What’s the difference between Journalism and Blogging?

_{Original Article Written By Dan Redding at Smashing Magazine}

CNN.com delivers journalism. Your cousin’s homemade Twilight fan fiction site, on the other hand, is a blog. However, somewhere in between lies a hotly debated grey area.

So can blogs be journalism? According to NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, “They can be, sometimes.”  How can you tell the difference? Depends on who you ask. Rosen himself is both journalist and blogger (he runs PressThink, a weblog about journalism and the press). In his essay ‘Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over’, Rosen decides that the sometimes indiscernible difference between these two forms of writing is less important than the implications of massive shifts of power in the media. Rosen acknowledges what Tom Curley (Chief Executive of the Associated Press) called “a huge shift in the ‘balance of power’ in our world, from the content providers to the content consumers.” What does that mean for those of us in a position to take advantage of our newfound power?

It means we should move forward with a spirit of responsibility and immense excitement. We live in a revolutionary time when just about anyone with access to a computer can make his or her writing available to an enormous international audience with the click of a button. As Web designers and online writers who are experienced with the Web, the potential of our medium is tremendous.

Journalistic Tools for Bloggers

This photo comes from a series chronicling Paris street dancers practicing dance styles including breakdancing and capoeira. This photo, by Denis Darcazq, was acknowledged by photojournalism foundation World Press Photo in 2007

Write Compelling Leads

A ‘lead’ is the first sentence of an article. The lead is your first and best chance to compel the reader to stick around and read more. A sentence that is humorous, provocative, or curious can be extremely engaging.

To learn more about captiving leads, you can’t beat the literary titans of fiction. One classic first sentence comes from Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis: “Gregor Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug.” Who wouldn’t want to know what happens next?

Use the Active Voice

The active voice is much more compelling than the passive voice.  To say ‘I am designing the website’ is a clearer and more powerful statement than ‘the website is being designed by me.’ According to The Elements of Style, “The habitual use of the active voice… makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative concerned principally with action but in writing of any kind.”

Twins are held up to watch Princess Margaret pass by in London on Armistice Day, 1951. Photo by Ruth Orkin

Write in Positive Terms

Describe things in terms of what they are instead of what they aren’t. Instead of saying that a painter ‘doesn’t use a lot of color,’ say that she ‘uses a limited palette.’

Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar

It should go without saying, but it doesn’t: proper spelling and grammar are necessary if you want to be taken seriously. Writing that is descriptive, informative, and properly written speaks volumes about credibility and professionalism. It can be a baffling experience to visit a popular design blog and read a post that’s riddled with spelling errors and awkward, incomplete sentences.

Spell-check your documents, have a friend proofread them, and take the time to do it right. It’s understandable that bloggers who write in their second language might have some inaccuracies, but over time, those inaccuracies can degrade the quality of a brand.

For an invaluable resource on the subject, pick up The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. The tips and tools you read in that book will reverberate inside your head for the rest of your writing career.

Verification

Journalism’s “essence is a discipline of verification” (The Elements of Journalism). “Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists have tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first.”

Let’s say you’re writing about breaking technology news that you read about on another blogger’s site. Unless they’ve shared their sources, you probably don’t know where that blogger received their information (and it was likely to have been copied and pasted from yet another blog). If you want to make a commitment to accuracy, you can always take the extra two minutes to pick up the phone or write an email to the company releasing the product. Ask them to verify your facts, because otherwise you can’t be sure that they’re facts at all.

The Web can be a scandalous and salacious place. False rumors of a celebrity’s death will occasionally spread like wildfire on Twitter. These kinds of events can be distasteful and even disturbing. Now that we’re all casual news reporters through social media, it’s important to verify the things we hear before passing them along. Obviously, independent bloggers don’t have the same obligations that a newspaper reporter has, but it’s beneficial to stay aware of these issues.

Hikers walk along the wildly-colored Danxia Landform at a geopark in Zhangye, China. This photo is one of Life.com’s Photos of the Year for 2009. Photo by Han Chuanhao/Xinhua/Landov

Originality

Do your own work. Be unique. Generate fresh concepts that will engage your readers. Try not to imitate the work of others more than is necessary and never steal or plagiarize. Need images, ideas, or reference for your next project? Try the library instead of Google Images and Wikipedia (an especially perilous resource due to the questionable quality of much of its contents). You’ll be helping to make the Internet a richer and more diverse place instead of recycling or regurgitating. Sharing your reputable information sources will add credibility to your work.

Interviews

The interview is a popular feature on design blogs. Interviewing is an art of its own, and when it’s done right, it can be very fun and it can yield surprising results (who doesn’t love a valuable business insight or a shocking revelation?).

“A reporter who begins an interview without the proper preparation is like a student taking a final exam without studying” (News Reporting and Writing, The Missouri Group). Before your conversation with John Q. Celebrity, you need to do thorough research and you need to write good questions. Read everything you can find about your subject and his career. When he can’t recall the title of the sculpture he made in 1997 and you remind him that it was called ‘Pretentious Masterpiece,’ it shows that you’re on the ball.

Write questions that will inspire unique answers. If you waste the entire interview asking banal questions that are easily available to the public (i.e. “Where did you go to college?”), you’re liable to walk away with an interview that’s going to put your audience to sleep. Worse yet, if your interview subject is someone who is interviewed several times a week, he or she might be irritated by the basic questions and the evidence that you didn’t do much research. Now you face the possibility of your interview subject growing cold, responding with disinterested answers, or cutting the interview short.

Once you’ve done great research and written compelling questions, you can relax and enter the interview with an inquisitive spirit. Buy a mini tape recorder and make sure you never begin an interview with dull batteries in it. Don’t be afraid to deviate from your well-researched questions if a more urgent question arises in your mind. Remember that you’re having a conversation with another human being — not just an article subject — and they want to engage with you. When the piece is completed and transcribed, the tone of your discussion will spring forth from your printed words.

Direct Quotations

Whether you’re transcribing your recorded interview or quoting an article, it is of utmost importance that every quote you write is entirely accurate. Changing a single word can change the entire meaning of a statement. In some situations, these kinds of mistakes can lead to anger, charges of libel, and even lawsuits.

A while back, a well-known Web designer expressed his displeasure over Twitter when someone re-tweeted one of his tweets, but changed part of his statement from “it’s disappointing” to “it’s pathetic.” The person on the other end of that exchange had altered the entire tone of that original tweet with the change of just one word. Pathetic is a much more severe word than disappointing, and the Web designer was irritated.

When you are writing a direct quote, make sure it is written verbatim. Verbatim means ‘in exactly the same words that were used originally.’ Punctuation can change the meaning of a statement, too.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning photo portrays aging baseball great Babe Ruth receiving thunderous applause at Yankee Stadium in 1948. An image like this is a good example of why journalism legend Dan Rather once wrote, “It’s disheartening for anyone in my line of work to be reminded that sometimes one picture is, indeed, worth ten thousand words.”

Ethical Writing

In journalism, the philosophical and ethical boundaries of reporting are matters of great importance and pride.

So what does ethical writing mean for bloggers? Well, if you’re writing a simple ‘how to’ tutorial, ethics might not be involved at all. But what if your tutorial passively encourages readers to use a product that’s manufactured by a company whose business practices are disreputable or inhumane? Sometimes there are ethical implications where we least expect them.

Ethics are a matter of personal opinion. These matters are complex and open to interpretation. But few things are more important to you and your brand than your standards and principles.

Is it ethical to write paid ‘sponsored’ blog posts where you’re paid to write and publish a review of a product? It’s one thing to feature advertisements like Google AdWords in your sidebar, but when advertising merges with your content in the form of an entire post that you were paid to write, that’s a different story. Some sponsorship programs don’t ‘force’ bloggers to write favorable reviews, but oddly enough, you’ll be hard pressed to find a sponsored blog post that is harshly critical of its subject. That’s because if you’re being paid, you’re biased. That’s the bottom line.

Make your money from your ideas, designs, and creativity — not sponsored blog posts. No one wants to see a glorified advertisement tucked in amongst your real content. Besides, sponsored blog posts just look tacky.

In Conclusion

Bloggers, journalists, and designers can all work together to make the future of the Web an intelligent, enjoyable, and responsible place. This post has merely scratched the surface of what the study of journalism has to offer you, so don’t let your path of learning end here.

This new digital era has sent the practice of journalism into troubled waters. Those of us who have benefited from the shift of power from content consumers to content providers find ourselves in a unique position. We now have the opportunity to help foster the welfare of that great, guiding principle: the truth.

Your average blog or independent online publication is not beholden to the corporate or governmental interests that the subsidiaries of major media conglomerates (like Viacom or Disney) might be influenced by. For that reason, some of us may find ourselves in the position to publish truths that would otherwise go ignored. Of course, we’re often likely to adapt our viewpoints from those of corporate media publications — this happens every time you retweet a New York Times article or quote a CNN report in your blog post.

Hopefully, those viewpoints are usually honest and truthful. However, if we maintain a commitment to accuracy while doing some original thinking, writing, and reporting, we may be able to make valuable, independent contributions to the legacy of the truth that lies at the heart of journalism — and at the heart of our shared societal and cultural integrity.

Tools for Working Remotely

While the concept of working remotely isn’t new, the tools to facilitate it have grown over the last few years.

Substitute Conference Calls with Online Video Chats

Instead of  hearing only your remote team’s voices, enhance your conference calls with video chat so you can see them and experience a more engaging conversation. Skype and Google Video Chat are two free and easy-to-use tools that make meeting face-to-face a practical way to include your entire team in meetings.

Both are easy to set-up and install. You’ll need a stable internet connection, web cam and audio. Many webcams come with built-in audio devices . All you do is plug ‘em in, launch your video chat application and start your meeting.

Use Collaborative Tools to Create and Manage Documents

If you’ve saved, emailed, updated, saved again, and sent a follow-up email to spell out the changes you made, you may want to give collaborative tools a try.  Collaborative tools allow team members to work on the same document, together in real-time.  They’re also a workable solution for newsletter editors that are inundated with email attachments of articles and revisions of articles. This 3-minute video illustrates Google Docs, one of my favorite collaborative tools:

The documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs are very similar to those in MS Office. There’s no new software to learn, so getting started is just a matter of getting over the fear of trying something new. I recommend taking the tour to help get comfortable with the tool.

Use Web-based Tools to Demonstrate

Screen shots are helpful for walking clients and co-workers through online processes. Sometimes, when you can’t be there, talking a client or co-worker through the process is the most efficient way. While both methods work, tools like GoToMeeting let you share your computer screen with others to demonstrate processes in real-time. This tool has proven helpful in our web-based trainings and one-to-one client demonstrations.

10 Things To Do Before the End of the Year

You already have plenty to do, I know! But to keep momentum going, it helps to do a few concrete things every day. Each of these “things to do” will move your organization closer to successful fundraising.

1. Set up an online suggestion box, and tell board members, volunteers, and staff  to use it to offer creative ideas for improvement. Seriously consider each suggestion, and do your best to implement the good ideas.
2. Ask a few employees to read up on TQM. Have them form a TQM team and identify ways to improve processes within the organization.
3. Read the business section of a major newspaper, and subscribe to at least one business publication, such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, or Fortune. Start thinking like an entrepreneur, and bring this mindset to your staff and board members.
4. Call your board members, and ask each one to contact a corporate decision-maker to discuss ways the corporation and your organization might work together. (Don’t have them ask for funds yet; that will come after you’ve established a relationship with the corporation.)
5. Revise your volunteer, paid staff, and board orientation materials to emphasize your organization’s mission and vision and get people excited about being part of a forward-looking team.
6. Create an exit interview to give to departing employees. Ask searching questions about the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. You’ll receive invaluable information about your working environment.
7. Identify a local nonprofit whose work enhances your mission. Make a date to talk with the executive director about ways to collaborate.
8. Determine areas in which you are exceeding your funders’ expectations. If there aren’t any, set some more ambitious goals.
9. Randomly call five people your organization serves. Ask them to evaluate the quality of service they received most recently from your organization.
10. Have each staff and board member answer this question: “If we had an additional $25,000, $100,000, or $1,000,000 at our disposal, how could we best use it?” These answers will give you some creative ideas for expansion.

Indesign Trick to Increase Productivity : Adding Cell Padding

Anyone who has streamlined over to print design from web design probably gets frustrated that InDesign doesn’t offer tables with the same padding options that HTML does. But that doesn’t mean you can’t trick your tables a little to mimic the same kind of padding you’d get in the web world.

To mimic web-table cell padding:

1. Select the Type tool and highlight your table cells.
2. Choose Table > Cell Options > Text to open the Cell Options dialog box.
3. Increase the Cell Insets. We set the Cell Insets to 1p4.
4. Click on the Strokes And Fills tab, increase the weight, and change the line type. For our example, we set the weight to 6 pt and selected Thick Thin from the Type pop-up menu.

Source: New Horizons Computer Learning Center

How to improve the SEO for your website

Below is a list of things you can do to improve the SEO for your website:

Claim your profile and upload pictures.
Go to the follow links and register your company:

• • • Google Places
    • Bing Local
    • Yahoo Local
    • Google Local
    • Ask City
    • CitySearch (data on this site feeds Ask.com and Bing)
    • Yelp (data on this site feeds Bing and Yahoo)

Submit your company info to the following websites:
Localeze
infoUSA

Add New Content Regularly.
We need to add some type of info to the website at least once per week. I think the blog is the best place to do this.

Ask for Reviews.
On your contact form thank you page, on invoices, on email communications, make a point to say “Hey we’d love it if you gave our business a review on Google/Bing/Yahoo Local.” These reviews, good or bad, make your business more creditable to future customers.

Link Building
Start a link building campaign aimed at obtaining one-way backward links pointing to your website. Arguably the best way to generate inbound links is by creating quality, useful content (a company blog is essential) and effectively promoting it using social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Press Release
You can inform the whole World about your company by writing and issuing a press release. There are a good number of press release distributing websites out there, which will help you gain a decent number of backlinks in a short period of time. However, if you don’t write a really great press release, your links might be short-lived.

Twitter
Create a Twitter account and link to Website.

Google Buzz
http://www.google.com/buzz

I hope these tips are helpful.

Cheers,

Utoia

Seven Cures for Nonprofit Writer’s Block

Not sure what to write about? Look around for inspiration. Here are seven sources of ideas.

1. Look at Current Headlines.

Peruse the covers of magazines and look at the titles. Can you adjust a few words and come up with a title for an article for your publications? This is easier to do with printed magazines than online, so take a walk to your local news stand or grocery store.

Use headlines to help you uncover stories that are already around you, but you just can’t see them for what they are.

2. Look at the Calendar and Holidays.

Every month of the year includes holidays — real and creatively imagined by various organizations to highlight issues and causes. Kivi has noted a handful for each month here .

3. Pick the Format First.

There are several tried-and-true article formats that readers generally love. Here are  five awesome formats:

• How-to Article
• List (e.g. Top Ten)
• Fact Versus Fiction (or True or False)
• Advice (usually in response to a question)
• Roundup (group several smaller items together under a common theme)

4. Fill in the Headline.

Like picking the format first, this gives you a push in the right direction. Copyblogger offers several  fill in the blank headlines . Here are a few for nonprofits:

• The Secret of [blank]
• Get Rid of [problem] Once and For All
• [Do something] like [world-class example]
• Have a [or] Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
• The Lazy [blank's] Way to [blank]
• Do You Recognize the [number] Early Warning Signs of [blank]?
• You Don’t Have to Be [something challenging] to be [desired result].

5. Start with a Metaphor.

Granted, this approach usually requires a little time for brainstorming, but the results can be very powerful. Pick a topic, and see how you can use it to describe your work. From that, story ideas will flow. For example, how is your work like gardening? Or travel? Or parenting? Download Kivi’s free e-book, 25 Metaphors Nonprofits Can Use to Get Their Messages Across for many more metaphor ideas and tips on how to use them in your writing.

6. Survey Your Readers.

This won’t work for writer’s block you need to solve today, but it’s the best solution long-term. Go to the people you are trying to serve with your writing and ask them what problems they are facing, what issues they are interested in, what surprised them recently about your work, etc. Get a better understanding of the information needs and interests of your readers, and deliver matching content.

7. Ask a Question on Facebook.

If you don’t have time for a survey, but still have 48 hours before you really need the idea, throw it out to your supporters on your Facebook page (Twitter works too).  Ask what questions fans have about a topic, what they want to learn more about, or poll them to narrow down a list of ideas you already have.

By Kivi Miller