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Managing Your Digital Professional Identity
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. View the Slideshow here.
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 résumé 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’ Work Samples - 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.
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
[The first three comments have been imported from web.aan.org.]
Police Brawl in DC: A Case for Citizen Journalism
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.
What is a Web Editor, Anyways?
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?
‘HuffIt,’ Declares HuffingtonPost.com
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
Resource to Use: J-Learning.org
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.]
Using Distributed Reporting – Now
Much has been made of the possibilities of “citizen reporting” or “user-generated content.”
A variant of these ideas is the concept of distributed reporting or crowd-sourcing – whereby the public formally or informally helps to contribute reporting or content to a news organization, which filters it as part of the newsgathering process.
Sounds interesting – but expensive and time-consuming, right?
Here’s 5 Ways for alts to use distributed reporting now – incorporate it into your music coverage.
- Verify your reporting – doublecheck quotes and descriptive details captured on film or audio.
- Enhance your end product by including citizen-gathered media.
- Broaden your perspective by reading other’s accounts before composing your own.
- Connect with potential sources and witnesses.
- Communicate with readers. Let them know you checked out their work, and post a link to your final story.
Here’s a quick example of how I used distributive reporting to enhance a recent blog post.
I went to Coachella 2007 last weekend – and was pleased as punch to spot Paris Hilton in the crowd of the CSS show, during the song “Meeting Paris Hilton” – and even happier to get a picture with her afterwards in the corn line. [See blog post on LauraFries.com.] I had some reported materials for my story – my notes and photos. But – what else was out there? What did I, as one reporter, miss?
A quick search of Flickr (photos), YouTube (video) and Technorati (blog search engine) for “paris coachella” turned up a plethora of materials – some of which I ended up including in my final blog post – pictures of CSS with Paris, video of CSS performing the song, and even a picture of Paris, corn in hand!
With help from “citizen reporters,” I was able to create a fuller blog post.
Of course, distributed reporting shouldn’t be limited to arts and entertainment coverage. Did your city recently have an immigration march? Are you working on a story about it? How about giving distributed reporting aggregators like Flickr, YouTube, and Technorati a quick search?
5 Quick Tips for Making Online Innovation Happen
“My newsroom has great ideas for online innovation. We have great brainstorming sessions, but then it all kinda peters out, and nothing happens.”
Paraphrased, this is a question a paper staffer asked me recently: How do I bridge the gap between a great idea and its implementation?
I know this is the hardest thing for an alt-paper – time and resources being so limited.
Here are some suggestions I had – what would you add?
1. Think Small
Sometimes, thinking of a great meta-strategy is too-much – too overwhelming, too expensive, too far out of reach. Identify a small improvement that can be made, and get it done this week. Free tools that bloggers use are a great place to start – embedding video, adding audio, or creating a photo slideshow – any tool that someone is using to spruce up their MySpace page can probably be incorporated into your site.
2. Think Storytelling
Photos, video, and audio are tools in your journalistic arsenal. From the first pitch of an idea, through reporting and story meetings, consider these tools in addition to your standard print accompaniments of sidebars and graphics. Its much easier to gather multimedia content during the reporting phase than to add it at the last moment.
3. Think Experiments
It’s one thing to imagine adding local mp3s for each music story running in the paper. That could potentially be a lot of work! So – think experiments. Try different methods; see what works for your readers and your staff before making commitments.
4. Think Collaboration
Many papers have a dividing line between the editorial staff and the web staff. The website might be produced downstairs, by a freelancer, or by another arm of your corporate ownership that you never see. Of course, at many smaller papers, the web duties are 20 percent of what a staffer with another full time job does. In either scenario, the key to accomplishing a project is for the content producers (writers, editors) to work with the web producers throughout the writing and reporting process – no Monday morning requests for slideshows.
5. Think Workflow
“That sounds great. I have tons of ideas. The problem is – I HAVE NO TIME.” This is really one of the biggest challenges facing alts and the web – overloaded staffers who are already overwhelmed with their weekly duties and planning special sections. There are no easy answers here – but the biggest tip I can offer is to look carefully at workflow, and to make as many time-saving technical changes as possible in order to free staffers up to innovate online.
Those are my tips – what advice would you offer a newsroom struggling to implement its great ideas?
UPDATE, May 1, 2007
Innovation in College Media has adapted these tips for a college audience – with useful tips for everyone.
Creating a Space for Community Conversation
May 10, 2007 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Advice, comments, community, conversation, legal, user generated content
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
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.
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 I handled the content challenge.
Example: Community Blog at Portland2007.AAN.org
Community: My community consists of employees of AAN papers, associate members like cartoonists and software vendors, and folks who are interested in alternative media. My 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?) My constructive corraling mechanism was to moderate identity creation – that is, I am 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 – 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. I balanced the annoying wait time against the possible trouble I would get into if folks were allowed to post willy-nilly on the site, and decided it was worth it.
So, my 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 spirt, what do you think of my technical solution? Have I played the 4 Cs of Creating Community Conversation correctly? What tactics have you tried?
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