Interesting stuff I saw online, Jun. 23 to Jul. 24
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Jun. 23 through Jul. 24:
- Show Us the Money: How Social Media Engagement is Paying Off – Blog – Standing Partnership – "Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%."
- News Websites in Texas and Kentucky Invoke Shield Laws for Online Commenters – "This week brings word of two new cases testing whether state shield laws apply to user comments posted on news websites."
- CNN’s iReport attracts nearly 4,000 submissions on Iranian elections | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – The role of amateurs has been significant in coverage of the Iranian elections.
- Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment Nieman Journalism Lab – "Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking."
A Kentucky paper’s pre-Internet reader comments
David Greer
Reader comments existed before the Internet. And David E. Greer knew how to make the most of them — using an answering machine and a printing press. Below, he tells us his experience, which I thought could teach us something about reader comments today.
Greer, now member services director for the Kentucky Press Association, shared his story in an e-mail after reading my piece on story comments in the last edition of the ASNE’s The American Editor. He allowed me to publish an edited version of his comments here.
* * *
In 1990, I had just been named editor of The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, a 16,000-circulation daily in Elizabethtown, Ky., 45 miles south of Louisville. It’s home to Fort Knox, in a county with 100,000 residents, making it Kentucky’s fourth most populous county.
I came into the job with a few years experience as a reporter and editor at smaller papers. Along the way, I had also done talk radio in the 1970s during Watergate. This, of course, was long before talk radio became real popular.
At The News-Enterprise, I kept getting readers who called me on the phone and just wanted to talk about local issues, politics — stuff that you might hear discussed on talk radio. Lacking any other easy outlet, my readers would call me. So, I got the idea of putting a transcript of some of their calls in the paper with my written response in boldface printed under the reader comments. Read more
Can really small towns plug into social media?
Links from my KYA presentation at the bottom of this post.
The stumper I got from my session at the Kentucky Press Association‘s annual conference came from Sarah Craig, general manager of the Todd County Standard in Elkton, Ky. I love getting questions, but I couldn’t answer this one on the spot: How can a really, really small community — and its weekly newspaper — benefit from the social media boom?
Sarah said Todd County has a population of around 10,000, with negligible broadband access (except when some folks are at work). Most of the access from home is via dial-up.
I pledged to give it some thought and write about it here. The four-hour drive from Louisville to St. Louis gave me plenty of time to think. Hopefully, I can get some help on the answer from anyone who reads this. Read more
Kurt's Tweets- Realizing how woefully out of touch I have been with this part of the county. (@ Saint Louis Bread Company) http://4sq.com/5z5Bfh
- Just had my first Gmail phone call -- with my parents -- and the quality was fantastic. Wow. http://tcrn.ch/a8GndI
- Another day, another interview. Fingers crossed. (@ Saint Louis Bread Co) http://4sq.com/avGImL
- Helping my son learn the first 20 elements on the periodic table. Disturbed by how many more elements there are since I studied this stuff.
- Giving blood. (@ St. Martin's Episcopal Church) http://4sq.com/aiWuEk