging them to contribute content themselves; in effect turning interview subjects into viral marketers for the publication.

And because the community I was trying to serve would have limited access to the web, I’d be sure to create a print-product that my reporters and trusted community members could circulate as they did their jobs of reporting and source-gathering. Even something as simple as a 8.5×11 newsletter that others could photocopy and distribute themselves would serve multiple purposes: 1) reporting the news in a medium that was accessible to the community it was serving, 2) soliciting user contributions, and 3) creating a feedback loop between community and publication.

In collaboration with the community, my reporters would eventually be able to create a number of media products:

• Traditional reporting in a newspaper
• A rapidly-updated website, with professional and citizen content
• A micro-distribution newsletter

It’s a lot of work - no denying it. But if you lived, like I do, in Columbia Heights, afraid to walk home at night, distrustful of the police you [allegedly] see brutalizing teenage girls, hearing the gunshots that are kids killing kids, you’d be happy to find even a 8.5×11 piece of paper on your doorstep, telling you that at least somebody was paying attention, and you had the means to fight back.

In what is no doubt a response to the public outcry over the cutting of books sections in newspapers, the New York Times launched a Books Blog at Papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com today. Written by Dwight Garner, senior editor of The Book Review, the blog at the moment features 3 introductory posts and an empty blogroll - not what I would suggest for the launch of any blog product.

Anyone know of any other books-related web projects being produced by newspapers?

[Apologies for the infrequent posts of late, folks. Stuff over at Portland2007.AAN.org has been keeping me busy - AAN’s 30th Annual Convention is this week in Portland, Oregon.]

Hey all! AAN has joined the lemmings on Facebook. Join our group, and feel free to add pictures - especially any embarrassing shots of executive director Richard Karpel. We added the 2007 Portland convention as an event on Facebook as well, so you can add your convention party pics there AND to AAN’s Flickr account (just email pictures to photos *at* aan *dot* org, and they’ll appear in our Flickr photostream).

And, well, if you’re still feeling it, you can add us as a friend on MySpace as well.

2.0 Links

• AAN on Facebook
• 2007 AAN Convention on Facebook
• AAN on MySpace
• AAN on Flickr