If you’re on the fence about signing up for Twitter, know this: Twitter can drive traffic to your site.

This blog is less than a year old. I’m 23 years old — hardly an established brand or identity. That’s why I only have a little more than 100 people following me on Twitter.

But Twitter drives traffic to my blog every day, and on some days it is the top non-search engine referrer to my site. Even if you don’t have a lot of followers, Twitter is very viral.

Let’s say I make a new tweet on Twitter about a new blog post. People read it and like it, and then they post that they are reading it on Twitter as well.

Some of their friends find my post through their tweets and then decide that they are going to tweet about my blog post too. And it continues. Suddenly, people who have never read my blog or knew I was even on Twitter are coming to my blog.

All with little work on my part. Now if Twitter drives traffic to my blog, imagine what Twitter could do for a large, established brand.

The secret to getting Twitter to drive traffic is to be interesting. Most news organizations have missed this point. Most news organizations use Twitter accounts to just list their most recent headlines.

Boring. Twitter is not a repurposing tool. It’s a conversation.

The most popular people on Twitter have a brand that people want to know more about. The New York Times Twitter account has about 2,400 followers. Not bad, but blogger Robert Scoble has more than 14,000 followers.

CNN has about 2,100 followers, while venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has more than 6,500 followers. The major mistake that both the Times and CNN make is that they simply use Twitter as a headline feed. But Twitter is about conversations, not one-way pronouncements.

Before I make a Twitter post, I often talk about what I am writing about, why I am writing it and just give my general thoughts. People can then ask me questions or make comments. It’s a public conversation.

In fact, many times you’ll see me working through my thought process on Twitter before making a blog post. But it gets more people interested in my content. In fact, Twitter is a fantastic brand-building tool.

The Times probably doesn’t see a big traffic bump from 2,400 followers, but an individual like Scoble probably sees a lot of traffic originating from Twitter. Scoble is much more popular on Twitter than the Times or CNN because he uses Twitter as it was meant to be used.

So, how can news organizations use Twitter to generate traffic? First, news organization could begin using Twitter to have conversations about stories they are covering. Imagine a public page 1 meeting, where people can ask questions.

A page 1 concept could be very popular with users. Anyone at the Times who writes a blog or column should have a Twitter account where they share opinions 140 characters at a time. Employees must also be willing to interact with people on Twitter too.

Twitter is also a great way to cover live events in new ways. Many events are not broadcast, and those are good events to Twitter. Heck a reporter could even use Twitter to cover a local government meeting, and then use the tweets to write a full-fledged story.

I’ve done this before, and Twitter works pretty well as a note-taking tool. Plus, it gets people more involved in the process. All without any extra work on my part.

If you use Twitter as merely another one-way conversation tool, it will be nothing more than a really poor version of RSS. But if you use Twitter as the two-way communication tool that it is, not only will you be able to drive traffic, but you’ll most likely be able to discover new readers and users.

User interfaces matter, and that’s something most newspapers don’t get.

But it’s something that the Mustang Daily thoroughly understands. Their site has a striking, elegant and simply beautiful design. That’s why the Mustang Daily gets this weeks College High Five.

The design is even more striking when one considers that MustangDaily.net is powered by College Publisher. Yes, you read that correctly. The Mustang Daily proves that you can use a preexisting CMS like College Publisher and still highly customize your site.

Collegiate publications using College Publisher, or considering it, should take a long look at what the Mustang Daily has proven is possible. Not only is it a very striking design for a college newspaper, but is also better looking than most professional journalism Web sites. The site, however, is more than just a pretty face.

The Mustang Daily has a great feature set complete with multimedia, podcasts, blogs and interactive Flash packages. But it’s the great design that allows this content to shine. The site is so clean, elegant and easy to navigate that it’s easy to find everything. Plus, a design like this makes it easy to discover new content or content that a user wasn’t even thinking about.

That’s what a great design should strive to do.

The Center for Innovation in College Media named the Mustang Daily the best overall design. The judges had this to say:

They take number one because of their overall organization and abundance of visual elements on the homepage. It has simple navigation below the masthead; well-designed secondary buttons for multimedia, blogs, etc.; dominant, clickable, rotating art; a concise “online features” section highlighted by a subtle background color; well organized section previews complete with the main story of each section containing thumbnails; a unique “yousubmit” button; not to mention a well-placed AP viewer and poll. All of this is found on a homepage that is one of the smallest in length in the competition. The masthead type is a little lacking in proportion, but other than that it’s pretty flawless. Beautiful. Useable. Winner.

The one negative I see on this site is that main story content sends users to a new page. This is an issue because most people use pop-up blockers. I had to tweak my blocker to view the main story content.

It’s strange because all the other content on the site does not behave in this manner. But this is something that should be very easy to fix.

If you’re looking to do redo your Web site, you would be hard pressed to find a better inspiration than the Mustang Daily.

Life is too short to spend your days toiling away at a job you don’t like.

With an imminent recession facing this country that will surely rock the journalism industry further to the core, it’s a good time to reevaluate what each of us is doing.

A lot of journalism companies aren’t worth working for anymore. If you’re going to get laid off anyway, you might as well enjoy the ride.

Journalists have long believed their only concern was content.

Business concerns, metrics, marketing, etc aren’t important to those journalists. Business staffers conversely have cared little about the content side of the business and the effects their practices have had on the content side.

The definition of a dysfunctional company is one where content producers don’t care about business, while business staffers don’t care about content. That modus operandi may have worked when journalism companies had monopolies, but it makes little sense in the hyper-competitive online landscape. Now content producers need to make compelling content that can stand the scrutiny that comes with hyper competition.

Business staffers now must consider the impact their practices have on the content side of the business. Is trying to stick too many — often loud — ads on a Web page bad for content? Yes!

Do design and user interfaces matter greatly on the Web? Yes! Do pay walls hurt content and content producers? Yes!

Journalists need to be concerned with making sure they are producing content that matters to users, while business staffers need to make sure their decisions don’t detract, but rather enhance content offerings. This in no way, shape or form means that content producers should be trading coverage for ads or violating any journalistic ethics, but it does mean that people producing content have to care about producing content that people want in the forms they want them in.

Without a monopoly to prop up legacy journalism practices, journalists must find new ways to operate.

“There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.” - Eugene Kleiner of KPCB.

It’s about high time that journalists and newspapers start panicking. At least panic will lead to disruption, and often panic is the only way to forge lasting change. Too many journalists think that the Web has just brought on a transitional period.

It’s not. It’s nothing remotely similar to a transitional period. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift.

Howard Owens wrote a post about how journalism has radically changed forever:

This isn’t a “transition period” for newspapers. It’s a whole new game.

Journalists, editors and publishers need to radically rethink journalism and newspapers. What’s happening to the newspaper industry is not cyclical. When the economy is healthy again, most newspapers will be living on life support.

It’s time to panic.

Newspapers don’t need to just add blogs, databases and video. Newspapers need to radically rethink the fundamental product they produce and the business model they operate under.

Zac Echola says journalists need to realize the days of false scarcity (and monopolies) are over. The nature of the Web and ever-falling technology prices mean that competitors will increase over time due to falling barriers to entry:

Gone are the days of false scarcity (i.e. airwaves, static parks) and expensive resources (i.e. ink, paper and shipping) where the prices continue to rise. The falling costs of technology make distribution easier.

The barriers to entry for a newspapers are great. Two of the biggest costs associated with a newspaper are printing (paper, ink and presses) and distribution. Many paper’s spend more than half of their budget on printing and distribution — the kinds of costs that online competitors don’t have.

The barriers to entry on the Web are very minimal. Many, many people have their own sever space like me. Millions of people have blogs — most blogging services are free.

The only way newspapers can compete with this newfound competition is to be better than the competition. But producing sub-par online products, utilizing pay walls, charging for archival content and using archaic distribution channels is not a good way to compete in an abundant market place. Echola argues that content owners need to unbundle their content, allowing it to reach the largest possible audience.

Many newspapers are owned by large media conglomerates. They’re built for slow, glacial change. The Web is the ultimate democratic-capitalistic market place.

Anyone can compete.

That’s why it’s time to start panicking. Yearly mass layoffs may count as panicking, but they do not count as radically rethinking journalism. Nor will they break the downward trend that newspapers face.

One of the world’s most famous venture capitalists John Doerr gave an impassioned speech on climate change. Watch the video and substitute journalism in for climate change and see just how eerily similar it sounds:

We cannot afford to underestimate this problem. We face irreversible and catastrophic consequences. We must act and we must act decisively.

“Our question is always, ‘How do we grow in a way that is leveraged?’ We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.” - John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla.

That leads us to Today’s Thought: Companies that are only concerned about making money will make little, while companies focused on creating memorable experiences will make a lot.

Too many news organizations are only focused on making money. They’ve lost sight of what they originally set out to do: Tell memorable stories, inform the public, serve the community — serve their users. Instead they’ve morphed into some perverted mission of only caring about quarterly balance sheets and profit margins.

In short, making money has become the primary aim for many news organizations, which is they are losing money, readers and impact.

Only news organizations focused on creating memorable experiences for users will see growth and have a bright future ahead of them.

What words — if any — are your news organizations not willing to print?

I don’t believe there is a traditional media organization (in the U.S. at least) that is willing to print every word in the English language, especially those deemed offensive.

My paper is willing to print “shit” in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.

Here is the passage that will be edited with [expletive] in most editions:

The reminders of danger are never far away. A huge explosion one recent Friday rocked the city just before 7 a.m. A suicide truck bomber had blown himself up at a police station about a mile away. The next day, five soldiers were packing up tents they’d recently vacated when the staccato crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons ripped through the air.

The fusillade sounded as if it were right overhead. Spc. Jeremy Epps didn’t even flinch, as the others scrambled for cover. They laughed at his bravado.

“Man, the neighborhood I grew up,” said Epps, 28, from Indianapolis. “That shit don’t bother me.”

That last quote makes this passage work. War is gritty. It’s the reality on the ground.

For those of you who don’t know, Stars and Stripes is only printed overseas. It’s the official newspaper of the Department of Defense with the majority of our (print) readership currently in the Mideast because of the two wars. Many of our readers have witnessed far worse things than words that may offend some notion of community standards.

The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.

That leads us into the notion that newspapers are for families, despite the fact that the younger portions of most families do not read newspapers. Let’s make this clear: there is no such thing as a family newspaper when the average newspaper reader is around 5 million years old.

Maybe it is a fair compromise to use [expletive] in editions of the paper not serving people in combat. Maybe our readers in the Middle East want their stories gritter, more real, while readers on bases in Germany, Japan and elsewhere want a paper that adheres to more standard journalism practices when it comes expletives. Most papers wouldn’t have made a comprise — they would have censored any remotely borderline word in every edition.

I don’t claim to have all the answers in this situation, but I do think it is a bizarre construct that supposed 1st amendment publications censor themselves arbritarily based on some notion of community standards (in the U.S. at least). This situation at Stars and Stripes could have gone either way, and a compromise was reached. In this situation, I’m willing to bet none of our readers will care.

I’m not sure, however, how one justifies how the Los Angeles Times censored Tribune overlord Sam Zell’s comment. The Times reported that Zell uttered a “two-word obscenity” at a photographer.

The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of two-word obscenities. There is no point in censoring something if people won’t have any idea what you’re writing about. His obscenity, by the way, was the crux of the story. Omitting makes it a no news story.

One final thought: perhaps the reason why so many conversational and occasionally snarky blogs are popular is because people have grown tired of the dowdy Mainstream Media that won’t even print obscenities — in the Times’ case — that are essential to the story.

The Web is grittier, more real than printed publications, and I think that’s something users connect with a lot more.

A new Harris Poll found that a majority of Americans don’t trust the media and believe traditional journalism is “out of touch,” according to The Editor’s Weblog.

Here are two statistics that I want to home in on:

1. More than 50% of Americans polled now do not trust the press
2. 2/3 of Americans believe traditional journalism is “out of touch” with what readers want from their news.

These findings are eerily similar to a recent We Media/Zogby Interactive poll. That poll featured such gems as:

1. 67% of Americans feel traditional journalism is not meeting their expectations
2. 70% feel journalism is important to the “quality of life” in their communities, yet 64% are dissatisfied with journalism in their communities.

Journalists can blame the Web, Craigslist, Monster.com, the economy, the consolidation of ownership and all the other bogymen out there, but that can’t shake the fact that Americans don’t believe traditional journalism understands what readers want. It’s hard to run a business when employees don’t care about customers.

At the end of the day, journalists need to realize the cold, hard reality that journalism is in fact a business, and business thrive when they serve their customers well. The vast majority of journalism is not Fourth Estate Journalism. It’s community journalism — the kind of journalism that the community decides what is important.

I’ve talked a whole lot about niche journalism recently. That’s what the Web represents and what people want. Well, you can’t have a successful niche audience if you only care about what interests you.

Audience is key. You have to care about your audience.

That’s the fundamental problem with traditional journalism — not enough journalists care about their audiences.

The Gannett blog (not affiliated with Gannett) reports that Gannett’s 10-paper Wisconsin Newspapers group is considering a plan that would merge copy and pagination work into a regional operation.

Obviously, Gannett believes the plan will save money by eliminating positions and reducing “duplicate” work.

Consolidating all copy editing into giant regional or statewide desks has emerged as another way for newspaper publishers to cut labor costs at a time when revenue is falling. But critics say copy editors can’t do their jobs well when they work far from the communities their papers serve. (Mayor Smith? Smyth?) Gannett business partner MediaNews Group is a prominent proponent of consolidation.

I’m sure this move would save money in the short term. It might even save a lot of money. In the long term, however, I’m fairly confident this cost saving strategy will cost Gannett money by further compromising their journalism products.
Most copy editors I know are overworked as it is. I’ve known Gannett copy editors at small and mid-sized papers that routinely worked more than their 37.5 hour work week, but were not paid overtime. They had little to no time to take breaks either.

Cutting positions would only increase the overwhelming workload that many copy desks operate under. That kind of work load is one reason why so many misspellings and factual errors creep into stories (that and the fact that writers have to write ridiculous amounts of copy these days). Each one of these errors undermines the core value of a newspaper, causing some readers to cancel their subscriptions because they feel the product isn’t good enough.

Credibility is all journalism has, and I fear too many publishers and business staffers don’t understand that concept. All they see are dollars and cents, but readers see so much more. Every mistake could be the last mistake that a reader is willing to tolerate.

I do think the concerns over copy editors not knowing about local communities are valid. Certainly remote copy editing can work, but it often takes more time. A local copy editor knows the area well, and won’t have to look up nearly the same amount of information as a remote copy editor.

Now, I could see the merit of combining design desks, because design work could be done reasonably well remotely. Plus, many papers within the same chain have identical designs to begin with. A good, clean design is important, but design is not nearly as important as content.

Heck, most of the stories I read each day I read through Google reader. For me — and millions of other readers — content is king.

What do you think about creating a regional copy and design desk? It seems to me to be another short-term fix that will cause long-term damage.

In the past week we’ve lost two well-known journalism blogs that used WordPress.

MultimediaShooter.com might be down for the count, and Matt Waite has decided to stop using WordPress after his site was hacked and his MySQL database ruined.

Waite is now developing a custom Django-based platform for his new site. He is done with WordPress, and its security issues. Should we all be concerned about the security of WordPress? Are there better, more secure options available?

I love WordPress and think it’s a fantastic platform, but if it’s not secure enough, I’m wasting my time. An insecure platform can destroy a Web site and a entire company. Hopefully, WordPress 2.5 fixes many of these issues. I wonder which version of WordPress MultimediaShooter and Waite used?

This is yet another reminder of the need to back up regularly. Hopefully, this is not a disturbing trend that is forming.