During Week 8 we took a look at the art of getting readers to interact with us, mainly through Twitter and Facebook. It's not so easy but, as you'll see in a post below, getting folks to spend time with your content is crucial to the future of digital journalism.
Most of you in the class, however, are naturals at interacting through social media and had no problem getting friends and family to comment on your work. Sometimes all it took was an introduction in the form of a question (such as, "Do you agree with this?") to get people to weigh in on a Facebook posting.
We took a quick look at how to use Scribd to embed documents. I think it's a pretty cool way to lead readers to your source material. It helps you gain cred.
We talked a little bit more about doing lists. They're important because they're accessible and can multiply pageviews. But I noted that they don't always have to be tabloidy. I highlighted my colleague Simone Wilson's recent post on legislation being rammed through the California legislature -- and I pointed out that even the mighty Gawker was doing them.
We then got into longform journalism, and the idea that not all digital reporting has to focus on short, snarky writing. In fact, the online revolution has really opened up the prospects for longform storytelling because there are no space constraints. The limits are imposed, rather, by how much interest you can drum up in readers.
But many journalists and even publications such as Vanity Fair have tapped into the potential, using Amazon's Kindle Singles to expand magazine-size articles into short books that can be sold online. Self publishing is the rage. It's not always profitable, but it's a new opportunity for digital journalists.
We worked on a live news post based on an LAPD press release and discovered that it's not always easy to inject voice into a story and still be timely. But it can be done.
The assignment was to read this excerpt of Chris Anderson's book Free and argue for or against charging readers for news (a.k.a. instituting the kind of paywalls used by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street journal). Five paragraphs were requested.
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