Naomi Reiter

An Editor Getting Married

Being an editor and content creator in the online media industry is one of those jobs that colors everything you do. Sometimes in social situations I find myself interviewing new acquaintances as if they are subjects, and have to pull back. I Photoshop casual snapshots and "Save for Web & Devices". I proofread tweets.

As my wedding approaches, those editorial tendencies have reached a crescendo. My fiancé recently pointed out that I have completely branded our wedding. I created a logo and slapped it on everything from our invitations to beach totes.  My most important vendor has been Vistaprint.

For a destination wedding like ours, a wedding website is a smart way to provide information to guests. Many couples go to TheKnot.com for tools to build a site—my fiancé built ours in Drupal. On that site is not only lodging and travel information, but a curated slideshow of our courtship, a video homage to my fiancé, and a press-ready account of not only how we met, but how he popped the question, supported by a high-resolution digital image.

I am Project Manager of this event, running operations on a Google docs intranet.

As I frantically turn this wedding into a brand, I'm struck by the fact that two years ago, I lacked many of these skills. Video editing, writing website code, project management—you could skate by as an editor without knowing how to do these things. But editorial roles have evolved into content creation, aggregation, and curation, and it takes far more than a press pass and an AP Stylebook to keep up these days.

Online Journalists and Editors: Remember to hone your skills and keep up with the technologies that streamline your job and help your content stand out.

Google's knol Lets Me Share What I Know

I just discovered Google's knol product, which allows users to share short bits of knowledge. I gave it a try, sharing my recipe for lower fat Hollandaise sauce, a scrumptious, guilt-free concoction that I just made up this morning:

 

What do you think?

Pay Attention to Me!

 

 

The first two chapters of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue by Jim Kukral didn't inspire confidence—in fact, I felt rattled by all the exclamation marks. It was in the third chapter—when Kukral began throwing around names like Gary Vaynerchuk, the man that brought wine to social media, and Help A Reporter Out founder and CEO Peter Shankman that I realized the writer knew what he was talking about.

If you are in the media game and under 35, you may not learn a lot from Attention!

I take that back. I was reviewing this book chapter by chapter, and it turns out to be quite insightful. Kukral builds up momentum slowly, albeit fervently, but the payoff for sticking with him is rich snapshots of success. And, the chapters are short so he gets into concrete examples quickly.

Halfway through reading Attention!, a side project that had been kicking around my brain for several months suddenly crystalized and I now have the tools in place to execute my plan online.

And Kukral is the right balance of cheerleader and straight shooter to be inspiring. Anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit should buy this book. 

Just Launched: 'The Naomi Reiter Daily'

Move over Flipboard and all you smug iPad owners, paper.li offers Twitter-holics their own personalized newspapers. Behold:

eMedia Vitals launches Drupal-based ConvoStrata

New service aggregates social media conversations on future of
media and journalism

Leave it to eMedia Vitals, the essential online publication for digital media professionals, to overlay social media conversations on its content as a new approach to covering the future of the media industry.  

eMedia Vitals unveiled a new homepage that feels more like Facebook and less like a content site. The goal of the project is to advance the conversation about the future of journalism and media.
  
"Some people will look at our homepage and say that this is when social media 'jumped the shark,' but we think that social media (along with mobile) will be a fundamental business driver for media in this decade as search was for the last," said Prescott Shibles, eMedia Vitals' CEO.
 
eMedia Vitals is part aggregator and part original content creator, offering ideas and insight to more than 22,000 magazine and newspaper professionals. Aggregating social commentary on industry trends adds to the richness of the site's content and seemed like a logical next step. "When I saw Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's headshot and tweet on our homepage, I knew we hit on something unique," said Shibles, who hopes to see media executives more fully embrace social media.

The platform's underlying technology, named ConvoStrata, is a Drupal module built by the team especially for this effort. The executive team is still considering whether or not to release the code to the open source community next year.

eMedia Vitals: New social media features capture conversations in real-time

eMedia Vitals, the recognized authority on digital media, is pioneering a new way of creating B2B communities online. Instead of creating its own social network, it is integrating conversations from a variety of social networks in real-time with the proprietary content and curated news coverage published on its website. 

“Valued content fosters connections and sharing, but users want to talk to people they know, not other readers of the site where they are commenting,” said Prescott Shibles, CEO of eMedia Vitals. “We wanted to capture the full breadth of the discussion happening out in the social ether so that our readers could engage in whatever way they wish.” 

eMediaVitals.com’s content “river” now integrates social media comments with its content to give users a look at the conversations surrounding articles, blog posts and topics. By integrating social media APIs, users can see what’s been said on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn about any piece of content on the site. This feature aims to create a hub of media professionals who share their questions, thoughts and solutions on the site—and other social networks. 

“Aggregating conversation benefits everyone involved,” said Mitch Speers, eMedia Vitals’ chief operating officer.  “It benefits eMedia Vitals because it allows us to benchmark editorial content based on our readers’ interests. It benefits vendors, because they can extend their expertise while reaching qualified audiences. And most of all, it benefits our users by giving them the power to influence content types, and to initiate— or jump into— educated conversations with colleagues and vendors alike.”  

Users also benefit from being able to sign in with their social network of choice, eliminating the hassle of remembering another password or being asked for the same information repeatedly. 

“The goal of this effort is to be a living experiment where media professionals can see a different way of engaging a community, one without the risks of a vocal minority revolt like the one happening on Digg right now,” said Shibles. 

eMedia Vitals plans to study the effects of its socialization efforts and release a white paper on its findings later this year. 

eMedia Vitals reaches more than 22,000 magazine and newspaper professionals and is the official content provider for the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), American Business Media (ABM) and the global magazine association International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP).

For more information, contact Katherine Heisler at (917) 675-5907.

Shiny New Ad Models

I posted this poll nearly a year ago when the sky was falling. In the end, the majority of respondents (46 percent) thought that magazine ad revenue would have bounced back by now. Maybe it has--People Stylewatch gained more than 87 ad pages in December (year-over-year), according to min editor-in-chief Steve Cohn. 

Twenty-three percent of my poll respondents thought that print and online magazine ad sales would come around in 2010, but I see exciting new platforms, apps, blogs and other hybrid new media innovations that will at once make our lives ever more interesting, and kill off legacy media ad sales for good. 

When I first posted this poll, my vote was for 2010, but that's right around the corner and I can't wait to see the new ad models that will emerge with each shiny new toy.

'Golden Age of Publishing' Means Users Do Work

It's been a while since anything's been posted here because I've been doing a lot of writing for eMedia Vitals, which has involved participation in this year's tentative media conference season. From what I've seen, folks seem to be getting serious about their brands' digital components and the exciting possibilities emerging as more and more in what's been called the Golden Age of Publishing, the future is now. 

One of the themes buzzing around these events like a tenacious bumble bee in the Carnegie House garden is user-generated content (UGC). Collecting and curating it, finding trusted sources and generating engagement are the topics of conversation as publishers dream of the time quality UGC could buy them.

I reached out to iStockphoto—the entire inventory is user-submitted—to chat about how the iStock community came to be. Check it out here.

Tools of My Trade: Open Source Options for Today's Journalist

As many of you know, like many editors and journalists in 2009, I was the victim of this "Great Recession" in January and am now only partially employed and freelancing. And if you're a writer, you know that you can't just stop writing or else your head might pop off and your fingers cramp into unsightly claws until you shrivel up and die.

Thus, I started this blog as an online portfolio, a way to keep my skills keen, and, for the most part, as an outlet for that driving need to write. For the last eight months, I've sort of just been waiting for the economy to bounce back so that advertisers will once again get into bed with publishers and I can go back to doing what I do. However, I think we're all getting the picture that many things in publishing have changed for good, including our role as journalists. 

What's an Editor to Do?

For one thing, I now see that, without an abundance of editing jobs available, it's my responsibility to find a way to apply my pretty specific skill set to another industry. Let's see: I can craft sentences and string them together to tell a story; I'm pretty handy with the Adobe suite of editing tools, including InDesign, InCopy and Photoshop; I can get people to talk to me and tell me their story...it's not exactly surgery or rocket science, but that's stuff I can work with, right?

As long as I can remain flexible and learn new skills, skills like simple HTML code, and SEO tactics, and marketing using social media--that's the key. Because one of the industries that is doing okay, and that demands my skill set is marketing. Marketing is one of the reasons why publishing is actually languishing. Marketers are rendering publishing redundant as they more often create content in-house rather than partner with the bloated publishing industry.

Social Media: Social Revolution

We in the media biz have been desperate to figure out how to monetize social media ever since Facebook started allowing externally-created applications, enticing more than just undergrads to waste time petting Fluff Friends and throwing virtual snowballs. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr: the Fab Four of virtual sharing. These are the first four thoroughbreds in the race to keep connected in an increasingly fragmented world. We use them to share our thoughts, snapshots and video clips of our lives, to remind ourselves that others are out there, interested in what we do with our days.

We share news about ourselves and our world, and pretend that the fact that we're eating a sandwich, or going to a ballgame is interesting to anyone else. The fact is, it is. We look at dozens of pictures of people we don't even know, because at the end of the day, we are a voyeuristic race of creatures. Who cares about the trainwreck that is Speidi on the cover of OK! when we can look at all 42 of Cindy-in-the-next-cube's weekend barbeque pics?