Saturday, July 19, 2008

Twitter tips

Just caught this on the Spokesman-Review editor's blog.

In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.

We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors need to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.

The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.


This feels like familiar territory. Our audience has discovered reader-submitted galleries and those are hot. We have a hot politics blog. Everything else is percolating at a much lower energy level. We just had layoffs and I think there's a hangover from that.

I am new to twitter and generally find good referals there to things I would find valuable to read. This SR pointer came from twitter, Jay Rosen specifically, as did, I think, these interviews with Beat Bloggers on Mevio.

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