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5 Social Media Trends All Writers Should Follow in 2015

This is a special guest post written by Hilary Smith, a recent graduate of Medill School of Journalism. Always one to help young writers, I’m pleased to offer this on her behalf.

As we approach the holiday season, we also come to the end of another amazing year of technology and the continued growth of social media. The year 2014 brought us the iPhone 6, but more importantly gave us new technological advances in brain mapping, better mobile collaboration and more agile robots.

Writers need social media. It may be a distraction, but it’s also the only way you’re going to build your readership. Unless you’re John Grisham or Stephen King.

Entering 2015, we need to pay closer attention to the hottest new trends that are forecasted to affect the Internet, especially authors, bloggers and other online writers. The death of Google Authorship can mean the rebirth of other new social media strategies that we can embrace to pump up our readership.

Here are five important trends that wordsmiths should follow for 2015:

1. Go Mobile or Go Home

Long ago, author and famed environmentalist Roger Tory Peterson wrote: “Birds have wings, they’re free, they can fly where they want, when they want, they have the kind of mobility many people envy.”

Today we have mobility that can surpass our feathered friends when we can circumnavigate the globe in mere seconds with our hand-held mobile devices. Practically everyone today is carrying a tablet or smartphone so make sure all of your material is mobile friendly.

2. Million Dollar Eye Candy

Okay, I just made this one up but I’ve also seen it paraphrased online, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video offers a million more.”

All of your posts should include a visually stunning, attention grabbing picture or embedded video to capture your audience’s attention. Social media traffic is heavy and it always seems like rush hour, so to get your reader to stop at your piece by giving them something appealing to look a first. If anyone still uses the Yellow Pages or reads a newspaper, it is the difference between trying to find a small amount of text or viewing a full page advertisement.

3. Don’t Be a Show-Off

French Philosopher Henri Bergson stated, “The only cure for vanity is laughter and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.”

Don’t over-promote yourself or your material. Sure, it’s okay to be excited when your book first launches, but then you need to back off. Learn to become a teacher and advisor rather than a salesperson by giving free webinars and chatting it up in HangOuts.

4. Respond – But Stay Positive or Stay Silent

This one comes from my Dad and perhaps one of your parents, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

The same goes for social media, don’t show anger and resentment or respond to nastiness in any way. If someone blasts your work with something negative, ignore them. If they attack you a second time, block them. On the other hand, when someone leaves a positive comment, respond to it. Remember, you’re not delivering a sermon, you’re opening a dialogue.

5. Greater Integration of Messaging

“Our tools are not improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.” — Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook naturally serve as great messaging tools, but when integrated with an event promotion strategy, social media can amplify your message and encourage attendee posts before, during, and after the event to create anticipation and buzz.

Another way to help boost your readership is through the use an “Influencer.” This is where focus is placed on key individuals rather than the target audience as a whole. By identifying those individuals who can influence your potential readers, we gain even further exposure by “piggybacking” on their popularity and exposure.

Much in the same way that Father Time gives way to the New Year’s Baby, stone tablets were replaced long ago with social media just as our bound and printed books are now available online. Don’t be a prehistoric penpal, engage with your readers successfully online through social media.

 

About the author:
Hilary Smith is a graduate of Medill School of Journalism, and specializes in telecommunications. She also covers social media, VoIP technology and globalization. You can find her on Twitter at @HilaryS33.

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Screw the Long-Term Strategy! Smart Content Marketing is Agile

There’s an old story about an architect who was hired to design an entire campus of buildings surrounding a large empty quad. When the buildings were done, the administrators asked the architect to lay out a series of sidewalks between buildings.

He decided to wait instead. As he waited, people walked between the buildings, finding their own way, eventually wearing the most efficient paths into the grass. Then the architect had the sidewalks installed on the paths the people had made, saying they were more efficient and useful than anything he could have created himself.

How many times have companies created a long-term strategy for content marketing or social media marketing, only to scrap the entire plan after two weeks because of a crisis or major event.

I’ve talked with companies that will schedule everything — blog posts, Facebook updates, and even individual tweets. I’ve seen spreadsheets of scheduled tweets, three per day, five days a week, which took days and weeks to create, all thrown away because of a change in a law, regulations, or even a CEO or CMO.

There are plenty of reasons to have a long-term strategy, but plenty more reasons to avoid the strategy and be more agile. Here are five ways you can be more agile with your content marketing.

1. Create a topic checklist.

For some clients, we’ll blog about particular topics each month, but the actual titles of the blog post are wide open. We’re more concerned about the general theme of the month, but we don’t script each individual post. For example, a men’s clothing line might have a topic checklist like this:

November

  • 2 posts on dressing warm for winter
  • 2 posts on hats
  • 2 posts on scarves
  • 2 posts on winter suits

The blog posts themselves could be about how to wear a suit in the bitter cold, which kind of hat to wear to the office, the proper way to tie a scarf, and what materials are warmest in the winter.

This method lets the content marketing manager decide what to write about, taking input from product managers, as well as PR and marketing staff. It’s also flexible enough to change if problems or news stories arise. For example, if hats became suddenly more popular, they could drop a couple posts on suits and scarves, and write more about hats.

2. Watch your analytics

Google has stopped telling us what keywords bring people to our blogs, but you can still get a good idea by looking at the pages that get the most traffic. If you spot a pattern, you’ll understand what people are turning to you for. This means you should put more energy into those topics.

Keep an eye on your Google rank as well. Use a service like WebCEO to find your true Google rank for certain keywords and topics. Write about the areas you want to shore up, as well as write more about the things you want to improve.

3. Answer customer service and tech support questions

People who ask questions are usually a smaller subset of people who have a particular problem. That is, if 10 people ask a question, there may be anywhere from 100 – 250 people with the same problem. Write blog posts and create videos to answer those questions. As people search for the answers to their questions, they’ll find your content and visit your site.

Search your email for questions that start with “how do I. . .” Talk to your customer service department to find out what people are calling about. Rewrite and publish FAQs and tech support knowledge forums into blog posts. Use screencasts and videos to show people how to complete a particular process or fix a problem.

4. Monitor the industry news

As David Meerman Scott says, newsjacking is about injecting your ideas into a breaking news story. It’s about becoming the “second sentence” in a news article.

As soon as you hear about breaking news in your industry, write a response story that includes your take and your ideas on how it affects your customers and your industry. It should be the second sentence in your blog post or press release. At the very least, your customers will appreciate you alerting them to the issue. At best, journalists will see you as one of the authorities on it, and call you for a response.

Be a voracious reader of little-known and industry insider sites. Create RSS feeds of your industry’s thought leader blogs and news sites. Set up Twitter lists of those people and monitor them constantly.

Most importantly, be prepared to jump on those news stories immediately. Take a crisis communication approach: Be first, be right, be credible. That means writing blog posts as soon as things happen, or even assigning someone to be a dedicated content marketer whose primary responsibility is to write content. (This may mean giving them a “get out of meetings free” pass.)

5. Think like a beginner, or ask your beginning customers

You work in a particular field day in, day out. You’ve talked about your work so much, you’re sure everyone knows the most basic information about what you do. It turns out, most people know nothing about your industry, your company, or your specialty. They come to your website because they have those basic questions and they need answers.

Ask your salespeople to explain their sales pitch, and look to your FAQ. Come up with lists posts like “Five Things to Consider About _____,” “Five Things to Avoid When Buying _____,” or “Five Reasons You Need _____” to answer those beginning questions.

Many of my clients are surprised to see these beginning posts are some of their most-visited posts. They figured “everyone” knew all about the subject, but it turned out no one did. I’ve helped clients scrap entire content marketing strategies because they had to take it back to the beginning.

Rather than spending a lot of time and effort creating a content calendar, leave yourself open to serendipity and happenstance. An agile content marketing approach lets you change directions and go with the flow when responding to events as they arise. It lets you provide more value to your customers and clients than a fully-developed and strictly-followed content calendar will ever do.

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Five Steps for Surviving Google Authorship’s Death

I was pretty pissed when Google canceled their much-loved Authorship.

For one thing, they did it less than a week before an advanced content marketing seminar I was leading, which killed about 25% of the entire presentation, which sent me scrambling for another solid 15 minutes. I mean, I had a great graphic with Chuck Norris, bacon, and a cartoon of a bear riding a shark, and They. Killed. It.

Second, this was the one thing that was going to make honest writers out of all the meh-diocre hacks and spammers. Rather than allowing anonymous drones to fill up the Internet with less-than-acceptable articles, the good writers were going to be rewarded with high search engine ranking.

And now they killed it. Killed it dead. Deader than any show Ted McGinley joins.

But as I’ve had time to grieve and process my feelings, I’ve realized that Google Authorship’s demise does not mean the end of quality writing or content marketing. Yes, it will mean we all have to work harder, but it’s not impossible.

Google Authorship played a very important role in SEO: it drove people to Google+. If you wanted to take advantage of Authorship, you had to link to the network, and use it properly. But not enough people embraced Authorship (or Google+), and so they shut it down.

That doesn’t mean we’re going back to the SEO old days, where keyword stuffing was all the rage. Google is is putting extra nails in that coffin with their Panda 4.1 release.

If anything, they’re still beating the “write better” drum, and giving favor to small and medium businesses that make content creation one of their top priorities.

So if you want to catch Google’s attention, do it right the first time.

It’s Still About Personal Branding

Oh, the stories this guy could tell. If only he’d keep up his blog.
Authorship did one thing: it put a writer’s picture on the Google search results, and included the author’s name. That’s it. Yes, that was helpful because it added a semblance of trustworthiness and credibility to the article, but just because your face appeared next to a result didn’t mean it was any good.

It also told Google who the good authors were, in the hopes that they would give preference to those writers who did it right and followed all the rules. But they still have ways of knowing. They’re just not going to show that favoritism via photos and names.

Google has also killed the benefit of guest blogging, especially for backlinking purposes, which has all but eliminated the dearth of guest posts appearing everywhere on the Internet. So it’s actually become a viable personal branding strategy again, even though it’s finished as an SEO strategy.

This is where being a good and connected writer, or hiring them, comes in handy.

According to CNBC’s article, “Want to lift your Google ranking? Hire writers,” writing guest posts in places with high visibility adds to your reputation and credibility as an expert in your industry.

Writing is a central part of Jamie Walker’s job. Her San Francisco-based start-up SweatGuru, which develops Web-based software for fitness instructors and personal trainers, counts on Google for over half its traffic and has virtually no marketing budget. Instead, Walker is frequently penning blog posts for the Huffington Post and the site SheKnows.com, offering advice to yoga teachers and techniques for running. It’s about establishing herself as an expert, without pushing SweatGuru’s products.

I’ve said many, many times before, I think “write good content” is a galactically stupid strategy (it’s a way of life, not a checkbox you tick off or a thing you decide to do, as if it’s optional). But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. If you’re writing for highly-visible sources like Huffington Post, that’s not a place to drop your Buzzfeed-quality articles. It needs to be some of your best work, because that’s the first thing people are going to see. That’s what will win converts to you and your brand, not pumping out a lot of low-quality work just to meet an artificial-yet-ineffective deadline.

You need to write well, because Google will reward it. People will read your work, share it, and spend more time on your site, which are all factors in Google’s search algorithm (along with 200 other signals). Don’t settle for good enough, because people will ignore it in favor of stuff that’s better.

If you can’t write well, learn it. If you can’t learn it, outsource it. This is not a place to cheap out or screw around. If your business depends on the quality of your content, make sure it’s the best damn content you can put out there.

While you’re creating that top-notch content, don’t forget these four other tactics.

  1. Write guest posts on influencers’ blogs and outlets. The more visible the outlet, the better, just don’t do it for the backlinks. If anything, stick a single link to your main page or Twitter page in your bio. Google won’t even count it, but stick a rel=”nofollow” tag in there so they know you’re not trying to be tricky. But don’t put your best eggs into that basket. Save your best content for your own blog.
  2. Join an allied industry group on LinkedIn where you can serve and provide value. Do this in addition to joining your industry’s groups. Write information for the allied group, not your industry group. Don’t worry about trying to impress your colleagues, focus on impressing your potential customers. Your industry colleagues won’t hire you, allied group members will.
  3. Curate insider information. Curation should only take up 20% (1 day out of 5) of your total content marketing. It should not be your entire strategy. This means you need to find the best and hardest to find information, not the Mashable article that everyone’s already read. Share that information with your allied groups so they can do their jobs better.
  4. Embrace social sharing. It may be old hat, but there ain’t no hats like old hats. The best way to get people to see your content is to share it on social media. They’re not going to stumble upon it by accident. There won’t be a grand awareness of your latest article. And the social media fairies won’t sprinkle it with their magic dust into your networks. You have to tell people, several times in fact. Post it two or three times over two days. Remember, not everyone is on Twitter at the same time. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and possibly once in the evening or the next day at lunch time. Google still pays attention to social sharing signals, so the more your content is shared, the better.

Authorship may be gone, but if you’re an effective content marketer, that shouldn’t matter. If you’ve already been doing it right, you’re still able to keep doing what you’ve been doing. It’s like taking a nail gun away from a carpenter. As long as he’s still got his hammer, he can keep working.

If you’ve still got your blog or website, you can keep working too.

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Five Lazy Words To Cut From Your Marketing Copy

Many marketers suck their readers into the bog of humdrum with over-used words and industry jargon, hoping no one will notice they’re just coasting on properly spelled words and grammatical sentences. It’s a sign of writing laziness to trot out the same old phrases and buzzwords, using them just one more time, in the hopes of getting out of yet another marketing copywriting jam.

These words aren’t even buzzwords anymore. They’ve had the buzz driven right out of them. They’re words that every good copywriter must stop using if they want to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Needs

Needs is the marketing equivalent of “stuff.” It’s so overused, government agencies are going to start using it. That’s nearly as bad as when your mom joined Facebook.

  • Check Teacher’s Pet for all your back to school needs.
  • Steve’s Auto Parts has all your automotive repair needs.
  • Visit Cackling Larry’s for all your old-timey gold prospecting needs!

This is the cardinal sin of copywriting. Never, ever say “needs” in your marketing copy. If you have to, torpedo the entire paragraph and rewrite it. If you can’t think of another word, switch careers.

Solutions

“Solutions” fill “needs.”

Need I say more?

Storytelling

“Storytelling” took off soon after the phrase “content marketing” did. And as the content marketing industry has become populated by the creative writing set, the word has become overused, even if the method has not.

I won’t go into the problem of blog posts written by “storytellers” that look less like stories and more like school papers or technical manuals, except to say this: if you call yourself a storyteller, tell stories. That’s different from Articlewriting, Blogposting, and Instructionexplaining.

Content marketers, stop saying you’re doing storytelling. Not everything is a story. You’re a writer, so write things. That’s a timeless, all-encompassing word that’s not in danger of becoming trendy overused jargon.

You’re not a storyteller unless you go to festivals wearing a black turtleneck and tell stories in that funny poetry-reading voice.

Rich

Content-rich, visually-rich, keyword-rich. It used to be an effective word, but it’s been so overused, it’s eye-rolling-rich. We say it when we should just say “full of” or “better.” But I’m even starting to see it to mean “meets the barest definition of.” As in “this book is word-rich.”

Why not say heavy, appealing, replete, full, packed, stocked, gorged, or my personal favorite, chockablock.

If I can get anyone to use the phrase “keyword-chockablock,” I will have lived a complete life.

King

Then-Prince (now King) Willem Alexander of The Netherlands going for gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Content is king. SEO is king. Social media is king. Marketing copy is king.

The phrase “_____ is king” is as ubiquitous as those damn Keep Calm and blah blah something clever blah t-shirts. Someone’s going to say it, then thousands of people are going to repeat it, to be followed by many more thousands going, “nuh-uh, the thing I said was king is still king.”

Nothing is really king. It’s important, it’s crucial, it’s essential, it’s even critical. But it’s not “king.” The only King is Elvis. Also, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

And please, for the love of God, do not replace “is king” with mission-critical.

The world is filled — FILLED! — with overused jargony phrases that make me want to tear an Oxford English Dictionary in two. But these are the five I think we should do away with immediately. If we can start here, we can improve content marketing for everyone, making the world a bright and happy place.

(While we’re on the subject, I’m not real wild about “content” either.)

Bottom line: Your marketing copy will suck and fail to engage or excite people if you use these phrases. So just quit and take your marketing to the next level.

(I want to add one more phrase to the list now.

Photo credit: Itzok Alf Kurnik (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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There SHOULD be a High Barrier to Entry in Content Marketing

The downside of content shock, says Mark Schaefer, is that there will be a high barrier to entry for companies and people who want to start content marketing.

He says that like it’s a bad thing.

There needs to be a high barrier to entry, at least for those who want to be successful.

The problem is, says Schaefer, the Internet will grow 600% in the next six years. In other words, as big as the Internet is now, there will be six more Internets of content by 2020.

Yet we consumers only read, watch, and hear 10 hours a day of it, and that number won’t increase. We can’t even keep up with the current Internet now, and it’s going to grow by “one Internet” every year. There’s already too much, and it’s hard to find the really good stuff as it is.

That means we’re either going to accept more crap as “good enough,” or we’re going to hold out and trust that the best work will rise to the top, via recommendations and sharing.

The “Myth” of Rising Content

Schaefer calls this the “myth of rising content.” He says that “amazing content” — well-written, well-produced content — is the price of admission, the bare minimum to get in.

It’s a myth I prefer to believe in. If amazing content were only the price of admission, then we wouldn’t have a shock. We would have so many people just struggling to get into the game at all. But as it stands, we have so much mediocrity that, if you were to put some effort into it, could create some outstanding work that would catch people’s attention. And if you really focused, you could create some stellar work that would make people talk about you for months.

It’s like the book publishing world 30+ years ago, before the Internet was even a thing. You had to be awesome just to have a book published. Now, anyone with a laptop and wifi can publish an e-book, and the marketplace has become crowded again.

Forty years ago, when there were only a few TV stations, you had to have a great TV show to get on the air. Now, thanks to cable TV, there’s way more than “13 channels of shit to choose from.” But there are a few shows that everyone is watching — Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, House of Cards — because it’s “amazing content.” Everything else isn’t amazing, it’s just “good enough,” so these shows stand out because of their amazing-ness.

This means the only two ways to be successful are to either produce more content than anyone else, or do it better than everyone else. Since most of us can’t produce hundreds and thousands of blog posts, photos, and videos per week, we’re just going to have to be better.

That’s the high barrier. To be better than nearly everyone else out there. To write better articles, shoot better photos, and produce better videos and podcasts. The high barrier isn’t a lot of money, it’s a lot of skill. You need professional writers, professional videographers, and professional photographers.

You can’t just hire a bunch of new college grads, stick a camera in their hand or plunk them in front of a computer, and expect them to create great work. Sure, they’ll do good work, especially if you hire a creative writing major, a photojournalist, or video producer (which I highly recommend).

But that’s the go-to strategy that’s creating this mess: get the new kid to do it.

It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, kid, it just has to get done.

That’s the attitude that will get your work mired in the 600%. It’ll be buried under the thousands of blog posts, millions of photos, and decades of videos. This is where the high barrier will help. It will save people from being overwhelmed, and keep them interested in your work, whether you’re a media company, manufacturer, service provider, or artist.

You need producers who have the skill and experience to make their work stand out from the rest of the crowd. You want professional writers, photographers, videographers, and audio producers. Not everyone who can string two sentences together is a writer, and not everyone with a $300 camera is a photographer or videographer.

In my professional work, I see so much crap written by someone who thought their first draft was “good enough for who it’s for,” and they rushed to get it out in the 30 minutes between meetings. So I’ve stopped reading “good enough” blog posts, stories, and articles. This means I’ve stopped reading newspapers that fire their best writers and columnists, and replace them with rookie writers doing nothing but restaurant reviews. This means I don’t watch most TV shows, I look for the hidden gems on cable, Netflix, and YouTube. This means I don’t listen to commercial radio, I listen to two or three eclectic favorites via iTunes, or a few podcasts.

I look for people who treat their work like a craft and not a commodity. That’s where I get my 10 hours a day of content, and sometimes not even that much. I think the backlash against this new diarrheic Internet is going to be that people are going to read, watch, and listen to less. We’re going to be more selective, and that means people are just going to have to work harder.

This also means we as business owners and marketers need to change our focus about how we generate our content. We need to avoid the trap of “more more more,” and focus on being better.

We should hire writers who are mortified by a single misspelling in an article. We need to hire writers who take a few hours to write a single piece because they’re forging, honing, and sharpening their work, and still aren’t satisfied when it’s done. We need to work with photographers whose biggest investment isn’t a zoom lens attachment for their iPhone.

We need to make sure our work is some of the best available. And you’re just not going to do that if you focus on being good enough.

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#Ferguson Shows Why Citizen Journalism Is Still Critical

If you’ve been keeping up with the news from Ferguson, Missouri, chances are a lot of the updates and photos are coming from individuals who aren’t journalists, posting live video feeds from their cell phones. When members of the traditional media were being arrested by the police, and the cable news stations were all kicked out or, in the case of Al Jazeera Television, fired at with gas grenades, it was often the alternative news sources and citizen journalists who fed us new information and updates.

I spent most of last Friday night, as well as last night (Monday), following what was happening in Ferguson through a variety of Twitter users, including Vice News, Alice Speri, Ryan Reilly, and Adam Serwer, as well as alderman Antonio French (who was arrested Friday night), his wife @Senka, and several LiveStream, Ustream, and Vine users. That’s not to say the mainstream media wasn’t there — they were. But on that first night, most of the video footage and images they replayed over and over on CNN were coming from people uploading them from their phones to Twitter and Instagram.

 

I won’t rehash what’s been happening this week — the militarized police response, the protests, the tear gas and the flash grenades. The fact that you know about it at all is thanks to the mainstream media, the alternative and non-traditional media (Huffington Post, Vice News, Freedom of the Press), and citizen journalists. (Update: The police kicked nearly all the media out of the area at 12:00 am CDT, often pointing guns, firing tear gas, and threatening to arrest them. One journalist, Tim Pool, allegedly had his press badge ripped off his chest and told by a police officer, he “didn’t give a shit.”)

Citizen journalists can range from anyone with a Twitter account and a cell phone to an independent news organization as complex as a large blog or an online news website, like The American Reporter (disclosure: I’ve been the humor columnist for the American Reporter since 1997). And anyone with that basic technology can record and disseminate news on a micro scale, or have your content seen around the world by tens of thousands of people.

While the term citizen journalists is often spoken with air quotes around that second word, especially by professional journos, they still play an important role in getting out early information. Ever since George Holliday recorded the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles 20 years ago with a Sony Handycam, private citizens have become citizen watchdogs against the police, the government, and in some cases, even the media themselves.

In many cases, they’ve been doing it without protection, at their own risk, and without the benefit of a publication’s legal team to back them up. They’re the people who find themselves at the center of the action and rather than run away, they pull out their cell phones, hit the button, and stand around a little longer than is safe or wise.

This means anyone can upload videos of things they think are wrong, or want to record for posterity and history.

Of course this means we also have to become critical thinkers and viewers, making sure that what we’re seeing is real, and not a hoax. That we’re re-sharing news from people we trust, and not just blindly retweeting everything with the trending hashtag of the day.

We Also Need to Trust Our Technology

But while we were watching Ferguson news on Twitter, it turns out Facebook’s algorithm didn’t even allow #Ferguson news to show up in our news feeds at all. On that Friday night, if you weren’t looking at Twitter, you didn’t even know anything was going on. (And if you rely on Twitter’s U.S. trending reports to see what’s happening, you were told that #ThatsSoRaven was infinitely more important than #Ferguson, as the tweens’ show trended that night, while the civil unrest in our own country was supposedly not even happening. The hashtag trended in individual cities like Indianapolis and Nashville, but not the country as a whole.)

Medium writer Zeynep Tufecki argues that this shows why not only is net neutrality important — what if Facebook and Twitter didn’t want us to know about Ferguson? They didn’t mess with the algorithm, but what if they had decided to play that card? — but even the technology used by both real and citizen journalists could be affected. California is considering legislation that will require “kill switches” in cell phones. While the technology is there to discourage violent cell phone theft, who’s to say an overeager militarized police department won’t force a wireless company to throw that same switch when they’re about to come down on a crowd of protestors?

Citizen journalism isn’t going away, despite the gnashing of teething and rending of garments by the professional journalists who look down on the amateurs with only slightly less scorn than a militarized police force. It’s here to stay, and as we’ve seen in Ferguson, it sometimes may be the only source of information we have for a while.