There was a time in media when professional journalists hated bloggers. They hated their guts and thought they were little more than badly-adjusted, shut-ins who sat around at home and wrote ill-informed (sometimes patently wrong) rants. I thought that time was behind us. Obviously, I was wrong.

Michael Cooke, editor-in-chief, of the Toronto Star accepted an award recently at the Canadian Journalism Foundation and trumpeted the investigative work done by his journalists. Cooke also took the time to slam bloggers and citizen journalism.

“Is journalism one hundred unpaid bloggers all talking and yattering at once, or a city filled with amateur citizen journalists uncoordinated in all their efforts? Those bloggers and citizen reporters are as close to real reporters as karaoke is to Frank Sinatra live and in person.”

He quickly followed that up with a conciliatory comment about how there’s room for both “serious” investigative journalism and yattering bloggers. It was like splashing cold water in someone’s face and then following it up with a handshake and an introduction. You’re not going to get a warm reception.

Cooke isn’t just wrong about this, he’s plain insulting. I wonder how the citizen bloggers who contribute to the Star’s Your City, My City blog feel about Cooke’s remarks? Or what about the bloggers who have their uncoordinated work rewritten by Star staffers feel about this?

Sure, many, many bloggers aren’t worth a second glance but a few show the tenacity, smarts and journalistic moxie that any editor or professional journalist would find enviable.

It’s also patently unfair to compare a Toronto Star journalist, with the resources of Canada’s largest paper behind them, and a nice salary to allow them to work full-time, to a blogger, who more often than not is doing this for exposure, for fun or just for the sheer passion of it. They often have few resources to work with, little or no training and most certainly don’t have the luxury of pursuing their work full-time. It would be like an NBA star badmouthing the guys who play 3-on-3 at their local gym. It’s in bad form.

The journalism ecosystem has changed and bloggers are a legitimate and crucial part of it. A better thing to do would be to figure out how to interact with bloggers and citizen journalists. What Cooke and other recalcitrant traditional journalists should do is try to figure out why, despite the scant rewards and obstacles, so many do take that microphone in their hands and try to do their best Frank Sinatra.

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter: Using social media as a journalist

Most journalists should be active in one or more social media tools. Not only because of the benefits but at least to understand how these tools work and how they can be used in journalism.

Personally I use these social media tools to generate story ideas, improve my profile, gain exposure, network and gather news.

1. Blogs

Probably the most time-consuming but the one that has the most potential reward. I’ve listed some great examples of journalists who use blogs to great effect.

Mathew Ingram

Former communities editor Globe & Mail, now at tech blog GigaOm. Mathew was a great advocate for social media/web 2.0 at Globe. He’s now at the frontline of tech reporting with GigaOm.

David Akin

Canwest Parliamentary correspondent, uses social media to enhance day-to-day work. Note how David has used Twitter, Facebook, etc. on his blog to give you a sense of how active he is on social media.

Corey Mintz

Corey’s blog is very off-the-cuff but gives his readers great personal insights into his process, outtakes from his column. It shows off his personality, and creates a great relationship with his readers.

What do these blogs all have in common? They extend a personal brand, they give you more insight into the person behind the work, it’s a platform for writing, ideas, stories that might not fit in a traditional media format (newspapers, magazines, wire stories, etc.

Blogs and traditional media
Blogs do things well that traditional media don’t: opinion, curation, aggregation. It’s why we at the Post really like them. We probably run 10+ blogs. Here are a few examples from the Post.

Full Comment

A blog that’s home for our opinions/columnists/editorials. Started because the Post saw a gap in right-wing commentary/blogging in Canada. As a result Full Comment has become very popular among this comunity. The blog gets lots of comments, thousands of page views a day. More importantly, we’ve got tons of buy in from our more senior writers AND younger writers.

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Our news blog lets us experiment and do things and chase stories that we wouldn’t traditionally be able to do. Our blog is a lot less rigid than our normal story pages, so we can do things like embed videos and maps, add more links, images, etc. Also, it’s a good repository for off-kilter stories non-traditional news, etc.

Many other outlets do something similar. A few good examples, the NY Times’ City Room blog, NPR’s the Two Way.

2. Facebook

I actually don’t use Facebook too much profesionally. It’s more of a personal tool for me to keep track of my friends, family and colleagues.

But for a publication Facebook can be very powerful and in fact crucial.

The National Post fan page

A Facebook fan page lets users incorporate the Post into their Facebook experience. People spend a lot of time on Facebook, so it just makes sense that we’re there too.

The ability to share interesting stories is also key. Facebook is one of the top 5 ways of referring links to news sites (e-mail, Google, Twitter are some of the others). When a user shares your story that’s a great thing, it’s extra clicks, it’s exposure, it’s buzz.

Finally, it’s also an easy way to do a little community building and gain more interaction with your users

Some other great examples:
Mashable Look at the number of fans! That’s 100,000+ people who may share, comment and talk about your articles!
the Walrus Magazine Look at how they extend their real-word product into Facebook, changing up their profile image to match their current covers, mentioning real-world events, etc.

3. Twitter

I started using Twitter about two years ago and it’s tough for me to overstate how useful and rewarding it has been. I use Twitter in two very different and complementary ways.

a) Twitter in
I use it as a personalized news wire by subscribing to news sources I like.
Eg. I do a lot of writing and have a personal interest in books… so I follow a lot of publishers, authors, book publications, etc. The Twitter list function makes it a bit more manageable.

I also use it as a way to see what people I like, respect, and have crushes on are thinking about.

Many, many examples:

@susanorlean (an amazing New Yorker writer)
@jeffjarvis (author, J-school teacher at CUNY)
@cshirky (NYU j-school prof, tech advocate)
@walrusmagazine (large mammal, also a great magazine Twitter account)
@ivortossell (tech writer, pal, drinking buddy)
@xoxsnp (Fashion writer, go-getter, up and comer)

b) Twitter out
I use Twitter as a way of communicating and developing a personal profile.
I sync up my blog to Twitter, I also use it to promote things I’m doing, even ideas that I’m thinking about. I think it’s how your professor found me.

@boyreporter is my personal Twitter account. Follow me if you want. I’ll try not to bore you.

How the Post uses Twitter:

No big surprise, but we’re on Twitter and we love it. Here’s a few reasons why.

a) News gathering and dissemination.
Twitter is fast. Blazing fast. In the last few months alone, Twitter has helped us cover stories like the Fort Hood attack and the Haiti earthquake. Twitter gave us almost real-time updates from people on the ground, whether they be local media, eyewitnesses or officials.

@nationalpost our flagship account has about 7,600 followers and we use this as a way to spread our stories, they often get retweeted and spread virally which, of course, means more traffic for us.

@npbooks, which is an account that I help start and run is a niche books/literature account for our books blog. It’s very targeted, has a lot of personality and people love it.

So a few parting notes:

Work social media into your daily routine

Checking Twitter, blogging, Facebooking all takes time and if you’re working, going to school, writing, etc. You might not have time to do all this. Try to work some of these things into your daily routine. Use a program like Hootsuite, which allows you to embargo your tweets, to plan tweets in advance.

Blog in spurts, write two or three posts, and then push them out later in the week. (Hint, hint, the author of this blog might do this once in a while)

Don’t overshare

Not everything needs to be and should be public. Remember, most of the time, you get to decide what goes up online. Writing about that bad break-up on your personal blog might not be a good idea… unless you want a career as a relationship columnist, in which case, it’s probably pretty brilliant.

This stuff won’t replace basic skills

You can be a social media guru, tweet like crazy, blog like an overeager 15-year-old girl and have a thousand Facebook friends, but they don’t replace basic journalism skills like writing, reporting, research and interviewing.

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With the Olympics now in full-tilt, it’s useful to think back to the last big event held in Vancouver, Expo 86. This was before my family moved to Vancouver, but I think the fair opened up Vancouver to the outside world.

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Also the star of Erik Larson’s very fun and awesome book The Devil in the White City

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, I don’t think the Grey Lady is going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, the Times, who have had a robust web presence longer than almost every other newspaper out there, is in a good position to transition to an online-dominated media environment.

Their survival is likely ensured because they have the clout to hire excellent people

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and once in a while let them work on their own thing.

From New York Magazine’s intriguing profile on a part of the Times’ online team:

This past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times. Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to mortgage its new building, slashed dividends, and, as of last week, was printing ads on the front page. So dire had the situation become, observers began to entertain thoughts about whether the enterprise might dissolve entirely—Michael Hirschorn just published a piece in The Atlantic imagining an end date of (gulp) May. As this bad news crashed down, the jackals of Times hatred—right-wing ideologues and new-media hecklers alike—ate it up, finding confirmation of what they’d said all along: that the paper was a dinosaur, incapable of change, maddeningly assured as it sank beneath the weight of its own false authority.

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And yet, even as the financial pages wrote the paper’s obit, deep within that fancy Renzo Piano palace across from the Port Authority, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

See, it’s not all bad out there. And in another silver-lining type development, the LA Times announced that for the first time its online ad revenues were sufficient to cover the editorial payroll! Granted, they hacked their newsroom to the bone earlier this year, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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As a tech reporter, some of this stuff is second nature to him. His community, the people he’s covering, competing with and following him have jobs that revolve around technology, whether it’s cellphones or software. But even journalists in the most obscure of beats or specializations can benefit from Web 2.0 technologies and programs.

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Most experts would also argue that building an online presence can help you find that job, in the unfortunate event that your publication ceases to exist.

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It’s a heartening turn of events. An art form that has struggled with low visibility, the advancement of computer graphics and a reputation of simply being for kids, puppetry is enjoying a renaissance; it is returning to its edgy roots while at the same time increasing its main-stream exposure. Puppets are everywhere: the stage, the screen and online, spurred on by a generation reared on these string, rod, fleece and googly-eyed creations.

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Abelard and Heloise indeed!

Also, I got a few great looking galleys at Book Expo, so these will have to be added to the pile of things I’m reading. So without further ado. The sequel:

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, Rob Walker (I love Rob Walker’s Consumed column in the NYT, his blog, Murketing, is also quite good)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte (this is me geeking out)

Fiction:

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano (A lot of post-humous praise for Bolano. His works are finally appearing in English)

The Man Game, Lee Henderson (I’ve been looking forward to this for years!)

De Niro’s Game, Rawi Hage (Man, oh man, I met Hage at Book Expo last year and still haven’t read the book. I feel a bit guilty)

If any of you out there are looking for book recommendations this summer please ask. I’ll try my best to give you a few appropriate recommendations. You know how to find me.

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Both men have novels coming out in the Fall. Henderson’s is a long-awaited novel set in 19th-century Vancouver that involves the great Vancouver fire, and naked lumberjack wrestling. Boyden’s is a ‘sequel’ to the amazing war novel Three Day Road The Big Blue buy .

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OK, the real purpose of this post…. both these men are quite studly. And my friend Alexis agrees that Boyden is a dreamboat (also, a very charming guy). Sorry ladies, he’s taken.  Henderson may or may not be single, we never got to that line of questioning.

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So, if we were to create a hypothetical calendar of cute male Canadian authors who’d be on the list? Who’d heat up those cold February weekends? Whose hand do you want to hold while walking through the park in early spring? Which poet/playwright/novelist would you want to spend those romantic summer evenings with? The lines are open.

Oh, if any publisher or other group (I’m looking at you Quill and Quire!) decides to do hot authors of Canada calendar, I want a cut. Or if you do a hot women authors of Canada edition, I’d like an invite to the launch party. I’m not hard to please.

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I was happy to run into the gang from Quill and Quire and the ladies from the House of Anansi

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, this year’s Libris award publisher of the year! I even get quoted on the Quillblog. I’m the witty one making comments about Michael Winter.

And now, it’s back to work.

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