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We talk about social media. We talk about curation. Here’s a great place to see the latter in action about the former, and it is full of great resources for you. Mindy McAdams presents social media and journalists.

A Brother and Sister get married

A love story, as told on Twitter. (Via NPR or Chirpstory but unfortunately it is not embeddable. Do check it out, however. I’ll wait.)

Sharing this through Twitter made it unique, in a way. The great pictures and the personal touch make it lovely. But remember, the best work — no matter the tools you’re using — always stems from great stories.

Should advertisers know where you are?

The future of location-based marketing is cool. . . or scary. Yes it is.

I used to ask classes how they felt about the idea of their phone getting a buzz whenever they passed a nearby Starbucks. “Hey! You’re just down the block. Come in, show us this message, get $1 off a latte!”

No one in any of my classes has ever liked that idea. We’re going to start seeing that more frequently, however.

When B-roll alone tells the story

This might not happen often, but here’s a great example of a video that requires B-roll to be the most useful part of a project. Take a silly thing like football (I like football!) and an even sillier thing like dog shows (I like dogs!) and put them together.

The premise is “What breed would play what position on the football field?” The video is showing the dogs, essentially putting names to faces, while the two guys strategize on building a dog team.

Here’s the roster breakdown, with the caveat “For the sake of argument, these dogs have opposable thumbs and can understand the purpose of sporting contests.”

UPDATED to fix the video, which was inexplicably embedding something else into the post for some browsers.

Dr. Daniels will be proud this is under 350 words

Alabama professor George Daniels finds that his students are writing blog posts that aren’t very approachable to their intended audiences.

Don’t write blah blogs. How is that?

Dr. Daniels feels students are often writing solely to their professor, only the one person in the scheme of things.

(Your scheme of things includes: building/cultivating an audience and brand, developing rapport with readers and fellow content creators, being interesting, engaging and, finally, finally earning your grade.)

He has a few suggestions and solutions for you. They are worth your time and consideration. The first two:

SOLUTION #1: Remember you’re writing for an audience outside of the university

[...]

The purpose of the blog is not to take a boring academic assignment and dump it out here online for all the world to see.

You’re building a work habit that prospective employers are (hopefully) going to admire.

SOLUTION #2: Pick something that will attract some interest or elicit a response …

Get to the point quickly. Speed and time are so valuable in this space. The audience’s attention can be short. Get your hook in the first sentence.
Don’t say in 1,000 words what you can say in half that space. As you know, writing tight takes thought and time. You have to work at that.

Include links, photos, videos, slideshows. Text-only posts don’t provide a lot of context or demonstrate your ability as a content curator. Get beyond the Wikipedia link. Find the source material. Find other supplemental material. Did you look for contradictory material, too?

As professor Mindy McAdams writes, “Too many students write blog posts just to get the assignment out of the way — the poor quality of the blog post reveals that plainly. No future employer is going to be impressed by that kind of writing.”

Remember, this is part of a portfolio of experience.

Here’s an argument to that effect:

Engagement, it’s what’s for dinner at NYT

Seven ways the New York Times is using social media for ‘deeper’ engagement is an analysis piece with two really interesting ideas. The rest aren’t bad, they’re just obvious or commonly in practice. But check out numbers three and four:

3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”

Heron recognises she is “lucky to count on about a dozen interactive developers as colleagues” on her team, “which is kind of a dream come true for a journalism nerd like me”.

She told the news:rewired conference that the “team of developer-journalists has rebuilt our traditional liveblog and transformed it into more of a second screen, social media-heavy experience – a one-stop-shop for reporting, analysis, newsworthy tweets, reader engagement, and interactive election results”.

4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”

The New York Times team decided it should provide its “own coverage and analysis” for the “aforementioned media cacophony”.

Media reporters Brian Stelter and David Carr have been using Storify to collect the “news media’s tweets, videos and Facebook posts on primary nights”. They have been adding their own analysis as narrative within the Storify.

Engagement, or immersion, if you prefer, should be the goal at the beginning and the end of news products. Otherwise, why is your audience bothering?

A look at online advertising

Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted:

A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.

[...]

Overall, the analysis finds that while news organizations have tried to persuade their advertisers to buy space across multiple platforms, there was little evidence that they had succeeded. The kinds of products and services being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms, and often were seen across multiple websites.

Interesting findings, but the researchers were seemingly only at the front page of sites. A lot of traffic comes from search engines, directly into interior pages. Indeed, many front pages aren’t built for the human aesthetic, but rather for the search engine spiders.

Sites selling specific ad space, or clients buying ads exclusively on sports pages or on automotive stories, don’t seem to figure into this. That’s worth studying (and, professionally, worth practicing) but it would be incredibly labor intensive.