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Twitter mandates?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by beanpole, Jun 6, 2013.

  1. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    A mandate like this is not necessarily about how much money it generates. It's about tracking and measuring employees and their performance.

    This is just the current thing for newspapers, like story quotas and blog-post quotas in the past, done for the sake of making sure your outlet is swimming with the tide and not falling behind the times.

    And journalists have never liked quotas of any kind beyond "How many inches do you need on this story?"
     
  2. PaperDoll

    PaperDoll Well-Known Member

    For the record, I have no idea what our quotas or mandates are. I did videos from some major local sports events this season, but not others. I also got mocked by a couple of real photogs for even trying, since, according to them (and I'm inclined to agree) that iPhones just aren't made for shooting sports. But at least I'm making an effort.

    If there were consequences for not following the mandates, I'd agree. But I haven't seen any evidence of that. People who bust their butts still get laid off.

    Our Twitter ratio is finally positive, but we still follow far too many high school and college athletes. I've been dropping anybody who doesn't seem to regularly Tweet about his or her sport, or who uses a lot of unprintable language.

    I have noticed there are some high schools with a critical mass of Tweeters, and anything said about those schools -- even if it's not a kid on Twitter -- gets propagated far better than others. I'd like to cultivate that response for all our communities, because (hopefully) retweets mean pageviews.

    Yes, there are mandatory ads before the videos. That's the reason for the quota; video views make us money in a way that regular page views don't. (At least, that's my understanding of the situation). I believe the quota is based on total views, not time online. We break our stories down into multiple pages, and can do the same with blog posts.

    Thanks to annoying ads, two clicks are better than one!
     
  3. BillyT

    BillyT Active Member

    As an aside, we have a fairly lurid murder trial going on right now -- guy apparently beat his girlfriend's 5-year-old son to death.

    It's the second one in a year or two.

    Our cops and courts reporter, who is great, was not really a twitter guy.

    His live stuff from the trial is gripping and has a lot of people -- including most of the newsroom -- tuned in at all times. Great stuff, and so are his articles.
     
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