SPJ region 3 conference update

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It’s day two here at the SPJ region 3 convention at the University of South Carolina.

Yesterday was great. New people, new ideas. I attended the following sessions:

  • New Media Challenges: I learned a lot more about managing online communities.
  • Preparing for Tomorrow’s Newsroom: A very original and insightful presentation by Joe Grimm.
  • Freelancing for the New Media Age: There was basically no mention of new media, but the freelancing tips were good.
  • Reception: Chatted with students and others while eating chicken and brownie and sipping sweet, sweet iced tea.

I was unable to liveblog the events yesterday afternoon because there is no guest access to USC’s wireless network. I took notes and post summaries of the events when time allows.

What’s on deck today:

  • One-man Banding
  • Mark of Excellence luncheon
  • Reporting by the Numbers
  • The Changing Political Landscape

Then we fly back to Miami tonight and it’s deadline tomorrow!

In my mind I’m going to Carolina

And so the music-themed posts continue tonight…

I’ll be traveling to Columbia, S.C. for the SPJ region three conference in a few hours. This will be my third regional conference in as many years, at which I represent the University of Miami campus chapter and The Miami Hurricane.

Region three includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Are you going? Let me know in a comment or via e-mail, greglinch[at]gmail.com.

Also, I’ll be at Duke next week for the Next Newsroom conference. Drop me a line if you’ll be there.

I love being a student and being able to travel to these conferences for free!

Stay tuned: I’ll have my laptop there to liveblog and post general thoughts during both conferences. I will also have my video and still cameras.

Also, be sure to look for my Twitter updates during the conference — and in general.

Weigh in: Would a tripod count against me as one of my two carry-on items? D’oh!

The CMSes they are a-changin’

Using a blogging platform for a Web site?

Yes.

After first planning to use Drupal, we’ve decided that it is no longer the best option for TheMiamiHurricane.com‘s new content management system.

So, (drumroll), we’ve decided to go with WordPress.

Why? In short, it is the better overall, long-term option. More reasons/details to come in a future post.

I’d like to thank Sean Blanda from Temple University. Sean’s insights and advice — via his blog, a session at the CMA conference in NYC that our news editor and adviser attended and an e-mail response to visuals editor Will Wooten — helped us feel more confident in our final decision.

Some background: I started reading Sean’s blog during spring break, particularly intrigued with the posts about the Temple News‘ experience with WordPress. Ironically, a day or two after reading some old posts, Will e-mailed me and brought up the idea of using WP after doing his own separate research.

Besides Temple, the Sagebrush at University of Nevada Reno also uses WordPress.

Advice for bloggers, part one: Reader stats

I started blogging in November to discuss online journalism, journalism education and other related topics.

Since mid-January, I’ve also been using the blog to fulfill an online journalism class requirement because everyone in class is required to maintain a blog.

Professor Sam Terilli, who spoke to my class Thursday about law and the Internet (see related video), brought up a point that one of my classmates, Josh Newman, mentioned on his blog Friday:

“[Terilli asked] the question that, I think, made most of my classmates (including myself, excluding Greg Linch) squirm a little. ‘How many people read your blogs?’ …Silence.”

Josh goes on to mention Google Analytics. This is a great service, but it’s only one way to measure how many readers you have.

I subscribe to all of my classmates’ blogs via Google Reader and would recommend that they utilize FeedBurner, an earlier suggestion (How to…use FeedBurner) that the class has been using, to keep track of their subscribers.

FeedBurner is great for adding an e-mail subscription widget, something our professor required, but that should only be a preliminary step.

Explore the different tabs in FeedBurner, specifically “Publicize” and “Analyze” — the latter of which shows you how many RSS subscribers you have. The number of subscribers is also available on the “My Feeds” page.

There’s a lot that can be said about the question of increasing blog traffic and readers, so I decided to divide my thoughts into shorter posts.

Stay tuned…

UPDATE, March 23: I clarified above that not all journalism students are required to blog — only the ones in the CNJ 442 Online Journalism class.

Other School of Communication students have their on personal blogs and may blog through the SoC’s Web site.

Also, I should have mentioned SiteMeter as another option for blog/site analytics.

Journalism prof, former Herald counsel’s advice for new (or any) bloggers

Sam Terilli, a University of Miami journalism professor whose background is in law, spoke with my online journalism class Thursday about law and the Internet. He has practiced law for more than 24 years, including 12 as general counsel at The Miami Herald.

After his talk I asked him what advice he would give to a student wanting to start a blog. Check it out his answer, which is relevant to any blogger.