Wednesday afternoon #loweclass was treated to a visit from the senior features editor for CNN digital, Mira Lowe. This visit was part of something I call the Herb Lowe advantage.
Mira Lowe showed us new tools that she uses everyday. Chartbeat is a real-time analytics tool that allows you to see what people are clicking on your site that very minute. Another tool she showed us was called News Whip. This is a tool that identifies trends on social media and scores links based on their “social velocity” which tells you how quickly a story is being shared. These tools help her answer the question she works to answer each day, “What should we be focusing on?” These tools can be helpful in learning what stories she wants to be sharing but Mira Lowe explained that they do not replace news reporting. In addition to sharing her tools with us, Mira also gave advice on how to get people reading our content. “Your story doesn’t end when it’s published.” She urged us to share our work on social media. Of course, sharing it is not enough on its own. In order to really push our content we have to make people want to read it when we share, rather than simply saying “look at my work.” After we talked about how to share our work we took a look at some high quality content. The night before Mira’s visit I explored a story that she recommended. The story was a feature on CNN.com called The poor kids of Silicon Valley. The story featured six videos and pictures with each piece of text. We discussed how the author, John Sutter, was creative with his storytelling method. He uses first person narration and beautiful visuals to deliver the story. It was great to have someone who influences content in the professional world stop by our classroom to share with us. After class all my classmates had positive things to say about our double-Lowe-day. Not every journalism class has access to a professional like Mira. Perhaps two Lowes are better than one.
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AboutOn this page you can find blog posts about my adventures in journalism, ponderings about projects, experiences with storytelling tools and updates on what I'm working on. Archives
February 2017
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