UCLA Extension New Media Reporting: Week 2 Summary

THE NEW YORK TIMES vs. GAWKER

During our second week of class we read some of your papers comparing The New York Times online to Gawker. You noted that Gawker is more vertical looking and has a breezier attitude, often preferring snark and celebrity scandal to serious news.

The New York Times, many of you observed, looks a lot like a print newspaper on a web page, and maintains a serious tone with a three- to five-column layout familiar to newspaper readers.

SPEND TIME AT LA WEEKLY

I invited class members to come shadow me at LA Weekly for an hour if they wish. (I hope my bosses are okay with that).

THE INVERTED PYRAMID vs. BLOG STYLE

We looked at an AP story about a federal crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California and analyzed how it was written in the inverted pyramid style, which means that the most pressing, important facts are pacted at the top of the story and lighter details are at the bottom.

We then each rewrote the piece in a more bloggy, Gawker-like style, foregoing the inverted pyramid and using snark and our voices and viewpoints more.

STARTING A NICHE BLOG






I noted that journalists who want to venture into bedroom businesses, namely blogs, tend to focus more on niche subjects. I mentioned a piece I wrote for Entrepreneur magazine about out-of-work journalists who were diving into niche blogging.

I noted that something like failblog, which just features meme-captioned photos, mainly, is an extreme (and successful) version of niche, although it's not very journalistic.

A locally successful niche blog is Buzzbands LA by former Los Angeles Times pop music editor Kevin Bronson.

At the Village Voice Media empire, which owns LA Weekly, we have Toke of the Town, a blog strictly about marijuana, and True Crime Report, a blog about "WTF" crimes that is often put together using the company's own content from its different markets. Both blogs are successful and each case one person runs the show.

USING KEYWORD-RICH HEADLINES

Finally, we talked about using keyword-rich headlines, and why they work. We found an example where a U.K. newspaper had one of the highest rankings on a California story, seemingly because it had a wordy, keyword-rich headline.

My suggestion for now is that proper names, where possible, go to the front of the headline and that specific places and actions are also good. This gives Google's search spider something to latch onto.

HOMEWORK DUE BY WEEK 3

Our homework assignment was reading and analyzing three days worth (Monday through Wednesday) of the blog LAObserved and summarizing your thoughts in three or so grafs.