Still not on the wagon?

The media has changed so much in such a short amount of time and it affects all industries, especially the journalism industry. There is the traditional media relations method of press releases and pitching, but that is only one aspect now. Nowadays, with social networking, RSS feeds, and blogs - and just so much information floating around in cyberspace, organizations have to compete even more to get noticed. Because of the advances, journalists' method of finding material to cover has changed.

I recently came across an article via one of my twitter friends, @sallyfalkow, that confirmed my thoughts. She posted a recent report from Bulldog/TEK group reporter's survey on her blog.

It went a little something like this:

More of What Journalists Want

The second annual survey of working journalists across all media generated responses from 2,386 journalists, of which approximately 48% were editors or editorial staff and 34% were reporters or writers. The survey tracks the resources journalists use to search, follow and report news and features material.

There‘s been a significant increase in usage of blogs, social media and RSS feeds to stay on top of the news.

* Almost 75% of journalists read one or more blogs to keep up with the subject matter they cover, compared with only about 70% a year ago.
* 29% of journalists regularly read five or more blogs to keep up with their beat, compared with about 26% last year.

Social media use has seen an even bigger jump

* 75% of journalists use social media to research stories, compared with about 67% last year.
* Almost 38% of journalists now say they visit a social media site at least once a week as part of their reporting, compared with only 28% last year.
* More than 53% now say they visit a social media site at least once a month, up from about 44% last year.

Tracking news with RSS Feeds has increased too:

* 19% of journalists report that they receive five or more RSS feeds of news services, blogs, podcasts or videocasts every week, a gain of about three percentage points over last year
* 47% of online journalists track more than five feeds
* 41% of journalists receive at least one regular RSS feed, a gain of over four percentage points.

Digital Assets – a new PR skill

23% of the journalists polled say they seek audio or video material from corporate websites at least once a month—an increase of about three percentage points over the past year.

Among journalists working in national television, some 10.3% seek audio or video material once a week or more and that number jumps to 46.7% seeking such material at least once every three months.

Among journalists working in local radio, some 38.4% seek audio or video from corporate websites at least once a month.

Online News as a Resource

51% of journalists report that they use Google News and 32% use Yahoo! News services to follow the news. That means they are searching news sites for information and you need to have all your digital assets - press releases, video and images - optimized for search.

Technology - blogs, social media, RSS feeds, SEO - they are all here to stay. Still feeling overwhelmed? It's okay, we are here to help. That's what we are here for. Take a look at our website to see how we can help you. Or better yet, email me at nicole.galletta@sojoinc.com with any questions you might have.

RSS Feeds Right to Your Inbox

RSS feeds are becoming quite useful. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a standardized format for delivering regularly changing web content - such as sites with blog entries or news headlines.

If you have a favorite blog (like the Sojo Lounge blog) or website that regularly updates its content, you can subscribe to its RSS feed. However, not every site has syndicated its content, in other words, it is not accessible via a RSS feed.

RSS feeds can be read using software called RSS Reader, Feed Reader, or News Aggregator. This software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them conveniently in one place for you to read. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers. Disney, Wired, CNN, and Forbes are among some of the sites that syndicate their content.

Many blogs and website have icons on their site that indicate they syndicate their content. This icon is the most recognizable representation of a RSS Feed.



From that icon, you can usually subscribe directly to that website's content, however every website is different.

You can subscribe to our blog by going to the "Subscribe to our RSS Feed" feature. There you will see the icon above. Click on "Posts" and you will see several options. You can get Sojo Lounge full blog posts to several of the most popular web-based feed reader software as described earlier. You can go directly to our RSS feed url by clicking on the "Atom" option. Using the drop down menu, you can opt to have the RSS feed delivered straight to your Outlook inbox.

Happy RSSing!