Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.Newsweek’s White House correspondent Holly Bailey is taking a buyout. (FishbowlDC)
Zach Seward is leaving Nieman Lab to join the Wall Street Journal’s web team. (Twitter)
The Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism named its 12 fellows for the “Strictly Financials” seminar and 12 to business journalism profs for the Business Journalism Professors Seminar. (The Pulse) The fellows are:
Strictly Financials
<li>Rob Neill, business producer, MSNBC.com, Redmond, Wash.
Business Journalism Professors
The Big Money ranked Facebook fan pages to come up with The Facebook 50, a listing of the top 50 companies or brands on Facebook.
Dominating the list are food and drink (Coke & Starbucks hold the #1 and #2 slots, respectively) and clothing: Victoria’s Secret scored the #4 slot, and Adidas and JC Penney hold good rankings as well.
Where are we going with this? You know where. Where’s the media?
Turns out that National Geographic ranks #22 out of 50, the first media company (unless you count Disney or Pixar, which we’d call “entertainment” companies). CNN ranks #33. Vogue is 36th. MTV? 41, and last on the list is The Onion.
What can we gather from this? Perhaps that people on Facebook like things, not ideas. Or that it’s easier to get more than 4 million fans (as Coca Cola’s page has) when you have the budget of Coca Cola.
Or it means that newspapers may soon be hiring some more social media experts.
How’d TBM come up with their list? “Various metrics—including fan numbers, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity as determined by a panel of judges, and fan engagement—were factored into each page’s score,” TBM says.
Want to teach journalism and lead a student newspaper? The American University in Cairo (that’s Egypt, not Illinois) seeks someone to do just that.
Do you “eat, sleep and drink marketing?” (errr…) Then a retirement community in Virginia is looking for you to fill its director of marketing position.
HarperCollins seeks an Online Marketing Manager for websites in its Childrens Books vertical.
Old Navy is looking for a freelance illustrator.
Covestor seeks a Head of Marketing.
Oddcast seeks an associate creative director.
Online magazine The Globalist seeks a part-time editorial assistant.
The Detroit Daily Press, a print newspaper to compete with the Free Press and the News, launched last Monday with a 200,000-copy press run.
On Friday, the publishers, newspaper veterans Mark and Gary Stern announced that the paper had trouble getting advertisers and was dealing with “operations problems” and that the paper would be suspended until the first of next year. “This is just a bump in the road and not the end of the Detroit Daily Press,” read a statement by the paper.
This is a huge setback to the 30-strong newsroom, which includes many journalists from Detroit’s other struggling papers.
Seen your hours cut? Furloughed? Sucks. Especially with only 25 shopping days, 13 shopping hours, 11 shopping minutes and 17, no, 16, no, 15 shopping seconds until Christmas!
Maybe you can make painted snowman plates or a hug box for the people on your gift list this year.
But no really. Having your pay cut sucks, even if it’s not the biggest shopping season of the year. But in case your company isn’t clear on the rules of what they can and can’t do, it’s wise to review the Fair Labor Standards Act:
So yes, employers can take many unpopular measures aimed at either getting the company through the recession or lining the pockets of execs (depending on your viewpoint). However, you can always take comfort in the fact that no matter how bad it gets, you won’t be making those snowman plates. You’ve got standards.
AOL (excuse us, “Aol”) has been talking about building a “cheap content machine” for months in preparation for the company’s spinoff from Time Warner, and yesterday the company’s plans were revealed in more detail. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The online content company, which employs thousands of freelance writers including some big names, is creating a system that will choose what articles to assign based on a number of datapoints: Aol’s info on what Web users are searching for, the pages visited by AOL’s subscribers, and breaking news.
AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was “crib recalls,” following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.
Aol says it will pay its freelance contributors, who’ll work from the new site Seed.com, based on what its algorithm says the content is worth: anything from nothing (with a percentage of ad revenue) to $100 per item.
Compared to other web content mills, $100 per item sounds pretty slick, but we’ll withhold judgment until we see how many $100 assignments are out there and whether you have to write articles with titles like “How Does an Amalgam Separator Work to Remove the Mercury From Dental Fillings?”
Is it Twitter or some other T-word?
I do not know whether the great commercial and social advantages of the telegraph are not counterbalanced by its political evils. No one can judge of this so well as myself. The public mind throughout the interior is kept in a constant state of excitement by what are called “telegrams.” They are short and spicy and can easily be inserted in the country newspapers. In the city journals they can be contradicted the next day.. —President James Buchanan, December 1860*
The more things change, the more things stay the same, eh?
*Found in Blue & Gray In Black & White: Newspapers In The Civil War, by Brayton Harris.
Whether you’re thankful to be employed or happy for a chance at reinvention, tomorrow and Friday are days well earned for all of us this year.
2009 hasn’t been easy for many, we’ll be honest. But here’s another thing to be thankful for: The year’s almost over. Phew!
Enjoy your turkey (or turducken) tomorrow and don’t burn your house down with a deep-fryer.
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Rachel Kaufman
Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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