Saila's Miscellany

Richard argues strongly for evergreen story pages. It is not the brand, not the site, but the story itself that is the lifeblood online. Publishers should not think about editions, or even ephemeral streams of articles, but rather living story pages. Story pages are the most valuable real estate

What Yahoo wanted, however, wasn’t the future. It was to re-fight an old battle from the past. It was to beat Google.

[F]or newsrooms to truly move forward, newsroom managers need to consider creating new jobs, such as these seven:

1) Traffic conductor – “Someone who knows how to drive traffic to where we can monetise it,” Ms Novak says. “It’s a very sobering experience to find out where your traffic is really coming from.”

2) Editorial events director – a person who helps connect your editorial efforts with what is going on in the community.

3) Crowd intake co-ordinator – “We need someone to guarantee we always have the best pictures, videos, etc.,” Ms Novak says.

4) Community journalism educator – to help people become better contributors.

5) Transparency and integrity controller – to make it clear what information is from whom.

6) Chief of crowd creativity – “We need to work to help make the crowd more creative,” Ms Novak says. We need to be more specific and more inviting to get them to think more positively and more creatively, she adds.

7) Editorial quantifier – if we are to survive, Ms Novak says, we need to calculate what content is interesting to readers. We need to move our thinking from “clicks” (on an article) to “time” (spent on reading it).