The following piece was originally published in the May issue of The Inlander – the newspaper of Inland Press Association.

Pinterest is hot.
The photo-sharing social network grew by leaps and bounds through the end of 2011 and gained even more momentum during the first quarter of 2012. As you might expect, the explosive growth has prompted newsroom personnel to start asking, “How can we use this in our reporting?”

Before we get to that, let’s back up just a bit and talk about what Pinterest is and how people are using it. Pinterest is the digital version of corkboards you might see at a supermarket or community center. They provide an empty slate for people to post (or “pin”) images or messages
— and others to see and interact with.

Pin? That’s right, Pinterest has another term to file away with the rest of the social-media vocabulary like tweet, check in and
Like — you’ve acquired in the past few years. Pinning is the act of creating or curating content on Pinterest. During sign up, users are
prompted to load a “bookmarklet” (a small button) on to their browser. When users visit a site with a picture they want to pin to one of their boards, they click that little button, write their own caption and add it.

Publishers can also add “Pin It” buttons to their sites to encourage Pinterest users
to interact with their content.

Big Pinnin’

Just how explosive has growth been on Pinterest? ComScore — a web traffic tracker —shows usage in January increased more than 50 percent from just under 10 million users to nearly 15 million. And that number was expected to increase to nearly 20 million by the end of
March. While that figure is just a fraction of Twitter’s more than 300 million users, or the more than half billion users claimed by Facebook, it does indicate a growing awareness and adoption. Most notably, adoption has been by a preponderance of women. Pinterest has become the “in” place to showcase wish lists and everything designed to inspire.

Many boards are about our material culture: fine food and wine, clothes, fashion and shopping. Pinterest isn’t charging for the
service, but there’s definitely potential to do so in the future — not only for them but for newspaper companies looking to better affect
ROI for their advertising customers by directly harnessing the power of personal recommendations.

News usage

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest doesn’t seem to offer enough focus for breaking-news and beat reporters, though it’s not out of the question. However, it could be a gold mine for arts, culture and consumer reporters looking to identify emerging trends for story ideas.

Newsrooms might also find the platform a natural for curating content, preserving stories and giving them a longer shelf life. Of course, also, being active on Pinterest might serve to bring in visitors to your site who are interested in niche content.

Here are a few ideas you might try in your newsroom:

• Fair play: Take the unpublished photos from your county’s fair and publish them on Pinterest, include links to stories on the fair and where folks might buy a print of the photo from your company. Invite the public to visit your board and let them know it’s a home for this kind of local content.
• Gastro-sourcing: Create a board for finding the best lunches in your town for under $10 (or another theme like best Mexican food or taco truck). Invite readers to share their food-related pins with you — you can review and add them to yours, curating a comprehensive source for local  lunching.
• Our town: Can you tell the history of your area in images? Here’s your chance to find out. Audiences love easy-to-understand information on themselves and their hometowns. Create a board of local landmarks and their significance to your town’s history.
• Go crazy: As journalists, it’s important to evaluate your tools to determine their best application for your goals. Look, nobody knows whether Pinterest will be the next Twitter. It could flame out or take off. So for now, just experiment.

Takeaways

Pinterest is growing like waistlines during the holidays. Its popularity stems from widespread adoption among women, many of whom are using it to highlight the material goods they most wish to acquire. News organizations are in their infancy when using the service and are using it to highlight arts and culture content along with fine photography. Though there has been some controversy about whether the site encourages  violations of intellectual property rights, more and more people are joining the site.

If you would like to set up a webinar on Pinterest, or other topics in digital journalism, please call Henry at 505-490-6161 or write to him at henry@lopezwebworks.com

Henry M. Lopez, founder of Lopez Webworks, a Santa Fe, N.M.–based provider of web services, training and consultation is a former Inland Press Minority leadership Fellow and digital manager for the Santa Fe New Mexican. He can be reached at henry@lopezwebworks.com.

This article published in The Inlander, a publication of Inland Press Association, April 2012 issue.

Don’t call it the iPad 3. Apple’s latest offering in the tablet segment, announced in mid-March, isn’t the iPad 3; rather, it’s been tagged with the moniker “the new iPad.” The name drew a great deal of mockery from online pundits who wondered what its successors would be called. The newer iPad? The really, really, really new iPad?

All that aside, The new iPad drew a tsunami’s worth of something else: preorders. In the week before its scheduled March 16 release, a Piper Jaffrey analyst said the company expected Apple to sell more than 1 million units on its first day. Indeed, according to pcmag.com, wait times for the devices before its release were at two to three weeks.
All this for a gadget that starts at $500 — while millions remain out of work during an ongoing recession.

A larger trend at work

Doubtlessly the iPad line represents the 800-pound, 10.1-inch gorilla dominating the tablet landscape. But the iPad is far from the
only animal in the jungle, and it might soon see true competition for its spot as the apex predator.

Despite high-profile flops like HP’s TouchPad and BlackBerry’s Playbook, a slate of high- and low-end tablets have emerged that provide needed options for consumers, mostly based on flavors of Google’s Android operating system.

More and more are finding their way into tablet usage because of these choices: Studies show that the rise in American adults who
own a tablet has been powered as much by lower-end tablets like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook as they were by
high-end devices like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab.

What it means for publishers

Whereas Apple had a near monopoly of the tablet market in 2010, it now holds about 58 percent of that market, according to a January report in the Los Angeles Times. For digital developers and publishers, that means needing to constantly adapt to the
changing market by making more offerings on more platforms, each with its own revenue strategy.

In extracting revenue from the mobile space, publishers have struggled. A study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism found that revenue from mobile platforms accounted for less than a tenth of a
percent of the digital revenue stream for the papers it studied.

Yet opportunities exist in the tablet space and the closer-to-print reading habits of many  users gives reason to be confident that more traditional advertising methods might prove more successful on tablets than they have in desktop and smartphone platforms.
“The tablet will provide more of a display advertising opportunity, noting people use tablets like newspapers, with the heaviest traffic coming in the morning or late afternoon,” said one unnamed executive quoted in the study.

Audience models

As subscription plans become more prevalent on the desktop, publishers have extended those plans to include mobile and tablet applications. Companies like Journalism Online have made multiplatform integration a hallmark of its products.

How these efforts will play out in the long run is unclear, as less than a quarter of tablet users said they’d be willing to pay $5 a month for tablet-based news, according to MSNBC.

Not that subscription fees would be a panacea for newspaper company revenue woes, but the emergence of diverse revenue
stream would certainly be welcome. What does seem clear, at least for now, is that tablet users could be very attractive to high-end
advertisers seeking audiences with disposable incomes.

Tablet users are well educated, tend to have higher incomes than most households and, perhaps surprisingly, aren’t predominantly young hipsters wearing skinny jeans and sipping Americanos at the coffeehouse.

Instead, tablet users tend to be older than 30, and about a third of them are over 50, according to a Pew study.

Takeaways

The tablet market is complex and becoming more complex all the time; the iPad is no longer the only
game in town.

Android-powered platforms are growing vigorously and gaining market share quickly. Tablets and smartphone advertising
will require their own style of revenue-generating advertising, but their audiences comprise attractive demographics.

We talked about how people read on the Web, based on the research of Jakob Nielsen, and the implications such habits have on the way we structure the design of a page and how it can impact the way we write stories. Our conversation also touched on the relationship between usability and search-engine optimization.

The F-Pattern

Online readers are skimmers, use techniques that play to that habit.

Web readers tend to move their eyes in an “F-pattern,” according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. That is to say that as people engage a Web page, their eyes travel further across the width of the screen on the highest parts of the page. It also means that as a page gets longer, those eyeballs tend to not travel as far across the screen on the whole.

Together, we can conclude that our most viewed areas of the screen are the top left regions of the screen while bottom right areas are less viewed. And, the further down we travel, the less likely it is that a reader will reach the content.

Dealing with Skimmers

What’s happening that causes such circumstances? The answer is that online readers tend to be skimmers – they jot their eyes quickly around a page looking for interesting tidbits that couldn’t be found in the first few paragraphs and headline or are seeking out insights into the story.

It probably isn’t in anyone’s best interest to try and change or “correct” this skimming behavior. Rather, like any business catering to its customers, we are all best served by understand the need in the market and meeting the need. In this case, we need to arrange text in such a manner that it plays into the habits of our readers while serving our mission as news professionals to get the word out in our communities.

Pro tip: Just Say It

When writing news online, just tell what the news is. The first few lines of an article are often all that might be read in their entirety. So, don’t hide the news, just put it out there. And, in the interest of making your articles more friendly to search engines, get those key themes, names places and concepts that define your story high up in the text.

Personally, I’m not a fan of anecdotal leads (they’re too often rooted in trivia rather than being insightful) but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them online. Instead, be aware of what you’re writing and how it can help to clearly explain the content of your story quickly so as to keep your reader interested in the story.

Pro tip: Creating Stop Signs

If we accept that readers are often skimmers, then we can conclude that skimming can result in important information being missed by the reader. As journalists, we don’t want that, as news readers we don’t want that either.

So, Nielsen’s research suggests, we need to create stop or yield signs in our text to keep important information from being lost and providing an outline of the content for readers. We do that by creating internal headlines that tell our readers what content they’ll find in a given section of an article.

Review the structure of this article. Notice it began with a lead that told you exactly what you’d get from this article. The sub-headlines (Dealing with Skimmers, The F Pattern, Creating Stop Signs)  then provided information on what the individual sections would provide.

This marks a shift in how content is marketed to readers. We’re not just marketing full articles, we’re marketing sections of those articles and more specifically, individual facts presented in a few paragraphs.

Also, the usage of such internal stop signs will help your readers when they come back to your website in the weeks, months and years following an article’s initial publication.

BBC News routinely does a good job of providing internal headlines in articles. The practice makes content easy to understand and provides reference for later research.

Other Skimming Tactics

CNN uses Story Highlights to call out key information in the article, giving skimmers reason to dive further into the article.

CNN uses a story highlights box that gives updated information about a story and calls out why the story is important. For a reader, this pitch could be the deciding factor in whether to read or skim the entire article. Likewise, it gives the skimmer reason to engage with this topic if the story highlight box successfully conveys what’s compelling about the story.

After all, these efforts made by news organization are meant to sell what’s compelling about the article (publisher tactics don’t remove the need for compelling content.)

Making Us Better

Providing information clearly, in organized patterns make the news easier to ingest and understand. Breaking content into smaller pieces will make it easier for readers to find information when searching for it later. Together, these tactics make for a better news product that people can use in their everyday lives.

We must never forget that not only do we journalists compete against other publications and mediums to gain the attention of readers; we compete against the other pressures and priorities in their lives to win a few minutes of time. If that means that online readers have become skimmers, then we should accommodate that. But in doing so, it’s likely that we’ll make content more easily absorbed by non-skimmers as well.

That’s digital creating better experiences.

Henry M. Lopez provides newsroom training both online and in person, to arrange a training session on this or another topic, contact Henry at 505-490-6161 or henry@lopezwebworks.com.

@henrymlopez Hi would you be able to recommend a few ebooks that could help me learn coding for webjournalism?

The question came from my own tweet mentioning that I used to take classes when I was first starting to learn to code, but have developed enough skill now that I can pick up books and read them to acquire new skills. Though I don’t know Kashfi from an IRL meeting, I thought it was a great question and figured I’d write a post on some reading recommendations.

Getting started

Head First Labs HTML/CSS – In my opinion not every journalist needs to be a well-rounded coding machine. But I do think if your career path includes working online you should doubtlessly have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS. HTML makes up the structure of the page, while CSS directs how your pages are presented. This book is more than 600 pages and filled with very simple and easily understood lessons. Unlike some other series on the market, this series of books (Head First Labs) is made to be fun. There are plenty of graphics and pictures. If you think you might be intimidated by learning HTML or CSS, this is the book for you.

W3Schools.com – W3Schools isn’t a book, it’s a website. And, it’s the place everyone – journo or not – goes for tutorials and refreshers. The site covers a wide swath of Web technologies and includes hands on tutorials. Beyond HTML and CSS, there are tutorials on scripting languages and web services. W3Schools is free and a great way to dip your toes into a bunch of different web technologies.

CSS Pocket Reference - I don’t care how good you get – we all make fundamental errors and sometimes need a reference to fall back on. O’Reily’s CSS pocket reference is a huge help to have on your shelf at 3 am during a 60-hour coding bender. This isn’t a book to learn CSS with, it’s the resource you turn to when you forget selector rules or which attributes can be applied to which tags.

WordPress for Dummies -  Folks who start taking a deep interest in learning to code want to start their own websites. And, it becomes readily apparent that coding each page by hand just isn’t going to cut it (after all you don’t code pages by hand on your company’s site). So, you’re going to need a Content Management System (CMS). WordPress is that CMS for most people, so if you want to start understanding some of the under-the-hood workings of a CMS, WordPress is the right place to start and this book can help.

Up and Going

There’s much more

This isn’t an exhaustive list of resources for someone looking to become more involved in the coding side of digital journalism. It’s not even a comprehensive list of things I read. But it’s a start. Look, you’re going to do fine migrating into web journalism. Don’t worry, you can’t break the Internet, but you can hurt your own career by not acting and learning new skills and techniques. So try something. Not everyone needs to know everything. Try out different technologies, find out what interests you. It could be blogging, or social media. Maybe it’s video editing or audio production. You might end up being a great designer online.

Who knows? You will once you give it a chance.

If the folks reading my column can then go to a party and talk knowledgeably on the topics I write, I’ll consider the column a success.

In this lesson, we’ll retrieve data from the American FactFinder2 site, and connect it with the data we retrieve in the first lesson.

America FactFinder2

This site is the census bureaus repository for census data. It can be a bit tricky to get the exact report you want, so take a deep breath before diving in.

The report we want to pull is for 2010, Santa Fe County, New Mexico: HISPANIC OR LATINO, AND NOT HISPANIC OR LATINO BY RACE by census track. Take a look at the video on how you pull that report.

The detailed work of merging the data and the shapefile information is covered in this next video. It’s about 13 minutes long. Take your time. Ill add some more detailed text here to explain the video with more detail.

Let’s get down to it – you want to make a map based on information from the 2010 census data. You’re not sure how to get it done, so that’s why you’re here. We’re going to go through the steps you need to follow to get a map similar to the one above that I created for The Santa Fe New Mexican. The map was created with free tools. My first map took me several hours to complete. Mostly, that was me screwing up and redoing the same steps over and over again. Once I figure out what the heck I was doing, I was able to crank out a map in 15-20 minutes.

The map we’re doing here will show the distribution of different ethnic groups in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. You can do your own county, but I’d recommend as you’re first starting to use the same data as in the example below. That way, if you have a question, I’ll know what you’re talking about.

First steps

Make three bookmarks in your web browser for the three sites we’ll most be using in this project.

TIGER/Line – This Census bureau page will allow you to download “Shapefiles” which give you an outline for different governmental jurisdictions. For the purposes of this project, we’ll download the shapefile delineating census tracts for a US county.

Shape to Fusion – We’re going to use this free utility to upload the shapefile to Google and make it usable by Google Maps. This is where the magic happens – without this utility you could spend an avalanche of hours trying to hand plot the census tract boundaries.

American FactFinder – This is where the census office puts all that tasty data that you want to share with your readers. We’ll be getting population data sets from there.

Google Fusion Tables – This free Google utility is where we’re going to deposit our data as we get it. It’s also the utility that’s going to merge together the shapefile data we got from TIGER and the census data we got from American Factfinder.

A spreadsheet program – You can use a program like Microsoft Excel for tweaking the data. If you don’t have a copy of Excel, no problem, use a free spreadsheet like the one included in Google Docs or consider downloading Open Office. It’s free, too.

Getting your shapefiles where you can use them

I’ll recommend starting a folder on your desktop to hold the files you’ll need for this project, I don’t care what you name it.

Visit TIGER and download the shapefile for Santa Fe County, New Mexico. If you want to download the file for your own county, go ahead, but you’ll benefit by using the same data I am for purposes of this tutorial. Later, when you do your own map, you’ll grab the shapefile for your county.

Watch this very short video to see step-for-step how to download the shapefile.

The files will arrive in .zip format. There’s no need to un-zip the file, we’ll upload it in that format. But, if curiosity gets the best of you, unzip the file and notice that what you get is a folder with several files inside of it. Those files contain the geometry of the census tracts in Santa Fe County. There’s not much you can do with these without specialty software. Let’s move on.

Uploading to Google Fusion Tables

In order to get your shapefile in to Google Fusion Tables in a format that Google Maps can use, we use the Shape to Fusion utility at http://www.shpescape.com/.  You will need to have a Google log in. Take a look at the following short video demonstrating the upload. When you’re done you’ll be able to explore the data the utility uploaded to your Google Fusion Tables.

If you click the visualize menu, then “Map” you’ll see that you’ve just created an outline of the county whose shapefile you downloaded from Tiger and uploaded to Google Fusion Table via Shape-to-Fusion.

Our next lesson will include how we go about pulling data from the census and then how we marry that data with the geographic data we’ve laid out above.

As always, if you have a question, feel free to leave the question in the comments below, or use the following widget to leave me a voicemail. By clicking the widget, my Google Voicemail will call you and you can leave me a message.

These are slides from my “Taking Social Media Reporting to the Next Level” Webinar. This would be for folks who would still consider themselves as novices but have a working knowledge of twitter.

We talk about using the advanced search and how you can create geographically relevant searches with twitter’s widget module.

I’ve not included an audio track of the actual lecture. If you have questions, drop them in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

Thanks,
Henry