Social Media Roundup: The World Is Your Blog’s Oyster

What has been a tumultuous era for news outlets,with declining paid readership and a surge of competition, could present your association with its best chance to raise its profile—if you can meet readers’ quality standards.

Plus, once your home and office space are pristine, there’s one more item to add to your spring cleaning list. Learn more in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Out With the Newspaper, in With Your Blog

The third in a series of posts by @monkbent  (opens in a new tab) explaining — clearly — why the old business model in news has vanished. http://t.co/bYAo0wZlwK  (opens in a new tab)

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) March 25, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

In “Newspapers Are Dead, Long Live Journalism  (opens in a new tab),” the concluding entry of a three-part series, writer Ben Thompson highlights the tectonic shift for content creators in a post-newspaper era.

“No one shared my article because it was from Stratechery [Thompson’s blog], but then again, no one shares an article today just because it’s from The New York Times; all that matters is the individual article and its worth to the reader and potential sharer,” Thompson says. “As a writer, this is amazing. When it comes to reader attention, I am competing on an equal footing with The New York Freaking Times!”

That potential for quality content to have equal prominence presents an opportunity for associations: Your posts and reports can compete with those from the most storied news outlets in the world, but associations have to bring top-notch quality to the table. (ht @jayrosen_nyu  (opens in a new tab))

Spring Cleaning for Dead Links

https://twitter.com/YAN0/status/448472420639588352

David Yanofsky over at Quartz offers an interesting peek  (opens in a new tab) into the World Wide Web of rotted links. The Million Dollar Homepage  (opens in a new tab), billed as “a piece of internet history,” offered pixels of real estate at the price of $1 per pixel. The site is a strange collage of casino ads, smiley faces, and tiny Ghostbusters logos. Unsurprisingly, 22 percent of the links on the page are dead.

It’s a perfect case study for link rot—a growing problem on the web as pages age, decay, and eventually die, leaving sites riddled with links that reach dead ends. It’s an issue that not only affects your site’s search ranking, but also is a huge hassle for readers.

There are plenty of ways to combat link rot, from useful WordPress plug-ins  (opens in a new tab) to Google’s custom 404 page  (opens in a new tab) that tries to guess what the link was originally pointing to.

Spring will soon be here in earnest. What better time is there to examine your association’s site for busted links that are dragging you down? Feel free to share your own link rot tactics in the comments below. (ht @YAN0  (opens in a new tab))

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