Last Monday I made a guest appearance at a reporting class in town. I speak to students fairly regularly lately, but usually on quick topics like Web writing, video or multimedia and the like. This time I got a good hour and 45 minute conversation with a couple j-school professors and a small reporting class that had some great questions.

This conversation started with a 15 minute presentation about the state of the media. I didn’t talk about specifics like video or multimedia or programming. I explicitly avoided those topics. I wanted to have a conversation about conversations. I wanted to talk about how conversation and mass media can be the same thing on the Web.

We covered some topics like blogging, how people can commit acts of journalism without being “citizen journalists” and some tough issues our industry faces. We talked about how the act of searching narrows your scope as a news consumer, creating a tunnel vision that ignores the bigger picture. We talked about how technologies like tagging can increase the scale of that narrow scope and how it can lead to pivot points to other conversations.

It went over very well, I think. I was on top of my game when asked tough questions.

But one question came up that I think I stumbled on: What can journalism students do to help themselves get jobs after they graduate?

I mumbled something about LinkedIn and I said start a blog, immediately, but I should have been much more specific: I didn’t mean that you should start a blog to learn how blogs and the Internet works. We grew up with this. Point and click. Easy. I trust (and expect) you’ve gotten at least that far. I meant: Start a blog to network with others in the industry.

There’s a big difference between a blog that you use to grow a larger audience and a blog that you use for networking.

1. A networking blog should be a living document of your professional self. You should stay focused on topics that matter to people who may hire you. You should start reading blogs from people in your field.
2. When someone makes you think, you should think out loud on your site. Have a conversation with others. Email people questions. Chat with them on twitter. Get to know people. Working a blog isn’t much different than working a room at a conference. Stay focused.
3. Show off your work. When you do something good, show it off. Don’t be bashful.
4. SEO the crap out of yourself. When you apply for a job, the first thing most people do is Google your name. If your MySpace shows up with some compromising pictures, that puts you at a disadvantage. I don’t think you should have to take down those photos (with a bit of digging, I’m sure you can find some videos of me doing the drunken robot somewhere), but make sure your best stuff is at the top of the results page.
5. Seize every opportunity you can. When I talk to people about Creative Commons and copyright, I talk about a student who sent The Forum photos from Northwood, ND. A tornado ravaged the small town last summer and Forum Communications had multiple properties covering the news. One student drove up to the site and started taking photographs. He took some great pictures and then he put them in front of us. We used some on In-Forum. On Monday, just as I was about to break into this spiel, a student in the back of the room told it for me. I had the fortune of finally putting a face to the photos. So:
6. Always remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of the machine.

The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

I hate to sit here constantly defending Howard Owens but here we are again. Howard recently posted a great little MBO plan to turn Luddite reporters into web savvy journalists. The plan includes super easy things anyone can do in about two weeks if they tried. But I guess the plan was too straight forward, as the comments attracted quite a few nasty trolls (with no sense of irony, either, since they’re reading and participating in blogs).

Anyway. My two cents.

What many of the complainers and trolls there forget (or maybe haven’t taken the time to know): Having a good web site begets a good paper. Publish to the database. From there you can cull the best content for print editions, mobile versions and even broadcast packages. And those are just the obvious ways to reuse your online product. You have real, quantifiable metrics with which to base editorial decisions. You have opportunities to provide breadth of coverage as well as target content to maintain and gain readership. You can optimize your content for your readers. You have opportunities to diversify content. You have opportunity to interact with the public directly (through comments, blogs, twitter, etc.) and indirectly (through site metrics).

Doing nothing different (and that includes reporters, editors, publishers–any level of news management) at a struggling news organization will only lead to the loss of your job and eventually, your paper.

And you know what? I’m sure that your former readers won’t mourn your loss because plenty other sources out there currently take the necessary steps to move in the same direction the readers and advertisers wish to move. Your information is your brand. If your audience doesn’t want the information you’re giving them, then they don’t want your brand.

NONE OF THE THINGS ON HOWARD’S LIST ARE EVEN HARD TO DO. The objectives require hardly any skill beyond tenacity. Your readers are going online and so should you. If you don’t understand what makes the Web different from print, god help you and the audience you’re trying to serve when you think of the Web as simply digital print.

I mean…really? You can’t take the time to learn how to push a single button on a point and shoot camera? You can’t spend the whopping 10 seconds to sign up for twitter and facebook to see what they’re about? You can’t start a free blog (which has no production schedule)? You can’t ask someone how to drag and drop some video clips around on a time line? That’s lazy. Journalism never had room for that kind of laziness or lack of curiosity to begin with and don’t pretend otherwise.

I’m willing to bet that I can think of a use for every single one of the items Howard lists for any beat. Any beat! Here’s your chance. I’ll do the real hard work–thinking–for you. Just tell me what you’re working on either by emailing me with the form on my homepage or in the comments below. Seriously.

Note: This is cross-posted from my other blog, It’s Randomonium.

Best class ever. Get famous on the Internet, get a better grade.

Think this is a stupid waste of time? Think again. Having a good grip on how to manipulate their digital footprint will be key for these kids come time to get jobs.

People (prospective employers, prospective girlfriends/boyfriends, teachers and just about everybody who knows you in real life) will eventually Google you. Internet stalking is a reality. I’ve done it and so have you. Let’s just admit it already.

Ultimately, we all want Google to reflect the real us—or at least, the very best parts of the real us.

This is why I have a Linkedin resume, two blogs, twitter and a public-facing Facebook profile among other sites plastered with my name that I control. Ultimately, if you Google me I want you to see me as I want you to see me. Not as I was posting on forum boards and IRC years ago.

Online image literacy is going to be one of the most imporant things coming up as Gen Y hits college and the workforce. We’ve only scratched the surface at what Google can do to affect our personal lives.

From a professional/creative standpoint, you want to make a good impression while having as few barriers to entry as possible. The Internet is all about communication and lowering the barriers (and with it, many of the old guard standards) of obtaining audience share.

On the Web, we are all media entities.

I got a few requests to explain the flowchart in my previous post a little more, to give a few details as to how I integrate everything I do on the Internet.

So here goes nothing.

Let’s start with the central point of my Internet adventures: Gmail. Everything happens here. Everything. Gmail isn’t just my email client, it’s a very good record of everything I do on the Internet.

I primarily use Google Talk for chats, so if I need to remember a conversation, it’s usually there. That’s the beauty of Gmail. It’s a personal database. Search Gmail from Firefox.

I have 5 email accounts filtered into one central Gmail account that I’ve had since the second week Gmail launched. I’m only using 20% of my storage (though, that percentage is growing quickly as of late, and you’ll see why in a bit). Chances are, if you’ve ever contacted me, it’s sitting in a Google server somewhere.

But Gmail itself is a little unruly if you wish to dump tons of data into it. I’m one of those weirdos that likes to have his inbox empty at the end of the day, so I find myself constantly labeling and archiving messages, even though I had several prefilters set up. That’s where Lifehacker’s Better Gmail firefox plugin comes in handy.

I had previously been using a smattering of Greasemonkey scripts I found on Userscripts.org, but it was difficult (and a serious pain) to keep everything up to date.

This customizable plugin helps increase work flows and I’ve installed it on every machine I use. But there’s two features that make it a killer plugin: Google Calendar and Google Reader integration within Gmail. Say goodbye to Outlook.

It gets better. Using RSS and a little trick with Yahoo! Alerts where I email myself RSS feeds, everything I share in Google Reader gets emailed back to me. I filter it out of my inbox, tag it and when I have a vague recollection of some obscure blog post, I just search my Gmail account.

And that link blog from Google Reader gets pushed elsewhere too. A few recent reads end up on my link blog, but they all also get pushed onto my Facebook profile via Mario Romero’s Google Reader application.

I use the same Y! Alerts trick for just about everything with RSS, including but not limited to del.icio.us and flickr. And I can push information back out to flickr, Facebook and Backpack using Quick Contact emails set up in Gmail.

Most of this communication happens in the background as I passively push a button or two to bookmark items for future reference. I hardly use Gmail to actually make one on one (or even one to many) communications.

That’s where Facebook comes in.

After much wrangling, I’ve finally convinced all of my friends to join Facebook. All of them, and quite a few acquaintances too. I think of Facebook as a media hub. Where I use Gmail to collect massive amounts of data I think is relevant to me, I use Facebook to push that media saved in Gmail I think might be relative to at least one friend. I do this through a fairly simple series of Platform applications:

Note that I have Facebook send me a ton of email (all of it processed and filtered before it reaches my inbox) and so the cycle begins anew.

This is how I spend my day moving personal data around.