Megan Taylor

Al Tompkins posted this great interview with David Simon, assistant city editor at The Frederick News-Post, about the Forgotten Soldiers project.

The project tells the stories of soldiers who have been unaccounted for in 5 wars.

The project began with a simple press release about an American Legion dinner to honor the county's sole Vietnam War veteran who remains unaccounted for. He's been featured in our paper a number of times, but we began wondering if veterans of other wars might be unaccounted for.

The interview is inspiring, and the project is very comprehensive, if a little disorganized.

The entire project includes maps, databases, articles, timelines, individual stories, a guestbook, AND a pretty big multimedia package.

Like most huge projects, there's an organization problem. What do I click on first? Where do I start, where do I finish? How do I know if I've already read this part? Etc.

It makes me want to go digging around in public records and databases. I just need a topic to start with.

Download Squad has an excellent interview with Lawrence Swiader, the Chief Information Officer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Swiader talks about the development and technological aspects of the project, as well as the relationship forged with Google.

While I still have issues with the accessibility of the project, I think this is something newspapers should take a good hard look at.

Some great advice from Al's Morning Meeting:

Instead of "How Do You Feel?"

It has been such a treat this week to lead a Poynter seminar for public-radio reporters. One of our guest faculty members is National Public Radio's Audie Cornish, who often covers big disasters like the aftermath of Katrina, Alabama tornadoes and such. One of her goals is to get close to people in time of trauma. She offered our group some alternatives to the "how does it feel" question. On her list was:

* What happened?

* What happens next?

* What did you do?

* What do you make of this?

* How do you explain what has happened to other people?

* When it first happened, what did you think -- and what do you think now?

* What surprised you about how others reacted?

* What are you worried about?

* What are you telling your children/family?

* What does this make you think about your own community?

* Why do you still live here?

I always thought the "how do you feel?" question was so dumb. The answer is always predictable. Cornish's questions force the subject to take a moment to answer. Which is good, cause then you're more likely to get a substantive quote or interesting information. These questions aren't just for radio or traumatic events. Think about how they apply to day-to-day reporting and multimedia.

Can you think of any other good questions to ask during an interview that will ?

The obligatory end-of-semester post:

This semester has been the most fun and the most challenging so far. I spiced up my CSS skillz and learned enough Flash to be able to produce a good amount of what's already being done as well as to push my myself further. I learned a lot about design, and am pursuing further studies on my own. I learned the value of a budget. I took driving lessons and will be getting my license and a car very soon. I made some very important connections to people in my department, people who can teach me and connect me with other VIPs. I had just enough free time to keep my head from exploding, but not so much that boredom got me into trouble.

I lined up two summer jobs that will add some experience to my resume so that I can get a great internship and then a great job. I will still be working at the Help Desk, but I also joined the new media department at the Independent Florida Alligator and will be updating and redesigning the Citizen Access Project Web site. I'm also taking an advanced editing course.

Having invested so much of myself in learning Flash and upgrading my coding abilities in the last few months, I'm eager to revisit storytelling and learn how to combine multimedia technology with extraordinary reporting. I don't know if I'll get that chance this summer, but I definitely will in the fall.

As all students do, I worry about how prepared I will be come graduation, to take a job in my field. Unlike many other majors, however, journalism is changing, and fast. So are the required skills.

Mindy McAdams, Ryan Sholin and Howard Owens, among many others, have blogged about the changing skill set of journalists.

Others in the field or education have reinforced basic reporting skills and ethics.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but it seems to me that, even having taken all the right classes and learned all the right things, getting a job will still be a challenge.

I got into journalism halfway through college. Many of my peers have had multiple internships; I haven't even had one. Not that I don't want to, or don't think I can, but my circumstances have been such that I either wasn't ready or I couldn't afford to add an internship to a difficult semester.

Now, with (officially) a year left, panic sets in. I've several opportunities open to me, and my first thought is to try to take them all at once. A job at school that will expose me to the field. Working at the Independent Florida Alligator. An internship at The Gainesville Sun.

I know that, in addition to classes and my 20-hour work week, taking all three opportunities at once is a recipe for a psychotic break. What I don't know is how to narrow down my options to what will be most beneficial to my career. Where will I learn more? Where will I get the most experience?

A few months ago, I filled out paperwork to verify my status as a double major in Journalism and Linguistics. Now it's that time again - I have to register for Summer and Fall classes. After looking over the course offerings and doing some soul-searching, I've decided to drop the Linguistics major down to a minor.

I would love to have the major, but the required classes for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that I have yet to take are not worth it.

This way I can take more interesting classes in the College of Journalism, grab an internship, and relax a little.

Your social networking site of choice, be it MySpace, Facebook, whatever, may seem like the perfect place to post that picture from the night you drank so much tequila that you passed out in the middle of a friend's living room and everyone drew on you with markers.

It may be harmless until potential employers go searching for background on applicants and find that picture.

The same applies to LiveJournal posts about a crazy party and friends posting on your "Wall."

Even if you are scrupulous about what you post about yourself, people can still bash you online and lose you a job or internship. This has become enough of an issue that Web sites like ReputationDefender have sprung up.

ReputationDefender promises:

First, we SEARCH. We scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information about you and present it in an interactive monthly report, including: Social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, etc.), professional review Web sites, Blogs, online news sources, photograph, video, and audio sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.), millions of additional sites on the "open Internet."
Then, for about $186 a year, the site promises to "destroy" or alter the online information about you that you don't approve of.

Their promise to alter information extends to online news sources. I'm not sure what they consider to be an online news source, but I don't see how they could alter an online article from the NYT, for example.

In the meantime, there are also a bunch of "identity aggregators" (like ClaimID) which can help you collect what you wrote about yourself, what others may have written about you, and where you exist online.

Edit: Well, at least I know that Reputation Defender monitors their own rep very well. This was on their press page:

Find your Reputation Online
Megan Taylor writes about ReputationDefender. The piece is good, except that it mistakenly reads our FAQ to say that we do Destroy or amend news articles. In fact, we expressly say we don't and won't. But it's a good piece nonetheless.

Oops, sorry about that.

I jumped out of my niche for a few minutes the other day to participate in a roundup of blogging tips. Here are the results:

1. Daniel: A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.
2. Brian Auer: According to my Google Analytics, about 35% of my traffic comes from other people’s blogs and 25% comes from the forums I’m active with, while search engines provide about 15%. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums.
3. Kat: I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.
4. Tillerman : Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.
5. Eric Atkins: Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.
6. Sridhar Katakam: Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. How do you know which blogs to keep track of in the first place? Add the MyBlogLog widget/code to your blog. When you notice a MyBlogLog user visiting your blog, visit that person’s in turn.
7. Dennis Coughlin: Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.
8. Guido: Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.
9. Grant Gerver: Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.
10. Megan Taylor: Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience.
11. Ramen Junkie: Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.
12. Ian Delaney: Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Making a post along the lines of ‘Evaluated resources for XYZ’ is useful. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
13. KWiz: Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.
14. Splork: I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.
15. Alan Thomas: Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.
16. Brandon Wood: A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.
17. Engtech: Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.
18. Goerge Manty: Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or setting up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.
19. Mark Alves: Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.
20. Andrew Timberlake: A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.
21. Inspirationbit: Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.
22. Scott Townsend: Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources.
23. Jen Gordon: I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.
24. Chris: Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense, you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.
25. Kyle: Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.
26. Nick: Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.
27. Jester: Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.
28. Cory OBrien: Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).
29. Shankar Ganesh: Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog.

Learn how to make Web pages, shoot video, gather and edit audio, read, write and comment on blogs. In other words, produce content. Make yourself visible online, not just as a person, but as a journalist.

Choose an RSS reader and use it! Find out what other people are doing and what they want to know about.

As Mindy McAdams reminds us, the future of Journalism is now, and it's online. Newspapers are reworking their newsrooms and budgets to develop strong online presences. Keep up, or be left behind.