How online journalists see themselves

Ryan Thornburg of UNC surveys online journalists in North Carolina, with a little help from Phil Meyer, Teresa Edwards and McClatchy's own Julianne Mulhollan.

A snippet, about the "Gannett" effect:

"Several panelists from Asheville ... contacted me to say they really didn’t work online. In their email signatures and in phone conversations, the job titles that they chose for themselves never included the online elements we found next to their names on the paper’s masthead. Among this group who declined to participate in the survey were people who I found had created online-only content for the Citizen-Times during the month the survey was conducted. I’m fascinated that despite what I perceive as obvious participation in the creation of online news, they still declined to self-identify as someone who worked primarily online."

Watch for more results at Thornburg's blog.

Go, Trevor

Trevor has five more days to get about 200 hits to keep an upward trend at Fantasy Baseblog.
The math looks like he'll hit it. Help by giving him some blog love.
And yes, this is unabashed PR for a colleague. Isn't that what the social web is for?

How to keep eating and doing journalism

As gloom and gossip bloom, take a few moments to wander over to Global Vue, a blog for a class at UNC fall semester, and read and think about some other ways that journalism can pay for itself.

See how easy it is to add Twitter to a site?

OK, so I'm coming a bit late to this whole Twitter thing and am still trying to figure out its appeal potential ...

But, imagine if every reporter were texting updates from meetings, from crime scenes ... from the newsroom. And all those Tweets were collected on a page on Charlotte.com ... Talk about the latest in breaking news!

We all know frequent updating draws users back to news Web sites. With enough of the right people contributing to a Twitter stream, you can't get much more frequent than this...

Thoughts?

Hat tip to WCNC's excellent Twittering of the election. But does it just have to be for "big nights"?

Walls, tweets, politics and language

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
--Robert Frost

A few examples of journalists breaking down walls:
1. Kayla Castille of WCNC in Charlotte urged the station to use Twitter to report on the N.C. primary. Read the story behind the results here.
2. Chris Krewson of The Philadelphia Inquirer used Twitter for Pennsylvania's primary and continues to engage his local community through the Twitter network. Read about it here.
3. April Bethea of The Charlotte Observer responded to a request by Rogelio Aranda for a few grafs from a county commission meeting. Rogelio had heard about someone speaking up at the meeting against inflammatory remarks about the Hispanic community made earlier by a county commission member. Rogelio figured that information wouldn't fit in the main paper, but knew readers of The Observer's Enterese Charlotte would care. April wrote nine grafs, Rogelio translated, and the blog linked to other reaction elsewhere. Hits went up.

Being on the (b)leading edge is not easy. But it's not impossible.