Plastics

Ah, the microblog. Such a new phenomenon that spell check has underlined it for me, as if to say, “why, what on earth could this be? This isn’t in my dictionary. What is this microblog you speak of?” Not to worry, spell check! You’re not alone in your state of oblivion. Many have yet to fully understand the art of microblogging. I recommend to you and to all of those people, spell check, reading chapter 4 of Briggs’ Journalism Next for a crash course in microblogging 101. Briggs discusses the following in this chapter:

• How and why microblogging became popular
• How microblogging works
• How professional news organizations use Twitter to compliment their existing publishing platforms
• How to build a community of followers
• How individual journalists can make microblogging work for them in their professional lives

The only microblog that I am familiar with is Twitter. Even so, I’ve only been active on Twitter for a few weeks, so I hardly consider myself an expert Tweeter. Learning how journalists benefit from Twitter was informative and inspiring. I’m not saying I don’t care about the history of the microblog. But, it’s already here. With a bang. So while I think it’s great that Twitter was used for alerts and communication during stressful situations once upon a time, I mostly just want to figure out how to get the most out the the damn thing in the here and now.

So, what’d I learn?

• Don’t put Twitter on auto-pilot. It prevents the journalist from engaging with the community.
• For journalists, the benefit of microblogging is learning about your audience.
• The 80-20 rule: 80 percent of your posts should be informative, 20 percent should be personal.
• Quality over quantity.

A growing concern of mine with this whole microblog phenomenon was the role that journalists would play. If everyone is on Twitter spitting out stories, do you really need journalists?

“Even with ordinary citizens Twittering away about breaking news, journalists still play an important role by verifying facts and publishing updates as more information becomes available. People were already turning to news organizations’ Web sites for the latest developments in the news, and now they turn to those organizations’ Twitter feeds for even more immediate information.” – Briggs, pg. 102

Looks like we do still need journalists. Phew.

Let me start out by saying that I never thought I would have to use XHTML code after ITE 103 again in my life. That being said, chapter 1 was boring. Chapter 1 also made me glad that I was too lazy to sell back my ITE 103 textbook. It will come undoubtedly come in handy in my future.

Chapter 2 started with a great quote from USA TODAY travel blogger, Ben Mutzabaugh.

“Readers are our friends. In print it is easy to feel like you are at odds with readers because people will find one little thing wrong. So, as a journalist you get defensive. The readers of a blog chime in and help you to get the story right. Readers help make the blog stronger than any single author could make it alone.”

I don’t think of myself as a perfectionist by any means, but don’t we all prefer constructive criticism over being told how wrong we are? The blogosphere seems friendly!

I’m new to WordPress, so I plan on taking advantage of the part in chapter 2 explaining how to customize your blog and add widgets and whatnot. I hadn’t really tried to figure it out further than the tutorial done in class, but I’m sure this’ll help.

It’s not like I was anti-link or anything before reading chapter 3, but I guess I just never fully understood the full value of inserting links into stories or posts. Briggs talks about people being skeptical to direct readers elsewhere thinking that they won’t come back again. I understand this. Then I read this Google quote on page 82: “All Google does is send people away from itself and all people do is come back.” Brilliant.