Comments for Trade Pressed

Comment on What’s Twitter really for? by Olivier Travers

Olivier Travers — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:18:07 +0000

We’re just running headline feeds into Twitter for our sites right now. We also have a couple editors with their personal accounts, but overall I haven’t seen anything really convincing from any publisher (including ourselves), nor on Facebook for that matter. We’re testing the waters but I’m not sure there’s that much of a fit between these informal, mostly personal applications and trade publishing.

Comment on Great interview questions for feature stories by Sue Pelletier

Sue Pelletier — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:13:26 +0000

I like, “What is the one thing people should know about what you do, but don’t?” One that can be fun is to ask people what superpower would help them most in the course of their daily work, and why. You may not get anything usable, but it can loosen them up a bit.

Comment on Great interview questions for feature stories by Melissa Hill

Melissa Hill — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:44:54 +0000

This is a great question, and it caught my attention right away. One thing I can think of off the top of my head is the question I end every interview with: “Is there anything else important that you can think of that we didn’t cover?” Usually, there isn’t anything else that’s new, but the person tends to recap what they felt was the most important point or points, in a more succinct and colorful way. I often end up using these tail-end of the interview quotes. I’m really interested to hear what other people have to say, though. The one about what keeps them up at night is great. I will definitely use that.

Comment on Ethics in journalism 2.0 — impossible? by Leah

Leah — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:40:58 +0000

We follow ASBPE and ABM ethics sometimes - only when executive leadership wants us to. They allow us to follow those codes to some point; when they don’t like them, we choose to ignore them. (When I say “we,” I don’t mean the editorial staff. The decision is made and then passed down to us.)

Comment on Video on a magazine’s website by tradepressed

tradepressed — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:06:38 +0000

Leah, I think you’re right about audio. Of all the fancy-pants web stuff, I think that’s the only one that might work. Maybe.

Sue, you’re so right about amateurs being the new professionals. It’s a great turning of the tables. That’s what I love about blogs. Anyone can be a “pro writer” now.

Kevin, I feel the same way about watching video at work. I hate when videos pop up unsolicited and I hate when the only way I can get the story is with a video.

Comment on Video on a magazine’s website by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:22:42 +0000

As a reader of business trade press magazines in the software industry, I would not find video content to be helpful or efficient. If your readers are in a professional setting, by the time you dig out the headphones and get setup to watch the video, you may get sidetracked. I also get annoyed on sites like CNN, where some of the stories you may want to read are only links to video’s, and I’d much rather read it.

I would suggest if management is not giving up on having video’s, that you consider providing alternative means to getting the content, such as a short summary or transcript.

Comment on Video on a magazine’s website by Sue

Sue — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:31:21 +0000

I think they have to be more than just your basic droner talking head or boring Q&A, unless your readership is very old-school. To get people to actually watch them, these clips should be YouTube-worthy video blogs that are entertaining as well as educational.

Like it or not, for multimedia to be effective (or at least watched), it has to stand up to what the amateurs are doing, and they’re doing some great stuff.

Comment on Winning the awards — Somebody tell me how it’s done by Leah

Leah — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:37:16 +0000

I’ve heard similar things. I think judges like to read articles they can understand and relate to. I’ve never been a judge in an awards competition, but work with people who have. Their advice: Pull people in with the first 100-150 words of the article. Sometimes, that’s all the judges read before they decide whether the article is worthy of moving on. If the intro is dry or hard to understand, I think it gets tossed out pretty quickly. And, even if it’s an editorial category vs. a design category, I think the design is important to grabbing (and holding) attention.

I’ve tried to look at all of our recent award-winning articles to find similarities between them, but I really can’t.

Comment on Video on a magazine’s website by Leah

Leah — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:32:07 +0000

I’m with you. I can’t see the readers of our magazine (who we KNOW are pressed for time) sitting down to watch a 5-minute video when they could just scan a 500-word (or shorter) article and get the same info. I don’t have the patience to use video players on websites, so I’m not sure if our readers will, either. But, for some reason, it’s definitely the next big thing. I can see audio clips being more beneficial than video (since you can listen while you do other things), but I haven’t seen as much of that.

Comment on Winning the awards — Somebody tell me how it’s done by Paul J. Heney

Paul J. Heney — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:35:45 +0000

We tried to get the judges from the 2007 Tabbies to weigh in on this very topic earlier this year … a few of them did, you may find their comments helpful:

http://tabpi.evecommunity.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1501018971/m/1101069833