Here’s another Slideshare.net find - Andy Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing,” has posted a short & comprehensible slideshow on how to use word of mouth marketing to increase your blog’s popularity.

This is all great advice for any alt-blogger looking to increase the audience of their paper’s blog.

The slideshow above was part of a presentation entitled “Blogging for Journalists” I gave at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida in July 2007 for the 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists.

During the UNconference “Blogging for Journalists” during the Portland 2007 AAN Convention, I sketched two flow charts that later turned into this presentation. (Thanks to participants for the healthy discussion!)

Last week’s presentation posited the following:

1. The production process for creating online content for newspapers is, for the most part, extremely convoluted and cumbersome, inhibiting what newsroom staffers are able to accomplish online.

2. Setting up a blog is ridiculously easy. Since anyone can do it, everyone has. Many newsroom-produced blogs do not use the medium well; creating illogical editing/production workflows, or giving folks better suited to column-writing blogs of their own.

3. Let’s not waste time critiquing the flaws of existing newspaper-produced blogs. Instead, let’s consider blog software a storytelling tool - how can we employ this tool to further our journalism?

We then went around the room, positing scenarios, and brainstorming possible uses of blog software for journalism.

Is your newsroom considering starting a blog? You might find “Conversation Bullet Points for Starting a Newsroom Blog” helpful.

Create Digital Listening Posts Using RSS Feeds - It’s Easier Than It Sounds

Go to soccer games, Jan Leach recently urged a room full of students at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. You never know the stories you’ll overhear folks talking about.

Leach, former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, spoke to the power of “having a life outside the newsroom” - being present in the community, and having one’s reporter ear constantly tuned for stories.

In a digital age, let’s expand upon that theory - let’s create Digital Listening Posts.

3 Steps To Creating Digital Listening Posts

1. Sign up for Netvibes.com.
2. Spend some time adding links to local sites and bloggers.
3. Check your account periodically to scan for story ideas.

Here’s more detail.

1. Netvibes.com is an RSS aggregator [wiki definition]. Think of it like TiVo for news - you add a feed, and the webpage automatically fetches updates for you. If you’ve visited Google News before, you’ve seen RSS feeds in action - that site is populated by feeds. [Oprah-style intro to RSS feeds]

Your “start page” on Netvibes will offer you some beginning options - little boxes (widgets) that allow you to search for content relevant to your beat.

For purposes of demonstration, I set up a “Columbia Heights, DC” page, which pulls information about my neighborhood. (It’s easier for me to evaluate newsworthiness in my own ‘hood than in a randomly selected city.)

2. Adding links to quality local bloggers will probably take an afternoon’s worth of your time. Treat local blogs much as you would a community newspaper - a place for story ideas, trend spotting, or source-finding. Use technorati.com, a blog search engine, to search for local blogs. Metropolitan-themed blogs tend to link to each other; look for a blogroll to find similar themed blogs.

3. Check your Netvibes page regularly to find story ideas.

What Story Ideas Did I Find?

Image Search

• Interior photos of an extremely nice renovated house in a rough neighborhood; potential sources for articles on gentrification, or an architectural feature.
• A DC Bilingual Public Charter School; which could be the beginning of a profile, or a piece on funding issues.

Adding Blogs, I found …

• DCCabbie.Blogspot.com is a veritable treasure trove of story ideas. This outspoken (and often profane) blogger writes about an underground bar called the BUNKER he’s been going to since “this Russian chick started the joint over ten years ago,” and Ethopian cab drivers who save up to buy mansions at home. Lots of story potential here.
• Mr. T in DC’s Live Journal reports a man in his neighborhood who walks around with a grocery cart, stealing Sunday papers. Does he resell them? Where, and why? That’s a feature I’d like to read. [Mr. T is also exceptionally active in the online Columbia Heights community, posting frequently to the community forum and moderating the neighborhood Flickr group; he would be a good source to cultivate.]
• A WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council Member (DC Metro/public transportation planning organization), keeps a blog of transit developments - a useful source for transit beat reporters.
• For more ideas on using YouTube to find local stories, see Cathy Resmer’s post Finding and Using Local Content on YouTube.

YouTube searches revealed …

• An ‘94 “Illuminati Pedophiles in Washington D.C.” video - good perhaps for a feature on the subject, or a larger piece on the second life YouTube can bring to archival documentaries.

That’s a quick look at the current info in my Netvibes. Like all story tips, it’ll take some old-fashioned shoe leather journalism to see if any pan out.

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.]

It’s a great question - one that San Antonio Current editor Elaine Wolff [profile] answered adroitly in an AAN listserv discussion today. An AAN staffer asked - What’s the point of a newspaper producing a blog? Isn’t this just daily content written by people who write for the weekly? Are we just calling these “blogs” because sometimes we are using common blogging software packages?

Wolff replied in part:

“[…] We’re appropriating the word [blog] to communicate to readers that it’s an open forum for their input - more a conversation than a one-way flow of information. The next step is to make our software actually reflect that.”

So, call it a blog, call it daily content written for a media company that publishes a weekly - what’s really important is that we’re now in the business of conversations.

[Full disclosure: I worked with Wolff at the Current in 2004.]