The 10 laws of multimedia

We can get ourselves into such a fluster in our hurry to add the latest innovation to our websites that we may lose sight of what exactly it's meant to be doing for our readers.

So it's probably a good idea to take a step back from time to time and take stock.

Deb Wenger has a report, on the Advancing the Story blog, of a talk given by multimedia expert Al Tompkins (pictured) to educators at the Poynter Institute listing what he calls the 10 laws of multimedia.

He told them: "To be great, multimedia has to make the story better than it would be in a legacy form.”

The rules include making the site interactive, being search engine friendly, and tapping into local passion groups.

“The most important reason to do multimedia is to improve the journalism,” Tompkins told the group.

Of course, many people have what they consider to be a good multimedia strategy but it's always good to look at what other people suggest doing. You never know, you might be missing a trick.

Comment is not free (not at The Sun Chronicle anyway)

The comments section of websites can be a bit of a minefield. Now popularly lampooned in satirical magazine Private Eye, they can attract postings that are trying to be funny, are full of ignorance, full of spite or all three. But one US newspaper is trying to nip the abuse in the bud.

The Columbia Journalism Review has flagged up a Guardian article which looks at an interesting use of paywall technology – purely in the comments section.

The Sun Chronicle, a paper in Massachusetts, has put the paywall in place to try and prevent the appearance of what they describe as abusive, obscene or “otherwise nasty” comments.

In an interview with CJR on Wednesday, Sun Chronicle publisher Oreste D’Arconte explained that money has nothing to do with the decision.

The one-time fee of 99cents, she says, is to cover the charge of processing the credit card, which they use to verify the user’s name and location before discarding the details.

The Web staff felt they were wasting too much time deleting inappropriate comments and policing repeat offenders. D’Arconte and his staff wanted a way to encourage dialogue, while holding people accountable for what they said. Those who pay the fee and post abusive material will be banned from the comments section.

It may make life easier in terms of moderation but whether the 15,000-strong readership feel that their comment is important enough to warrant the joining fee and hassle of entering their card details remains to be seen.

Friday round-up: lessons from Brazil, going straight to the source and writing like J.K Rowling

Protecting the print product when you go online

We start with a story from the WAN-IFRA editors' blog on how the southern Brazilian newspaper Zero Hora has created a proactive online strategy that will protect its print edition, a product that got 2% circulation bump last year.

Zero Hora has 210 journalists working in its integrated newspaper. Although there are specific teams allocated to print and online, these teams are fluid and journalists are expected to understand the work of others and be flexible in what they do.

Speaking to the blog Editor in Chief Altair Nobre says that as a result of the internet newspapers constantly have to strive to be more original and creative, working harder to convince people to read the paper.

The online version is designed to be very interactive. For example, the Porto Alegre region has a rather unstable climate, explains Nobre, and so Zero Hora editors invite readers to send in pictures and short reports when there are storms.

Other key factors in the paper's success come from having a "young attitude" which attracts new readers from the younger generations and having a carefully planned out social media presence.

Ben Goldacre calls for unedited source material on one website

Journalism.co.uk is one of many to highlight Dr. Ben Goldacre's suggestion for a website that would have a variety of features to improve media transparency over their primary sources for certain stories as well giving readers “unmediated/unedited access to full comments from interested parties”.

The Bad Science author (pictured) suggested the site could do the following:

• Give each news story a unique ID;
• Any involved party can add/upload a full press release or quote to that story’s page;
• Anyone can add a link to a primary source;
• Anyone can vote these up or down like on digg/reddit;
• You can register as a “trusted source” and not need to be modded up or down;
• Anyone can add a link to media coverage of that story.

Who do you write like?

Finishing on a lighthearted note, if you grew up hoping to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, there's a handy little web tool that lets you analyse your writing and see which famous scribe you are most like.

I Write Like takes a pasted bit of text and compares it to the writings of hundreds of famous authors, giving you a result in seconds.

As one college media blogger points out, the results vary wildly depending on which text you submit. For example yours truly writes like Chuck Palahniuk, H.P. Lovecraft and J.K Rowling depending on which blog post is submitted.

It's all a bit of fun for a wet Friday afternoon. Just don't come crying to me if you're told you write like Barbara Cartland.

Project GStyle: Google gets some fashion sense

An interesting find today from blogger Adam Tinworth – Google have decided that fashion bloggers have got the best grasp of social media.

Above all those bloggers who choose to cover other industries, it’s those dedicated followers of fashion that are the cream of the crop when it comes to their understanding of social media tools.

Google have set up GStyle, an internal research project helmed by blogger Tony Wang of post.fashionism fame, to quiz fashionistas on how they use the internet, what their biggest challenges are and how Google can help them reach the upper echelons of blogger fame.

As Tinworth points out, the automatic assumption would be that the tech industry would be top of the tree. But, he writes, personal experience has show that there are vast swathes of the tech industry that don't "get" social media at all.

It makes you wonder how far off the mark journalists and media people are with their own understanding. The information may be for Google’s eyes only for now, but if it is released, there could be a lot to learn from it.

In the meantime, perhaps one should check out the list of the most influential fashion bloggers and see how they do things.

Making your Mobile site work on multiple devices

You may have lovingly crafted a mobile site (m-site) that looks amazing on the new iPhone4 but what happens when you discover half your readership own Blackberries? Does the site work just as well, or will it all fall apart?

With this in mind, as part of their Mobile Sites and Apps series, sponsored by Webtrends Mobile Analytics, the chaps at Mashable have provided five tips for optimising your m-site to be compatible across multiple devices.

You can check the article for full details, including links to useful bits of software to help you get the best out of your m-site, but in short, the five tips are:

1) Narrow your focus – of course, you can’t develop a site to suit every device but carefully consider which one(s) your readership have and develop your site for those devices.

2) Use an emulator to check your work – Mashable have links to their favourite emulators for you to check how your site will look.

3) Use multiple stylesheets for device support – this can be an efficient way of adding or subtracting particular features dependent on the device in use.

4) Change your user agent in Firefox or Safari – this will give you on-the-fly feedback of how the site will look whilst testing in your web browser.

5) Use your CMS – Then you can use a simple plugin device, such as the popular WPtouch device used by WordPress.

Study: Online and Social media boosted coverage of General Election

The televised leaders’ debates may have been the main talking point of the 2010 General Election but a new study highlighted by journalism.co.uk suggests that mainstream coverage was “enriched” by the use of online and social media.

The report, 'UK election 2010: mainstream media and the role of the internet: how social and digital media affected the business of politics and journalism', written by the co-founder of the BBC News website Nic Newman is the result of interviews conducted with more than 20 journalists, political bloggers and founders of political websites.

In a release to mark today’s launch of the report, Newman states how the results show that Twitter in particular has become a "core communication tool" in political and media circles.

With more than 600 party political candidates using the service during the election, it became "an essential source of real-time information for journalists and politicians", he says.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) also conducted a survey of more than 200 18-24-year-olds, as part of the study, which suggested that "unprecedented levels of participation" with the general election were a result of increased social media coverage.

The use of social media tools by journalists and mainstream news sites, such as liveblogs and digital correspondents, "helped to amplify the impact of social media even further" on this age group, says the study.

The Economist: maintaining the "niche" in a digital world

An interesting profile by Charlie Beckett,Director of POLIS, the journalism think tank at the London School of Economics, starts our week in digital journalism.

He details the working practices of Edward Lucas (pictured), the Central and East European Correspondent for the leviathan that is The Economist.

(This blogger can also personally comment that Lucas is a funny and charming writer that I have had the pleasure of drinking a foul spirit called Becherovka with, in a bar in Prague, getting to enjoy a tale of journalistic misadventure that shall be herein referred to as “The KGB meets ‘Winnie the Pooh’”).

Beckett writes how The Economist is always looking to build its substantial ‘niche’ as the compact, intelligent, authoritative, liberal package of analysis and reportage for the Globatariat as it tackles the challenges of technological development, such as the impending addition of wifi on aeroplanes.

Lucas, says Beckett, is: “a natural and inveterate blogger who understands the new media environment acutely.”

“The media business is becoming more rational,” Lucas tells him. “There is too much duplication and the institutional cross-subsidies for news are disappearing.”

Lucas has used this online nous to both provide more in-depth content to his stories, as well as injecting humour to try and lessen that feeling that reading The Economist is a bit like “homework”. Hence, says Beckett, his very amusing animation of a map of Europe, a piece of Fantasy Cartography that suggests geo-politics could be improved by moving the countries around.

Lucas has also used online network to “mine the expertise of his readers”. He has a network of contacts that he uses to test out ideas and gather feedback from, as well as regularly communicate with those that comment on the website or email him personally.

So (to abuse the classroom metaphor further) perhaps the lesson to be taken from this is to look at a textbook example of how a top journalist makes the transition from print to an incorporation of online content and do likewise?