Hello journalists! Here’s a little added help from me – and don’t forget – The Interactive TA’s have office hours – we sit in the newsroom at the computer stations. See any of us…
Monday evenings (4-8p)
4-6p = Gosia Wojtunik, 5-7p = Ian Chant, 6-8p = Brendaliss Gonzalez
Thursday evenings (4-7p)
4-6p = Ian Thomas, Channon Hodge, 5-7p = An Phung
1) Linking to government and city websites are great for optimization (I noticed some of you did this on your first blog post)
To Find articles on these sites – do an Advanced Google Search – (the button is right under the blue search button when you first search )
Or – in the search box – put in your term, let’s say “unemployment rate” then add “site:” plus the web domain you want.
Example –
unemployment rate 2011 site:.gov
or for New York City’s website –
unemployment rate 2011 site:.nyc.gov
2) Linking to other blog articles is great, too – as long as the blogger has a good reputation for what they are blogging about or is a “professional” blogging. If you’re lucky, they allow “pingbacks” which will link pack to your own post
(Explanation of pingbacks on the WordPress Site – along with other stuff – http://codex.wordpress.org/
To find these blogs – go directly into the main page of blogging websites i.e.- blogger, wordpress (search is in the top right of the page,) tumblr.com (some of these require you already have an account)
Or – you can use the advance search function with the add-on “site:tumblr.com”
Or – after you run a regular search, jump ahead to the middle pages in the search results and look for something professional and reputable.
3) Don’t forget – there are tons of local papers and news outlets in the city. I’ve heard there are around 300 outlets in the city. There are probably 3 or 4 that cover Coney Island, alone.
This is a funny use of this page – but here’s a list of about 20 of them right on our own J-School website – http://www.journalism.cuny.
2) AP Style – You’ll learn AP Style till you are blue in the face in Craft 1, but just to note things you all are going to use a lot while covering jobs: –
Percentages are written – 30 percent
New York City – New York City
New York State – New York state
Numbers 1-9 are written out – six dogs
EXCEPT when they are percentages – 6 percent
Numbers above 9 are digits – 11 students ate free pizza
(oh…gone are the days of free pizza!)
And last – you don’t always have to write a percentage exactly –
Instead of saying 27 percent of New Yorkers enjoy spitting…
You can say around one in four New Yorkers enjoy spitting