My Beck Pages http://mybeckpages.posterous.com Most recent posts at My Beck Pages posterous.com Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:27:00 -0700 Speech notes: Social media at the Los Angeles Times http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/speech-notes-social-media-at-the-los-angeles http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/speech-notes-social-media-at-the-los-angeles

The Los Angeles Times has been publishing a newspaper since 1881. Let me just let that time frame sink in a bit. Since Dec. 4, 1881, The Times has published every day. For 129 years.

Quick and dirty math: That's more than 45,000 days in a row. Quite a remarkable winning streak.

Much has changed for journalists in the 129 years since. Our front pages are a lot more colorful these days.

(slide of current front page).

And that's just for starters. The changes in the print journalism industry are well documented. The rise of the internet, coupled with a drastic reduction in our print distribution rates ...

have us searching for answers.

One of our strategies has been to look for ways to improve efficiency.

So a year and a half ago we merged our print and online newsrooms. Now our coverage on the web and in the print version is managed by the same people.

And that has changed the way we operate. We used to *only* have two deadlines a day, around 3 p.m. for the features sections, and 11 p.m. for news.

We still have those deadlines, but have added rolling deadlines whenever news breaks -- all day and night.

(slide of 24hr newsroom)

We are doing it with a smaller staff; but it's a more nimble operation. And our metrics folks tell us that more people are reading our journalism than ever. Overwhelming majority of our traffic comes from direct and search engine traffic.

But it's clear that the ground it still shifting underneath us.

And we can't sit back and assume people will continue to type latimes.com into their browsers or even from search engines.

Not when they are spending more and more time on Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks. Not when Nielsen's reporting like it did this week that 22% of all time spent online is on social networks.

So about two years ago we dove in, setting up accounts in just about every social networks you could imagine. Ms. Walter from Intel said earlier, we got a bit distracted by ALL the next shiny objects.

(unhub slides)

And really who knows what might break out of the pack tomorrow.

(woof slide)

So we are reassessing and are in the process of honing it down. Twitter and Facebook.
(Twitter landing slide)
 
We have more than 70 plus official twitter accounts and hundreds of individual accounts.
more than 500,000 followers total, but none greater than the 66,000 on our main @latimes twitter account

And nearly 50 facebook fan pages, with about 50,000 fans, 15,000 on our main Los Angeles Times page

Some are currated by editors, some are fed by RSS feeds, some are a combination.
We are in the process of trying to come up with the best recipe, prioritizing, strategizing and working out ways to measure success on these platforms.
Suveyed our newsroom for  twitter accounts: and about 230 of our 500 plus newsroom staffers had twitter accounts.
Starting an education process to bring along the rest of the people ... and help people with accounts be more active. Creating basic How to Twitter for the Times explainers for those who need it.
We do have quite a few savvy Pioneers in the newsroom. Polled some of our most active social media users, asking for success stories. Here are some examples.
--Ultimate news tip service, California staff has gotten social media tips that have produced at least a dozen front page stories in the last year

--michelle obama  Someone tweeted after seeing her at Pink's. We called the hot dog stand -- and yes, she had been there. (eating a mild polish sausage w/ grilled onions and jalapenos). 

--From one of our columnists: I find Twitter more useful and informative than email. Email is jammed w spam and 98 percent I toss but Twitter following the right people I get lots of tips, info and impt links.

--From one of our business reporters: I'm followed by many industry sources and executives and my tweets and their tweets (geez, I hate that word), has led to stories and better relationships. Even just tweeting about sporting events I'm watching has brought me closer to some sources who have the same interests.find out more quickly when scooped

--personal engagement most effective. Just like in real life, building trusting relationships with sources. Mark Horvath example
--great success with our Festival of Books twitter account. Really became a phenom last year, started using the hashtag #LATfob and carried over.
We are also trying to improve reader engagement on our own site.
A couple quick examples:
--Neighborhood pages, give people in LA County the opportunity to explore our maps and share information about the places they live
--More live chats on our Readers Representative Journal blog.
Basically we are trying to make the best use of all the tools available -- both on and off our site -- to negotiate these uncertain times.

It's heartening to know that story is a story no matter the delivery method. And some things never change.

For instance:
Check out on of the top headlines in that first Times print edition on Dec. 4, 1881. Not hard to imagine this as a tweet.

A Vial of Vitriol

An unknown scoundrel hurls it on a crowd

The Fiery Fluid Burns Men, Women and Children -- A Fiendish Crime at a Carnival in Philadelphia.

 

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1689817/youngme_reasonably_small.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bmKtNJ1FoR3 Martin Beck mybeckpages Martin Beck
Tue, 25 May 2010 15:56:00 -0700 Notes for a speech: at Cal Poly Pomona http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/at-cal-poly-pomona http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/at-cal-poly-pomona

I'm the reader engagement editor for the Los Angeles Times.

What is that?

It's a position created to help the newspaper and website improve something we have struggled with over the years: be more responsive to readers.

  • We aim to be more available and respond more quickly.
  • Increasing our online chats
  • Explaining more how we got a story
  • Share our work more actively on social media networks

By doing this we hope to:

  • improve our journalism
  • learn from our audience
  • harness the wisdom of the crowd.
  • And by doing all of that we hope to make our journalism more relevant to more people and....

.....  buy time for our business people to figure out a way to make our new delivery methods as profitable as print.

 

  • Because, maybe you've heard: printed newspapers are in trouble? This week an official with the very successful London newspaper Financial Times the end of their print edition above the sunset of print in 5 years. 

Let's do a quick, non scientific poll.

By show of hands:

Who reads a print newspaper daily?

Who reads one once a week?

Who reads one a couple times a month?

Never?

Who checks Facebook daily? Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Technorati, Tumblr, Posterous, AOL, Yahoo, Ning .... Everyday a new service or two pops up...

Play woof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-wGCHW0

Scary time for the business:

  • Will we survive?
  • If we survive who will remain to do the work
  • What will that work be like.

I don't know the answer to any of those questions. I don't think anyone does. Things are changing so quickly that we really have no idea what's coming next. But there's plenty of room for speculation. Here's one guess. It's five years old and I appologize if you've seen it before but i think it's still a great illustration of the media landscape.

Play: Epic 2015

So what do you think? It that a plausible future? There probably won't be a marriage of Google and Amazon and the NYT probably will be the last major newspaper standing.

  • I don't know.
  • But I do believe that it's a great time to be in the business and a student of journalism and communications.

Never has there been more information available about the craft of journalism. Text books used to have a near monopoly on journalistic how-to material. You used to have to wait months for trade journals like Columbia Journalism Review to weigh in on the ethics and craft of journalism.

Now there are probably hundreds of blogs, and twitters, entering the fray every day. You can consume a PHDs worth of J-school information and never leave your desk. 

My current favorite is based at Harvard: Nieman Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/

Another good one is Sreetips, from a professor at Columbia Journalism School. http://www.sreetips.com/

Really useful resources. Amazing advances in access to curriculum compared to when I was finishing my official journalism education. 

Also amazing changes in tech.

Impossible to overstate how much has changed in the business in my 20 years; brought a couple props to drive home the point.

When I started writing Sports for the Times, this was the state of the art: trs-80.

  • cost a bit more than 1,000
  • full size keyboard
  • most importantly 20 hours of battery life (from 4 AA batteries!)
  • file from anywhere view couplers and a payphone.
  • So good that I know reporters who clung to these up until forced to give them up in 2000.

Back then, however, these devices were a one way street. Reporters talked to sources at the scene, composed their stories and sent them over the wires in time for the once a day deadline.

  • Now we have a rolling 24 hour minute by minute deadline.
  • And we have tools that have evolved; tools that we now use to help transmit the story and the many in the audience are using to read or view our stories.

And despite all the changes one thing remains: there will always be a demand for people who can help people make sense of events happening in the community, city, state and world.

Questions?

 

Resources:

Epic 2015 explained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014

Epic 2015: http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/new-masterfs1.html

If necessary social media revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

 

 

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1689817/youngme_reasonably_small.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bmKtNJ1FoR3 Martin Beck mybeckpages Martin Beck