I was asked to join a panel of newsroom trainers to talk about journalism training and answer questions about what journalists want, need and can find inexpensively, primarily on the web.

Panelists: Charles Apple, freelance journalist and blogger; Matt DeRienzo, Journal Register Co.; Howard Finberg, Poynter; Deborah Gump, Middle Tennessee State University; Evelyn Hsu, Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and Robin Phillips, Reynolds Center for Business Journalism.

It was a lot of fun and very informative. Here’s a Storify including the chat’s highlights. Lots of good tips here:

Newsroom Training, #ASNEchat, Nov. 8, 2011

Here’s the full collection of #ASNEchat Storify archives.

And Steve Buttry has pulled together an extensive list of Resources for Training Journalists.

I enjoyed the process of getting ready for this interview and felt good going through it — not always an easy thing for we print journalists. We’re not used to being in the spotlight, or coming across as “experts.”

After talking with a few others today about how being on TV can be unnerving, I wrote this blog post to share what I learned: Print to TV: Lessons from the set of Good Morning Arizona

Village Voice Media, in conjunction with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, is running this team through an intensive, 10-week, paid summer fellowship for minority students concentrating on Web and digital media.

These are my new friends: @Victor314, @Ujohnny, @AudioPathos, @adelehampton, @kholoodeid, and @BryScottD.

It was fun to think about branding as I prepared. I’ve talked a lot about journalists and their image on the web and the need to be consistent across different tools, but I’ve never focused on creating a brand. What I learned:

You can tell this tale short: Figure out who you are and be it.
A little longer: People have an image of you whether you like it or not, so take control.
Or in 27 slides: See below.

Beyond the basic message about Being You Online, I packed the presentation with examples of how nine other young journalists present themselves (their BRAND) online.

The Village Voice fellows could do far worse than emulating the professional images of:

Lauren M. Rabaino – @laurenmichell
Mukhtar M. Ibrahim – @mukhtaryare
Heather Billings – @hbillings
Monica Guzman – @moniguzman
Rebekah Monson – @RebekahMonson
Robert Hernandez – @webjournalist
Matt Thompson – @mthomps
Maxine Park – @maxinepark
Benet Wilson – @benetwilson

The Village Voice team members are all doing journalism and building their online images already (see slide 8). But they had great questions and were very thoughtful about what more they can do.

If you want to follow their progress this summer, they are using this hashtag on
Twitter: #vvmfellows.

With young journalists like the six fellows and the nine professionals I held up as examples all forging new ground, I’m feeling great about our future. Let’s follow them all.

It was fun to create a presentation for teenagers who are interested in journalism, but most likely only understand social media as a personal tool.

Feel free to share: Wilkes University Tom Bigler Journalism Conference.

Applause is always welcome.

Online? Is there any other place? Any other way?

Well, yes. There still are other editions of the news: paper, broadcast, radio, print magazines. But very few of those exist without an online partner, an online edition.

I was thrilled to see this post on 10,000 Words … once I got over the surprise and erased the thought bubble above my head that asked: “What? Get involved with online journalism? Who isn’t?”:

How you can get involved with the online journalism community today

This is a great, supportive community. And the post, written by Lauren Rabaino, has some good ways to get involved, start meeting others, and begin picking up new skills and sharing old ones.

For more about the weekly web journalism Twitter chat (#wjchat), which I’m very active in, check out #wjchat archives of previous weeks.

Don’t forget. You are already part of the web journalism community .. whether you like it or not.

It was a good week. Thanks, Jason.

I taught six webinars this week, two each: Social Media 01 (the basics), Social Media 202 (tips for journalists using social media as a research tool), and Social Media 303 (cutting through the clutter).

The sessions were very popular and well received. And it looks like Jason, put it to work immediately.

Want to watch recordings of the three webinars? Check them out here at the website of my day job.

BusinessJournalism.org: Social Media 101, 202, 303: Self-guided training

I love this message from Molly Davis who had taken an SEO that I ran with Chad Graham the day before. Chad, social media editor at azcentral.com, and I talked about the algorithms of search engines, we coached the reporters and editors who tuned in to learn a little about their content management systems, we compared good and not-so-good headlines and URLs.

We tried to infuse the journalists with a sense of power in the whole SEO game. We wanted to explain that good SEO is really good journalism. Their job is to write clearly, thinking about how a reader would search for their story, thinking about how a reader will understand their story.

Molly Davis seems to have got it. “Unintended consequence”? Nope. Unexpected, maybe. So glad to hear that our SEO tips helped Molly do better journalism.

If you’re interested in more about our Webinar, take a look at the slides.

I created my @RobinJP Twitter account two years ago today. I think that’s like 12 years of Social Media experience in Twitter years.

So happy anniversary to me. And my buddy Twitter. I’ve had some great highlights during the last two years.

I’ve had many Perfect Moments on Twitter.  I tried to explain why they matter on my Perfect Moment Project blog:

• Happy Twitter Birthday to me.

Fighting For The Right To Marry, A Family Tradition

But I also love that she has helped tell the story of marriage in a way that makes it clear that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue.

Well done, Suzie.