Silent in the Morning

In this chapter, Briggs provides readers with ways in which one can make smart business decisions in order to survive in today’s age of  journalism.

He highlights the fundamentals of building an audience online, including:

– Tracking your content

As for tracking your content, Briggs brings up a starter list of content types journalist and newsrooms should be regularly tracking such as: total news stories per day, blog posts by specific blog, news updates, SMS or other mobile news alerts…and many more.

– Web Analytics

Deals solely with the tracking of Web site traffic. This allows newsrooms to know exactly what its audience is consuming and at what rate. Key points of traffic reporting systems revolve around pageviews, visits and unique visitors compared, and engagement and referrers.

– Search engine optimization

Briggs continues on to explain to readers how one can optimize their Web content in order for it to pop up on search engines. To become a professional in search engine optimization, one must first understand search engines. Search engines perform three functions. First, the send out spiders and robots to scan all the web pages for new information/pages and send reports back to the main search engine such as Google or Bing. Next, large, more powerful computer programs index the reports sent back from the spiders and robots and build large database files with references to all the content connected to the right links. From here, when someone types a keyword into Google or Bing, you are making a query of that search engine, for which the indexed websites are presented.

– Effective headline writing for the Web

Make headlines more eye-catching by using keywords, use conversational language, and don’t be afraid to inject a little attitude. All three of these will hopefully convince the reader to clink the link and read the content provided.

– Distribution through social media

Utilizing social media outlets such as Flickr, Blogs, and Twitter/Facebook for distributing media content is an essential step to survive in the world of journalism. Take for instance Steve Klein, professor at George Mason University, whose blog on the Detroit Red Wings was tweeted by a notable hockey reporter, only to result in a major increase in traffic from hockey fans all over the internet.