Wednesday, August 15, 2007

DanieVDM, via Flickr (CC license) What skills do you think are essential to putting today's online media to good use?

A lot of people, especially in the news biz, are very interested in online media -- either of their own volition, or they realize that understanding and using it better will improve their career options.

Trouble is, online media moves fast. It involves a dizzying array of tools, networks, and skills. Simply knowing how to use a Web browser, search engine, and e-mail are no longer enough to keep up.

If you're ready to go to the next level of using today's online media well, where do you start? Which skills are especially useful for journalists?

I spend a lot of time educating people about online media, so I've been thinking this over. It seems to me that two cornerstone skills are learning to use a feed reader and getting direct experience with participating in public conversations (commenting on blogs and forums, not just e-mail lists).

Here's why I think getting experience with those two skills can help you learn just about anything else you really need to know in online media right now. It's really about evolving your mindset, rather than merely learning skills:

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Feed reader: If you know how to subscribe to a feed in any feed reader, even one as simple and non-geeky as MyYahoo, you start to realize the value of being connected to an ongoing but targeted flow of information -- whether from a particular venue (such as a blog) or a topic (subscribing to a saved search from a feed aggregator, such as Technorati).

Using a feed reader helps you realize how findable and connected feeds can make any kind of content, and you start making feeds a priority in your publishing efforts and content management system choices. You realize how reaching your audience or community is not just about your site, so Web design starts taking a back seat to effective distribution.

You also realize how much easier and faster it can be to track multiple information sources via feed, as opposed to e-mail or conventional Web surfing. This can minimize your sense of information overload. And, of course, feeds are the basis of subscribing to most podcasts and vidcasts (even in iTunes).

Commenting on blogs and forums. This is technically simple in most cases -- just filling in a short online form. However, for many people (especially journalists, I've found), actually getting involved in a public conversation that's likely discoverable via search engines (often not the case with e-mail lists) is a challenging but eye-opening experience. It's humbling but surprisingly empowering to be on a level public playing field with their readers, sources, or other communities. So often journalists prefer to hold themselves apart from these constituencies, and engage them in conversation only via private channels (phone or e-mail).

Getting in the habit of commenting on blogs and forums, following at least some comment threads or conversations that sprawl across multiple venues, or at the very least reading and responding to comments left on your stories at your own news organization's site, helps you join the participatory culture of online media. It helps you realize what you can gain from direct public engagement, and how to use it to make your work easier in some respects and more effective overall. This in turn influences how you plan and execute reporting projects or publishing efforts -- especially learning to feature discussion, not just treat it as a sideshow.

OK, those are my picks for cornerstone skills. What are your choices, and why? And if you aren't yet using these particular skills, why not? Please comment below.

I've written more about this on my blog Contentious.

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