Newspaper reporters are used to readers writing letters to the editor complaining about or complementing their work. They know that their names can be raised at governmental meetings and even in other publications. But are they equally aware that their names may appear in online forums, chat rooms or elsewhere online?

Thanks to the growth of the Internet, it is not uncommon for people to discuss online what they’ve recently read. In addition to stumbling and digging stories, readers can post them to their Facebook or Myspace profiles as well as to dozens of other social bookmarking and sharing sites. So many place for a reporters name or writing to appear, that they might just lose track.

There are a couple of approaches to dealing with this issue:

Google Alerts

This is a topic that I’ve previously written. “Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.” So what you can do is create an individual alerts for all the permeations of your name. Additionally, you should create an alert for any username that you publicly use, such as your Facebook Myspace usernames.

Subscribe

Frequently when you leave a comment in an online forum or blog (you are reading forums and blogs and commenting when appropriate, right?), you can subscribe to receive further updates. Now while this won’t tell you if the conversation that you are having leaps to another forum or blog, but it will let you know how people are responding.

While those are both methods that will notify you by email of updates, there are other sites that you can check on your own, they include:

• BlogPulse
• Technorati
• Yahoo, MSN, Ask
  

Or you can subscribe to a service like Naymz, which has its own Reputation Monitor product.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it is enough to get you started. If you want to go deeper or learn more about this issue, try Googling phrases such as “Online reputation management” or “Online Reputation.” But at the very least, set-up the Google Alerts, it’ll only take you a few minutes, and then you can just sit back and reap the benefits.

Have another approach to monitoring your online reputation? Share it here.

To be fair, this used to be a much broader problem. Thankfully though, in recent years, some newspapers print email addresses for reporters at the bottom of stories and others use online forms. Some don’t do either and even make it hard to directly contact anyone, hoping instead to channel all interactions through a series of general forms.

In order to get a sense of the practices that are going on in the industry, I looked at the contact practices of the top 30 newspapers according to the most recent Nielsen Online report, and here’s what I found:

• 16 newspaper include reporter email address either at the bottom of stories or via clicking on the byline.
• 5 provide no direct access and instead drive inquires through general online forms.
• 4 use reporter specific contact forms and shield email addresses.
• 5 offer full staff list (email addresses and phone numbers) once you dig through the main contact us list.

Some other practices worth noting:

• On some sites (nytimes.com, startribune.com) in addition to providing a reporter’s email address, clicking on the byline reveals a list of of the reporter’s recent stories.
• At least one site (politico.com) offers full bio and picture for their writers.

As you can see, the trend is toward great ease of access and I argue that is a good thing. Additionally, I encourage newspapers to move away from the master staff list approach. All too often those lists are some sub-category of the Contact Us or About Us navigation. Readers in some of these cases have to first click on (for example) Contact Us, then find the department and then (in some cases) the name of the bureau before getting to a list of reporters. I just don’t see that many people going through that gauntlet and I think that, ultimately, your newspaper loses out.

I think it is important for readers to be able to dialogue with reporters and other staff members. Actually, it doesn’t make any sense to me to provide access to reporting staff but, as is the case at some papers, hide photographers and some editors.

In my perfect newspaper world, readers would be able to engage newspaper staffers via email, instant messaging and/or chat rooms. At the very least, I would think via email. So what does you newspapers do? Are you among the 16 or the 5?

NOTE: I’m proud to be participating, along with fellow journalism bloggers from around the world in the Carnival of Journalism. In addition to reading my post please visit the Carnival host site and see what my colleagues are writing about. Not sure what a blog carnival is? Check out this entry on Wikipedia.

Case in point — long stories.

It is well known that “lack of time” is one of the main, if not the main, reasons why readers cancel their subscriptions. Many newspapers have tried to address this by offering shorter stories or, at the very least, reduce the number of long stories that they publish. In a memo last year to the staff of the Washington Post, Executive Editor Len Downie and Managing Editor Phil Bennett wrote:

“For too long we’ve confused length with importance. Often the result has been stories that readers don’t want to finish and displays in the newspaper that don’t do our journalism justice.”

This is not just a problem at the Washington Post and definitely not just a print issue. Look at this story from one of my local newspapers. Not counting the byline and tagline, this piece comes in at 1,808 words, which loosely translates to 48 inches long. In print, that is a long story. Online it is a really long story. And looking at it online it’s clear that it lost any of the ‘elegant’ design that it might have had in print. Actually online it’s just a pain. But it didn’t have to be.

While I’ve heard the argument that subheads can destroy a writers prose, I believe that you need those visual cues to help the reader, in-print and especially online. I would go so far as to support the idea that a long story without subheads, might just as well appear without paragraph marks. OK, maybe that is going too far, but seriously I think we need to keep the reader in mind, both when we write and when we present.

Some newspapers (New York Times, the Star Ledger, etc.,) will take a long story and break it up on multiple screens. Some sites even have a single page view for those who still relish the long form story. But even the papers that divide their stories between screen use subheads.

Now I’m not saying avoid all long stories. Honestly I think that would be a tragedy, but I think we can do a better job presenting them online.

What about you? How do you handle long stories?

For many newspapers, covering the caucus or primary meant the creation of landing pages or a micro-site, blog(s) and possibly experimenting with sites/services such as Twitter or Facebook. Days of planning, reporting and writing went into your coverage, not to mention the involvement of staff from probably throughout your organization. So why let all that work go stale with only the occasional local or AP story to perk it up? And why allow all that new traffic that you garnered to just wander away?

Here are some ideas to keep your political engine chugging and your readers coming back for more:

• Identify and profile local convention delegates and super delegates. While your states selection process may not have begun yet, you can speak with people who have previously attended and identify those who are planning to apply. You can also provide an primer on the application process as it does differ from state to state.
• If you haven’t already, identify local political bloggers and create your own blog network. Consider aggregating all their feeds on your site, you can even divide it by party affiliation.
• Join the Publish2 Election News Network. As Scott Karp (Publish 2 founder) explains it, this would allow you to “post links to coverage in states that still have primaries upcoming and of course national coverage. This could be a great editorial supplement in states where there’s not much to report locally with the primary past.” And I couldn’t agree more.
• Keep an eye on the money. With candidates still vying for the Democratic and Republican party nominations, fund raising will continue in earnest. Use these sources to track who is donating in your coverage area:
  • Follow The Money
  • Open Secrets
  • Fundrace 2008
• Look at how the campaigns are spending money locally? Are they still running any ads, still planting political signs? What are they doing to keep supporters engaged?
• Invite local campaign coordinators to blog about their efforts. (Think you have a problem staying motivated!)
• Have any locals running as Third party candidates?
• Check out this widget set from MSNBC. Might be an easy way to dress-up your page and keep the data current.
• Offer a Google Maps mashup showing where the candidates are on a given day. Here’s one effort via Slate.

So those are a few from me, what are your thoughts? What stories and/or features are you thinking of doing? I think this is one of those areas where their is no reason to reinvent the wheel, so share your thoughts and ideas, by helping someone else you might just help yourself.

When I viewed it for the first time I was struck; here was a great speech given by Obama after the New Hampshire primary and a musical performance by many artists that I liked, combined into a inspirational video. And the combination didn’t just work for me. According to the Viral Video Chart, since Feb 2. the video has been viewed 1,891,780 times and it is currently the number 1 ranked Viral Video.

To me, this was a powerful example of something that I think we in the newspaper industry are still struggling with. To me, the video was a great example of how both the message AND the medium are now both important. If you haven’t seen the video for yourself, take a moment and check it out:

If this was just an OK speech it wouldn’t have mattered how the video appeared and if it were a crappy video, that would have distracted from the message of the speech. To be as effective as it is, it needed to be both. And that is where I think the newspaper industry runs into trouble.

At too many newspapers, on too many websites, we worry more about the quality of the production and less about the quality of the content. And at still too many other newspapers and on too many other websites we worry more about the quality of the content and less about the production value. Thankfully, there are still other newspapers where they’ve managed to strike a happy medium and that is what I hope you take away from the Obama video.

Today newspapers need to focus on both. Perfection is not necessary, but balance is. Just keep reciting, it’s the message AND the medium, the message AND the medium.

Now might be a moment to drag out that maxim “if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.”

My suggestion is that you still host those discussions, those meetings and many more gatherings and sessions, but do it in a venue that takes advantage of the habits or your reporters. How can you do this, you ask? Two words — Chat Rooms.

Just six-months-old, ChatMaker.Net allows you to create “very own exclusive, invitation-only chat room.” Simply select a name for your room and the site generates a web address that you can share with only those you want to invite. Once inside, participants can click on the generic name that site assigns them and enter their own name. From there, you’ve got your own online discussion.

While ChatMaker does not allow you to share files or pictures, it does recognize links, which I think justs ads to it’s strengths. And unlike many Instant Messaging applications that allow for group chats, you don’t need to be a member of any particular service or sign-up for anything; and, it is completely free.

I believe that this approach can work in your newsroom because, as I previously said, it plays to the habits of your staff. Think about it, they are already IMing with their friends and/or colleagues. They’re sending their own emails on, say Gmail, at the same time that they’re working on their stories. This is the multitasking generation; don’t ask them to do something different, just have them add another task.

I think the concept of using technology to strengthen the team approach can have real value, but today I want to focus on something that can have just as much, if not more, impact without any tech. In the run and gun life of a newsroom, time for reflection is a rapidly disappearing commodity, even finding time to read one’s own newspaper can be challenging. So it’s really no surprise that postmortems are left for either the morning meeting or the front-page meeting (if at all).

Now it could be that editors are distracted by the word’s etymology (Latin, post mortem, after death), but more then likely it’s that in the crush of ever-increasing added responsibilities, postmortems have become another one of those things editors (at all levels) would like to do, “if they could only find the time”. But I would suggest, I would urge, I would even go as far as to implore you, to find the time.

So what am I really talking about? What do I think a postmortem entails? Who should be included? And, given that time is truly limited, does every story deserve a postmortem?

Well starting in reverse, I agree that this can’t be done with every story, but it should be done with at least all 1A stories and from there, all section front stories. These are your heavy hitters, these are the stories that day in and day out represent your newspaper both online and in-print. And, at many newspapers, these stories are frequently written by the same reporters. As a result, you have a real opportunity to make a lasting impact in how these stories are reported, written and presented.

The idea is not to get a group in a room and select a scapegoat to blame for story or package’s weaknesses; this is supposed to be a learning experience. My suggestion is to limit it to the key players, yourself, the reporter(s), the photographer(s) and, if necessary, the photo editor. I’ve left out designers and copy editors because, in many cases, they come in later in the process. I would not open it up to the newsroom in general and I would not encourage attendance from anyone higher up (although I recognized that at times, that is beyond any of our control). Make sure those who will be attending know about it the day before; I’m not a big fan of rude surprises.

OK, so we’ve identified which stories deserve this treatment and who should be in attendance, now what?

First off, I would suggest that you have the reporter take notes. The reason for this is that a single-page write-up should come out of this experience and it make sense for it to be from the story’s author. This will become a reference document for future stories as well as something to reference during evaluation season.

Secondly, I would start the discussion with what the initial vision was for the story. With that context, talk about what worked, what we would do again in the future and any lessons we can draw (call it the “Supernanny” approach. Show fans, you know what I’m talking about). From there I would move on to those aspects we would want to do differently. What didn’t work and how could we approach those aspects differently.

Before wrapping up the meeting, get the reporter (or if relevant, the photographer) to review what’s worth repeating and what’s worth changing. Thank everyone for coming and giving of their time and remind the reporter to type of the notes distribute them to the participants.

I make it sounds simple, don’t I? Well it’s not, but it is a straightforward approach and, believe it or not, you can do it within 20 minutes. Actually, set a clock and stick to it. You will find the tighter the review, the more focused it will be, the more people will enjoy it and the more they will get out of it.

Not convinced? Try it and then let me know what you think.

I want to spend this week offering tips for the editors who read this blog — not for the senior or executive editors and really not even for City, Metro, Sports, Features or Business editors, but the assistant editors, the newsroom’s oft-under-appreciated middle managers.

In many newsrooms the team approach is still alive and well. This is when an assistant editor is given a group of reporters to guide, mold, monitor, edit and evaluate. I have seen teams with as few as two reporters to as many as seven. But given the workload of the typical assistant editor, what usually winds up happening in many newsrooms is that the focus shifts from coaching and developing to process — filing weekbooks on time, submitting expense forms, and editing daily copy, with the occasional therapy session possibly in the form of a monthly team meeting. While each of those are indeed relevant and have a place in the overall team approach, so much else gets overlooked.

I believe that there is a way to use technology to improve and strengthen the team approach. My thoughts are that it would great to have a structure whereby you could (at least):

• have discussions as a group
• share documents (source lists, tip sheets, etc.)
• highlight online resources
• maintain a group calendar

There are two possibilities that come immediately to mind: Google Groups and Ning.

Google Groups “is a free service which helps groups of people communicate effectively using email and the Web.” It’s a rather flat, low-tech approach to what I’ve described. It allows for easy discussions, sharing of documents, highlighting of resources and keeping a word-based calendar. It does offer an RSS feed, which is a nice feature. A Google Group is relatively easy to set-up and maintain. You answer about half-a-dozen questions and you’re up and running. The group can be restricted to members you approve, so privacy is not an issue.

Ning “is a platform for creating your own social networks.” From the sites own explanation:

You start by choosing a combination of features (videos, blogs, photos, forums, etc.) from an ever-growing list of options. Then customize how it looks, decide if it’s public or private, and add your brand logo if you have one. People who join your network will automatically have a customizable profile page and will be able to message and friend each other.

Definitely the high-tech brother of Google Groups, Ning does handle some thing differently (such as documents), but if you’re comfortable online and are looking for an approach that tech-savvy reporters will find appealing Ning is the way to go.

Neither of these options is a replacement for you and by “you” I mean interacting personally with your reporters. What I think they do bring to the table is a layer of organization and depth that will make the rest of your team structure stronger. Have another approach that works for you, let me know?