Guest Speaker: Jennifer Lord Paluzzi

Jennifer Paluzzi, editor in chief of CentralMassNews.com, stopped by my Reinventing the News class to give the worried journalists in the room hope for the future of journalism, which can often seem pretty bleak from our perspective.

According to Paluzzi, when she was laid off from her job at a corporate newspaper, she was told that her career in journalism was over. Instead of giving up, however, she started a hyper-local, online only newspaper in her community: The Daily Grafton. The Grafton operates under three tenets, displayed prominently at the top of the site in case anyone forgets: “Local. Daily. Online.”

Jennifer Paluzzi is the editor in chief of CentralMassNews.com

“People in a small town want to know about their news just as much as they want to know about what happened in Congress,” Paluzzi told the class. “They should actually want to know about it more.”

Although she started the paper mostly to keep tabs on school board happenings, Paluzzi said reader interest grew to a surprising level.

Before she knew it she found herself at the helm of a coalition of sites bent on using smart web tactics, social media and solid reporting to bring local news to the residents of Central Mass. All the news sites centered around CentralMassNews.com are written with the same three factors as Paluzzi’s original Daily Grafton (that’s local, daily, online!), and these sites are giving even long established local papers in their areas a run for their money.

Be sure to watch for a Central Mass News site to crop up in your community- the coalition is growing rapidly- and remember that each site has its own Twitter.

Guest Speaker: Stephanie Miller

Reinventing the News students were treated last week to a presentation from Stephanie Miller, CBS Boston’s Director of Digital Media.

Stephanie Miller

Miller was there to speak with us about a WBZ-TV program called “Declare Your Curiosity.” The program is helping people get in touch with journalists, helping journalists get in tune with their communities, and getting people pumped about journalism overall. “Curiosities” are allowing journalists to easily serve the interests of members of a community, something that many would argue they don’t do nearly enough of.

“What type of community will you be building around you?” she asked the journalism students in the class. “You have to develop that community, and you really have to develop that sense of collaboration and that sense of participation.”

By visiting the curiosities web site, community members can use a form to tell WBZ journalists what they’re curious about in Boston, whether it be drooping power lines, an out of place building, or how to buy booze online. Journalists then write articles catering to these requests. Curiosity is sated, the community is served, and the journalists get to experience the heady feeling of a job well done.

Click this link to add WBZ Curiosities to your RSS feeds in Google Reader, and remember that the program thrives off of the curiosity of Boston residents. So the next time you see or hear something that you’re curious about while roaming the streets or riding the T, use WBZ to get a journalist to investigate it for you.

Sree Sreenivasan at Northeastern

Self described “technology evangelist/skeptic” and Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia University’s prestigious school of journalism Sree Sreenivasan came to Northeastern on Tuesday to impart some wisdom about the modern journalist’s relationship with social media.

Sree Sreenivasan

As we all know, web sites like Twitter and Facebook can be extremely helpful to journalists in a number of ways, but many find themselves scratching their heads when it comes to best utilizing these tools.

During his 90 minute lecture, Sreenivasan shed light on many of the ways that we can use social media more effectively. The few dozen students and professors (mostly journalists) in attendance were encouraged to ask questions throughout the lecture, the course of which was largely determined by our queries.

How can we keep track of what people are saying on Twitter, i.e. trends? How do we walk the fine line between personal and professional use of Facebook? Why the hell should we even care?

Sreenivasan has compiled this helpful list of his own social media tips and other guides on his Tumblr blog. My personal favorites:

• Retweeting, though many fail to see the point, is actually crucial; “no matter how small the group that first sees a tweet, the actual potential audience is millions.”
• The best Tweets are those that “point” to other content, like news articles and blog posts, and an effective social media user is a good “pointer” (as I’m sure you’ve heard, no one gives a shit what you’re eating!)
• A good “pointer” directs people to the work of others as well as the work of him or herself
• Never be afraid to try new things, on the web and in life (don’t be ignorant)
• An important feature of both sites that many people overlook is lists. Assign contacts like friends, coworkers and family members to different lists, especially on Facebook, where each list can be assigned specific privacy settings (so you can avoid situations like this):

what an idiot

Check out Sree’s blog for a huge number of tips if you’re not sure what the point of all this “social media” crap is, or, even if you already consider yourself a seasoned TwitBooker, to get some pro tips on how to use these crazy new-fangled gadgets even more effectively.