The benefits in training workshops are numerous:

– most blog platforms are free to use and useful for training the basics of writing for the web;
– a blog post can replicate a standard online article;
– a blog is an easy to use, creative digital space;
– trainees can experiment with embedding multimedia and even adjusting html code;
– and, particularly for print journalists moving to digital media, the CMS of a blog often functions in a similar way to the CMS of a news media website.

However, if you’ve ever shown trainees examples of scrolling style stories such as the NYT’s Game of Sharks and Minnows or the Guardian’s Firestorm, you’ll often hear the question: how can we produce the scrolling style, especially for long form writing such as magazine style feature stories?

I usually point out the obvious, explaining that blogs do in fact let you scroll down the page. And depending on the level of experience of the participants, I might also suggest storytelling applications that onMedia has tested such as Creatavist.

But more so these days, particularly if I’m training short workshops, I like to introduce trainees to Medium – the blog platform developed by Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams.

Why Medium for training?

Using Medium, trainees get simple, yet very visually pleasing results, very quickly. And that can be hugely beneficial when trying to get your workshop participants enthusiastic about experimenting with new ways of storytelling.

Medium offers a simple blog design that lends itself to long format writing. Think magazine style features for example. You could say it does one thing very well. If your trainees have a story that observes the basics of good writing for the web and includes at least one strong image, then Medium’s design and layout enables them to produce a visually attractive piece, fast.

Opening an account is free and easy. All trainees need to do is log-in with a Twitter or Facebook account and literally start writing.

If all goes well you’ll usually hear a few “Aha’s!” and see some smiles from participants as they start to add text and images and scroll down their story.

Working in the Medium editor is very much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). You immediately see what your story is going to look like. There’s no going back and forth between edit and preview/publish modes as I’m doing right now writing this post on WordPress.

Embedding images or other shareable media such as video, audio, tweets or ThingLink images is straightforward – just a quick cut and paste of the hyperlink or html code into the desired location marked with a ⊕ will bring up the embed options.

Saving is automated (see top left of page in editing mode) which hopefully should mean no tears in class because someone has lost their work.

Medium also uses fonts that are well suited to reading on the web and mobile displays: FF Meta Serif and Myriad. Some might argue that’s a limitation, but it does mean you’re less likely to have a workshop participant publish their story in something completely inappropriate such as ComicSans!

Once you’ve published your story, you can group stories together under collections. For workshops, this is a useful function as you can make a collection of everyone’s stories. Don’t forget to add tags which make it easier for a story to be discovered and read by other users on Medium. It is after all a community of users that appreciate good writing.

And, Medium stories can be embedded into other websites and most blogs. Click on the example below and scroll down to find the embed option “…”at the bottom right of the story.

Keeping it simple

Medium is not a blog platform that you can customize with all the bells and whistles such as WordPress.

It’s not going to appeal to everyone, nor will it lend itself to every type of story.

But what Medium excels at doing is providing a simple editing interface and publishing platform. For more advanced trainees (there’s always one!) with a good knowledge of HMTL, Svblte might be appealing as an alternative blog platform to Medium that offers a similar clean magazine style of design and layout.

As with all free to use platforms, it’s worth reminding your trainees that a change in ownership or lack of funding could result in the service being discontinued and their precious work disappearing. (It does happen – Posterous was a popular blog site that had its demise in 2013). From the settings, you can export Medium stories as a zip file.

Author: Guy Degen

DW Akademie’s Bob Barry caught up with Alimou Sow when he came to Germany for his prize last month.

How did you come up with the idea of writing a blog?

Even back then I wanted to be a part of the changing world, to learn and to develop with other young people. And I started asking myself how I could do this. The path I ended up taking was the Internet and it really was a privilege for me to be able to do this.

What was the last topic that you found interesting that you covered in your blog?

It was called “A Farewell letter to my fridge“. I wrote to my refrigerator to let it know that I didn’t like it anymore. We have been together for quite some time but recently it has been letting me down and it just does what it wants. In reality, I knew that it isn’t my fridge’s fault, the problem really lies with the electricity supply in Guinea.

What did you want to say with your blog’s name: My diverse Guinea?

I want to show Guinea from a certain perspective. I take a close look at Guinea and also take a close look at the daily life of Guineans. I have a particular way of seeing my country that is tempered with a certain amount of love for my own kind. There isn’t one particular subject that I stick to. Rather I choose topics that other Guineans can relate to very easily because many of us share the same reality. What I talk about is how many people live their lives.

What is your guiding principle then?

Well, my blog gives a glimpse of the socio-cultural life of Guinea. So I look at Guinea from the social point of view, because my specialty, if you want to talk of a specialty, is I don’t mention politics on my blog. Politics are excluded. I prefer to talk about social aspects of Guinea. That’s what I chose to write about because I think that with all the problems Guinea faces it would be easy to be absorbed with these but I don’t want to do that on my blog. Rather I want to talk about subjects that directly affect and touch Guineans everyday lives.

Can you tell us about an interview or an experience that has changed your life as a blogger?

Just starting to write the blog has radically changed my life. It has made me what I am today. Now I take part in conferences and international forums and it’s amazing because I started and now I have this modest success and I am very happy to have won Deutsche Welle’s prize for my blog.

What do you like most about blogging?

I particularly like knowing that there are people on the other side of the world that I am reaching and touching from my room, from my suburb in Conakry. The idea that these people on the other side of the world understand and recognize what I am saying and writing about makes me really happy and makes me smile. This is what fuels my blogging, knowing that people on the other side of the world appreciate the work and it encourages me to continue.

And what don’t you like about blogging?

In theory, there isn’t much at all that I don’t like because blogging gives me a platform. In practice, maybe what I don’t like is that connecting to the Internet can be so difficult and it can take me forever just to upload a picture. The rest is great.

What is your dream as a blogger?

My dream is a modest one – to illuminate parts of Guinean society and also to be an example for young people so that they can see, yes it is possible. I was born in a village about 20 km from Conakry and I see myself as a boy from the village. I only studied at government schools but with work and courage I managed to make my way. So if I have a dream, a modest one, it would be to inspire other people and to be an example to them. I want them to know that they can also overcome hurdles and achieve things in life.

What tools are most important for your work?

The Internet because I need that to do everything that I do. There are also two other things I need  – a laptop, which is of course absolutely necessary for a blogger and a camera or a phone that can take photos that are good enough to publish. And specifically in my case, I also need mobile internet, or 3G.

DW: What’s the first thing to consider as a webmaster when you are trying to ensure more Google users are directed to your page?

Sebastian Katthoever: As a blogger you need to find out first which searches are currently bringing readers to your website. The two websites Google Webmaster-Tools and Google Analytics will tell you this information. For example, let’s say I write a blog about German cars. I need to look at what users are searching for on this topic and what I have on my page already. I need to appreciate both of these things before I can start getting some results.

There is also a great free product called Insights for Search from Google. If I just type in German cars this site tells me all the terms that are being searched for in this subject area. And there is a graphic demonstration to go with it. If you know these expressions, then you can put that into your blog entry. Say I want to write about the new Mercedes A-Class car, then I can put other terms into that article that are otherwise popular right now and that will get me more traffic. I think that is exciting because it allows you to see what people have searched for in the last few weeks – and what they are searching for now. For a person that runs a site that’s really important information.

Are there other active steps that a blogger can take to be found more easily by Google?

There are lots of different ways. You have to imagine Google uses a mathematical algorithm to do each search. In this algorithm there are over 100 factors. For someone who is doing a blog it is difficult to cover all of these factors, but there are a few that are particularly important.

For instance, the title of the page should have the right keywords, words that are associated with the topic on your page. Then you have to make sure that the keywords for the subject area that you are writing about show up in the headline of the article. The sub-headlines should also have the keywords and in the article text, these same words should also appear regularly. There is a rule of thumb that 3 to 4 percent of the article should be made up of keywords related to your subject area.

That sounds like it could really reduce creativity. To what extent is the work of journalists being compromised by this do you think?

Every journalist has to decide for himself to what extent he or she wants to play along. I think that even small adjustments are sufficient to receive considerably more traffic via Google. For instance, using a quote in a headline won’t help at all if it does not use some of the keywords from the article. An ambiguous quote can often be a nice journalistic device, but it may mean that the search engines won’t find your piece. The text can generally be relatively freely formulated perhaps but the title of the page has to be done a certain way in order to be found. We have to remember when we are writing – an article can be fantastic, but if no-one finds it, then no-one reads it. That’s a shame because you are making such an effort.

Do the number of links on a page play a role?

Yes, they play a big role. Not only the links from the world wide web that link to your blog, but also the internal links on your page, are important. If you have a blog with a lot of articles then you should, for example, use so called “tag clouds” to sort the articles into different topics. This is because when Google scans your page it needs to identify structures and a hierarchy. This helps it decide whether an article is important or not.

If we continue with our German car blog example, if I have a sub-page with a whole bunch of articles on electric cars, Google realises that this page is particularly relevant for this subject area. The articles themselves are thereby each given more importance, which means they are more likely to be listed higher in the Google results list. That’s what you are aiming for.

After you’ve made changes to your site, how can you find out whether your new tactics are working?

Actually, before you start with trying out any new SEO measures, you should look at the extent of the referral traffic that you already get from Google.  Google Webmaster-Tools can tell you that. That gives you your start position. Then, after you have, say, improved the headlines and tags you can have a look at your statistics one or two months later to see if there has been a change in traffic. That would be a simple way of doing it.

What about just running some searches yourself to see if you land at your own website?

You can do that, but you need to realise that the Google algorithm is regionalised and personalised these days. That means a search that you run on Google in a large German city will give you different results to when you run a search in a rural part of Africa.

There is also a difference depending on whether you are a man or a woman, or whether you are young or old. Google knows all of that information about its users these days and that means the search results differ. That’s why many experts in the SEO scene use professional tools, to find out whether the website adjustments they are making are working.

Finally, is it advisable for bloggers to do SEO maintenance on their site themselves or is it better to get professional help?

At the start I think most bloggers are best served by just doing some reading on the topic. There are a lot of blogs and technical books on this subject, with some great tips, and they can give you some useful ideas. If you still aren’t having any success, then you can get professional assistance. But I think for a blog or a smaller publication, there is no harm in having a go at SEO yourself.

Interview: André Leslie

Increasingly, many media outlets are using blogs in a more formal way – often giving journalists the freedom to explore a topic in more depth or take readers behind the scenes of their work.

But while technology makes blogging easy, starting out as a blogger and actually writing something worth reading can be a daunting task.

Blogging is a little bit like a digital writing adventure. And even though you might think someone is a good writer or a good journalist, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll instantly be a good blogger.

So, what follows here are a few tips to bear in mind for writing a good blog post.

1. Find your voice

Like any sort of writing your blogging will get better with practice and as you find your own voice. And that’s important. It’s your blog. Be yourself. Think about how you’d discuss or explain a topic with someone. A good starting point is to think about being conversational and clear in your writing.

As a blogger hopefully you are also reading other people’s blogs. Think about a good blog post you have read recently. More often than not, you’ll notice that good bloggers tend to have the knack of grabbing the reader’s attention in the first paragraph and sort of summing up what the post is about.

Not only is this a good way to hook your readers’ interest, it’s also useful for search engines which attach more importance to the first paragraph.

2. Tell a Story

We’ve probably all read a blog post that reads something like a project report. Perhaps simply recounting step by step what happened or reading like it might have been written for a public relations newsletter. Much better to actually tell a story and offer readers some insight or analysis into your field of expertise or interest.

There are dozens of ways of telling a story. If your topic seems huge and complicated, why not focus on one element? Or tell the story through the eyes of one person. By examining one person’s experience you can help the reader understand the bigger picture.

Try to add something new. That’s what readers are looking for. Offer new information or advance the story. Curate and collate, and add some value to a topic or debate. Explore angles that others have not covered.

Be bold. Your post can offer a point of view. That might spark a useful debate and motivate your readers to comment.

And, less is more – make each word work hard. Your blog post is competing with the entire internet for the attention of readers. The reader has found your post and they’ll want you to get to the point fairly quickly.

3. Chunks of Goodness

Whatever form your blog post takes, try to make it easier for our eyes to read. Think of scanability as Paul Bradshaw notes in his blog and The Online Journalism Handbook.

If you have a lot to say then think about using:

– sub-headings, or

– bullet points.

All of these devices, along with embedding multimedia elements, help to break up your text and make it easier to read.

And don’t forget, your reader might not be sitting comfortably at a table reading your blog on a desk top computer with a large 20 inch screen. They may be on a train reading from a small laptop or a tablet or a mobile phone.

4. Hyperlinks Link Us to the Web so Use Links

As a blog editor, it is not unusual for me to receive a text from a new contributor without even a single link.

In this day and age of the Internet, of literally all things from NHK’s Domo-kun to a polar bear called Knut having some sort digital reference, it is unlikely that we would publish a blog post without any links.

Links are helpful for your readers, especially for research. And hopefully your readers will recommend your blog post via a link to other people in their network either via their blog or by email or via social media.

Learn to love links.

5. Multimedia Makes a Blog Post Much More Appealing

Sounds obvious, but a blog post with some sort of multimedia element will work wonders.

If you’re handy with a video camera why not give some thought to producing a video blog post or video vox-pop or using video in a creative way to embed in your post?

Likewise for audio. Record an audio interview with someone or try using Audioboo or Soundcloud for embedding audio clips as we did from a conference in this recent blog post.

And say if you’ve taken loads of photos, why not check out the slideshow function on photo sharing sites such as Flickr? Embedding a Flickr slideshow is a very simple and elegant way of presenting a lot of photographs in a blog post.

6. It’s a Conversation and it’s Social

Once you’ve finished crafting your post and hit the magic publish button that’s not the end of the story – the conversation may well continue. And so it should, either via comments directly on the blog or perhaps via your Facebook page, or through cross posting your blog post to Twitter and adding an appropriate #hashtag.

You can even try to spark up some conversation. If you have something new to offer readers, you can either directly update your blog post, or write a comment that includes the new information.

And as you become smarter about your blogging, part of your planning should include sharing posts via Facebook and Twitter. That might mean giving some thought to adapting your first paragraph and/or title into an interesting teaser for sharing your post on Facebook or Twitter. The power of recommendation through social media is valuable and it’s well worth participating in the conversation.

Online resources:

Journalists’ Toolkit: WordPress Basics

Copyblogger: The 8 habits of effective bloggers

Online Journalism Blog: Starting a blog? 12 ideas for blog posts

Author: Guy Degen

This year’s winning blogger is Lina Ben Mhenni. The 27 year old university lecturer’s blog A Tunisian Girl was recognised for: “writing bravely about repression and censorship in Tunisia long before the international media descended on the country during the tumultuous events of December 2010 and January 2011.”

Freelance DW-Akademie trainer, Sarah Mersch, spoke with Lina and asked her about the Jasmine Revolution and what changes she is now seeing in Tunisia’s media.

In light of new found freedoms are the media and journalists in Tunisia fulfilling their roles and responsibilities?

Even if the media are free now, I have the impression that fundamentally nothing has changed. Journalists still work the same way. It’s the same journalists who already worked under Ben Ali and spread propaganda, and they continue to work as they did before, except that the instructions they get from their superiors are different now. But the way they work has remained the same.

Are international media, such as BBC, Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle an alternative?

Yes, of course. I try to watch various international channels. Shortly after the beginning of the revolution in January, I also watched Tunisian channels, I was even a guest in some of these programmes. But I’m not really interested, because nothing has really changed. I prefer the international news channels to the Tunisian ones, as they are much more credible, transparent and neutral.

Was the revolution in Tunisia in your opinion a “Facebook-revolution”, as it’s been so often described?

The internet has played a role. It has accelerated the development and made sure the topic was covered, especially because traditional media didn’t pay any attention. In addition it was important to mobilize people for demonstrations, for example. But it is exaggerated, to speak of an internet revolution. Had there only been the internet, we would have never reached our goal. There were people who lost their lives, people who were injured. Those were much greater sacrifices than we what did as internet activists.

How do you see in this context the possibilities for social media, blogs and citizen journalists?

We now have a problem, because everyone has understood what power social networks and the internet can have. This is being taken advantage of. There is a lot of false information being circulated. We have to be very careful and pay attention to what information and sources we trust.

You were for a long time one of the few who stood openly against the regime of Ben Ali without using a pseudonym. Do you feel an appreciation for your commitment?

I’ve never done that for the sake of recognition, but for my country. When I started writing, I did so to express myself. Over time it developed more and more into activism, or I should say cyber-activism. Of course there are many who support me, but there are almost as many who disregard me.

How will you continue to work personally?

I’ll continue as I did before. If I go somewhere in Tunisia and report, because there is something wrong, then I’ll do that without hesitating. If I want to criticise a political party and their positions, I’ll do it openly.

Are you now no longer afraid because of your activism?

Of course I was afraid until the regime fell in January, as anyone would have in this situation. But in light of the injustices in this country, I was able to conquer this fear. To see the suffering of others has led me to forget my own fear. Now, however, it is rather worse. Previously it was clear – the threat came from Ben Ali and the political police. Nowadays it’s no longer clear who is the enemy, the threat may come from all directions. This has increased the fear again.

Elections have been called for the Constituent Assembly. Is the country on the right track?

It is difficult to assess the situation now. Of course there is a certain amount of chaos, but this is completely normal, after all it was a spontaneous revolution. No one had an idea how the transitional government could look like. After the elections, I think it will be time to draw initial conclusions. But I’m optimistic because the young people have played an important role. And now we are vigilant and will try to protect the fruits of the revolution.

Our colleagues from The BOBs will post videos from the award ceremony and you can follow live tweets on @dw_thebobs

Photo: Sarah Mersch