Author: taudette

After briefly blogging on the “hat” factor ahead of this week’s Royal Wedding, I posted a gallery of photos here.

I’m in Perugia, Italy this week for an international journalism festival. Here’s a piece I wrote for the festival’s magazine:

As a newspaper reporter, I can’t resist any and all tips for delivering news online, so in reviewing a Thursday morning panel discussion entitled, “The news frontier: engaging the community,” I’m going to offer examples of what organizations like Media Wales or Huffington Post have done to keep in touch with readers (and keep sane while doing so).

Commenters’ database: Josh Young, formerly of The Huffington Post, said the news organization – which relies heavily on non-professional contributors – launched a database to keep track of its commenters. The database watched how often they were “favourited” by other members of the community, how often their comments were deemed profane, how often what they said was useful…. Ultimately it painted not only a picture of who used their site and how, but during last year’s Gulf Oil Spill, the database proved helpful for editors quickly sifting through high-quality submitted content and not-so-high-quality submitted content, based on the community members’ previous relationship with the Post.

Make community members feel like they have an innovative, transformative role: And that shouldn’t just be a make-nice sort of feeling, said Paola Bonomo, head of online services for Vodafone Italia. She pointed out crowdsourcing not only has incredible potential, it’s worked for news organizations like The Guardian, who offered up all the paperwork on the MPs’ expense scandal to readers, allowing them to help out with coverage by sifting through the documents, too. Media Wales online communities editor Ed Walker said his Cardiff-based organization has relied on readers to help populate online maps that show traffic delays, and during an election at the moment the organization is asking audience members to send in pictures and items about local candidates on the campaign trail.

Keep your commenting governance in-house: It’s tempting to use platforms like Facebook instead of editing readers’ comments in-house – perhaps it’s the lack of anonymity that makes for fewer “trolls,” for example, Bonomo said. Young argued, however, the only reason to hand over commenting to an outside organization would be an absolute belief running comments through Facebook, for example, is going to generate a more viral sharing of your product. In general, he said, organizations need to build in-house commenting systems and keep control of their relationship with their audience.

You’ll find my first royal wedding blog post for Postmedia here.

And a behind-the-scenes shot of the making of this blog post here:

I love this column/how-to guide for political reporters, written by Graham Thomson at The Journal. If I were to sum up the basic tips everyone should take from this:

1. To get a real snapshot of an election campaign, don’t call ahead.
2. Do show up, do ask to speak to the candidate, and do be patient enough to wait out the volunteers as necessary.
3. If being hustled out the door, ask campaign volunteers for directions to the other campaign office.

Seriously, as someone who has traipsed after politicians as they knocked on the doors of “cherry-picked” neighbourhoods (my most memorable example is following Rahim Jaffer’s campaign in 2008, although in fairness Edmonton-Strathcona is a deeply divided riding), I think Graham’s tips belong in everyone’s toolbox.

Of course, this plan of action is better suited to columnists than news reporters. Journalists don’t line up interviews in campaign offices or pre-arrange door-knocking tag-alongs in order to make nice with politicians; we generally have deadlines to meet, and little opportunity to opine in print.

Nonetheless, love it.

In other news on news, the Canadian Association of Journalists just published this open letter to journalists, which demands attention.

There’s really nothing like the pressure of writing four essays in four weeks to get you thinking about innovative (but not so new) social media platforms. Today a colleague and I at POLIS were struggling to upload a document to the think tank’s web site when we — really, she — realized it would be much easier to create a Scribd account. So, here is the new POLIS Scribd account, which we’ll be populating over the next few weeks, and here is my new and totally empty (for now) account.

On the weekend I spent a number of hours experimenting with online audio editing and posting platforms…. To be honest, I haven’t edited audio since I was in my third year of university at Carleton! But after some frustrating stops and starts I think I figured out a few tricks…. I’ll post the results when they are published. In the meantime, here is my new Audioboo profile and a very, very rough posting of audio from a recent trip to Malta.