Chris Snider

College football season kicks off this weekend and pro football the next. Which means your football coverage plans are likely in full swing.

So here’s a checklist to make sure you’re ready for the opening kick.

The basics

• Schedule page
• Roster page
• Historic results, statistics page
• Desktop wallpaper (could be schedule or just photos of players)
• Printable schedule posters
• Depth chart
• Entertainment guide – what else to do while in town for the game
• E-mail newsletter
• RSS feed

Blog ideas

• Challenge readers to predict the score  (makes a good Friday blog post)
• View from the opponent (could be a guest post from a reporter who covers the other team)
• “Where are they now” profiles (football fans love history)
• Polls (using PollDaddy.com)

Photos

• Create “ultimate photo galleries” for best players on the team
• Create historic photo galleries – especially for rivalry games
• Create historic photo galleries of former players and coaches

Video

• Produce a weekly talk show (example: two reporter interview each other and discuss previous/upcoming games)
• Video from the coach’s weekly press conference

Live chats/blogs

• Live blog during weekly coaches press conference
• Live chat to answer fan questions during the week (use CoverItLive for live chats)
• Live chat or live blog during the game (or at least during pregame)

Gameday coverage

• Live game chat or live game blog
• Pre-game text alerts with any recent news
• Twitter updates for news, scoring updates, etc.
• Post any gameday news to Facebook fan page
• Pre-game photo gallery right when the game starts
• Live scoring updates
• Create first-half photo gallery at halftime
• Send out text alerts with scoring updates
• Photo gallery from the game
• Video highlights from the game
• Quick-hit halftime analysis column
• Interactive graphic of the key play
• Consider an alternative homepage display (and sports page display) for gameday

Mobile

• Mobile site specific to your team
• Mobile app
• Mobile live scoring
• Text alerts

Social media

• Facebook fan page
• Twitter account for site and for individual reporters/columnists
• Forums
• Foursquare widget to see who has checked in at the stadium

Want some more ideas. Here’s what some media companies have created for the upcoming season:

• The Dallas Morning News wants your Super Bowl predictions.
• Here’s a game from the Indy Star.
• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a Rams iPhone app.
• The Des Moines Register has desktop wallpaper schedules for high school football teams.
• The Green Bay Press-Gazette has a Packers mobile site.
• And speaking of the Packers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a guide to Packers bars around the world.

From the Facebook + Media page:

Watch this video to learn more about the “Like” button you see on other websites, and how social plugins let you take your friends with you around the web.

The Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Digital Media Test Kitchen takes an in-depth look at the state of news on mobile devices in a new report.

Among their 15 recommendations:

• Step up mobile interaction
• Create mobile-exclusive content
• Use location-based technology
• Target teens with news games

Read the full report.

Follow the Digital Media Test Kitchen on Twitter.

Facebook reached 500,000 million users last month and is one of the most popular web sites in the world.

It’s also one of the most popular sites for driving traffic to media web sites. With that in mind, newspapers need to have a clear strategy for how they are using Facebook. A large part of that strategy should be creating a Facebook page and encouraging people to like your page. This puts your page’s updates into readers’ news feed.

I decided to take a look at how many people like the Facebook pages of the top 100 newspapers (by circulation) in the United States. I looked at what appeared to be the main Facebook page for each newspaper (if I got the wrong one, please let me know in the comments section).

I realize that most newspapers have multiple Facebook pages, but for the purposes here I decided to focus only on the main page. The results:

Most popular pages:

1. New York times – 686,401 fans
2. Wall Street Journal – 109,322
3. Washington Post – 57,842
4. Denver Post – 24,612
5. USA Today – 23,308
6. Chicago Tribune – 16,911
7. Los Angeles Times – 15,880
8. Arizona Republic – 14,721
9. New Orleans Times-Picayune – 10,384
10. Des Moines Register – 8,639

Most likes as a percentage of print circulation:

1. New York Times – 72.17%
2. Washington Post – 10.00%
3. Knoxville News Sentinel – 7.61%
4. Des Moines Register – 7.60%
5. Denver Post – 7.38%
6. Palm Beach Post – 6.72%
7. New Orleans Times-Picayune – 6.61%
8. Mobile Press-Register – 5.76%
9. Wall Street Journal – 5.22%
10. Birmingham News – 4.94%

Complete results:

The New York Times ran an article Sunday about media companies using Tumblr to increase their social media reach.

Over the last few months, other media outlets have caught wind of Tumblr, which is free to use. The newest recruits include The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, BlackBook Media Corporation, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Life magazine and The New York Times.

The article focused on Mark Coatney, who set up a Tumblr account for Newsweek and was recently hired by Tumblr. Coatney’s role is to help media companies understand what they can do with Tumblr.

“I saw it as an opportunity to talk to our audience in a new way,” he said. On Twitter, he said, “the main feedback comes mostly from retweeting,” or retransmitting an interesting message. On Tumblr, “the tone is a lot more conversational.”

There is certainly potential here. Tumblr doesn’t have nearly the reach of Twitter or Facebook, but news orgs that have mastered those two and are ready for something else might find it valuable.

I used Tumblr for one of my classes this spring. Students posted their homework right to their Tumblr, which made it simple for me to see everything all in one feed.

Some interesting openings in the Midwest digital media space…

• The Des Moines Register is filling a couple digital positions, hiring a college sports digital editor and a digital reporter to cover the Iowa Hawkeyes.

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is hiring a social media editor. I don’t see a link online, but I got this via email. Here’s more info (thanks Will Sullivan for the link).

Social media promotions editor
Exempt, full time, reports to Interactive Director, Will Sullivan

We are looking for someone to reach out to the St. Louis audience and let them know about our work. Specifically … we want an intelligent, curious go-getter who will get the most out of social media in launching new products, building audiences and communities.

Send your application digitally to Will Sullivan at stltodayrules [at] gmail.com. Application deadline: Sunday, July 18th (We’re looking to move quickly on this.) No phone calls or paper applications accepted.

• The Chicago Tribune is hiring people for a “new consulting business in its digital department.”

The new business, called 435 Digital Services, will be hiring a handful of people for the effort and will redeploy existing employees to the project to create a unit of about 10 workers, says Bill Adee, the newspaper’s digital department vice-president.

Tribune has placed ads seeking new hires and hopes to install them by the end of this month, Mr. Adee says. One ad calls for a “social media guru” looking to “show off your sales skills.”

Here are some tips to think about before you hit publish on your next blog post:

1. Write an SEO-friendly headline. Tell me the “who” and the “what” in the headline, so readers and search engines know exactly what you are writing about.

2. Include at least two links that help readers find more valuable information on the topic. If those links are to previous posts on your blog, then all the better.

3. Make the most important text bold. If your readers only spend a few seconds trying to decide whether to read your post, make sure they are drawn to the best part. Also consider bolding all names, if you’re a name-dropping kind of person.

4. Pick the appropriate blog category. Categories are a great way to organize your content into the main themes you write about. Kind of like the older brother of tags…

5. Give your post some tags. Think of the keywords or key phrases people might search to find your post, and use them as tags. Names of people and names of towns or neighborhoods make for great tags.

6. Add an image or a video. Don’t have an image, try searching millions of royalty-free images at Flickr Creative Commons. If you’re not sure where to put your image in the post, put it at the top (near your headline).

7. Is your post long? Use subheads to break up the text and make it easier to scan.

8. Preview your post. Make sure everything looks the way you intended. Then hit “publish.”

9. Tell the world. Do you have Twitter or Facebook friends who would want to know this news? Share it with them.

Interested in starting your own blog? ChrisSniderDesign.com is happily hosted on Fatcow.

Photo by parislemon on Flickr.

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I’ve worked with some amazing headline-writers in my career – newspaper copy editors who were almost poets when it came to writing the perfect turn of phrase to fit the space given.

Unfortunately those witty headlines that catch our attention in print (where they are packaged with a photo and a subhead) don’t always work in the more literal and search-engine-optimized world of online journalism.

There’s a whole new set of rules when it comes to writing headlines online:

1. Use keywords. Get the main subjects of the story in the headline. Think about what words readers would search in Google to find that story – and use those words in your headline. If the story is about a person, use their full name in the headline.

2. Tell me what’s new and unique about this story. Don’t back into the subject or give me a label headline. Write a headline that makes me want to click through to read the story. I’m a busy person, and if the headline doesn’t sell me on reading the story, odds are I won’t.

3. Grab my attention. Make a big claim. Point out the controversy. Or just say something interesting.

4. Keep it simple and straightforward. I know you’re clever. Clever doesn’t work well in online headlines. Literal does.

5. Study what headlines work. Check out the headlines that get to the top of Digg. They make big claims or just plain grab your attention. I’m not saying all of your headlines can do this, but look for the ones that can.

Do a Google News search for the topic you wrote about, and see what headlines made it to the top of Google’s algorithm. Getting to the top of Google News isn’t the number one goal (creating a good experience for your core readers is more important), but it sure is a nice bonus.

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I noticed Twitter’s new Blackbird Pie feature today for the first time.

Have you ever come across a great tweet and wanted to share it with your blog readers? I have. And until today I had to take a screengrab of said tweet to post to my blog.

Not anymore. Twitters Blackbird Pie allows me to embed someone’s tweet, with all of the links intact.

I see a few good uses for media companies related to this:

• In sports coverage, if you want to show what athletes on your beat are tweeting about.
• If you cover a concert or event, and you want to show what others who attended were saying.
• In breaking news situations, you can show what others (especially eye witnesses) are sharing about the news.

Here’s what the embedded tweets look like:

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I made a few updates to my online breaking news checklist today.

Download the updated PDF here.