How would your blogging piece look in The New Yorker?

Keep that in mind and you’ll write as sharp and focused as possible. Don’t get cramped up though, just give the best you’ve got.

I’ve found this brilliant tip in a podcast by the blog stars of 43folders en Daring Fireball. They’re casually discussing their blog strategies and while that might sound boring, it actually included the most encouraging pieces of blog advice I’ve ever heard.

Some other blips from their chat:

• Focus on a goal which is beyond your reach (I agree!)
• Don’t try to copy the success of someone else (oh! I’m gonna be the next <major blog here>)
• Find a super, super niche
• How would this piece of writing look in The New Yorker? (ouch)

Ok, enough tips already. You might recognize the following problem: reading so many blog tips that you hardly get any blogging done. So, let’s get back to the real deal: writing. Don’t forget to say hi to your perfect reader.

(By the way, who would be your perfect reader? For the sake of sharing: mine is Jonathan Safran Foer.)

Foto AP / Noah Berger

The thing is, they just don’t like the medium. My pals have a hectic live. They hardly take any time for breakfast, let alone to sit down and spend 30 minutes on reading ‘that paper thing’.

The few friends who do read newspapers, are the ones who travel by train. They form the exception who prove the rule. They spend twenty or thirty minutes behind a train window. The perfect time for a quick read.

So what about my buddies who don’t have newspaper subscription? How do they get their daily portion of political, economical and social analysis?

Well, at work, they browse to the online editions of newspapers. They realize that there’s a difference between an article on a quick news site and one on the online edition of a newspaper. My friends know that the story they read about China’s economy on The Huffington Post isn’t of the same quality as the one they read on wallstreetjournal.com.

Because the economy editor of the Wall Street Journal is one of the best in his country. He didn’t just copy/pasted a Reuters report, he also did his own research. He asked the China correspondent for more insight. And he discussed it with his fellow writers.

My friends realize this. They prefer the quality newspaper over the cheap news site. Yet they’re not paying for the content. I don’t blame them. If you can get it for free, why would you give even one penny? Plus: online news has become a free commodity. It’s not in people’s mindsets to wire some money to some newspaper’s bank account for a smashing piece on the future of energy.

So how can we save quality journalism? Other than getting as many people on the train as possible?

First of all: by keep making incredibly good newspapers. I still believe in the medium. It might become an elitist thing, yet all the other medium-types out there have a major downside. It’s hard for news consumer to focus on a long piece. Before you know it, some e-mail alert pops up. Or a colleague starts sending Skype messages. When you read something on paper, you’re focused. There aren’t distractions coming from the medium itself.

On the other hand, it becomes more evident that running a news business just based on paper isn’t gonna work. So let’s focus on some different business models. Here are some suggestions:

• It will be incredibly hard to get my friends to pay for something they view in their browser. Partly because they’re not used to that. But mainly because they have an absolute lack of concentration when browsing around. Reading 2.000 words is a little bit too much to ask for.
• So when you want my friends to pay for something when using their browser, come up with something spectacular. Offer an archive full of interviews with their rock heroes (Like The Rolling Stone). Ask money for a digital meet and greet with your best editors and columnists. Come up with a new way of visualizing complex political structures.
• Hit the apps market. Hit it hard. Don’t just make one general newspaper app. Instead, hire a smart web savvy person and give him only one task: come up with ideas for paid apps. Do you have an archive full of movie reviews? Make an app for that. Comes in handy when standing in line for the box office. Do you have a star columnist? Charge money for each of his writings.
• When making a general app, don’t focus on just giving the latest news. My friends can get an app like that for free. Sell it as ‘the app for quick analysis’. The one that doesn’t just tell you what happened, but why it happened.
• Present your journalists like they’re rock stars. Show my friends why their writings are worth paying for.
• Start an editorial team which just focuses on presenting news on e-readers. It requires a different form of news selection and presentation.
• Don’t be modest. Immediately show my friends that they’re not just on some random news site. The brand value of quality newspapers is devaluating every day since new news brands are popping up everywhere. Answer this question explicitly on your digital editions: What makes this news brand special?

So let’s start an online brainstorm here. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on a strategy for saving quality journalism.

State of Play

Who has seen the film State of Play? In this film an old-school journalist – the kind that, on a bleak winter’s day, buys the right police officer a cup of coffee in exchange for inside information – is forced to work together with a blogger. A young lady that the experienced journalist thinks uses something like a space ship to write her little articles, while he is still working on a ten-year-old PC. The blogger never has a pen at hand and does nothing but feeding hypes.

The blogger, in her turn, is eager to learn from the old dog, but doesn’t like his conservative attitude. Why should she have to wait for the news to be on paper first? Too bad, all those irritations. For they end up having to solve a Watergate-like scandal together.

If I were in charge in Hilversum, I would make this cooperation between the “old” and the “new” media my top priority.

I would tell the old dog: new media are not scary. I won’t ask you to twitter, type eight blogs a day, or transmit all your findings live on your mobile phone. If you’re just damned good at doing a strong report or setting up a great election debate, then by all means: keep doing that. But I will ask you, just as in State of Play, to work together with a new-generation journalist. Allow me to introduce her.

She blogs, she twitters. She is on Facebook. Not out of vanity. Or because she wants to tell us that the coffee is good. No, she does all these things because they give her a unique opportunity – an opportunity that none of the wannabe journalists from generations past ever had. The chance to publish without some traditional medium dictating if it is interesting enough. Let me give you an example from when I was a student. During the 2006 elections I was at the Plantage filming an argument between Prime Minister Balkenende and television host Mr Witteman about seven Balkenende bloopers that the Prime Minister felt should not have been broadcast. I used those images to start, separate from the television show – but on my blog – a discussion on how media treat their guests. The discussion was adopted by publications varying from RTL Boulevard TV magazine to the respected NRC Handelsblad newspaper.

In the old days a journalism student could, at best, expect to put a newsletter in the mailbox. Today, a blog enables you to reach thousands of people. That is if, in addition to good texts or images, you also have good sales techniques. For you don’t just simply find an audience. Our new-generation journalist has those skills. She knows how to reach the right audience. She networks smartly and debates on Twitter with the digital spear heads of the establishment. The Tim Overdieks. Or the Eelco Bosch van Rosenthals. The people who may later offer her a job or a traineeship.

Alright, I have now hired her. Welcome to Hilversum. It’s time to work together with the old dog. She has to learn from you. She wants to know everything there is to know about those great reports of yours. And she wants to translate your story online. For wouldn’t it be a waste for such a beautiful production to be off the air for good after thirty minutes? That report deserves to live a digital life.

Let me give you an example of how we do this at nrc.next. How we can use the knowhow of that old dog online. When we first started the next blog, just as today, news about the crisis was dominating the newspapers every day. We wanted to filter out the nonsense on the blog. Only show the economic developments that had a real impact. Someone at the newspaper had an infallible eye for those developments. One problem: he wasn’t all that keen on innovation and was proud never to have done anything for nrc.next. But he was prepared to email the best economic articles online on to a couple of bloggers. Sure. The crisis filter was born. Every day the best German, French, British and American economic news. A good online guide, based on the old dog’s knowhow. Created by a blogger.

Another example. At the peak of the Mexican flu NRC appointed a flu team. They reported on the possible epidemic on a daily basis. Eye-opening reports. Averse to hypes. But questions kept pouring into the email boxes. Readers were still worried. And so the we as blog editors came up with a Flu Update. The editor-in-chief of the flu team would weekly answer questions from readers.

The first week the editor-in-chief – the old dog type – gave us a long piece of text. Although the answers were good, there was not much interaction. No names of the readers, no links to more information. We reblogged the article. Every week we had to do less editing. The texts became shorter, more personal, more reader-oriented. The author became a great blogger. He started to interact in the discussions. Debunked rumours. And discussed information that doctors started to share in the responses.

Doctors in the responses? That’s right. When the response climate is good, the online discussions go beyond name-calling. On the next blog editors react to responses that they think are worthwhile. They reward interesting or amusing questions by giving them more attention. They eliminate the rotten apples. They’re no good to anyone. This way the next blog is not an anonymous bulletin board, but a place for discussions on a fairly high level. A place where visitors add information from their own expertise and experience. Media consumers are no longer couch potatoes. They want to share knowledge. The doctor gives tips on a news blog. The conductor on the bus shares his practical experience in another report on violence in public transport. This sometimes actually results in news. For example, when we did an article on gaps in the public transport chip card system. One of our readers immediately reported another gap. The new-generation journalist, the blogger, knows how to get that kind of response.

She is on Twitter herself, and she flawlessly combines her personal life with her professional image. She is the face of the programme. A contact for the Twitter and Facebook audience. She inspires confidence. She explains the news choices, in Joris Luyendijk style. Think of it as a fire ladder thrown from an ivory tower.

The new-generation journalist goes to work with the old dog. She publishes his most interesting research material on blogs, obtains more information from viewers and hopes to find new angles this way. She doesn’t rely on a rolodex, on making a few calls, she can reach hundreds of people and their networks by just posting a call on Twitter.

This is what happens at the editorial staff in The Hague. Two young bloggers, assisted by authorities like Joost Oranje, scrutinize statements made by campaigning politicians. Fact checking. Together they clarify the hectic election times. Readers can give tips or bring forward new facts. A digital life, that goes beyond a newspaper article or a TV broadcast, but that is a dynamic journalistic process.

State of Play

All’s well that ends well in State of Play. Watergate II is solved. And the experienced journalist makes the blogger a chain of pens. So she will never have to look for one again. I don’t exactly want Hilversum to be that sentimental but I would like to ask you: how will you – alone or with the help of a blogger – give your productions a digital life?

Translated by NPOX. More movies about journalism:

• 24 must-see movies for journalists (and 3 series)
• 16 Movies for Journalists, the Follow Up

The new Swagger Wagon of Toyota, a vintage photo collection of Times Square, an autonomous neighbourhood from the Second World War, sleeping in a Hollywood sign from 1923 and infographic about oil. All these subjects have one thing in common: I blogged about it earlier today on a newsblog that covers current affairs with offbeat links. It’s a way of guiding readers through some of the web current highlights. And I love it. So when I heard about the following quote a couple of weeks ago, I was caught off guard. Here’s what productivity expert Merlin Mann said during an interview:

I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people. When the main way we communicate with each other is through all these things — and I’m not saying, “Don’t use Facebook, don’t use Twitter.” What I am saying is, if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.

BOOM! Scanning Twitter and Facebook, coming up with connections to the content of quality news outlets like BBC, that’s all I do as a news blogger. But hey, I don’t wanna be the potato chip guy!

Photo Bob Jagendorf

What followed, was a panic reflex that other bloggers might recognize. We don’t want to produce potato chips, We’d rather serve you a fine meal. Meaning we should become a real thinker, read books – or blog posts with more than 2.000 words – and write in-depth articles.

That’s not the solution though, since we – as bloggers – LOVE to write quick updates. Be the first. Provide our readers with snappy updates.

So I took this problem to someone I value highly for his good advice. His answer was short ‘n sweet: ‘you’re absolutely wrong’. All those quick blog posts – those potato chips if you will – form a delicious meal together, he said. We, bloggers, are curators. We guide readers. We help them coping with the information overload. Every damn day. And we have to be quick, and sharp. Those are exactly the qualities you’ll need as a news blogger. You must master the art of baking potato chips and serve them in a spectacular way:

Photo by avlxyz

So I’m proud to say that I’ve baked some pretty good potato chips. I’ve linked to insightful analysis by great thinkers, beautiful photo series and hilarious videos (seriously, check out the Toyota one). I’ve got inspired by all the interesting news and artsy stuff I’ve seen flashing by on Twitter and Facebook.

Next week, I’ll leave the potato chip bakery to travel to Nepal. The mountains. I’ll bring my Moleskine and Evernote, to see all the notes I’ve jotted down during my potato chips week. Use them for longer articles. For my book.

Because the secret about eating potato chips is exercise. We can enjoy that crispy stuff. Yet every now and then, we’ll have to train those brains. Long live variation.

When Tim Ferriss published his book The Four Hour Work Week in 2007, his mail box, voicemail, blog and Amazon review pages were flooded by comments from haters. Ferriss promoted a whole new lifestyle in his book, hence the emotional reactions. He now knows how to handle this angry bunch, and shared some of the right mindsets on The Next Web, one of Europe’s largest tech conferences. I happened to be in the audience, and here’s what I loved most about his talk.

Tim Ferris at The Next Web, photo by Anne Helmond

Ferriss added that it’s important to delay your response, so you can be rational. Nothing is worse than shouting back. If haters give non factual arguments, don’t reply. If you do reply, their blog posts or comments will only end up higher in the Google results for your name. If a hater comes up with some well-thought arguments, react to them in a calm and thoughtful way. ‘I understand what you’re saying, but here’s something to consider’. Whenever you do, point it out on Twitter and your blog, so you can come away with ignoring the non factual haters.

Another strategy by Ferriss is his zero tolerance policy. You’ll find the following text above the comment section of his blog:

Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration)

If someone does attack another commenter, Ferriss immediately deletes the message, since he has ‘no obligation to publish negativity‘. Great one-liner uh? Here are some more from his presentation:

• Don’t check your mail in the morning since other people will determine your agenda.
• It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. (Remember the 1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly)
• 10 percent of your audience will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.
• If you’re really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative – American sports agent Scott Boras.
• ‘If you want to improve be content to be thought foolish and stupid’ – Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
• ‘Living well is the best revenge’ – Welsh poet George Herbert.

Ferriss ended his motivating talk with a call to everybody to focus on impact. ,,Believe in what you do and act on it”, he said, ,,Keep your eye on the target.” I’m sure The Next Web team will publish a video of his talk soon. For now, you can work with some of his best tips. Good luck!

Hi there, my name is Ernst-Jan Pfauth. I used to be a geek blogger at The Next Web, yet in 2009 I sold my soul to the dead trees. At least, that’s how the Next Web guys have put it. Although I’m from Amsterdam, I’m not using the following metaphor to promote drugs.

Yes, I believe Internet is the new LSD. Sure, I owe you an explanation there, which I’ll happily give. Both the web and the mind-altering drug took important barriers away. Yet they can also cause major problems. I came up with this idea when I lived in New York.

In the Lower East Side, to be more specific. My roommate was a 43-year old actress who showed me around in the ubercool neighborhood. She introduced me to old hippies. One of them played in the Bruce Springsteen E Street Band. ,,Go to the Whitney Museum”, he told me, ,,there’s an exhibition about the year I was your age.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor in Psychology, wanted to promote the use of LSD, ‘since he had learned more during one trip than during his whole academic career’. He wanted to reach a young audience, yet had a hard time in trying so. Until he went on tv, and mentioned a rather snappy catch phrase.

Turn on, and acknowledge there’s various levels of consciousness. Tune in, use LSD, caress all the harmony with your fellow users. Drop out, and say goodbye to the materialistic society, get rid of commitments and embrace the new perspectives. Open those doors of perception.

By this point, you might be wondering why this guy from 1986 is talking about the summer of love. It all took place 19 years before he was born. His father was 14 years old back then. Why so nostalgic? Well, I dig the free-spirited mind of the hippies. The way they’ve changed their society.

Yet there’s not much I can do with this nostalgia. When I visited the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the former hippie hang out, I only saw toothless hobos. One shouted at me, ,,Wow man, that suit is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen since Crocodile Dundee.” Right… In conversations, the old fellows said they hated the web and mobile phones. ,Back then, it was about ‘be here now’, now it’s all about ‘be somewhere else now’.”

And the web, that’s a phenomenon I really love. I even making a living from it. So how can I turn this awkward nostalgic feeling into action? By listening to Timothy Leary again. At some point, the police arrested him for marijuana possession. When Leary got out of jail, he became a media icon. He had quite a wonderful life, until he was diagnosed with cancer. Instead of mourning, he started a website about the process of dying. He wrote short updates. Well, Leary actually started something like a blog. Mind you, we’re talking about the mid-nineties here.

Hey, those are Leary’s words. Finally, a quote which gave me a sense about where my nostalgic feelings come from. We’re talking about a new revolution here. Not in the nineties, sorry Leary, since web publishing was still a geeky thing back then. But with social media, anyone can publish.

The nineties are behind us, yet NOW the web is like LSD was in the sixties. It’s a network where everybody can pick up the digital pen and start publishing their stories. Multinationals are attacked by bloggers, governments have to face a critical mass on a daily basis and people with the same passion find each other. Protesters gather on the web and at the same time is a treasure room filled with millions of galleries with photos, videos and web art.

Yet, as I said before, it’s not all laughs. The web and LSD both have a problem. Hunter S Thompson described the one of the latter in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. After observing the culture and a couple of LSD trips, he wrote that a lot of LSD users saw the drug as the enlightenment itself. It turned them into…

Well, we have that with social media too. Some people just focus on getting as much friends as possible. They focus on the tools itself, instead of what they can achieve with them. Don’t spend hours and hours on getting new Twitter followers, find a way to motivate and inspire the friends you already have.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Make services that change the world. Help mobilizing the crowd. Sure, the new generation is active online. And when they don’t agree with a certain Iranian dictator, they give their Twitter avatar a green color. Or they become friends of the anti-dictator Facebook page. Yet we’re not gonna change the world symbolic actions. Let’s help those folks with influencing ‘the real world’. Let’s mobilize them to change the world.

And let’s aim high. Just like Apple’s Steve Jobs. He wanted to conquer the music and phone market. Well, that’s exactly what he did. And look what he said about LSD. How symbolic…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Interesting links

• Read a Dutch story I wrote about this theory on cultural blog Sargasso.
• BBC: Bedtime for Gonzo?
• TIME: Was Leary right?
• Skulluminati Research: Timothy Leary’s Message to You, Here, Now

As it turns out, Gawker did the right thing. See that start of a hockey stick in the graph below? That’s July 2009.

So hiding comments leads to better and more comments? Maybe. When having a discussion, it helps that between you and your opponent’s comments the ramblings by a hundred nut cases don’t show up.

Yet I think the real reason is that Gawker gave their regular commenters trust. They basically said: your thoughts and ideas are more important to us than those of random visitors. That must have given the commenters the feeling that they’re writings were really appreciated, thus they started commenting more. In comes the positive virtuous circle.

At nrc.next, the Dutch newspaper where I work, we’re doing something similar. We approve the reader’s first comment, and then let him have it. Plus: we interact. The comment section of nrcnext.nl is not some anonymous bulletin board. It’s a conversation between the blogging journalist and his or hers readers. The amount of comments at the news blog is smaller than I had expected, yet the quality of them turn me into a happy blogger every day.

Photo by Tiagø Ribeiro

Or, as my designer buddy Justus Bruns puts it: ,,kick-ass visuals, than your story.” He advices to look up Cargo Collective for inspiration.

An excellent resource for ‘kick-ass’ photos is Flickr. They have a huge collection of Creative Commons-licensed pics. Here’s a 5-step manual to use Flickr for stock photos in a proper way

How are you using visuals on your blog?

Partly since WordPress worked pretty damn good. Partly because I thought that too many people just used the platform for a check-out-this-stuff-made-by-other-people-blog. Didn’t really feel the need to hop on that bandwagon. Preferred to use my personal blog for adding value by sharing new ideas.Took this idea so far that I even convinced one of Hollands most promising internet talents – Robert Gaal from Wakoopa – to ditch his personal tumblrlog.

For linkblogging, Robert could better use Twitter. Not his personal blog. Not the place where people landed if they wanted more information about Robert. He could better supply them with some of his grand ideas.

A year has passed.

I recently started a new blog. The aim: documenting the revolution of my networked generation. All I wanted on this new blog was to keep readers up to date about new developments. I wanted to link to photos, quotes, news articles, videos, all with a few clicks. No need to give an article a headline, since it’s just part of a collection of links. Suddenly Tumblr seemed like a good solution and I started to play around with it.

And Robert replied: ,,Is this the same Ernst-Jan as the one who told me to quit Tumblr since ‘it didn’t add anything’?”

I can understand why he’s surprised. Because, truth be told, I’ve even created another Tumblr-log. I use it to archive links I share on Twitter. I don’t promote it anywhere. I don’t want people to browse there for the blog itself. It’s just handy that when I link to a video on Twitter, people will watch it on my Tumblrlog. Which has a large link to dutchproblogger.com in the header.

Simply put: the tumblrlog is a way to lure people to the very blog you’re looking at right now.

So, dear Robert, I still believe it’s a good thing that you don’t have a link blog as your personal blog. You have so much more to offer. (For the Dutchies: check out Robert’s column in the ‘Financial Times of Holland’) Please, find the time, somewhere, anywhere, to start a new personal blog. The internet will love you for it.

Godin even takes it a step further. In reply to a question from the audience at a conference in Belgium, the marketing guru urged the crowd to blog everyday. Why? Because daily blogging speeds things up. Yes, you’ve read it right, writing everyday saves you time.

Godin has been writing his ideas and thoughts down on a daily basis for a couple of years now. He noticed that whenever he wrote something down, it puts him on a hook. Since the idea is online, for everyone to read, he should live up to it. ,,The act of writing is what moves things forward”, according to Godin.

I’ve experienced the very same. At the beginning of 2010, I jotted down my five (ridiculous) goals for the year to come. Friends and foes keep reminding me of them, which keeps me focused.

Unlike Godin, I didn’t recognize this as a pattern. He obviously did and eloquently shared it with the Belgian audience. Maybe that’s because of his daily blogging habit…

Click here to view the embedded video.