Crisis communications has one overriding mantra, one foundational principle that drives every emergency they respond to: “Be first. Be right. Be credible.”

If you’re not first, you’ll spend your time playing catch up for hours, days, or even weeks.
If you’re not right, your mistake will be repeated, or worse, cited as the truth.
And if you’re not first or right, you will never, ever be credible.

Crisis communication — also called CERC, or Crisis Emergency and Risk Communication — is what emergency first responders use to communicate with the media and the general public. It’s how the health department communicates warnings and updates during a public health emergency. It’s how Homeland Security communicates with the public during a terrorist attack.

CERC, compared to corporate crisis communications, is all about getting the right information out as soon as possible, and being seen as the source for news and information about an incident.

But it’s not happening anymore.

Five years ago, it was enough to just email a press release — which had been approved by a committee — to the mainstream media. Then you answered media calls and arranged interviews. You didn’t communicate with the public, you communicated with TV and newspapers.

But the definition of “the media” has changed. Today, anyone with a smartphone and YouTube is a TV journalist. Anyone with a smartphone and Facebook is a photojournalist. Anyone with a laptop and a blog is a newspaper reporter. The citizen journalist is the person with news to share and a way to share it. Quickly.

This makes the mainstream media crazy.

Not only are the citizen journalists breaking news before the media, they are becoming the first, right, credible sources of information, not CERC.

These days, news is coming from the people who are on the ground. They’re repeating everything they hear and see, and everyone else is passing it on.

CERC communicators need up-to-date technology if they’re going to stay up to speed. They need access to the various social networks if they want to reach the public. Using 4-year-old Blackberries and laptops is not enough anymore. And letting IT block all access to social media networks only makes the problem worse.

(I’ll save the discussion about why IT should not be involved in communication issues for another time.)

If CERC communicators want to stay on top of a situation, rather than being third in the race, they need to remember their roots. They need to use the technology that will make them first. They need to learn how to be right without committee approval.

Because until that happens, they’re not going to be credible.

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• 

The Indianapolis Star just suffered another round of layoffs this week, losing 81 jobs to Gannett’s ineptitude and bean counting. Of these cuts, 26 of them were in the newsroom — including 8 reporters and 12 editors — and 19 were unfilled jobs, all made in the name of budgetary concerns and profitability. The cuts were part of Gannett’s larger bloodletting of 700 employees nationwide.

Meanwhile, their CEO raked in $9.4 million in 2010, doubling his pay from 2009, including a $1.75 million blood moneybonus that was partly a result of his “restructuring costs and creating efficiencies.” Translation: ruin the lives of 700 people, and we’ll give you their salaries.

You

Believe me, even though I’ve called for more citizen journalism — and this is exactly why — I have complete sympathy for the Star employees who just lost their livelihood because Gannett wasn’t making enough of a profit. I worry about them and their families. Gannett seems to excel at accounting and numbers, but they suck at news reporting and suffer from a complete lack of understanding of community. Where Indianapolis readers see stories and personalities, Gannett sees dollar signs.

But Bobby King, president of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild, managed to throw a damper on my sympathies stick his thumb in my eye with this line from his latest blog post.

So, the answer that Star publisher Karen Crotchfelt came up with was to gut suburban coverage, eliminate an entire layer of copy editors (that last line of defense which separates us from the animals in the blogosphere) and make a nip here and a tuck there to reduce expenses.

Animals in the blogosphere?

The one thing I can’t stand from journalists is the way they look down on bloggers with this sense of smug superiority. Look, you guys don’t have any special knowledge or skills that any other writer can’t get. You have editors who save you from misspellings and continuity issues. Without them, you’re no better than we are. You print your words on dead trees, we print ours on a free software platform. Your printers cost millions of dollars, and without them, you’re dead in the water. I run my entire corporate blogging business on a $1,000 laptop, and if it breaks, I can get another one and never miss a beat. Our industry is growing, yours is shrinking.

If journalists want to survive this, they’ll quit looking down on the blogosphere as the gathering of the great unwashed and recognize it’s the future of news. They’ll quit acting like the crew of the Titanic and sneering, “ew, a rescue boat? How droll.”

Look, Bobby, I know you’re pissed, and scared, and are watching the dismantling of a once-great newspaper by some clueless nimrod 1,000 miles away. But don’t attack bloggers or refer to us as animals. Sure, we didn’t go to J-school or spend 20 years honing our craft. But blogging is more than 15 years old, and there are some bloggers who can outwrite most newspaper reporters. Hell, a lot of reporters and columnists have found a new career and a new voice as a blogger. (And it wasn’t lost on me that your “animal” comment was made on a blog.) But these former journalists are the ones who make blogging better.

So you can sneer at bloggers all you want, but we’re going to be here for a long time. You can look down on us, or you can join us.

Photo credit: evelynyll (Flickr)

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• 

When I wrote for my college newspaper, the Ball State Daily News, one of the things I liked to do was to put some paper in the manual typewriter, hammer out a few sentences, rip it out of the typewriter, and yell “COPY!!” which would always crack my editor up.

This was back in about 1988, when we thought that kind of news writing — furiously banging out news copy on clackety old typewriters — was old-fashioned, and that nobody did it anymore. After all, we were nearly at the 21st century, using dummy terminals to put all of our news into a mainframe that would process the story into a single column, where it could be printed, cut, waxed, and pasted up on the layout page.

The fact that I just used terms that most younger readers don’t know — paste up, wax, typewriter — probably renders the whole COPY!! joke unfunny.

I recently spoke to some journalism classes at Ball State about how to blog for newspapers. I tried referencing a few of my student journalism experiences, and even told an OJ Simpson story, and was met with blank stares. I didn’t realize until later that many of these students were born the year before I got married. They were two when the OJ Simpson trial was going on.

Still, I always appreciate the history of journalism, and I like knowing things about it, like the fact that copy boys were the boys who ran around the newsroom, grabbing papers out of writers’ hands. Writers who had just ripped their story out of the typewriter and shouted “COPY!!”

I was interested to find this video in a post, “How to be an Old School Journalist,” on Alltop.com. While the segment at 5:06 may be a little… upsetting, keep in mind that the video is around 70 years old.

Although I’m not sure exactly how old the movie is, you get some clues just by looking at the hats and suits, the cars, and even the phones. It’s an interesting look at what they thought of journalists — and women — back in those days.

It’s even more interesting when you realize how far we have come as a news gathering society.

• According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, we produce as much data in 2 days as we produced from the dawn of history up to 2003.
• More women blog than men. In fact, the Blogher Network boasts 2,500 women bloggers as part of their network alone.
• A story written for a blog can be produced in minutes, not hours. Publication of a post is immediate. No typesetting, printing, or delivery. Hit Publish, and it’s out there. A news story can be written in minutes, but then it has to be pasted up (electronically, of course), and then printed, and delivered. The shortest amount of time it can take is 4 – 6 hours from the completion of the story.
• To own a major newspaper takes millions of dollars and requires specialized knowledge to run specialized machines that only serve one purpose: to put ink on paper. To run a major blog takes a $1,000 laptop and a wifi connection. And when you’re done, you can watch a movie on it.

In Linchpin (affiliate link), Seth Godin talks about how the factory, the means of production, can be owned for $3,000 for a laptop (Seriously? $3,000? Seth, call me. I’ve got a deal on a few Dells for you, 2,000 bucks each.)

Bil Browning, owner of the Bilerico Project (the largest LGBT news blog on the web) runs his blog with four directors/editors, and 90 contributors (I even contributed an article last year). But he doesn’t have an office, doesn’t have printing presses, doesn’t have any overhead, other than his servers, and the salaries for him and his four directors. When I compare the low cost — $1,000 for a laptop — and ease of which he is able to reach hundreds of thousands of readers each month versus the time and effort we put into reaching people via newspaper today versus the time and effort we put into reaching people via newspaper 70 years ago, it’s a wonder we ever got it done at all. It’s also easy to see how Bil is able to reach his readership much more easily and cheaply than most big city newspapers.

Watch the video, see how our grandparents and great-grandparents got their news and information, and see if you’re not amazed.

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• 

Whither goest the newspaperman, that bastion of bulletins, that purveyor of print?

He is, I’m afraid, about to be swallowed up by the electronic era.

When I was in college, I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted my stories to be delivered with a thwack! on the front porch. To be folded up and carried in a suit pocket. To be clipped and stuck to the fridge. I wanted to use words like “lede” and “slug line.” I wanted to rip my story out of a typewriter, and shout “COPY!” (I used to do this when I wrote for my college newspaper, to great laughs from my editor.)

Sadly, it was not to be. Instead, I work as a professional blogger, and am looked down on by “real” journalists at “real” newspapers. (Full disclosure: I am also a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 weekly print newspapers around the state. So there.)

Last year, 53 weeks ago in fact, I wrote a humor column about Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, who wrote his own column sneering at bloggers with:

I DON’T have a blog. If I did blog, this is what it would be like. (To make it seem like a real blog, I’ll include typos and factual errors.)

I would link to Stu’s original column, but it, like most of his fellow newspaper reporters, are no longer available. They have been cast aside, presumably to make room for newer, more up-to-date pieces.

Bykofsky, who is perhaps best known for saying this country “need(s) another 9/11” needs to realize that blogging is not going to go away. Newspapers, on the other hand, are fast disappearing from our landscape. I think reporters would do well to rethink their attitude.

To paraphrase Chicago humorist Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke):

It’s funny when journalists mock (blogging). It’s also funny when people about to be eaten by a bear mock the bear.

Huppke’s quote was originally about Twitter, but mocking a bear is mocking a bear.

So what are the journalists’ complaints about blogging? That we didn’t go to journalism school? They’re teaching electronic media writing in J-school right now. That our pieces aren’t properly fact-checked and vetted by editors? Disgraced plagiarizer fabricator New York Times reporter Jayson Blair could tell you a thing or two about that. Or is it that our stories aren’t printed on dead trees? I found Bykofsky’s original column online.

Citizen journalists — the people who are picking up the slack that the mainstream media are missing — have taken to the web to cover the news and write about the issues that journalists have been missing. If they’re not former journalists who became bloggers, they’re learning how to do proper journalism. The really good citizen journalists are writing stories that are just as good, if not better, than a lot of the mainstream media stories.

These modern day pamphleteers share the news and their opinions via a blog instead of a printing press. And while they are still looked down on, these citizen journalists have uncovered a lot of stories that Byofsky and his ilk have ignored, overlooked, or scorned. We’re breaking the news before The News does.

Griping about bloggers is nothing but pure elitism. Snob journalism at its finest. When children start playing a game, it’s not uncommon for the child on the losing team to pout, whine, and make excuses for why he’s playing poorly. And Bykofsky’s blogging gripes make him sound like he’s taking his ball and going home.

The newspaper industry has been in decline ever since the advent of radio and TV news. It slipped further into decline when Craigslist became popular. And now, blogging is threatening to be the final stake through print journalism’s heart.

We’ve seen significant gutting at our local paper (the Indianapolis Star will now be laid out in Louisville. Sounds about right for Gannett.), and journalists are being thrown overboard left and right.

A friend of mine worked for the Associated Press in Indianapolis, and was let go right before Christmas 2009, after 17 years of service. Why? The AP was losing money because fewer newspapers were licensing their content. So rather than stick with the professional who had the most experience and best judgment, they let him go in favor of someone with a lower salary and less experience. In another state.

So we have younger, less experienced journalists — remotely — running our country’s newsrooms, and it’s bloggers who are being dismissed out of hand as Not Real Journalists?

I’m sad to be watching all of this unravel. I think the decline of the big city American print newspaper is one of the great tragedies of our time. But I also see the future of the industry, and if it’s going to survive, it’s going to be online, not on dead trees.

Journalists need to stop deriding blogging, and embrace it instead. Learn how to do it now, rather than watching it pass by. You can either mock the bear or turn and face it. Otherwise, your next byline will be from the south end of a north-bound bear.

For related reading, check out:

• Newspaper Death Watch
• Nieman Journalism Lab’s commentary on the AP’s “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online“
• Russell Baker’s commentary in the New York Review of Books, “Goodbye to Newspapers?
• A hilarious infographic on the AP’s “Protect, Point, Pay“
• Or go here to see the original.

Photo credit:

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• 

This was originally posted at the DeckersMarketing.com blog on May 28, 2009.

I was really honored to be selected as a media blogger for the Indianapolis 500 this year (I’m covering it at my Laughing Stalk humor blog). I’m sitting up here with a lot of local talent, although there are a lot of empty seats right now (I’m in Dennis Neal’s seat from WLW radio in Cincinnati).

I learned a long time ago that there are a couple of unwritten (and written) rules for media people. And if you’re interested in being a guest blogger for a sports team or major event, you need to follow these rules. They’re the same ones the big-J Journalists follow every day. (“Big-J Journalist” implies that these people are serious journalists who make their living writing and producing important work. These guys look down on bloggers, because we’re not serious or well accepted in journalistic circles.)

1. Never geek out. You were probably invited because you’ve got a passion for writing and for the team you’re covering. However, you’re the media now. You’re not a fanboy who bumped into your favorite player at a McDonald’s. Play it cool, be mature, and don’t try to be their buddy. You’re there to get a story, just like the real Journalists (see, I even used a big J), so act your age and get it done.

1. Never ask for autographs or photos. My friend Amanda, who writes Red Hot Mama, the Cincinnati Reds/National League Central fan blog, said she once tried to get some media credentials for a Reds game, and was told it would never happen. It seems the year before, they allowed a blogger into the locker room, but the guy geeked out and asked for autographs and photos with the players. The guy turned into a total fanboy and gave the PR staff the only reason they would ever need to not invite bloggers to cover the team again. Now, we can argue the Reds are missing some great PR and coverage, but until that PR director leaves, he’s willing to give it up to avoid the hassles and headaches.

1. Blogging is not big-J Journalism. And it never will be if you don’t act like it. Sure there are writers like Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, and even political writers like Matt Drudge and the Daily Kos are all professional bloggers and speakers. They take their reputations and brands seriously, and work hard to make blogging an accepted form of media. If you’re going to be a serious blogger — and maybe we should start calling ourselves big-B Bloggers — write your blog as if you have a serious brand to promote.

1. On the other hand, you’re not there to write fluff either. Don’t feel like you have to be the company yes man on anything. I was eating lunch today with a reporter who had also been a blogger for his newspaper. He wrote a not-so-nice post about one of the racers and his wife last year, and was griped at by the racer’s staff via email. While he is no longer blogging for his paper, he is still employed by them. He still writes critical pieces if he needs to, and realizes he’s not there to be the PR mouthpiece of the racers or their teams. The takeaway: if you find or see something that could be seen as negative, write about it anyway. Do it respectfully, and treat it like a big-J Journalist would. Write the facts, keep your opinion out of it, and be a professional.

Bloggers are still getting a bad rap from most of the mainstream media as being an unreliable source of news. And it will be, until we change our reputation and quality of work. That, and when the newspapers all go out of business, and network news is replaced by cable news and, well, blogs.

Until that time, as you grow your reputation and reach as a quality Big-B Blogger, practice journalistic techniques. Read books on newspaper writing (it’s still the gold standard of writing quality and ability), use Associated Press writing style, and study as many newspaper writers as you can.

But most importantly, for the love of God, don’t geek out.

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• 

Is it okay to delete your own tweets? Is it authentic and transparent to do this? What if you’re in the business of authenticity and transparency? Is it less okay?

My friend Lindsay Manfredi tweeted this question yesterday, and it got me to thinking.

What if you delete your own embarrassing tweets?
Is that being transparent??? Just curious.

What if they’re embarrassing? What if you said or did something that, upon reflection, made you look like a total idiot, and you just wanted to erase all evidence of it?

If you were David George-Cosh (@SirDavid), technology reporter for Canada’s National Post, you probably would. (I’d link to his Twitter page, but it was suspended.)

In April 2008, he had a veritable Twitter meltdown and got into a profanity-laden shouting match with PR pro April Dunford.

It started when April tweeted Reporter to me”When the media calls you, you jump, OK!?” Why, when you called me and I’m not selling? Newspapers will get what they deserve. Then things got all F-bomby.

Somehow, his dustup made it to the MediaStyle blog, plus several other social media blogs. After attracting a lot of unwanted attention, @SirDavid deleted the evidence. Too late. Someone took a screenshot of it, and it lives on now and forever. Including here. (Hey, I’m helpful that way.)

While his embarrassment is more than understandable, it raises the question about whether it’s appropriate to delete your tweets. After all, social media is about authenticity.

Let the real world see the real you. If you’re a kind and helpful person, put out kind and helpful ideas and information. If you’re a teacher at heart, teach others. And if the real you is a short-tempered foul-mouthed jerk, and you put that out into the Twitterverse, let it ride. If you get drunk at your friends’ weddings, feel free to post the evidence of your lack of decorum on the My Friend’s Getting Married, I’m Just Getting Drunk Facebook group (with nearly 200,000 members now).

Just be prepared to deal with the consequences when you do. Like when your Facebook photo gets found at the top of a Google search by an HR director. Or when your blog about your anti-government screeds are discovered by your pro-government boss. Or when your Twitter meltdown on a public relations pro makes the social media rounds.

If you’re in the business of being authentic and transparent — like a newspaper reporter — then you need to let your mistakes live on. (After all, you’re in the business of exposing other people’s shortcomings.) Or better yet, just don’t put tweet/post/upload that stuff.

If you don’t want any skeletons in the closet, don’t stick the bodies in there in first place.

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• 

A common complaint I hear from big-J Journalists about bloggers is that we’re not “real” journalists. That we’re somehow beneath their contempt and notice.

I first saw this attitude when I worked at the Indiana State Department of Health, and a few of my colleagues said we would never deal with bloggers because they only wanted to put out bad information. And in dealing with other Journalists, they almost seemed to say “blogger” with a sneer. As if “blogger” was something they stepped in on their way to the office.

As a result, many Journalists don’t believe things like Reporter Shield Laws should apply to us. For example, if an environmental blog were to uncover environmental violations by a large corporation, that blogger could be forced to reveal who his or her sources were. But if a newspaper wrote the same story, the reporter would not.

The biggest question comes down to who is a journalist. In the Branzburg v. Hayes case, Justice Byron White said

“Freedom of the press is a ‘fundamental personal right’ which ‘is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. … The press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.’ … The informative function asserted by representatives of the organized press in the present cases is also performed by lecturers, political pollsters, novelists, academic researchers, and dramatists.”

— Quote from an article by David Hudson of FirstAmendmentCenter.org

Even back in 1973, when Justice White threw open “The Press” to anyone who produced the printed word, technology has widened the definition to anyone who writes for blogs, the 21st century’s electronic pamphlet.

In his article, Hudson also cited Kurt Opsahl, the staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who mentioned a couple examples where bloggers outperformed the big-J Journalists

“Bloggers hammered on the Trent Lott story (Lott’s comments about Strom Thurmond) until mainstream media was forced to pick it up again,” he said. “Three amateur journalists at the Powerline.com blog were primarily responsible for discrediting the documents used in CBS’s rush-to-air story on President George Bush’s National Guard service. And the list goes on.”

Cox lists several other national-headline stories affected greatly by reporting from blogs, including: Dan Rather and the Texas Air National Guard memos, the White House giving press credentials to James Guckert/Jeff Gannon, the resignation of CNN news executive Eason Jordan after publicity surrounding his remarks at the World Economic Forum and the John Kerry-Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy.

Or to put it another way, the big political scoops in the last 5 years have not been by the media, but by bloggers. Also called little-J journalists.

So, other than an overwhelming sense of elitism by the men and women of the dead-tree media, what really separates us from being real Journalists?

Is it the medium? Many former newspaper reporters and columnists have left the printed word, and gone on to start their own blogging career:

1. Ruth Holladay who is serving brilliantly as a cheerleader for traditional media and a thorn in the side of her former employer, Gannett
2. Lori Borgman the former arts columnist for the Indianapolis Star
3. Columnist Saul Friedman who retired from Newsday rather than let his column go up behind a paywall

(I’m curious what their colleagues think? Have these writers somehow fallen from grace, and are no longer “good enough” to be considered Journalists? Are they now mentioned with the same sneer I heard three years ago?)

Maybe the pay is the issue. The fact that bloggers don’t get paid as much as newspaper writers (who, frankly, are not known for their lavish pay and glamorous lifestyle) may be the deciding factor. However, there are some online writers who make a lot more money than most successful businesspeople, let alone Journalists. So that argument doesn’t seem to hold weight.

Maybe it’s the training. The aforementioned paper-turned-pixel writers notwithstanding, Journalists seem to think they have the super-secret training that makes them a font of reliability and trustworthiness. Yet I know a lot of journalists who can’t spell, don’t know grammar, and in some cases, just plain can’t write. I took several journalism classes in college, and I can tell you they don’t teach anything extra special that someone with a penchant for the written word couldn’t pick up.

Even the Washington Post isn’t immune from bad writers. Meanwhile, there are several outstanding bloggers who produce some outstanding prose that would make any big-J Journalist green with envy.

Maybe it’s because the media is trustworthy and bloggers aren’t? You know, trustworthy. People like Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Ruth Shalit. Of course, Shalit is back in journalism, Blair is a life coach in Virginia, and Glass is now a multi-millionaire, thanks to the book and movie deals he has gotten.

Admittedly, these three are the exception to the rule, and not the rule themselves. But my point is there are bad apples in blogging and bad apples in Journalism. Still if you’re going to accuse bloggers of not telling the truth, you need to look at the journalists who make stuff up too.

I just don’t see what the big difference is, other than bloggers don’t kill a lot of trees to get their message out through a dying medium. Yes, there are bad bloggers, but there are bad journalists. Yes, there are bloggers who lie, but there are lying journalists as well. (Some people might say that term is redundant.) Yes, journalists are trained as writers, but there are a lot of trained writers who use the electronic medium instead of newsprint.

If the U.S. Supreme Court opened up the definition of Citizen Journalists to pamphleteers and leaflet-writers, then they can certainly open it up to bloggers. And as bloggers, we need to make sure we can meet that expectation. We need to take on the mantle of Citizen Journalist ourselves, and then make sure we live up to that standard. (I’ll discuss that more in the future.)

So what do you think? Are bloggers journalists? Or are we a bunch of cranks sitting in our parents’ basement under bare light bulbs, writing about conspiracy theories and Paris Hilton sightings?

Stacks of newspapers photo: John Thurm
Ann Arbor News photo: mfophoto

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• 

Originaly published at the DeckersMarketing.com blog.

I’m not going to repeat the same sad-but-scary stories of how newspapers around the country are folding up like, well, newspapers. No stories about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer going online-only, the Rocky Mountain News, the San Francisco Chronicle. No stories about how Gannett is hemorrhaging all over the place, and their only response is to cut the one thing that brings people to their newspaper: local news reporting, and get their local information from an out-of-town national source.

I don’t have to tell you any of this, because if you’re in the newspaper business – and God bless you for it – you know all of this.

But I’ve said for the past year that while the big city newspapers are going under, the smaller newspapers are in a better position to be able to weather the storm. The smaller newspapers I know, especially the weeklies, are not even messing with national news, because the dailies and TV news have it sewn up. Their advertisers are local merchants who don’t have to choose from a plethora of advertising outlets. There’s one game in town, and the newspaper is it.

That’s not to say everything is sunshine and roses for the small newspaper. But, like I said, they’re in a better position to come out of this alive.

One thing that’s going to help them succeed is to start participating in social media. You’ve heard the term before. The mainstream media is talking about Twitter, you know people who are on Facebook, and you’ve finally learned that a blog is not what a blumberjack gets when he chops down a btree.

I’m sure your first reaction is going to be, “But most of our readers are over 50, and they don’t use the Internet.” That’s true, they are and they don’t. But what about your readers who are under 50, and are online? Or better yet, what about the teenagers and 20-somethings who are online and aren’t your readers? Where do you think they’re getting the news from? The New York Times online, The Associated Press online, and of course, your closest metropolitan daily newspaper (at least while they’re still around). Why shouldn’t you try to go to the place where they’re getting their news too?

Because they’re going to be 30, 40, and 50 one day. And if you’re not providing them online news now, you won’t be around to play catch up later.

So how can you, the small newspaper editor, use social media to stay afloat, and possibly even grow?

If you look at the social media landscape, you’ll be overwhelmed with choices and terminology. I’ll try to explain a few of the basics, and you can go from there.

1) Put your newspaper online. Most dailies have a website, and some of the weeklies do. If you don’t, find a way to get it up there. You already lay the paper out on the computer, so it’s no extra work to paste the same article in an online window and hit the Publish button.

HOW:You can turn your paper into a blog (there are some great WordPress templates that lend themselves to newspapers, or you can get one of the newspaper-website software packages, like TownNews.com. (The Greenfield Reporter in Greenfield, IN uses them. Full disclosure: they publish my Laughing Stalk humor column in four of their satellite newspapers.)

BENEFIT:Here’s the great thing: an online newspaper can be another source of revenue for you. Advertisers who are appearing in your print edition may be interested in paying a little more to also appear in your online edition. Businesses that might not be able to afford an ad in your paper may be interested in the lower ad rates of the online version. You can track the performance of their online ads, and use those figures to show how effective they are, and charge the appropriate rates.

2. Join Twitter and use it. Twitter is a micro-blog (as compared to a regular blog), because you only have 140 characters to convey an entire message. That message can be straight text, or it can be a link to a website, blog post, or a headline and link to a story on your website. If you’re on it, you can follow me at @edeckers.

I follow several Twitter feeds from national and local news sources, including the New York Times, NPR, WTHR (Indianapolis’ NBC affiliate), and Toronto’s Globe and Mail (hey, I like to feel sophisticated). While I tend to ignore most of the tweeted (a Twitter message is a tweet) articles, there are times one of the headlines catches my eye, and I click on it. There’s also @BreakingNewsOn, which has tweeted news stories before the mainstream media even showed up.

HOW: This one is simple, go to Twitter.com and sign up. Use your paper’s name (set up a separate one for your personal use). Download TweetDeck and Twitter Local. You’ll send and receive Tweets on your TweetDeck application, but you can search for local Twitter users through TwitterLocal.

As you follow your local people, they’ll follow you in return (it’s an unwritten rule). Then, just feed your news headlines and links to them as they come up (you can even automate this process at TwitterFeed).

BENEFIT: People will come to rely on you as a source for news. They’ll retweet (forward) your articles to your friends, and you’ll start attracting readers from outside your fair city or town. I’ve had visitors to my blog from as far away as England and Australia just because of Twitter.

3. Join a social network. This one is a little tougher. There are thousands of social networks out there, so the question is which one should you join. Again, you want to stay local. Does your chamber of commerce have one? Or a local social organization? Maybe there is not even one in your community. That’s great! You get to be the one to start it.

HOW: Go to Ning.com and start one for your community. Advertise it in your paper and on Twitter. Get people involved in the community and with each other. Post some of your stories on the network, and get people to contribute their own. Now you’re not only a source for news, you’re helping to build your community.

BENEFIT: I’ve been involved in an Indiana-based network called Smaller Indiana>/a>, a social network for people who live and work in Indiana. It has resulted in some great opportunities for its members (I landed my job as a blog manager because of Smaller Indiana), and people have formed some profitable business relationships and fulfilling personal relationships because of it. We have become a voice for social, business, political, and environmental change in our community. Now imagine what it would be like in your community if you were responsible for creating that. What would that mean for your newspaper?

The best news of all of this? With one exception (TownNews.com), this is all free. You can get a blog for free at WordPress.com, join Twitter for free, and create a social network for free.

The only thing it takes is time and know-how. Since you’re already busy putting out a paper, and you probably don’t have the technical knowledge to jump into this with both feet, you have a couple of choices. Build it slowly and learn as you go along, or hire someone to set it up and teach you how to do it.

If you take the build it option, start with a free blog at WordPress.com, and set up a Twitter account. Publish your top story and an editorial on your blog, and promote it through Twitter.

If you have the money, hire a social media and blogging expert to get it all started for you. You’ll spend a few thousand dollars in the beginning, but if you manage this right, it will pay for itself for years afterward.

Last year, Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly said in a speech that the Internet as we know it is only 5,000 days old (5,300 by now). 5,000 days ago, we didn’t have maps, TV, news, photos, records, government forms, or entire libraries online. Now we do. Now people get their information this way.

What will the next 5,000 days bring? Or the next 1,000? Or even the next 10? What new technology will let people get news and information? And what will this do to you and your newspaper? Will you be a part of the next 5,000 days? Or will you be the thing the teenagers in your town learn about during their unit on local history?

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I love football. The history, the tradition, the way they still honor their roots as a working man’s game. It can be annoying, however, when they apply rules devised in the 1950s to technology of the 21st century.

Out of the 32 teams in the National Football League, 12 of them — including the Indianapolis Colts — have banned Twitter, blogging, and Facebook by the mainstream media during open practices.

That doesn’t apply to the general public who paid to attend the practices, just the professional media types who cover the teams and say nice things about them in order to get fans to attend.

Last week, Indianapolis Star sports columnist Bob Kravitz recently wrote about this in his column, and talked about how “Bubba from Beech Grove can sit in the stands and send up-to-the minute tweets and blog posts about the latest sweet catch by Reggie Wayne. But Peter King and John Clayton and less luminous mediots like myself cannot.”

Kravitz says he’s not on Twitter and he doesn’t blog, so he’s not actually affected, but he still believes it’s a silly rule. (In truth, Kravitz was on Twitter once. We were at an Indy 500 practice day press conference, and he said he wasn’t on Twitter. So I snapped a photo of him on my cell phone, tweeted it, and said, “now you are.”)

It is a silly rule though. I don’t know what these teams are afraid of. They let the general public post all kinds of updates, but do everything they can to hinder the pros from doing their job quickly and easily.

If Peyton Manning’s right arm suddenly fell off, Bubba from Beech Grove (he’s the Joe the Plumber of bloggers) and his PDA-bearing friends can share the information with the world immediately. The media, the folks responsible for disseminating information to the waiting world, must “sprint” the three-quarters of a mile back to the media room, where they can collect the tools of their endeavors. (Oh, yes, no cell phones on the field, either. Apparently, the NFL isn’t up to speed just yet on the “vibrate” function.)

Kravitz said one of the excuses he’s been given is that the teams don’t want reporters to send out bad information based on what they see. Rather, the coaches should be given an opportunity to put the team spin on it set the record straight.

Apparently, the Colts and the other members of the Luddite Twelve seriously underestimate the reach of some of these social media users. Believe me, if Peyton Manning’s arm falls off, and one semi-connected Twitterer gets the word out, that little bit of information will make it to hundreds of thousands of fans before his arm hits the ground. (After which, Reggie Wayne will say that he was open, and he should have been the one to catch the arm.)

Any social media user can tell you that newspapers and mainstream media just don’t have the reach and audience that some well-connected websites and blogs do. In many cases, websites like the Indianapolis Star and Colts.com are just content fodder for the bloggers (like this one, for example). It’s not until articles hit Fark or DeadSpin that the real traffic hits. (Just ask the Star. Their traffic spikes whenever one of their articles makes it to Fark.)

It’s bad enough that these teams still don’t get what social media can do for them. With the exception of a couple teams (the Colts, surprisingly, with MyColts.net), none of the teams have embraced what social networks can do to increase their fan base. They don’t do twitter, they look at blogs suspiciously, and they’re still wondering what this whole “FaceSpace” thing is all about.

By banning the people Twitter and blogging from the people who are least likely to put out bad information, the teams are only showing their ignorance and making it harder for fans — ticket buying, expensive jersey wearing fans — to immerse themselves deeper into the team experience.

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Social media has been playing an important part in the swine flu epidemic, which public health experts worry will turn into a pandemic (an epidemic that crosses many countries).

When I was the Risk Communication Director for the Indiana State Department of Health, half of my time was spent talking about the influenza pandemic — pan flu — and what we could do to communicate during a pandemic. I had a staff of public information officers, and we came up with all sorts of ways to communicate with the media.

We had email, cell phones, and Blackberries, and all of our strategies relied on us being able to have access to those email servers and being able to get news out to the state media outlets, who would then take our news and push it to the top of the news cycle, thus insuring our message would be prominent. Which is great if we were living in 1995.

But they were all the tools in the toolbox for communicating about the impending bird flu.

“People need to quit calling it bird flu,” said more than a few docs and epidemiologists one day. I had made the mistake of calling it bird flu in a meeting one day. (The H5N1 bird flu in Asia was the big fear in 2006.)

“But that’s what people are calling it already,” I countered.

“So?” they all said, in that way educated smart people can. “We just need to educate people to call it pan flu, because by the time it becomes a pandemic, it won’t be from birds, it will be transmitted through people.”

“We’ll spend all our time educating people on not calling it bird flu that we’ll waste our energy we could be using to educate the people.”

But my pleas fell on deaf ears, and so we called it pan flu. “Pan flu” this, “pan flu” that.

Except nobody’s calling it “pan flu” now. We’re calling it swine flu. And that’s the name that stuck, unless you’re from Israel (they’re calling it the Mexico Flu).

So the health department is calling it swine flu, and after three days of no news, they finally put up a press release on their website, and a joint Twitter account with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

Social media has taught us all a few lessons when it comes to crisis communication and rapid response, whether you’re in a government agency or the corporate setting.

• Use the terms the people are using, not your experts. The people are calling this epidemic swine flu. I’m glad to see the health department also calling it swine flu. But avoid the urge to call it “pan flu” if/when that happens. Avoid calling it “influenza.” We all know it as swine flu, so continue to use that term.

• Go to where the people are. The people are not reading newspapers. That information, if we’re lucky, is only 12 hours old, which means it’s outdated as soon as the printer fires up. The people are online, on Twitter, and reading blogs. Meet them there, don’t make them come to you, because they won’t.

• Some information is better than no information. Rather than wait for three days to release one press release, give out bits of information as you have it. Talk about precautions. Talk about plans. Talk about the number of cases in the state (at the time, none; now there is one case.

• Use a blog to communicate with the public and the media. People aren’t reading local newspapers or watching local TV. They’re getting news online that’s been referred to each other through Twitter and other blogs.

• Use the name of the topic on Twitter. While using ISDH in the title is good, and word will eventually spread that ISDH_IDHS is the Health Department and Homeland Security, it’s not very obvious, like IN_SwineFlu.

• Follow area people on Twitter. Right now @ISDH_IDHS is only following the news sources, but not the people of Indiana. One of our goals at ISDH was to correct misinformation, and people are putting out all kinds of bad information on Twitter. They should follow as many people as possible in Indiana, and then address any and all questions, bad information, etc. Refer people back to the blog, or at least the CDC’s website. Set up TweetDeck with a group that searches just for “swine flu” and “Indiana.”

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(UPDATE)

A few links to articles I’ve written on using social media for crisis communication.

• How Social Media Can Help the Public Avoid the Swine Flu
• Five Twitter Apps for Finding Local Twitterers
• How Health Departments Can Use Twitter to Monitor Public Health Emergencies, Part 1
• How Health Departments Can Use Twitter to Monitor Public Health Emergencies, Part 2
• What Can Swine Flu Teach Us About Crisis Communication Through Social Media

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