For years individual content producers in news organizations didn’t have an easy way to figure out how popular or useful their content was with people.

But with today’s advanced site analytics, content producers have unprecedented data about users and their surfing habits. I wrote a long post about this subject over at BeatBlogging.Org. Consider this post the Cliff Note’s version with a few added tidbits.

What makes this data so important?

With Web analytics, content creators like writers, bloggers, photographers, database developers, etc can find out which content is getting the most page views and visits and from where those visitors are coming from. Content creators can also find out which search terms most often land people on their content.

Analytics will allow for content producers to make content that is more appealing to their users. For a football beat, it might mean creating more previews and Q&A sessions and less feature stories. For an education blog, it might mean writing more about teachers’ issues and less about the school district as a whole.

It also might mean different kinds of content. Your users might prefer posts that are short and comprised of lists. My users might prefer longer paragraphs. The only way to understand what our individual users want is to track their browsing habits.

The timing of posts is also extremely critical, and this varies per beat per news organization:

In general, after lunch and after work are the two peak times for Web traffic. This, however, is not universal, and detailed Web analytics will allow content producers to know the peak times to release content on their Web sites. In fact, different beat blogs at the same paper might have different peak traffic times.

Now, not every news organization allows content producers access to this information. In fact, most may not, but the content producers I have spoken to almost uniformly say it has helped them do their jobs better. Every news organization worth anything already has detailed site analytics.

It doesn’t cost a company money to give more people access to this information, but site analytics can be complicated and hard to understand without training. Some newsrooms have come up with ways of getting around that.

Suzanne Yada said her newspaper, the Visalia Times-Delta, has a daily meeting at 3 p.m. to discuss traffic figures and which stories are getting the most page views. Ryan Sholin says at the last paper he worked at he sent out a daily “Top 5.” Sholin said, however, that bloggers had full access to their stats.

Whether a news organization gives access to this data to every content producer or whether a news organization has a meeting or e-mail to discuss Web traffic, it doesn’t matter. What ultimately matters is that news organizations give content producers vital information that will allow them to do their jobs better.

To all my blogging readers, could you imagine blogging blind? That’s essentially what many news organizations are asking their content producers to do.

If your company doesn’t allow content producers access to this information, I have a question for you. Why doesn’t your company give individual content producers information about the content they produce?

Do copy editors have a future in journalism?

Will that role be drastically changing? Traditionally, copy editors at most newspapers had to do more than just edit copy. They also had to do page layout, fit stories to fixed spaces, write headlines, write captions, etc. Obviously, page layout is not needed on the Web, and every beat blogger should understand SEO for headline writing. And it might make sense to replace most captions with tags.

Don’t get me started on fitting stories to space either. That skill is dead. Stories on the Web should be as long or as short as they need to be. Copy editors no longer need to spend hours trying to fit a 15-inch story in an 8-inch space.

Every journalism company should have some copy editors, but the era of copy editors heavily rewriting content is over. News organizations can no longer afford to have employees whose main job is to fix the mistakes of other employees. It’s one thing to polish work, but another thing entirely to redo it.

Every beat blogger and online reporter will have to know how to write clean copy. It’s still a wise idea to have copy editors, however, but what will their other duties be?

Maximizing headline SEO? Audio and video post production? Making sure content is properly tagged?

I’m working on some content today for beatblogging.org about the moderation of user comments on stories and blogs.

I need your help.

How does you news organization handle these moderating duties? Are your comments moderated or unmoderated? If they are moderated, who does it? Do your writers and bloggers interact with posters?

What has worked well for you? What hasn’t worked well?

For point of referrence, this blog has a policy were everyone’s first comment is automatically held for moderation. If it is deemed appropriate, subsequent comments are not held for moderation. There are some other guidelines that garner why a post might get held for moderation as well.

It has worked well for me so far, especially since I actively moderate this blog myself and interact with readers.

Because TwentySomethingJournalist.com just launched.

You know what the worst kind of journalist is? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist doesn’t respect the newspaperman myth? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist doesn’t respect the Paper God? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist is ruining journalism? A twenty-something journalist.

What will the kids these days think of next? A site dedicated to finding innovative ways of modernizing journalism? God Lord.

On May 8th, I made a post about how a previous post from a year earlier had a resurgence in traffic.

I thought that traffic would eventually subside, but I was wrong. In less than 3 months, that post has almost doubled the amount of page views it has:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging has taught so much about how the Web works. When I made that post, I never envisioned that more than a year later it would still be receiving consistent traffic.

The Web works so much different than print. With a daily newspaper, for instance, all the views for a story basically come in one shot on the day an article is published. The day I launched that post (and the day after) are nowhere near the biggest days of traffic for that post.

That post also never had a huge day of traffic, and posts don’t need to generate giant days of traffic to be able to bring in a lot of traffic to a blog in the aggregate. About 90 was the most page views that post ever received in one day, but it has consistently drawn traffic. It has about 1,400 page views now, and in a year, it will probably have between 2,000-3,000.

A couple months ago I made a big SEO push on this blog. I changed the URL structure, put the post titles before my blog name, made sure I wrote headlines with lots of keywords for SEO, developed a site map and made some other changes to the site. I knew that my summer might be busy (I did BeatBlogging.org and Stripes at the same time during June), but I didn’t want my traffic to drop off that much.

And it hasn’t. While, I haven’t been setting records, July will probably be my second-highest month in terms of traffic for the JI. Not bad, considering I don’t post that much anymore, and I haven’t had a big, really popular post in awhile (BeatBlogging.Org is where my best work is these days).

But what I do have is a lot of long tail traffic. 165 posts received traffic yesterday, in large part due to strong SEO. With each post I make (this is No. 301), that long tail traffic gets more robust. Most of my traffic comes in via search engines and referrals right now.

Every journalist should at least experiment with blogging. I have been doing Web work since the the 90s, but blogging has taught me so much about the link economy of the Web. More journalists need to understand that economy.

It’s how the Web works.

A lot of journalists got into this business because they like to tell stories.

I think that’s one fundamental reason why so many journalists have a hard time adapting to the changing news landscape. For me, it was never about the story — it was always about the information and news.

So, if the format changes, it doesn’t really bother me. I’m not married to the format or the medium. I’m not here to weave intricate narratives and tell stories.

In fact, I’m not very good at telling oral stories. But I can tell you a lot of facts, figures and information.

This post was brought on by two things. First, the other night I was getting some drinks with some journalists and one said, “I’m not a journalist. I’m a storyteller.” He talked about how he had trouble keeping his stories short and didn’t like taking out quotes and information for brevity.

Obviously, his work was more for himself than for his readers. That’s does not serve our readers well, and it certainly doesn’t help journalism.

The second part of this post was inspired by a post by Howard Owens, “Not all information needs to be crafted into a story:”

Storytelling, whether written or visual, then becomes something that is more about serving your own ego than serving your readers.

So check your ego, whether writing or shooting, and give people useful or entertaining information in an accessible package.  Save the storytelling for when you really have a story to tell.

A lot of journalism seems to be ego driven. Some journalists report on what they want to cover, in the mediums they want to report in. It has very little to do with what people actually want.

But we’re in a business. We have to produce a product that people want. And most people just don’t read the whole story (thanks to Owens for the link):

But here’s the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they’re interested in … and of those, over two thirds don’t read every word.

Yes, sometimes journalism is storytelling, but as Owens notes, we should save the storytelling for when we have really good stories to tell. I see so many feature, anecdotal and other non-news ledes on stories that are really just news stories.

Let me tell you something: I have stopped reading a lot of news stories because I didn’t want to put up with another boring feature lede on a news story. I wanted the news, and I wasn’t willing to wait for some journalist’s ego to go by. And I’ve read some great non-news ledes and they were usually on great feature stories.

If you’re a storyteller, it’s no fun to have to truncate your stories. Is it really a good story then? Is blogging a good storytelling medium? Probably not.

But if you’re in the business of providing facts, figures, information — news — you’ll find blogging and Web journalism to be amazing. The Web (and its mobile cousin) provide a great deal of immediacy and depth that print never could. The Internet is an awesome vehicle for information.

Too many journalists think of themselves as storytellers and not as journalists. People ultimately want journalism so they can be informed. I think if we concentrate on making journalism that people want, we’ll find ourselves and our industry in much better shape.

And sometimes people want great stories, but let’s not force every news item into the storytelling format.

I’ve spent the last two years producing journalism in a myriad of formats and the last year arguing for ways to modernize and make relevant journalism in the 21st century.

I’ve argued for reinventing journalism. I’ve argued for journalists to let go of everything they’ve ever known.

Ultimately, informing people is my passion. I care deeply about journalism. I hope that’s what you’ve taken home from my blog over the past year.

I don’t care so much what medium or what form it takes. I just care about giving people information. I just want to make journalism better than it is.

I’ve been presented with a great opportunity to do just that, which is why I’m joining the Beat Blogging project with NYU’s PressThinker, Jay Rosen. Together we’re trying to discover how beat reporters are pushing the practice of journalism using Web tools like blogging and social networking.

Jay is one of those professors who gets it. He understands that journalism needs to change, and he has actively been pursuing ways to modernize journalism with projects like NewAssignment.Net, AssignmentZero.com, OffTheBus.Net and, of course, BeatBlogging.Org. It’s an honor to get to work with someone who has dedicated his career to improving journalism.

This project gives me the opportunity to do just that: improve the practice by adapting it better to the Web. It’s something I really believe in. And when I believe in something, I give it my all.

David Cohn did a fantastic job of getting this project rolling. But now it’s his time to push the practice of journalism further with his start-up Spot.Us. David is the kind of person journalism needs more of — smart, dedicated, innovative and, most of all, entrepreneurial. He got the Knight Foundation to give him $340,000 for his innovative idea.

David knows the future of journalism will look nothing like the past. He is actively working to make journalism better. We all need to be.

I’ve been out of college for two years, working to produce content that people care about. But now I can finally say my career has begun, because I’ll get to spend everyday working on the next phase of journalism, adapting the core practice of journalism — reporting — to the web.

That’s what Beat Blogging is all about.  Right now, there are beat reporters rethinking what it means to be a journalist. They are using new tools to do their jobs quicker and more effectively, while also engaging their communities better. Those are the journalists we want to highlight.

Join me as I scour the World Wide Web for the people who are pushing the practice of beat reporting. It promises to be an informational and wild ride.

P.S. Check out Jay’s post about Beat Blogging, where he looks back at the project six months in. Jay lays out how the project has gone and what the future will hold.

Lost in the whole Rob Curley/LoudounExtra “flop” flap is that innovation is never easy.

Heck, six out of 10 start-ups fail within the first four years of operation (let alone individual ideas and products at a start-up). And for some reason people are using the performance of LoudounExtra.com (it’s still going by the way) to cast judgment on Curley, his ideas and hyperlocal journalism in general.

Some people are going as far to use the WSJ piece as a “told you so” to hyperlocal journalism. Some are even personally attacking Curley and calling him a fraud.

With this kind of climate, how many journalists are really going to want to try to stick their necks out and attempt some real innovation? That’s what Curley did. No one ever said innovation was easy or that it always works as planned.

Curley would probably be the first to admit that LoudounExtra could have been better. It could have served its readers better. Lessons were learned from the site.

Innovation is a bumpy road.

But that’s just the thing. Sometimes you can have a great idea with great execution and still not perform as well as you thought you would. That doesn’t make what you did a waste of time.

No one said trying to innovate and build better journalism was easy. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

Curley has had many successes. He’ll learn from his lessons in Washington and make better, more useful and cooler products in Las Vegas. People shouldn’t use one site as a carte blanche to dismiss everything he has ever done.

But that’s not the point of this post. This is about the restrictive culture that many journalists seem to foster right now. Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink probably said it best about the unwillingness of many journalists to try to innovate:

News people who wonder why their industry gets creamed by Google and Yahoo are the same news people who dismiss an idea after it fails once.

Google has a culture where innovation and, gasp, failure are celebrated. To not embrace failure (or stumbling in the case of LoudounExtra) is to basically write off ever taking a risk. Even the best stumble from time to time.

The past few weeks have been filled with rumors about a new version of Apple’s wildly successful iPhone. But no talks about the iPhone’s spiritual ancestor, ???????? ????? ????????the Apple Newton. It was a failure.

The Newton has been an inspiration for much of the PDA market. Perhaps without the Newton, Apple wouldn’t have the iPhone. Everyone talks about another famous Apple product, the iPod, but how many people talk about Apple TV (or about its meager success)?

For every product Apple releases, many more prototypes never make the market. And even some of Apple’s products that do make it to the marketplace, like the Newton, end of failing. Failure has only made Apple work harder to innovate.

Failure must also make journalists work harder to innovate. Many innovative projects will fail. But we cannot allow ourselves to fear failure.

It’s fair to criticize LoudounExtra, because it didn’t go as planned, and we should learn from each other. It’s fair to point out how the project could have worked differently (no one, even Curley’s staff at WPNI is saying that LoudounExtra didn’t have faults or that they couldn’t have done things differently). It’s perfectly fair to dissect the project and what WPNI was trying to accomplish.

It’s not fair, however, to look at LoudounExtra and use it as proof that new, innovative forms of journalism aren’t possible. It’s not far to say that just because one project didn’t do well that another, similar project couldn’t succeed with some tweaking.

What happened with LoudounExtra does not reaffirm the status quo. The status quo certainly isn’t working. Journalism needs innovation.

Nor is it fair to look at the failure of other start-ups like Backfence.com and say that because of them hyperlocal journalism can’t succeed. Mark Potts, one of the founders of Backfence, has been learning from past hyperlocal attempts to try to understand what will and won’t work:

Backfence is gone, LoudounExtra is struggling, and neither Pegasus News nor Outside.In can be labeled a commercial success at this point. So what’s the right formula for hyperlocal?

I think the answer lies somewhere at the intersection of all of these models. You need sharp technology, lots of databases, aggregation of existing blogs and content, and lots of low, low-cost user-generated content. Professional content is good, too, if someone else is paying for it. You’ve got to be intensely local (LoudounExtra, by covering a 520-square-mile county, missed the boat here). And then you’ve got to market the hell out of the resulting stew, with aggressive community outreach, grassroots campaigns and, if you’re fortunate enough to be attached to traditional media, a print counterpart and the boost you get from an attached media Web site.

It’s not fair to look at every journalism start-up that falters or fails and say, “I told you so.” Many of those failures will directly lead to the successes of other start-ups in the future. Some of those failures will teach us the lessons needed to turn this industry around.

Will Sullivan is correct to point out that change doesn’t happen immediately:

Change is hard.

Trying new things at a media organization that’s claim to fame is on the Pulitzer name is especially hard.

99 percent of innovation is failing, then dusting yourself off and trying things a different way. If people in your own company aren’t interested in helping you succeed, then maybe it’s time to move on.

We all get that journalism organizations are facing tough economic times, but it is irresponsible to assume that every new idea or project that is tried will be an overnight success. Maybe even LoudounExtra will be a success if its given more time to marinate.

I’m glad to see journalists like Sullivan standing up to the parade of journalists that want Curley’s hide. I’m going to leave you with some final thoughts from entrepreneurial journalist Steve Outing:

News companies, especially, really need to inject some entrepreneurial folks into their operations. Entrepreneurs fail, learn from it, and move on. They don’t give up.

One of my good high-school friends signed up for Facebook last week.

Yes, the same Facebook that, had you listened to the digerati, has jumped the shark.

But Facebook hasn’t jumped the shark. It’s still becoming more popular and adding more features. Facebook may have jumped the shark for the kinds of people who have to try every social networking service in its alpha-invite-only stage, but it certainly hasn’t for everyday people.

It’s great to have friends who are pushing the envelope, and to be with people who are willing to try new things. I love my digerati friends. But we cannot lose sight of what the average person is doing.

When I say non-wired, I don’t mean someone without a mobile phone, computer or the Internet. But I mean people who don’t live and breathe Web 2.0. In fact, they probably don’t read Wired magazine, and isn’t that the ultimate barometer of one’s wiredness?

Let’s look at Twitter as a good example. If you just listened to bloggers and the digerati you would think that Twitter is the hottest thing going today on the Web. Oh wait, it’s jumped the shark because of frequent outages recently.

In reality, Twitter has less than 2 million users in the world. In many ways, Twitter isn’t even mainstream, let alone clones like Pownce. In comparison, Facebook has more than 70 million active users.

My friend is like the majority of Americans — high school diploma, has a computer with Internet, uses a mobile phone but doesn’t have a blog, probably doesn’t know what the hell Web 2.0 is supposed to mean (does anyone, really?) and probably has no interest in joining Twitter.

Ultimately, we have to build products that not only interest people on the cutting edge, but that also provide functionality that average person can and will want to use everyday.

For my friend, the time was right to join Facebook because its functionality made sense for him. I don’t think he’ll be joining Twitter (or FriendFeed) anytime soon.

It’s a simple question: What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

And it’s a simple answer: News organizations should stop pretending like it’s the pre-Internet days. Most news organizations are still legacy-first. Newspapers still care more about the print edition than the Web edition. Beats are still centered around making content for print edition.

The same goes for broadcast. Even the best news organizations often have separate Web staffs that produce editorial content for the Web product. But that makes no sense.

Why have two staffs to produce editorial content, when most employees could be creating content that works on multiple platforms? That’s what I mean by rethinking staff resources.

It’s simply a matter of making employees and content work for us. Duplication of work is a great way to stifle innovation, because most news organizations are under a tremendous budget crunch and can’t afford to waste resources like that.

It’s easier to go from Web-first to print than the other way around. Why? Because the Web is incredibly flexible.

It can do all sorts of content incredibly well. Print, for instance, can only do writing, and photos to an extent, well. And print even has major limitations on written content that the Web doesn’t have (arbitrary story lengths, anyone?).

Let’s take the example of a beat reporter. Some beat reporters have begun blogging, but their blogs are often treated as one more thing to do. That’s hardly a way to promote innovative content. In fact, one-more-thing syndrome is a good way to promote staff burnout.

Rather, a blog should be the heart of a beat reporters arsenal — not the 15-inch story. Any time a nugget of information comes in, a beat reporter should blog about it (or post to Twitter or both). As news comes in a blogger can either add to his original post or make a new post.

Twitter updates take seconds to write, but make fantastic notes for longer written pieces later on. This keeps readers updated and interested.

At the end of the day, when the dust has settled, it will be a lot easier to put together a 15-inch story. A beat reporter will already have notes (Twitter is great for this) and several post of content to work with.

But imagine the reverse scenario. A beat reporter concentrates on producing copy for the print edition first. This means no meaningful content will be posted until a story is completed for the print edition (or stories). This also means the story may be an aribitrary length to fit print needs — not the story’s needs. Many beat reporters who operate like this will occasionally dump smaller news items into their blogs.

When people ask “how can we make more time for innovation,” it’s really more about using time more wisely than about making more time. Think about it. Blogging and Twitter are naturally mobile friendly, which saves us even more time while reaching an even broader audience.

That’s another bird killed with the same stone. Any good blog has at least one RSS feed (if not multiple ones for comments and sometimes categories). Google Reader is a fantastic (and free) mobile RSS reader. Without doing any extra work your content is already mobile friendly.

And I don’t have to explain how ridiculously mobile friendly Twitter is. So, now a beat reporter isn’t actually doing any extra work, but he is hitting the Web and mobile with full force. And because of the way blogging and Twitter work, it’s extremely easy to make a print story from all writing that has already been done.

We need to make our content work for us. This means making our content smarter and rethinking how we us staff resources in news organizations.

This is my May post for the Carnival of Journalism. It is currently hosted by Ryan Sholin over at Invisible Inkling.