Image courtesy of Flickr user thorinside

Found this helpful tipsheet on blogging … The five pillars to a successful blog.

1. Linking to sources
2. Updating information
3. Continuous dialogue with readers
4. Active promotion of own your content
5. Embedding relevant content from other sources

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A helpful tipsheet from Robert Niles at OJR:

Today’s online publishers, editors and reporters need a new style that most effectively allows their words to reach their intended audiences. Unfortunately for them, the print-inspired AP style is not that. Today’s and tomorrow’s journalists need to learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques as much as, if not more than their predecessors who worked the print industry needed to learn AP.

via Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style.

Brian Storm, a visual journalist who is the president of MediaStorm, a multimedia production studio in New York, weighed in recently at PhotoNight at the University of North Carolina. He talked about his business, the future of journalism and gave some career advice.

You have to find what you love, and be great at it. If you’re trying to do it all, you’re useless. But if you understand it all, and appreciate it all, then you are very worthwhile.

Learn about business and get an entrepreneurial spirit. Learn about marketing and spreading social awareness.

Find like-minded individuals and keep in contact with them.

The non-profit space is going to be one of the biggest spaces for journalists in the next couple years.

Web sites are going to battle for your product very soon.

If you focus on your product, you don’t need to waste money on marketing.

Some of the hardest decisions you’ll make in journalism is what not to do.

Great product is key to exposure.

Being sticky is a really hard thing to earn as a producer.

You never know something until you have to teach it.

via Innovative Interactivity (II) | MediaStorm founder Brian Storm advises journalism community to partner and collaborate.

Create one newsroom “where everything happens,” on the web, via owni. Here’s the newsroom that Benoît Raphaël, the editor in chief at Le Post, envisions. The article is translated:

One Creation-oriented journalism (the Google Newsroom)
One Curation-oriented Journalism (community management and copy desk)

Note that I do not use the word “journalist” but “journalism.” Journalism taken not as a profession but as a (precious) function – where sharing journalistic skills with amateurs is considered as a strength.

Why the web ? Because the Google era has changed everything. And generated the emergence (and necessity) of the so-called networked journalism. A journalism that is not just content production but becomes an on-going process that is based on the strength of the network (information fragmentation, new rhythms, social media, user generated content…) to produce and distribute information.

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The top skills required for a Web journalist are solid news judgment, strong ethics, thrive under deadline, accuracy and a mastery of the AP Stylebook, writes Robert Hernandez, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California, in his latest post in the Online Journalim Review.

He says it’s easy to get caught up in wanting to learn every new piece of technology that comes along. But what’s important, he writes, is to get at the foundation of good storytelling.

Oh, that and it helps to learn a few other things such as “HTML, experience with CMS, working understanding of SEO, being social in Social media and the willingness to try new technologies.”

It’s about having the appetite, the zeal to continue to keep learning because we all know by now that the one constant is change.