That makes this announcement that NBC put out a casting call for local newspapers to be at the center of a potential reality show — shared in a posting on the National Newspaper Association website — both unsurprising and exciting. I can totally see how a newsroom could make for a good show — there’s deadline pressure, there’s quirky characters (inside and outside the newspaper), there’s always something new. It will be interesting to see how a “documentary-style reality show” would play out when much of the day in a community newspaper isn’t really dramatic. Sure, there are election nights and breaking news, but not every day, especially in a small-town paper, which seems to be their target. Jim Romenesko posted about the casting and has more details and responses to the idea.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You can subscribe to my updates by clicking this button:

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of Facebook’s relatively new subscribe feature — which allows non-friends to follow your public Facebook updates — but with a caveat.

Unless you’re world famous or algorithmically make it onto Facebook’s suggested users list, it’s near impossible to grow your Facebook following. While one’s Twitter following can be grown by the help of the community around you — by mentions, follow Fridays and the like — that kind of behavior, while possible on Facebook, is not particularly prevalent there.

So in an effort to change that, a Facebook executive on Wednesday announced that the company will be launching a subscribe button that will be embeddable on websites, similar to  Twitter’s follow buttons. It’s long overdue, since Facebook fan pages have had embeddable “like” button functionality for some time. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a video announcing the news, NBC VP of News Greg Dawson described what they’re looking for as an organization that complements and expands what the local stations can do. Voice of Sandieo and the local station, for example, partner on three main features, including Fact Check. “The purpose of this is good journalism and serving the city,” Dawson says. “We wanted to do stories that are unique, that you can’t get somewhere else, that you wouldn’t necessarily get on our air, if we were doing it ourselves, or on Voice of San Diego’s website, if they were doing it themselves.”

While they don’t specifically say the applicants for the partnership need to be websites, the application makes it very clear they’re looking for already established, robust online communities by whomever is chosen. They specifically want to know about page and video views and about how much content your organization is putting out on various platforms, including specifically asking about blogs and in a separate question flat out, “How do you use social media?” It’s clear that the TV stations realize that’s how they’re going to reach people interested in these unique, untold stories.

NBC says the deadline for local non-profit, news organizations to apply is July 22. (So pass this link on to your favorite!) It wants to pick at least four other cities to launch these cooperatives in. It will be interesting to see which cities it finds an able and adept partner in, who those partners are, and whether the work there is as fruitful as what comes out of San Diego. What’s encouraging, either way, is that this is an example of a major company deciding to partner with rather than try to start-up and compete with local, home-grown news organizations.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.