1. Headlines make the world go ’round

Your headlines have to sell the story, not tell the story. It’s as simple as that. After reading the headline I should be interested in reading more. This involves a change of thinking for most journalists. Headlines in newspapers often summarize the main part of the story. Add another deck below the headline and most people won’t bother reading the rest of the story.

But this is a different distribution model. If you have a reader with a newspaper in hand you want to make it easy for them to get through the whole paper. It’s called reader consideration. You’re supposed to make it easy for them to pick out the most important stories, read the ones that seems interesting and scan the headlines of the rest of them. But online, your headline is competing with a million other links that are begging to be clicked. Give the reader a reason to click the link.

2. Write Less

Brevity is king. Get to the point quickly. Readers will appreciate it. The intro paragraph to this post is three sentences, a mere 48 words. The headline promised you 5 ways to increase blog readership, not a display of my remarkable prose. Getting people to your blog or website is hard enough. Try  not to piss them off once they are there.

3. Don’t Use Links For Background Info

I see this mistake on most blogs and I am guilty of it myself. Somehow bloggers have been convinced that, instead of giving the reader a complete story including the background information, they can just casually mention it and provide a link. The theory is that those who know will keep reading, and those who don’t will click the link, read the other story and then come back to finish what you wrote.

Imagine reading a story in Newsweek that tells you to go find last month’s issue of National Geographic if you want to understand the rest of their story. Yes, on the internet it’s a lot more convenient and quicker to link to sources. But do the reader, and yourself,  a favor and summarize it anyways. You can still provide a link, but maybe they won’t feel the need to click on it. Because trust me, they’re not coming back. (p.s.: if you’re putting in links for background info leading to other sites, make sure the HTML code specifies to open them in a new window.)

4. Publish At Different Times

A good way to increase your traffic is to publish when people are actually reading (it seems so simple, doesn’t it?). If you are writing a news blog you need to publish your articles in the morning. You are targeting people who are checking the web briefly before they go to work and then several times during their work day. Publish between 6 a.m. and noon. I am writing this close to midnight, but will schedule it to run at 11:00 a.m the next morning.

5. Be Better At What You Do

Let’s face it, there are tons of blogs that look and read like no effort was put into them. If you are serious about increasing your readership you have to produce quality content. That doesn’t mean you need to break national news, but it does mean that you should take the time to read over what you wrote, check spelling and grammar, use the best possible artwork and all the other things that can make a difference. Make a commitment to read every post out loud before you publish it. Or print it out and read it over. If you don’t take the time to read your own stuff, why would you expect others to?

Add to the list of growing problems: plagiarism.

Most journalists used to think that bloggers were nothing but plagiarist; taking their reporting and rewriting a few sentences, then throwing up a link to the article. But then concepts such as the “link economy” and articles going viral through social media made a lot of news organizations rethink their approach to bloggers. Instead of scoffing at them, they hired bloggers for their own websites (or made reporters do it as part of their job) and welcomed the boosts in traffic that comes from lots of bloggers sharing links of their articles.

But the truth is, it’s hard to earn a living blogging the news. If you spend 3-4 hours on one blog post, with reporting, writing and editing, you aren’t going to get rich any time soon. So some enterprising bloggers are saying “to hell with it all” and just copy and pasting sentences and quotes from newspaper website

Here’s an example from yesterday. I covered President Obama’s trip to St. Louis and the protests downtown for the Riverfront Times (The Screaming Match Outside Obama’s Fundraiser Dinner). I spent about 3 hours walking around, taking photos, interviewing people and getting hassled by the cops to get of the street. But, reporting is fun for me, so I’m not complaining. But then I sit down to write the article and decide to see if anybody reported estimates of many people showed up. The first result in my Google search for Obama’s St. Louis visit is an article on Examiner.com, a website that allows local “bloggers” to publish news articles and earn money from advertising revenue. Here’s an excerpt from the article, “written” by Andrea Simoncic, the St. Louis Conservative Examiner.

64 year old Frank Scimo of Ballwin helped organize a group of about 100 people to stand outside St. Charles high school to support the president and his speech on health care reform.

“I believe the people should have health insurance,” Scimo said. He pointed to his step daughter, who has been denied insurance due to a pre-existing problem with her knees, as a representative of those who lack insurance but need it.

Organizer of the nonprofit Jobs for Justice, Amy Smoucha, 42, said she left the president’s speech full of confidence in the president and his plan for health care. “I’m happy to see he is so sincere about fixing the health care system,” she said.

And here is an excerpt from an article written by Jake Wagman, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Frank Scimo, 64, of Ballwin, said he helped organize a group of about 100 people to show up outside the high school in support of the president and health care reform.

“I believe the people should have health insurance,” he said. He pointed to his step daughter, who he said was denied insurance because of a pre-existing problem with her knees.

Amy Smoucha, organizer with the nonprofit Jobs with Justice, said she left the speech feeling confident in the president and his plan.

“I’m happy to see he is so sincere about fixing the health care system,” Smoucha, 42, said.

Notice the differences? There aren’t many. On top of that, the few words that she bothered to change or add actually make the writing worse.

But this is not about writing. This is about plagiarism. Nowhere in her article on Examiner.com does the “writer” mention where this information comes from. Just from reading it, one would assume that she was there, that she talked to all these people and got all the quotes herself. In other words, one would assume that she did some actual reporting.

But reporting, too, is quickly becoming a commodity. Sure, news loses value quickly, and a scoop is not long lived. But I believe the day when journalists allow people to blatantly rip off their reporting and writing is the day they might as well retire. You can’t tell me that I’m going to work my ass off for half a day to write an article which is going to be copy-and-pasted two minutes after it’s published and thrown on a plagiarism haven like Examiner.com so that some lazy asshole can generate some ad revenue.

As far as the example I cited, don’t think that it’s an isolated incident or only a couple of paragraphs. All you have to do is copy whole sentences and paragraphs and do a Google search to see where the information is being lifted from. If you’re going to be a plagiarist and too lazy to rewrite the article, at least have the decency to say where you got the information from. Or alternatively, just roll over and die.

There’s a fine line between being a blogger and being a parasite.

The reporter, Finbarr O’Reilly, uses his photos to tell the story, while his narration reflects the mood and actions taking place. There are a lot of shots of soldiers marching,  soldiers in frantic combat, soldiers engulfed in dust clouds. The reporter talks about the “fog of war” and the lack of a clear strategy; the uncertainty felt by soldiers about a war that doesn’t seem to have an end in sight. The selection of photos and the tone of the narration work together perfectly to paint the picture of an uncertain and dangerous situation.

Another reason I love this slideshow is for its lack of cutlines. “Every photo needs a cutline” is a line that most journalists have probably heard before. But for a slideshow like this, I believe cutlines would only distract from the photos and narration.

Of course, most of us are probably more comfortable writing cutlines than recording narration. But you don’t have to be Morgan Freeman to be able to speak into a microphone and tell a story. View the slideshow below and consider how it would be without narration and with text at the bottom of every photo. It simply wouldn’t work.

But another thing the bill does is define who is covered by it. According to S. 448, a journalist is somebody who is engaged in:

the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.

In other words, a journalist is somebody who does journalism. The interesting thing about this definition is that it does not mention working for a “media” organization anywhere. That means bloggers, student journalists and freelancers are also covered.

The SPJ announced its support of the current version of this bill yesterday in a press release.

Leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists welcome the compromise the Obama administration, senators and news organizations reached on a federal shield law that would protect journalists, their sources and the public’s right to know. Although SPJ does not believe S. 448 is a perfect bill, the Society’s leaders carefully examined the proposed legislation, and on behalf of its more than 8,000 members, have decided to support the protections granted to journalists.

SPJ now urges the Senate Judiciary Committee to pass S. 448 quickly so that the full Senate can consider the piece of legislation that is vitally important to a free and independent press.

Up until now people have had to put up with ads. Ads on TV, in newspapers, in magazines, and on the radio were there to subsidize the content. “You can be informed and entertained, as long as you pay attention to these quick messages from our sponsors,” or so we were told. But on the Internet, this business model simply does not work anymore. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? According to my AdSense stats, it was a very long time ago.

So, if people don’t pay attention to online advertising, how do you make money on it? That’s very easy, actually. You have to design horrible webpages covered with ads and full of pointless keyword articles and content targeted to get specific ads displayed. There is a whole economy around search engine optimization, and the whole point is to game the system to get more clicks which will hopefully lead to clicks on ads. In other words, your content is tailored for search engines, not for readers.

I am also going ad-free because I don’t want advertising to influence my writing. While my blog is still fairly new, I have found that the most popular posts, as far as traffic is concerned, are the ones that included popular search terms. I wrote a post about free applications for the G1 Android phone that might be useful to journalists, and it gets the most traffic from Google. That might lead me believe that I should be writing more posts like that, to get more traffic. And while that is a fairly harmless example, it’s a slippery slope to the point when I end up writing consumer reviews about products I never used in order to generate ad revenue.

Consider what newspapers did 10 years ago. They decided that the business model for the Internet would be advertising, and the more hits they could get, the more money they would make. They based their whole Internet strategy around increasing traffic, and hence they gave the content away for free. Now they have the traffic, but not the revenue. If newspaper companies would have tried to build a business model that was not based on advertising, they would be in a better position right now.

So there, I’m 100% ad-free now and I intend to keep it that way. If I do ever make any money from this blog it will be because I write or produce something valueable and original, not because I wasted your time with useless keyword-centric articles. Donations? I’m not homeless, thank you.

We all know the MSM is keeping the REAL truth from us. I’m not talking about the truth that is supported by facts, documents, and reality. No, I’m talking about the truth that we know to be true in our gut. And thus, if you want to get the real facts about some of the most critical issues facing this nation, you should turn to Blogacause, a website that promises anonymity to their bloggers.There, you are free to publish the truth about Google hosting the countries medical records online, Obama planning to kill old people early in order to save health-care money, and even more reasons why Obama is not a US citizen. All without the fear of the “thought police” coming to take you away to the local FEMA concentration camp. Finally, somebody has created a website where even the most patriotic teabagger can have the right to freely speak his mind without the fear of having his voice muffled (i.e.: hairy balls in mouth).

And with that Colbert impression out of my system, let’s discuss the real underlying issue here. Being a blogger myself, I understand and value the importance of having an outlet to the world. A place where you can write about important issues and try to have some influence. But why do we need anonymous blogs for people who are just repeating the talking-points of Rush Limbaugh and his gang. Granted, I don’t know the political motivations of the sites creator, Michael Groves. But Blogacause is certainly dominated by extreme right-wingers. But why do they feel the need to be anonymous. The same group of people who cheered on Iranian youths to overthrow the Ayatollahs are scared to publicly discuss politics in the US. Iranians took to the streets, knowing their protests might get them killed or jailed. Yet, in this country, the “opposition movement” is so scared that they feel the need to hide on the Internet?

Anonymous blogging may have some benefits for journalism. A corporate whistle blower, for example, could use an anonymous blog to shed light on corruption or public safety issues. In authoritarian countries, anonymity may be required for even the mildest forms of political opposition. But why do people in the US feel the need for anonymity? Personally, I really don’t understand the fear. The constitution and the bill of rights are there to protect the people from the government. If you are too scared to attach your name to your constitutionally protected speech , you are either lying, or you live in a weird alternate reality where the government is coming to take your guns away and put you into concentration camps…with socialized medicine.

This  is a list of my personal favorite G1 Applications that I think would be useful while working on a story on the go.

Qik

If you have never seen Qik before, it’s time you check it out. Qik allows you to broadcast live video directly from your G1 to the web. Go to http://www.qik.com and set up a free account, then download the Qik client and start broadcasting from your cell phone.

AK Notepad

This notepad application is far better than the standard that comes with the G1. AK Notepad has a reminder feature which allows you to set an alarm for a text file to remind you to update it.  It also gives you the option of sending your text files through email, SMS, or other applications such as a Twitter client you may have installed. You can change the appearance through themes and adjust the text size. AK Notepad also lets you put a sticky shortcut to a text file on your home screen.

Twidroid

This is by far my most favorite Twitter client for the G1. It has a nice user interface and gives you quick access to your profile, your favorites,  mentions, and direct messages.

Voice Recorder

Seemingly a simple voice recorder, the option that sets this one apart is the ability to email your recorded voice memo immediately. This can be useful if you simply don’t have a notepad handy, or if you want to walk around an event describing the scene and the people without drawing attention by speaking into a voice recorder. Once you’re done recording, this app gives you the option to title and send the recording right away, or to save it for later.

DroidTracker

DroidTracker allows you to publish your current location using Twitter or for people to send you a text with a pass-phrase and automatically get a response with your current location. This app can be useful when working in a team environment, covering a big event with multiple reporters, or if you are simply live-blogging from somewhere and want people to know your current location. Another cool feature of this app is that Lost/Stolen function, which lets you track the whereabouts of your phone and even force it to take pictures and upload them to Picasa.

Wapedia

A wikipedia client that gives you nicely formatted pages and a user interface that makes finding the right information a breeze.

Draw!

This is a simple paint application that let’s you make quick sketches and save or share them. You’ll have the option of sending your sketch through email, MMS, Picasa, and Twidroid (if it’s installed, of course).

PicSay

PicSay is a photo editor that lets you edit and share pictures from your G1. The free version limits the resolution of the picture, but it should still be enough if you are sharing pictures over mobile devices of sending them over Twitter. PicSay let’s you quickly add a title, highlight certain parts of the image, distort others, and then send the picture through email, MMS, or other applications such as a Twitter client (Twidroid recommended). Ok, I do admit that this application is more fun than productive, but it could be useful for some things.

Blogging is nothing new. It’s nothing revolutionary. It’s nothing amazing. When you really think about it from a techincal point of view, a blog is nothing more than a “content managment system.” A blog simply makes it easy to publish information to the internet. But, it’s not anything new.

I remember when I started my first website, back in 1999 I believe it was. I used one of the free webhosting companies and hard-coded HTML files. My website had a section dedicated to basketball, one to surfing (I lived in California at the time), and some other random stuff. It was kind of cool having your own website back then, especially for a 15-year-old living in Silicon Valley. The only problem was that everything looked so horrible and was so complicated. Every time I wanted to change something I would have to manually change the HTML file. If I wanted to add a link to something new, I had to go into all of the pages one by one and change that specific section. Needless to say, my website never really become a Silicon Valley success story. But then, not many of them did.

Fast forward to the age of Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, and their ilk. What was so great about them and made them so popular? Esentially they did the same thing that websites like GeoCities (first home of my amazing collection of usuless information) did before them, but with one difference. These blogging services made it a lot easier to mainting a website. You could simply pick a template, name your blog, and start “publishing.”

Now fast forward once again to 2009. Newspapers are going down the hill while bloggers stand ready to dance on their graves. Bloggers plunder and pillage news stories, often posting the whole article in blockqoutes, and claim they are simply helping to “drive traffic” to news websites.  If a blog is a “content managment system”, than professional journalists have been diminished to the task of gathering content for everybody to post on their blog. I am guilty of it too. Sometimes I see a breaking story and I want to write about it. I want to provide my expert commentary that the world so desperately needs. But as a journalism student I feel bad just copying the work of others. I know I should at least paraphrase it. But that can be hard work.  I also feel guilty for not actually calling up some sources to verify the story, to add more information to it, to get more insight. But that would be hard work, too.

So don’t get me wrong, I love blogging and I think it’s a valuable and powerful tool. But that’s all it is: a tool. Having a blog today doesn’t make you a writer anymore than having a typewriter did in the 70s. No matter which medium you are producing content in  (newspapers, TV, radio, blogs) it still comes down to the quality of your work. And maybe if bloggers get over themselves they will realize that they are not part of some “internet revolution”, but simply part of the evolution of the world. From drawings about hunting Mamnoths on caves to instantly publishing articles worldwide, we are still essentially doing the same thing. Telling stories and sharing ideas.