1. Twitter: Add a tweet button to your story and create content that people want to share with their friends.
2. Facebook: Add a “like” button to your post and create content that people want to share with their friends.
3. Search: Make sure your stories include words that people might use when searching for the information that you’ve provided, and create content to which people want to link.
4. Text (messaging): Create content that people want to share with their friends.
5. Tablet: Create content that people want to share with their friends.
6. RSS: Make sure readers can easily subscribe to your RSS feed and create a stream of content to which people want to subscribe.
7. Time shifters: Add a “read later” button and create content that people will want to read later.

Oh, and make sure you know in which publications you want to appear, and don’t write to appear in other publications. In old school terms, don’t write for Playboy if you want to appear in the Washington Post.

There was a time when reporters worked hard to write stories that editors chose to appear on the  front page of a newspaper. But the front page isn’t what it once was.

1. For microbloggers getting most of their news from Twitter, the front page is wrapped in 140 characters (with links bringing them to the full story).
2. For old friends who count on former classmates and colleagues for newsworthy links, the front page is a Facebook stream (with links bringing them to the full story).
3. For the student using search engines to find information, the front page is the first page of search results is the front page (with links bringing them to the full story).
4. For digital nomads who rely on alerts to deliver timely news, the front page is a short text message on a phone (with links bringing them to the full story).
5. For people relaxing with their new tablet, the front page might be an app like Flipboard (with links bringing them to the full story).
6. For news junkies living on the cloud, the front page might be a group of RSS feeds displayed by Google Reader (with links bringing them to the full story).
7. For time shifters like me, the front page might be a list of headlines gathered througout the day and saved on Instapaper (with links bringing them to the full story).

With all of these ways that people get their news and information – not to mention my6sense, paper.li and umpteen other services – journalists have more opportunity than ever to appear on front pages. The best part is that these are front pages for very customized publications where people get only the news that they’ve either chosen to follow or actively sought.

Image by “whurley” via Flickr

• Please go to Google to find the web site of the company I mentioned in this article.
• Please go to Google to that report cited in this article.
• Please go to Google to find more about the people in this article.
• Please go to Google to learn more about the product mentioned in this article.
• Please go to Google to find other news organizations’ reports about this incident.
• Please go to Google to see exactly where this incident occurred.
• Please go to Google if you want to follow links that don’t just point to our own past articles.
• My gosh, this list can go on forever!

As a news consumer, I actually hate that I have to go to Google for that information all the time. I want articles to lead me to all that information, much like many blog posts do.

The RSS

This Mashable profile of Diner Connection is part of a series sponsored by Microsoft. Since the ad message and its links have been inserted in the post as the first paragraph, that message also is delivered in RSS feeds. This is how it appeared in my Google Reader.

The channel

If someone clicked on a link from their friend’s tweet to this ReadWriteWeb data visualization post, they would be met with a ReadWriteHack “channel” heavily branded by sponsor Intel. Like the example above, first paragraph includes a note about the series, along with links to the sponsor’s site.

The thanks

TechCrunch advertisers don’t only appear in designated ad spots on their site or within RSS feeds, they actually create blog posts like this one thanking their sponsors. The post includes two links to each advertiser, along with a short description of each company’s products or services.

The stream

This one isn’t actually outside of the bundle, but shows how a publisher can integrate advertising directly into a site’s content bundle. The Mashable homepage simply displays excerpts of its posts in reverse chronological order. But injected into that stream are these posts from, and links to, their jobs site.

1. 
   ksablan Question for @ckanal @jeffjarvis @mediatwit @mediagazer @cressman @mathewi: What’s your top source for journalism news? 08 Jul 2010 from UberTwitter
2. 
   Megan @ksablan @AlexMurashko Mediagazer publishes our source leaderboard: http://mediagazer.com/lb 08 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck
3. 
   ckanal @ksablan That’s a tough one. I have this list & check them all frequently @ckanal/media-analysis. Really like @rww & @mashable. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
4. 
   mediatwit @ksablan No top source for j-news. Romenesko, MediaShift, Nieman Lab, Mediabistro, Poynter, ReadWriteWeb all good. 09 Jul 2010 from web
5. 
   mediatwit @ksablan Also: Howard Kurtz, IWantMedia, Mediagazer, BuzzMachine, On the Media, NewTeeVee and others. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
6. 
   mathewi @ksablan: increasingly, I get my media news from @mediagazer — but also my list of media sources on Twitter 09 Jul 2010 from Twitter for iPhone in reply to ksablan
7. 
   cressman Weirdly,it’s becoming Twitter. RT @ksablan: What’s your top source for journalism news? 09 Jul 2010 from Echofon

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Somehow, I made it into Rosen’s list, so here is where I get most of my information about journalism:

• My “J” Twitter List: I suggest following each person, not just the list. That way, tweets from each person on the list will show up in your main Twitter stream.
• Google Reader: Feel free to download  my list of subscriptions. Google has instructions to import that list into Google Reader. Watch out, it’s gigantic. Focus on the Journalism folder/tag.
• My Delicious network: In particular, I pay attention to pages that members of my network have tagged as ‘journalism’.
• My Meehive: I get a daily email of top stories from here.

Share your sources

Where do you get news about news and journalism? Please share in the comments below and help other readers and me to stay current with the changing world of journalism.

Last week, The Orange County Register hosted the fourth biggest Social Media Day gathering in the world. I work for the Register, but this is my personal blog. As such, the “we” in the title of this post does not to refer to the Register. Instead, this is a roundup of how “we” the people covered last week’s event.

SMDayOC

We asked people to use the #smdayoc hashtag whenever posting anything related to the Orange County Social Media Day event. According to What the Hashtag, 281 people have included #smdayoc in a tweet within the last seven days. According to my calculations, during one hour of the event, a tweet containing #smdayoc was published every 14 seconds.

Pictures

• Attendees used various photo tweeting services to share many images from the event.
• Caroline (@thevixy) used the new iPhone 4 and Sony DSC-W55 to snap 47 pictures and 3 videos in an #smdayoc Flickr gallery.
• Avante Gardens (@AvanteGardens) provide flowers for the event and then posted pictures of those arrangements on floristblogs.com.

Blogs

• Meredith Simonds (@MeredithSimonds) wrote a wonderful blog post that touched on the Register’s social media efforts and a tour of the pressroom.
• Longboards Ice Cream (@longboards) posted a blog entry full of pictures.
• At the bottom of her blog post, Daniela Bolzmann (@DanielaBolzmann) did a great job listing and linking to many other #smdayoc blog posts and other coverage of the event.

Audio

• The L.A.-based Tech by Southwest (@techsxw) podcast interviewed me for their story of how the Register created the fourth largest #smday event in the world.
• In an interview with speaker Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen), local historian Stan Oftelie explained the name of the auditorium where #smdayoc speakers spoke.
• Nguyen also recorded an audio preview of the event.

Video

• Ted Nguyen also shot a video preview that he posted to CNN’s iReport.
• Robert Watson (@TopBrokerOC), another speaker at Wednesday’s event, shared video of Register Publisher Terry Horne opening up #smdayoc.
• @BodyByB used YouTube to share her reflections from Social Media Day.
• When Zpizza in Tustin (@zpizza_tustin) provided free food for #smdayoc events, they recorded and shared video testimonials.
• Eric Bryant (@TheRECoach) shot tons of video before, during and after the event and created a #smdayoc YouTube playlist with more than 30 clips. If you don’t get a chance to visit that list, please watch Bryant’s interview (below) with 91-year-old attendee John Vrba.

Share more

Were you at the event? Did you post anything related to the event? Have you come across other coverage. Share in the comments below, and don’t forget to save those #smdayoc pages on Delicious.

A single news item is only important to a reader if it makes sense within a larger context. An example An example that journalist Matt Thompson offers up is the torrent of news items about health-care reform. Each item only makes sense if you understand the bigger picture. CUNY Professer Jay Rosen hails an NPR piece that explained the “mortgage mess” to him, providing background information necessary to fully appreciate new news about the mortgage industry.

If you’ve been following the ongoing conversation about context in some journalism circles, there’s a good chance you weren’t compelled to view the example hidden above. For you, that context was superflous because of your personal knowledge and understanding of the topic.

If, on the other hand, this is the first time you’ve heard the idea that news items need context to be useful to readers, a summary of related posts might be helpful. The conversation The conversation about context may have started four years ago when Nico Flores opined that content is meaningful only as “part of a wider conversation.” Author Jeff Jarvis ran with the idea, declaring that “content does not exist without context.” In 2008, Matt Thompson launched Newsless.org, hoping to advance the conversation about how to “fix” context, which he describes as journalism’s ailment. In 2009, Dave Winer argued that “streams” of news need structure, using Twitter’s lack context as an example. What followed were many tweets and more blog posts, all leading up to a “Future of Context” panel that was part of the South by Southwest conference earlier this month.

Every person who reads a news item, brings a unique set of life experiences and knowledge to put the news into some bigger story. Each reader also has a unique set of questions based on their ignorance of, and interest in, particular parts of that story.

One way to provide only the desired parts of a story for individual readers, might be to hide story elements until the reader clicks on a link to expand that part of the story. This is an old trick (shoddily implementod in this post) that might find new usefulness in this new context of … context.

I hoped to submit this post to Matt Thompson’s The Future of Context site, but technical requirements forced me to publish it here instead. Please follow the conversation about context happening on that blog to find out how journalists can create and deliver news in ways that can be more relevant and useful to readers than existing forms of storytelling.

From that collection, here is a timeline of 22 articles and blog posts from this year that contain some idea about what journalism will look like in the future. (Click on headings to see the original web pages.)

Update: Dipity makes this process so easy that I have added more events, and plan on throwing more into the mix as I stumble upon relevant links. Maybe this post should be titled “22+ futures of journalism, 2009 timeline”

Information now arrives — and is instantly published — through various real-time streaming platforms like Twitter. Traditional print journalists had little to do with live streams, but social media is changing the newsroom, and this technological conundrum presents an opportunity for journalists to lead the way by applying their skills to filter the real-time web.

Definition of “real time”

When Steve Gillmor, podcaster and TechCrunchIT editor, asked panelists to answer a question he had heard during the daylong event — where is real-time going? — some of the answers resembled tasks that news organizations have traditionally handled.

Answers: Andreas Weigend, formerly of Amazon.com, says real time is about more than just moving data quickly. “it’s about quickly getting questions answered, and gathering data to support decisions.” The opportunity I see:  Reporters can work with developers to create a system to detect questions and match them up with questions, or enable reporters to quickly provide those answers. Daily reporters have spent their whole careers predicting and identifying important questions, and quickly finding answers.

Preservation: Live real-time streams are just one side of a larger concept that activity stream junkie Kevin Marks refers to as “flow.” At the other end of that flow, is the preservation of things that were once real-time, so that they can be found later. The opportunity I see: Reporters are constantly researching public and archived content. They can help design systems to store real-time presentations.

Filtration: For Tweetmeme CEO Nick Halstead, it’s “all about real-time filtering; getting the right content in front of the people who actually want it in real-time.” The opportunity I see: Editors can work with developers to create a curation system to facilitate the filtration of live streams. After all, editors have traditionally pruned stories to fit into the space or time allotted, and they have chosen what appeared on A1 or the 6 pm broadcast.

Humans needed

The idea of filtration came up so frequently that TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld finally turned it into a formal topic of discussion, asking of there is a ”different way to sort of bubble up this information, that makes it less overwhelming but more immediate?” He wondered if the problem lied in the interface.

Bret Taylor said that FriendFeed, the company he co-founded, spends lots of time thinking about interface. He isn’t sure that anyone has created the ideal interface that “mixes that very palpable sensation of being realtime and the sense that it’s all relevant”

Brand trust: Marks explained that associating information with people we recognize — using something as simple as a photograph next to data — ”lets us engage the filters in our brains to decide” what is important. As Taylor put it, “if you know who made the recommendation, it has social value to you.” The opportunity I see: Journalists create personal “brands” when they interact on social platforms. Make those trusted brands and friends and followers will associate information sent by journalists as important.

Genuine interaction: Personal relevance can also be derived by algorithms that examine the social history of a person and her friends. Taylor mentioned that these types of recommendation engines have largely failed, “mainly because they are cold and inhuman.” Taylor’s ideal model would be “something algorithmic that doesn’t lose that sense of humanness and genuine  social interaction.” The opportunity I see: Back to establishing a brand. That brand cannot be built founded on techniques derived from statistics and best practices, it has to be built on genuine interaction.

Difference of opinion: But social recommendation algorithms can’t deduce why people do the things they do. When you buy a romance novel for a friend, Amazon might start recommending similar books, even if you abhor the genre. Gillmor brought up another problem: He’s network friends with his daughter but their cinematic tastes are completely different. An algorithmic system probably wouldn’t detect that, and might start suggesting that Gillmor watch some films that his daughter wants to see. When Weigend suggested adding user-entered metadata to indicate why the message was sent, Halstead replied that people have no desire, and won’t take the time, to add that field, so “the computer can’t do the filtering.” The opportunity I see: Again, back to getting into establishing a social brand through genuine interaction. If people get to know journalists, they can identify their differences and similarities, and apply that relationship to place value on messages.

How important?

So why should journalists care? Is this just another hyped tech trend?

Expectation: Taylor said that tools like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook “are changing users expectations such that they expect their product to be realtime.”

Products: Taylor also noted that if a user can’t explain what they’re seeing it will be a difficult product to sell. This aligns with what Iain Dodsworth‘s experience. When he started having  problems consuming all the data being thrown at him on Twitter, he created TweetDeck. The one-year-old startup has since raised $2.3 million in funding.

Investors: George Zachary of Charles River Ventures described real-time as “fundamental to what we’ve been doing in terms of internet investing as anything in the last 15 years.” David Hornik of August Capital focused on one particular aspect: “managing and filtering the overabundance of information is what’s really going to be interesting.”

Community: Seesmic creator Loic Le Meur said that people are beginning to realize “they have communities around themselves, and it’s the first time we see them. The communities are very old, but it’s the first time I can go to twitter.com/Erickschonfeld and see who is your community.”

Steve Gillmor said that Friday’s event was just the tip of the real-time iceberg. “We are in the full throes of a gold rush that’s going on here,” he declared as the daylong event came to a close.

By the way, here is a relevant video from last year when Clay Shirky declared that we aren’t suffering from information overload. Instead, we’re victims of filter failure.

Linked to from this post:

• Companies: FriendFeed, Google, Twitter, Charles River Ventures, August Capital
• Profiles: Andreas Weigend, Kevin Marks, Nick Halstead, Erick Schonfeld, Bret Taylor, Iain Dodsworth, George Zachary, David Hornik, Loic Le Meur, TweetDeck
• Twitter apps: Tweetmeme, TweetDeck, Seesmic
• Blogs: Techcrunch, TechCrunchIT
• Gillmor Gang
• Real-Time Stream Crunchup
• Transcript of the Real Time Round Table
• “Jump Into The Stream“
• “How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom“
• “8 Reasons journalists need a curation system“

Reach some of the people mentioned in this post on Twitter: @kevinmarks, @Erickschonfeld, @aweigend, @nickhalstead, @SteveGillmor

Journalists who hope to use curation to comprehensively cover stories and beats need an infrastructure conducive to that process. Today’s hodgepodge of widgets strapped onto today’s content management system aren’t enough.

Here are 8 reasons journalists as curators need a system to facilitate curation, based on Matt Cohen’s definition of curation as “the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice.”

1. Links aren’t enough. Don’t get me wrong, link journalism is an integral part of curation, but why link to a video that can be embedded into a story? Why link to a stream of tweets when it can be contextually placed within an article ? A curation system should support easy embedding of external content.
2. Canned widgets won’t suffice. When one person’s live tweets are relevant to a story, you might be able to embed one of Twitter’s default widgets, but what about a conversation? What about a filtered search? You can turn to third-party solutions, but then the story is dependent on those systems. A holistic curation system should include tools to embed content in a way that it makes sense for storytelling, not just the way the content-provider created a widget.
3. Copyrights must be respected. Do you need permission to use that Flickr-published photo in your story? What about that song you found on Myspace? Possibly maybe, probably not. A good curation system should detect the publishing rights attached to content or, better yet, provide search functions that search only content that may be reproduced with the owners’ permission.
4. Link-sourcing helps readers dig. Curating expert analysis and facts from online sources is important to a story, but linking to those sources gives readers an easy way to dive in deeper to learn more or decide how much they trust the source. And it isn’t just about blogs. A curation system needs to unobtrusively link to every blogger, videographer, photographer and microblogger whose content is used.
5. Embedding code is just plain risky. There are good reasons some content management systems don’t allow the use of raw HTML or Javascript in a story. A malformed HTML tag can make a web page go blank. Seemingly harmless scripts can contain malicious code. A curation system needs to support embedding without raw coding, and has to be easily extensible, so that the next big video platform will be supported.
6. Consistency is good web design. I’ve visited to many sites that present stories that sometimes have playable audio and video right in the middle of a story, sometimes in a right-hand column. Sometimes I have to click on a link to watch video on a separate page altogether. A good curation system enforces a consistency in across embeddable media.
7. Journalists need to curate social sources. As more facts and rumors stream from social media and their networks, journalists need to monitor and pull from those sources. Although there are external tools to find information, there are very few tools built specifically for journalists to find, investigate and verify that data. A good curation system should provide tools to make that facilitate and document that process.
8. Chrome OS: Google recently announced that they are developing an operating system “for people who live on the web.” Google accurately notes that modern systems “were designed in an era where there was no web.” Likewise, modern content management systems were built before the idea of journalist as curator. Sometimes, new ideas need new systems. This is one of those times.

Of course, not all stories need curation beyond a basic set of related links, but journalists need a system that supports aggregation, filtering and prioritization of outside media for those stories that require that kind of curation.

For a living, growing collection of links about curation, visit my Delicious bookmarks of pages tagged “curation.”