At NICAR 2012 Mark Horvit gave a presentation on using different search engines to find people or information.
Last week I gave two presentations to journalism students at the University of Arkansas. The events were sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. I modified Horvit’s approach and included some discussion on using search in social media to find news or people. Continue reading
The primary fight for Arkansas Legislative seats is largely divided with Republicans mostly duking it out for seats in the northwest corner of the state and Democrats competing for seats in the south and east.
All of the state’s 135 legislative seats are up for election following redistricting the 2010 U.S. Census. Continue reading
This past Saturday WSJ included a nice article about sommeliers by Lettie Teague. The art complimenting the article was designed by the talented Edel Rodriguez. I thought I needed to create my own version for Fayetteville Sommelier Aleks Berry, who recently passed the Advanced Sommelier Course & Exam distributed by the Court of Master Sommeliers. The bottle he holds is Veuve Cliquot’ Brut Champagne.
Yes, yes. I’ve relaunched the look of my site again. Not sure why; don’t ask. I just needed it to help inspire me to blog more (minimalist new style, maybe?).
One thing that I wanted to learn/experiment with were those things been popping up all over the web these days: custom scrollbars in Webkit.
Yes! Google has added them in recent Gmail and Reader facelifts. Damn sexy if you ask me. Really lets a web designer control the interactive feel of their pages. Well, web pages rendered in Chrome and Safari, that is.
God knows they’ve been around for a couple years now.
That, indeed, is a question that’ll probably affect my financial future. I just can’t tell if it’ll be positive or negative.
When I re-enrolled full-time at the UA this fall I was missing one important trinket from my past enrollment 6 months prior. It was my Art Minor, which has been discontinued due to limited faculty.
I was able to argue and fight to have it back (I paid for it, right?).
But now, with an expected graduation date of December 2012, I’m debating about taking 24 more hours in finance classes.
That’s right, I’m thinking about minoring in business. The extra year will cost me, but knowing an artist’s and journalist’s salary, I kind of want better option for my future, you know?
Fingers crossed!
The rough idea behind a visually trustworthy news homepage.
In my job, that must be the oddest phrase I deal with daily.
Newspaper Homepage.
Technically a newspaper isn’t a website and therefore has no homepage. So we focus on it being a digital representation of a (or several) newspaper(s) online.
For the most part, I still feel like an ignorant minor when it comes to this game.
The Arkansas Senate has passed a bill that would extend the media shield law currently protecting newspaper, radio and periodical reporters.
If the bill becomes law it would protect television and website reporters from exposing their sources to a grand jury. Radically, New Media.
I’m still not certain what website would be defined as an “internet news source.” What do you think? If Google News includes, then hells ya? Or would imakethingsup.blogspot.com qualify?
The Bill at arkleg.state.ar.us
TO INCLUDE OTHER MEDIA IN SHIELD PROVISIONS…
Via NWAonline/The Associated Press:
Senate approves bill protecting TV, website reporters
Really great article from James Fallows over at The Atlantic:
Everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel is bemoaning a decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion. But the author, a longtime advocate of these values, takes a journey through the digital-media world and concludes there isn’t any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.
I recently came across a problem while editing our template pages on WholeHogSports. The site had absolutely missed the boat for a decent bit of search engine optimization.
SEO is basically a quick and easy way to organize your information in byte-sized chunks so that search engines, the deaf and blind, and applications can understand what your pages are about without having to read an entire page of information.
It seems logical that, as journalists, we desperately need to make sure these words are precise, directing the most possible users to our information and beating the competition.
There are 3 main areas to focus your SEO efforts. One lets readers and search engines know the name of the page, another provides a description of that page and the final deals with the content inside that page, explaining images and providing flow.
Another very important thing to consider is how many sites link to your site and does your site link to its content well? If a human can’t get to the page, it’s very doubtful a machine can. The more links to your site and the more links you make to your content, the higher up the food chain you will travel.
The <title> tag is probably the most important piece of the equation. You must describe, in as few words as possible, what your content is about.
Example:
Now look how it appears in a Google search for “Fayetteville news”
While it’s not number one, it appears on the first page of that search. As Rebecca Lieb says in her book, it’s good to have a few keywords inside that title tag and goes a long way in securing basic searches for news.
For instance, on nwaonline.com, we include the story headline with the site name. That way, those stories will appear first in searches. Descriptive titles matter.
Now, getting the design desk on board to make SEO-friendly headlines for the website would be a pain for their print efforts, which opt for smaller words and bigger type.
Still, get descriptive, more than just the site name. This is especially true if your name has nothing to do with the way people might search for information on your site.
Check out a search for “hog news” and you’ll find WholeHogSports up top, though people probably aren’t searching for “hog news,” but instead “razorback news.”
The description is the chunk of information right under your title in searches. For instance, the NWAonline search shows “NWAOnline is the premier digital source for news in Northwest Arkansas. Featuring content from the Northwest Edition of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette…”
While this title is nice, it’s also too long, but I have my reasons.
We use the description tag to describe our news services online and add all of our daily print brands. So, when you do a search for “northwest arkansas times” we’re number 1.
The description tag also plays a major role in letting apps like the Facebook share button pull the information for a story you’re (as a user) trying to share with your friends.
It’s good to have an excerpt or lede pulled for news stories. Features and opinion copy benefit in having separate description tags, usually generated just for SEO and apps.
If your description tag is the same for all your pages, your sharing apps and Google won’t be able to figure out the difference between a story page and a homepage.
A good description would have the who, what, when, where, why. And I wish the main character’s name. But that only happens for celebrities in the news.
Yeah, that’s hokey, but it’s important to consider how images and text will be interpreted by the blind or the seeing-impared.
One good thing to do is double-check that all of our images have an alternative attribute (alt for short).
This allows for a description (maybe even a caption!) of what is going on in the photo. It also lets search engines know what they’re seeing, since they still can’t yet see.
Flow is also very important. Depending on the structure of the HTML page, you might have some text appear separate from the surrounding text it belongs with.
A good way to check for this is to turn off CSS on your browser and view your site without any styles.
So there you have it. It’s a complicated subject that I’d be happy to discuss. Just bring me some PBR, a cigarette and a linotype.