Sarah Hartley › Comments

If newspapers continue to subtly portray social media users as exceptions to the norm, the weird techies, they will miss out on understanding what social media means in people’s lives. - Sarah Hartley

I don't really agree with most of these. Particularly point one! Bit of fun though..... - Sarah Hartley

f you haven’t made any audio slideshows yet, pledge to make at least one in 2010. They’re great because they’re relatively quick and cheap to make (a second-hand SLR and audio recorder could set you back perhaps £300; Soundslide software is just £50) and the results can be stunning. - Sarah Hartley

Going digital is not an excuse for opting out of the class war, or the gender war. It is not a neutral space you can go to because you’re “not really interested in politics” and just want to be creative. - Sarah Hartley

Newspaper employment has utterly collapsed in the last 15 years, with employment numbers now around where they were in the mid-1950s. The good news: It's a great opportunity. The next decade will give birth to new forms of reporting, more in tune with today's technology and news consumption habits. - Sarah Hartley

In the 21st century, news media is much more centered around individual reporters. Maybe a staff's down to a single writer covering a particular beat. Or even if others remain to file for the paper, a writer individually maintains a blog and Twitter feed. What happens to those when the writer goes on vacation? Too often, they go dark until the writer returns. No news organization can get away with that anymore, not in this hyper-competitive online news market. - Sarah Hartley

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments to come - and potentially truly massive business plans - appears to be the one which has been worked on for the past two years or so by Steve Sampson and his team working in a secret bunker. - Sarah Hartley

Why not take a page out of blog design and have a running tally of your most recent major headlines? This way I can visit a news site any time of the day and see what I missed previously. Can’t you safely assume that a majority of the readers aren’t going to scan the whole front page for something that interests them, especially if you are trying your best to draw their attention with major headlines? - Sarah Hartley

Firstly, we all understand again that resources are what determine editorial results. Digital technologies can be wonderfully efficient but you still get what you pay for. Are we prepared to invest in good online journalism? Unless we add value, why should we expect the public to pay? Forget how we used to do it, what is going to work? - Sarah Hartley

To give you a flavor for some of the less supportive comments, I have been called a clown, narcissistic, a nobody, arrogant, envious, holier-than-thou, a blowhard, self-obsessed, an idiot, puritanical, misguided, a hater, a fascist, a moron, a pinhead, and ignorant. And that's just a short list. I admit that the veracity of these descriptions are up for debate, but I'll leave that discussion to the readers of my blogs. - Sarah Hartley

There has been a lot of discussion about labeling links with literal callouts for the action or word to click. The appendages for “here” and “click here” are contextually messy and visually ugly, but if they improve usability, it might be a worthy tradeoff. For this test, I was curious about how it would affect the raw clickthrough rate. This result surprised me. Simply adding “here” as the link at the end of the phrase increased the clickthrough rate by 27% to 12.81%. - Sarah Hartley

It’s a reminder that journalists will do anything to avoid getting real jobs, including conjuring a new kind of workplace that doesn’t include any of the legacy costs of trucks and printing presses. - Sarah Hartley

It’s an online co-op where former Times reporters, editors, and designers can hang a freelance shingle and land jobs. The site, which evolved out of an email list for laid-off staffers, currently has around 30 members. And it’s throwing its hat into the ring for a Knight News Challenge grant. - Sarah Hartley

New guidelines will say that local authorities will still have to advertise in papers and councils will be required to publish information about planning applications on their websites. - Sarah Hartley

cool infographic being passed around online. Made by the guys at Trendstream, it maps social media access and involvement around the world. - Sarah Hartley

Here's why I think this is going to be both successful and important to the future of journalism. Advertisers crave a reliable, predictable audience. The more precise your target audience is, the better able you are to rely on advertising to keep the program streaming across cyberspace. Our human spaceflight program has always brought amazing benefits. Wouldn't it be awesome if coverage of the final frontier creates a new frontier for journalism? - Sarah Hartley

This year, we were talking not just about what new features to add to our current sites, but also about the possibility of building an entirely new website for the first time in a couple of years. - Sarah Hartley

But size isn’t the only important factor, Potts says. Demographics matter too. The ideal community for a hyperlocal news site would include lots of school-aged kids, homeowners, well-established community groups and a local political system. “No one cares about county government,” he says. - Sarah Hartley

When journalists say "you get what you pay for," there's often a moralistic tone to it that does no one any good. No one's going to save journalism by hectoring people. Instead, journalists, and their audience, should look at it as a simple practical question: as it stands today, if you pay less, eventually you will get less. (Assuming, that is, no one invents a new means of subsidizing journalism without you paying anything.) Are you OK with that? - Sarah Hartley

DayLeeds is an initiative intended to reboot ‘old media’, provide mechanisms for blending social media with mainstream content, create conversational content and ultimately provide a chorus of new voices for an old city. Though DayLeeds is rooted in efforts to reinvent Leeds’ media ecosphere, the underlying practices, platforms and technologies are in essence “tools for a post-digital newsroom”, applicable to any geography. - Sarah Hartley

Before the plans are finalised, further consultation will take place with editors, tutors and trainers, the NCTJ said. The new qualification will be piloted across a cross-section of NCTJ centres from September 2010, it was outlined at the recent Journalism Skills Conference. - Sarah Hartley

Even though the prevailing wisdom is that SMBs (small- and medium-sized businesses) won’t create or update their own listings (aka self-service advertising), Google still sees opportunity if the products can be improved. Just 14% of local businesses have claimed their profile page on Google, yet some 5,000 businesses create a business page on Facebook every day. - Sarah Hartley

Where does it all go from here? In my view, the nonprofit model will shake out into two, three or maybe four discrete models, depending on reach and mission. Like cousins, at first glance, they’ll look somewhat alike and may get together once a year for reunions. But each will have its own distinct direction, habits, inclinations — and contributions to the public debate. - Sarah Hartley

One implication out of all this was that individual journalists need to get more savvy about potential revenue streams and the mechanisms of Internet marketing. This doesn't mean cramming a reference to Katie Price into every headline, it means understanding SEO, affiliate marketing, getting a blog sponsored, being willing to experiment with ad platforms like Addiply and so on. - Sarah Hartley

The following is a case study of four companies and a look at how they engage with their customers and coworkers to brand themselves on Twitter. - Sarah Hartley

The so-called “Networked Camera” detects Wi-Fi spots and transfers pictures automatically without you needing to take it out of your bag. - Sarah Hartley

Guardian readers were asked whether they would pay £2 a month to read their favourite paper online, 26% said yes. But if all newspapers charged? The proportion prepared to pay for the Guardian might have been expected to rise. Instead it fell to 16%. - Sarah Hartley

Newspaper folk have seen this conversation before, in the great blogger-versus-reporter wars (circa 2008). Then, caricatures of old curmudgeons and whippersnappers in their mom’s basement distracted from a larger conversation about the different roles of media. It appears we are doomed to make the same mistake again. It - Sarah Hartley

The company’s digital managing director Roger Green spoke with refreshing honesty by saying he’s sick of upstart local businesses—or “zero-revenue publishers” as he calls them—looking for a free ride from the Gannett (NYSE: GCI) owned publisher’s commercial mass. “You should sit in on some of the joke meetings I’ve been in with with people from no-name start-ups who say we should help them start their business and pay them for the privilege… I’m glad bloggers are starting to suffer from this sort of thing.” He’s open to “reasonable” offers, but warns hyperlocal start-ups that they should either “work with us or take us on”. - Sarah Hartley

First, media companies need to give people the news they want. I can't tell you how many papers I have visited where they have a wall of journalism prizes—and a rapidly declining circulation. This tells me the editors are producing news for themselves—instead of news that is relevant to their customers. A news organization's most important asset is the trust it has with its readers, a bond that reflects the readers' confidence that editors are looking out for their needs and interests. - Sarah Hartley