Journalism Next:

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Journalism Next Chapter 11 Building a Digital
Audience for News
Cindy Royal, Ph.D Assistant Professor Texas State
University School of Journalism and Mass
Communication croyal_at_txstate.edu www.cindyroyal.co
m www.onthatnote.com tech.cindyroyal.net twitter.c
om/cindyroyal facebook.com/cindyroyal
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Building a Digital Audience

• If journalists write great stories, but no one
  reads them, how will journalism survive?
• Good writing is still the foundation. But it's
  not enough.
• Make smart business decisions based on data
• Tracking content
• Web analytics
• Search engine optimization
• Effective headline writing
• Distribution through social media

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Measuring Journalism

• What gets measured gets managed
• Essential to competing in data-driven world
• Track. Measure. Adapt.
• Decide what to track (stories, blog posts, slide
  shows, videos, podcasts, news updates, Twitter,
  Facebook, retweets, replies, user-generated
  content)
• Set benchmarks
• OKR Objectives and Key Results
• Make judgments based on historical data/future
  goals
• Track your audience use analytics

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Identify Key Data Points

• Pageviews
• Visits and unique visitors
• Engagement and referrers

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• How search engines work
• Spiders/robots
• Indexing
• Queries
• Google juice Google gives more importance to a
  website that links to it
• Keywords
• Search-engine friendly headlines/content

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Grow Audience with SEO

• Content is king
• Linking is queen
• Make sure links make sense
• Use title tags
• HTML Meta tags

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Use Social Media as Distribution Channel

• Blogs
• Flickr, YouTube
• Twitter, Facebook
• Digg, reddit, Fark, Stumbleupon
• Increase social capital becoming the trusted
  center for a community
• 2-way conversation
• Puts human face on journalism
• Track, measure, distribute, adapt