Chip Oglesby

I’ve seen enough articles about Nick Carr’s and Clay Shirky’s back and forth rhetoric over the internet making you dumber and smarter. Surprise, surprise, they’re both publishing books very soon (disclaimer: I plan on buying both because I like their work).

I think a lot of newspapers are missing the point of what these articles are saying. Instead of bickering back and forth about using readability or actually using links in articles, what I would like to see is more people encouraging newspapers to actually use links!

I’ve visited quite a few South Carolina based media companies this week, searching for their RSS feeds for my new job and their sites have a long way to go. Some papers like The New York Times do decent jobs at creating topic pages, which I’m a fan of, but there are very few outgoing links to other, competing websites.

When would this be helpful?

For beginners, linking out to other sites helps define you as an authority on news. It’s showing your readers that “hey we don’t know everything, but we’ll show you who does, and we’ll show you where you can find it.” Be a link authority in your community and at your paper.

How can we get started?

If you’re a reporter, you should have a delicious account. Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that allows you to store links online and tag this with specific keywords. You could do this with every story that you write, with items that you’re following or as your own personal clipping service. Here’s my delicious account.

Another option is to use Publish2. I used publish2 while at The State when the Boeing news story broke to aggregate stories from around the U.S. on Boeing’s big news in S.C. It received a lot of high praise for including supporting stories.

What should we do next?

Your next step is to talk to someone in your online department. More than likely, they’ll be willing to add the links as assets to your story (hopefully). If you have a system like CCI or some other offline system, it might add them for you automatically. You should also requests for your online CMS to your website and ask your Online Editor to let you go in and manually add the links yourself, you may get shot down, but you won’t know unless you try.

In conclusion:

Stop talking about how the internet is making us uber ADD and just look at it for what it is: a way to make the world more connected through a simple use of an HTML link.

Google’s TV announcement yesterday could be a potential solution for video woes at newspapers.

Between 2004-2008, video was suppose to be one of the “saviors of journalism.” Plenty of newspaper shooters and CEO’s had high hopes for video, most of it was a flash in the pan.

In my opinion, video-journalism has been limited from the beginning because of the view environment. Just as mobile phones are not good for long form journalism, viewing long form video while sitting upright at work is not ideal. Watching videos at work or while on the move lends itself to watching quick short videos.

Looking at metrics from most videos, most people exit a video after viewing only 1:30 worth of footage. What would happen if they were in a better viewing environment? Would newspapers finally have the chance to create the long form video they’ve always wanted?

Bringing the internet to the living room is something that I’ve been wanting for a very long time. Apple TV did this previously, but in a very limited capacity, before and after it crippled Boxee from running on it’s hardware. Apple allowed Youtube and Flickr to stream to it’s device, but Google TV will search the entire internet.

What Google has done will open the door for newspapers and self publishers alike. No more viewing video on a small computer or cell phone screen when it was meant to be viewed on the big screen.

Newspapers who explore this option should look at the ability to run regular interactive commercials similar to what Hulu offers. Longer video opens the door for advertising options other than pre-roll or post-roll ads.

It would be interesting to see research done on how the same video compares in two different viewing environments, one on the computer and one on a flat screen TV.

This announcement also opens many new possibilities for publishing video on the internet. For example:

• Small businesses can now publish longer serial dramas using Youtube channels.
• Newspapers could publish in-depth videos exploring socio-economic issues in their viewing areas allowing individuals to contribute to the report.
• Athletes and celebrities can publish their own interactive channels combining various social media outlets.
• Political candidates can host their own interactive town hall meetings and fireside chats remotely, giving them the ability to travel to more places, saving time and money.

Google TV doesn’t have to be just a one-way device either. It can be interactive using social media tools as well. This could potentially opening the door for RPG/choose your own adventure webisodes.

Now more than ever newspapers need to start looking at Google as a distribution partner and not someone who’s “stealing their income.”

On July 14th, I posed a simple question on twitter: Why not use bit.ly links in the newspaper?

Here’s the backstory to all of this. One day, i was reading the paper and I saw a line that read “For more info go to thestate.com” It looked a lot like this: This has long caused a very interesting discussion with our online department. Do people who actually read the paper go online to read an accompanying PDF or see a photo gallery?

This conversation always leaves me wanting two things. 1. A direct link to the story 2. A way to track if people are actually going to this “exclusive” content. That’s when it dawned on me, Why not use bit.ly? With bit.ly you get bot options! There’s a short link that and bit.ly provides analytics of how many people click on a link and when.

There are a few things to take into consideration, such as human error and broken links but there’s no reason this couldn’t be customized into your CMS. Since stories are usually put on the site before the paper goes to press for the first run, there should be ample time to create individual links to stories.

Seth Long took my idea and went into much more detail in his blog post and I encourage you to read it also.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts about this idea.