Your byline becomes a valuable commodity online
We all have to live up to our bylines. Credibility rules and
people need to trust the words following our names. But we bylines may never have been as valuable as they are right now.
Last week, the journalism chat on Twitter turned to need
to develop a new skill: attracting readers. It reminded me of a story that
caught my eye on the newsstands in Wired: “Internet
Famous Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion.”
With Allison as its cover girl, Wired wrote:
“The
New York Times has profiled her, and New York magazine has
called Allison — a dating columnist for Time Out New York and
former editor-at-large for Star — "the most famous young
journalist in the city.’ "
Julia Allison is
kicking your butt, but it has little to do with her
being a journalist. Her site, xojulia.com,
is her ”life cast” -- what she’s doing now. She’s Twitter on steroids.
And we could all learn
from her.
That’s where the
discussion on Twitter picked up, started by Howard Rheingold
and Jay Rosen over essential skills. Rosen:
“Publishing used to be the barrier. Now that
publishing is easy, getting your stuff picked up, linked to is an essential skill.”
Scott
Rosenberg, formerly of Salon, added on his blog that it’s a skill most of
us who work in print or broadcast are “occupationally blind to” because we are
used to the media outlets we work for serving up audiences for us.
“They cannot see this
because, all their working lives, the business of gathering their audience has
been handled for them ... This
privilege disintegrates out on the Web once you leave the protective umbrella
and traffic supply of a media company.”
Even working for an established media company brings
challenges for individual reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists
who are now judged by the number of page view we get.
Yet as Dan
Gillmor pointed out, many journalists are squeamish about going after their
own readers, and rightfully so:
“Self-promotion should make
you slightly uncomfortable. The best journalists know the absolute necessity of
humility; when accomplishments lead to hubris, that's when trouble arrives. (I
suppose this is true of every walk of life.) That's why self-promotion should
never be motivated by pure ego, or resort to the kinds of slippery tactics that
journalists love to expose in other fields.”
That’s what we can learn from Julia Allison. Writes Wired’s Jason Tanz:
“It's easy to dismiss
Allison as little more than a rank narcissist — and many of her vocal online
critics are happy do just that. But come on, admit it: You've spent a good half
hour trying to pick out the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace
page. You struggle to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook
status. You keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on
Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You strategically
court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare the size of your
Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You set up Google Alerts to
tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name. See? Self-promotion is no
longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be
a personal branding machine.”
The personal brand of our bylines are becoming our most precious commodity. It is what will stay with us through circulation crises and layoffs. As Rosen said, publishers used to hold the
key. They provided the audience. But
could those roles be shifting, in favor of the content providers – those who
report?
Cindy Stanford thinks
so. We met on Twitter, and I like to
describe her as pursuing her PhD in social networking. She’s a doctorate student at Wichita State in the psychology of human-compter interaction. I sought her out following the reaction I received to
my Twitter coverage of murder trials in Wichita. I wanted to know what I should
do next. Should I only use Twitter for news coverage? Should I post about my personal life?
Stanford I suggested I do both.
“People are becoming more aware and cognizant of where their
information is coming from,” she said. “In the future, you’re personal brand is
going to become important."
It’s something we all need to be thinking about as we move forward in our
journalism careers.
To that end, Wired offers some fun
tips on how to build an audience through Facebook and Twitter.
My favorite is a suggestion on how to get the most out of
Twitter, from Joshua Allen of Denver, who
today has 4,447 followers:
"Every single Twitter post you write should be
something that could get you laid, ruin a marriage, or bring a tear to a fat
little kid's eye."
For the record, my wife doesn’t
necessarily agree that’s a good idea.