1. Sharing sharing sharing

Unlike other blogging platforms (eg. WordPress, Blogger) sharing is built into the DNA of Tumblr. It takes one click to repost a great image, quote or video from one Tumblr blog to yours. This rewards blogs that have great and well-defined editing, aggregation and curation. If you find great content and post it, it’ll get shared. Find enough great content and you’ll make yourself a destination.

Example: The Daily What. The popular blog finds the best, funniest and wackiest stuff online — odd videos, funny headlines, gobsmacking stories. Getting something on the Daily What pretty much means you’re getting reposted, liked and commented on by dozens if not hundreds of people.

2. Showing off your editorial voice

A number of publications use Tumblr as a great platform for their editorial voice by finding and posting a mix of self-produced content and things from other publications. Others trawl the seemingly endless waters of the internet for great finds. For a new publication, or one without a big recognizable name Tumblr is another way for you to show potential readers what you’re all about.

Example: Worn Fashion Journal‘s Tumblr. An indie fashion magazine out of Toronto, the Wornettes find photos, illustrations and articles that inspire them. It gives the magazine a way to keep their magazine out there and I get the feeling that it helps the editors, contributors and interns sharpen their ideas. (Disclosure: I’ve contributed to Worn)

3. Visuals

Most CMSes and blogging platforms are designed with text in mind. It’s understandable considering that text is the dominant medium for many media outlets. Tumblr, on the other hand, is great for visuals. It actually seems to be designed with photos and graphics in mind.  There are tons of templates that are designed for photoblogging and it’s easy to design (or find) a template that’s visually rich and striking.

Example: The National Post Tumblr. We started the blog as a way to get the Post’s beautiful graphics, illustrations and photography on to a space where it could really take centre stage. Tumblr was the perfect fit. Want another great example? The New York Times’ T magazine Tumblr has pictures so big you probably want a 24′ monitor to really make it work.

Other notable Tumblr blogs:

The Washington Post‘s Innovations Tumblr cherry-picks the best digital journalism out there and gives us an inside glimpse at some of the great things their online team is doing.

A visually-heavy blog from a radio network? NPR’s Tumblr picks the best stories and lots and lots of images. A smart way of inserting yourself into the Tumblr community and conversation.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t include Newsweek‘s Tumblr, the granddaddy of media Tumblrs. Reading Newsweek’s Tumblr feels like a conversation with the smart and cosmopolitan writers and editors who work there.

It’s not hard to see why. Forced by shrinking revenues, newspapers and magazines have had to cut page counts, slash expenses and staff and cut the rates and salaries for their writers.

But recently, a number of technological developments have given writers and readers of long-form journalism some hope. A look at some of them:

1. Instapaper and Read it Later

If you think about how you read online, it becomes very clear that most, if not all, of your online reading happens at your desktop or laptop computer. It’s only been in the last few years that smartphones and tablets have become mainstream devices and an important way for many people to read online content.

Enter Instapaper (and similar application Read It Later). These apps allow you to “timeshift your reading.” Articles that you find while browsing during the day (admit it, you’re checking other websites when you’re at work) can be saved on Instapaper and Read it Later to be read on your smartphone or tablet.

A service like Readability also raises interesting ways that publishers can make money from long-form content.

2. Longform.org and Longreads

I’ve written about both of these services before and both of them are excellent ways to find out long-form stories. Curatorial communities and services like Longform and Longreads (not to mention your own social media outreach) can help writers and publishers reach larger and more engaged audiences.

I expect to see certain publications (hello literary journals!)  to reach out to services like Longform and Longreads to raise their profiles and attract readers.

3. Kindle Singles

Kindle Singles are Amazon’s entry into the long-form game. They allow publishers to sell short works for a few dollars a piece on Amazon’s popular e-book platform. Amazon already has some great content for the format: TEDbooks, the New York Times, ProPublica. Seth Godin has also launched his Domino Project, which he touts as a “a fundamental shift in the way books (and digital media based on books) have always been published.”

The format raises interesting avenues for individual freelancers. In the future I could see a name-brand writer selling their own features, past columns, etc. in this format.

4. Kickstarter

Former Worldchanging editor Alex Steffen is using Kickstarter to fund his next mini-book, a guide to building a greener city. A quick scan of the Writing and Publishing directory at Kickstarter, the crowdsourced funding platform for projects, show a number of interesting literary and documentary projects.

Got an idea for a 50,000 word profile on an obscure but mind-blowing musician or historical figure? A five-part travelogue across northern Ontario? A crowdsourced, multimedia project about the G20? Consider partnering up and turning to Kickstarter to fund your project. You’ll get the starting cash to cover some of your starting expenses and once you have a completed product, a chance to sell it.

5. The Atavist

There’s been a lot of buzz around this Brooklyn-based micro-publisher. The Atavist publisher longer-form pieces and sells them online on iTunes (in app) and through Kindle. I’ve had a chance to use their app and it’s a lovely way to enhance a story with audio, video and other features. I could talk more about it, but the New York Times’ David Carr beat me to the punch.

This post actually goes out to the folks at St. Joseph Media. So what actually did you buy here? Just a domain name and a seven-year-old logo? Actually, you’ve bought something more than that, a lot more. Lets face it competition is growing for Toronto Life — your flagship publication and the publication that stands the most to gain from your Torontoist purchase. Just in the last few months you’ve got the Globe going upscale in printing and paper quality in an effort to chase high-end magazine advertisers, TorStar is retooling eye Weekly and lately that scrappy publication has been trying to muscle in on your turf. Even BlogTO is nibbling at the edges with their restaurant and store round-ups. So how does buying Torontoist help you?

1. An internet-first team

You’ve bought yourself an editorial team that only thinks about the internet. They’re not saddled by print schedules and long magazine lead times. They know how to aggregate and curate. They also know how to produce original content for the internet and do so on a regular basis on small budgets. They even have an award to prove it.

Torontoist’s G20 coverage is admirable considering the amount of resources that staff would probably have had. Think of what the team can do for your TIFF or Fashion Week coverage. Torontoist’s staff can also be your eyes and ears on the ground. The site has always been great at ferreting out stories that have a way of getting traction in mainstream media a few days later. You, St. Joseph Media, have exclusive access to that now.

2. Scouts and testers

Let Torontoist be your idea incubator. Need to test out a new online platform? Try it out first on Torontoist with a team that isn’t saddled with the day-to-day duties of putting out a magazine and can think like online-first editors and users. Push its writers and editors play around with online storytelling techniques. The results may not always be polished and perfect but you might learn something that you can use on one of your other magazine sites.

3. Respect the community

I’ve always marveled at how Torontoist was able to tap its community for content, ideas and more. The blog’s annual Heroes and Villains feature is a big debate and traffic driver. The site’s Flickr pool is one of the best repositories of local photography anywhere. Need more proof? I did a quick scan on Twitter and Torontoist has a very respectable 24,000+ followers — that’s more than eye Weekly and Now (TOist rival BlogTO is closing in on 40,000). Respect that community. Keep giving them great content and they’ll keep giving you their time and energy.

One last thing: Buying Torontoist isn’t going to automatically guarantee you a win against your competition. And you’re still going to have to figure out where a scrappy, run-and-gun blog is going to fit into a company full of magazines. May I suggest looking at the relationship between New York Magazine and the Vulture and its other blogs, or the Atlantic and its online properties. But at the end of the day, let Torontoist be Torontoist you might be happy at what you get

A number of great write-ups of the post have been written. Mathew Ingram’s is here and there’s one from my friend Dana Lacey at J-Source. There’s also a liveblog from Samara available. I’ve pulled out five things that I got from Emily’s highly informative speech.

Boyreporter.ca

You’re reading it. I’ve decided that this blog needs a serious change in focus. Over the last few months I’ve been focusing strictly on issues around online journalism on this blog. So if you’re looking for funny cat photos or videos you’ll have to go to…

Boy Reporter’s notebook

This is my Tumblr blog. Like many Tumblr blogs it’s completely informal and really more of a way for me to play around with the platform. This is where you’ll find those cat videos and photos of Lionel Richie.

@boyreporter

I do a lot on Twitter and it’s where I post most of the things I find on a day-to-day basis. Expect everything from tweets about food to books to a lot of stuff on, what else, journalism.

Photo taken by Flickr user Brenderous

The Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote a great post (based on a lecture he delivered in Toronto) on eight trends that could have a big impact on journalism this year.

Benton touched on a big range of technological, economic and cultural trends that are already changing the industry but one of the things that Benton doesn’t explore much is how storytelling is changing in journalism.

Many of the tools of online journalism open up new ways to tell stories beyond the simple inverted pyramid or even the long-form feature, the proverbial meat and potatoes of day-to-day journalism.

I’ve listed some of them below. This list isn’t complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it is some of the more interesting new storytelling forms and ideas I’ve come across.

Using social networks to tell stories

Millions of us spend a significant amount of time on social networks and journalists have been mining Facebook and other social networks to find sources and research background.

We’ve already seen Tweets and Facebook status messages used the same way as quotes and other personal statements. The Washington Post, last fall, used a woman’s facebook messages as the narrative thread for a moving story on her pregnancy.

In the same bent is a social media curation tool called Storify (Keepstream is another tool) that lets journalists stitch together stories with significant social media components to them. In print, it makes perfect sense to quote tweets and Facebook status messages. Really, there’s no other way to get your point across. But quoting a tweet and not linking out to it (or embedding it) in an online story is kinda silly.

What’s becoming clear is that the journalist can play a key role as curator and annotator of the seemingly endless amount of information out there in our various social networks. I can’t think of a more perfect example of this than Andy Carvin’s tweets throughout the last few months.

Carvin has tirelessly sifted, authenticated and commented on thousands of tweets flooding out of the Middle East and North Africa as revolution gripped the countries in those regions.

Below: A screenshot of Andy Carvin’s Twitter account

Maps and location

One of the more intriguing online stories I’ve seen in recent memory is Open File’s moving Remembrance Day maps of Toronto’s Second World War dead. It was part of Open File’s ambitious Remembrance Day package, the Poppy File. Patrick Cain plotted the homes of almost all of Toronto’s war dead to powerful effect. Many of these maps were also broken up to show deaths by service, or deaths from certain battles during the war. The timeline of the war itself also give us a natural narrative.

An amazing piece of journalism where maps play a key role is Basetrack, the project sees multimedia journalists embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan.

Another interesting tool to tell stories is Intersect, which I got to see in action at last year’s Online News Association conference. The program allows you to place photos, stories and media in the “intersection” of time and place using maps and timelines.

Toronto start-up My City Lives is another intriguing location-based project that drops user-generated videos on real-life locations in Toronto.

Google Maps is already a pretty easy tool to use and with location features becoming more common with smartphones, I expect to see ambitious online outlets play with mapping and location to tell stories.

Below: A part of Open File’s Remembrance Day project, the Poppy File

The game as story

Gamification is one of those buzzwords that’s being thrown around a lot lately. Think of programs like Foursquare that use badges, points and leaderboards to encourage user activity. There are people thinking of how to use gaming mechanics in the news but I want to turn this 90° and ponder whether games themselves can be a way to tell a story.

Could a Canadian newspaper use a game to simulate a federal election? What about a game where you simulate an economic policy? This isn’t necessarily new either, sports fans have been able to join fantasy leagues, pools and tournament brackets for years.

Below: Foursquare badges aren’t news but maybe there are ways to get gaming elements into the news and storytelling?

A few other trends that aren’t going away anytime soon:

Crowdsourcing — Sometimes the best stories come from your readers. Facebook, blogs and twitter have made more people comfortable with sharing stories. As a result it’s much easier to get great content from your readers.

Another intriguing use of your readership, and one that’s actually almost two-years-old now, is the Guardian’s “Investigate Your MP Expenses” project. It asked Guardian readers to sift through the thousands of pages of MP expense reports and flag anything suspicious.

Access to primary documents — Programs like Scribd and Document Cloud make it easy for outlets to share primary documents. The trick is crafting a compelling narrative around it.

Data journalism — Each year that goes by journalist and programmers are getting savvier at using data to tell stories and shed light on issues. Here’s a good round-up of a few intriguing data journalism projects.

A few concluding notes:

New tools and new methods don’t mean that traditional journalistic storytelling isn’t important. The well-crafted, thoroughly researched feature can be more compelling than all the slideshows and maps put together. There’s also the simple fact that in daily news environments there’s little time to work on fancy features when there are real deadlines at your heels.

Nonetheless, it’s important to note that more people are getting their news exclusively online and that devices like iPads and smartphones can make for rich storytelling experiences. With little more than pen and paper journalists have been able to tell some amazing stories, I can’t wait to see what they’ll be able to do with the tools out there now.

If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know that twitter is a huge part of my personal and professional life. On Friday, I reached a pretty big personal milestone and sent out my 10,000 tweet. Yes, it means I tweet a lot. Some of it is inane, but I try my best to keep it entertaining, informative and relevant.

I’ve had the chance to talk to journalism students about using social media to build their practice and I can’t stress how useful twitter is. So in honour of 10,000 tweets I want to reiterate the three things I’ve learned about twitter:

1) It’s a great way to ‘meet’ people in journalism

In a recent post, I expressed my admiration for the Atlantic’s online strategy. Through some odd game of six-degrees of separation, one the online editors for the Atlantic, Jared B. Keller introduced himself. I’ve had the chance to trade jokes with him and swap ideas with someone working at one of the most interesting outlets in journalism today.

I’ve also found it easier to go up and introduce myself to fellow journalists and editors who I’m already following on Twitter. Hey, at the very least you can ask them about that link they tweeted a few days back instead of engaging in small talk about the weather.

2) It’s a great way to keep up with the news

If you follow the right people and sources on twitter you’ll pretty much always have something to read. If you’re a freelancer looking for an idea, twitter can help find an idea for your next story or at least keep tabs on what other publications are doing. If you’re a beat reporter follow other people in your beat and relevant publications to have a curated stream that’ll keep you on top of what’s happening.

3) It’s a great source of breaking news *

The Mumbai terrorists attacks, the miracle on the Hudson, Toronto’s G20 protest, the Egypt revolution. I used Twitter as a news gathering tool when covering all of these stories. It’s an imperfect medium, and it won’t replace actually having reporters on the ground, but you can’t ignore it anymore.

* Except of course, when it isn’t. Hoaxes can spread easily on Twitter, so remember to verify before retweeting.

This year it’s no different, with one exception, I’ve been asked to join the panel to take over for Erin Balser, who now works at CBC Books.

You can listen to me defend Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans. We even taped pre-show confessionals in Nic’s closet.

You can go to KIRBC for the rest of the episodes this week. Also, I have a really good looking book club.

——

In other book-related news, I’ve also had the chance to interview the author of two books I thoroughly enjoyed in 2010, Tom Rachman (the Imperfectionists) and Rebecca Skloot (the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). Both pieces ran in the Post in the last few weeks.

Profile: Tom Rachman

Profile: Rebecca Skloot

I suppose it was only a matter of time until Tumblr became a part of the news ecosystem.

A lot of users go to Tumblr for funny animated gifs or photos of hot girls but the recent events in Egypt actually saw Tumblr become a place to find great coverage, analysis and photos of the uprising in that country.

The blogging service has apparently rolled out edited tag pages, in this case #Egypt, to pull together the best content being published about that story. The Atlantic, which has an active presence on Tumblr, is one of the editors, which gives this little experiment some mainstream media cred.

It’s not as important as Twitter, or al-Jazeera’s compelling live coverage from Cairo, but it’s an interesting use of the Tumblr platform and the addition of human curation makes the feed much more usable than Twitter — do a search for #egypt and #jan25 and you’re inundated in seconds.

Maria Popova a.k.a. @Brainpicker

I save more links by Brainpicker than any other single person I follow on Twitter.

A writer, design nut and seemingly all-around interesting person, Popova manages to find wondrous stuff daily.

From her site:

Brain Pickings is about curating interestingness — picking culture’s collective brain for tidbits of stuff that inspires, revolutionizes, or simply makes us think. It’s about innovation and authenticity and all those other things that have become fluff phrases but don’t have to be.

Good Magazine @goodfeed

Based in Los Angeles, Good started as a magazine dedicated to showcasing people and organizations trying to come up with solutions to the world’s problems. The magazine has expanded online and their Twitter feed is one of the ways I keep up with their work.

Slate @slate

I’ve been a religious leader of Slate for many years and there are few online-only publications as smart and interesting. Slate has a more political and current-events bent than some of the previous feeds I’ve mentioned but there’s a great deal of levity there.

Honourable mentions: Can’t forget the smartypants at Wired and Fast Company, both of whom have excellent Twitter accounts. Also, I wouldn’t be a nerd worth my salt if I didn’t mention BoingBoing, the original “Directory of Wonderful Things”.