My Favorite Stories of 2008 Part II

Earlier, I wrote about 10 of my favorite stories from our web site, divorce360.com. Since then, I've come across some additions to my list. So I share:

1. Credit Card Crunch Causes Divorce.
First it was the real estate crash. Then the stock market crash. Apparently credit card companies are next in line. And as couples struggle to deal with the overwhelming financial issues, their relationships are struggling as well.

2. Divorce in your DNA.
It's bad enough that you have to overcome the grief of divorce, but what if it is hard wired into your genes? A study this year showed that some men may be more prone to divorce than others. The culprit? Their DNA. Unfortunately, there's not much anyone can do about it. "There are ...many different factors influencing how happy people are in their relationship and the gene variant ...will make a very small part of these factors," said the researcher who studied the issue.
3. Sue your Ex for STD.
He cheated. You showed him the door. Only later do you discover he gave you a lifelong gift on his way out -- a sexually transmitted disease. What can you do? Take him to court. Legal experts say some partners are making their spouses pay by suing them in civil court. It is, after all, the American way.

4. Share your Divorce story on YouTube.
Want to get back at your ex? You can try the same stunt pulled by Tricia Walsh Smith. She aired her divorce laundry on YouTube. Others have tried blogging about their ex-spouses. The video didn't help Walsh's case, but she certainly got a lot of feedback. She's parlayed her new-found fame into a music video, which is even worse than her first go-round.

5. The Cancer Made Me Do It.
This story falls under the category of "Pathetic Excuse of the Year." With his wife in remission from her battle with breast cancer, former North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards admitted on national television that he cheated on her while stumping for the nation's top office. One excuse played out in the public: the stress of sickness can make one act out of character. Ick.

6. Trend: Dump your Wife for a Facebook Friend.
With everyone jumping onto the social networking bandwagon, it should have been easier to spot the newest trend. Forget online dating. These days, spouses are hooking up with their high school honeys and dumping their wives for their long-lost flames. Whoever said you can't go back?

7. Getting Divorce? Get a Ring.
When you break up with a spouse, one question people often ask is, "What do I do with my ring?" There are still a number of options -- sell it, give it away, pawn it on a web site just for this purpose. And after the divorce, feel free to buy a ring that marks your new status. Yep, a divorce ring. So in addition to all the health forms (single, married, divorced -- check), you can advertise your marital mess right there on your finger.

8. Some People Announce their Weddings, Others their Divorces.
So how do you tell folks that you've kicked out your marital roommate? Forget the subtle holiday cards with your new return address and maiden name. These days, the hottest trend is a divorce announcement, followed promptly by a party. Think of it as an engagement party, except for singles. Lost your toaster, ask for a new one. You can even register. Who knew?

9. Baby Girl First, Divorce Next.
Here's a study that makes you wonder if gender equity is possible in America. Researchers discovered that married couples whose first child is a girl have a greater risk of divorce than those with boys. The risk is very slight, but it does make you wonder.

10. Most People Have Faith in Marriage.
To end this list on an uplifting note, here's a poll that warms your heart. The U.S. divorce rate is more than 40 percent. Second marriages have an even higher risk. But a Roper poll shows that most divorced Americans believe in the institution of marriage, even if their own relationship wasn't successful.

It just goes to show you -- a little faith goes a long way.

10 Top Stories for 2008

This month, our web site, divorce360, marks the end of its first full year.

In 12 months, we've launched the site, redesigned channels and focus pages, improved our search engine optimization and added everything from a business directory to a social networking area.

In many ways, working for a web start up is very much like my old job as a newspaper editor. Thing change daily, and you never stop trying to make it better for readers/users.

To celebrate our first year, we examined traffic and arrived at a list of top stories, blogs and community advice on the site.

Along those lines, I've put together some of the more interesting stories we've published on the site this last year.

1. Facebook Has Potential to Serve Divorce Papers.
The Internet has given us a whole new way to interact with people. Beyond digital copyright law, there are other legal ramifications. Using social networking to serve legal documents might be a new -- and gray -- are of law, but it's coming, as our recent story can attest.

2. Two First-Borns? Bad Match. Birth Order Can Help Marriage.
Studies have shown that birth order makes a difference in how you see the world, but how you see your spouse? Apparently so. There is strong connection between birth order and divorce rates,” explained John Curtis, Ph. D. and former family counselor turned management consultant and author. The most successful marriages -- "the oldest sister of brothers marries the youngest brother of sisters.”

3. How You Sleep Hints at your Feelings about Marriage
Want to check if your partner is really happy? Consider the way you and your spouse sleep at night. Do you snuggle up against each other in a spoon? Then you're very comfortable together. Do you hook legs? You're great friends. "The way partners share a bed says a huge amount how much they really like each other, trust and feel safe with each other," says Dr. Mark Goulston of the University of California. "Analyzing sleep positions can highlight trouble spots they may not even be aware of."

4. Recession Hurts Divorce Settlements.
It's hard enough to deal with the emotional issues when you and your partner decide to split. But when the recession causes financial ones, how can it be any tougher? First the recession was hurting divorce settlements as they were being negotiated. Then, because of the financial crash, job losses and the mortgage crisis, couples began returning to court to renegotiate the settlements they had.

5. Baseball Can Save your Marriage
Want to save your marriage? Try going to a baseball game. Okay, it's a little more complicated than that, but not much. Essentially, here's a study that says if you share a hobby or pastime with your spouse, you're more likely to maintain your relationship. It's kind of a no-brainer when you think about it.

6. Older Couples Divorcing to Save their Retirement
One of the saddest stories this year is about older couples having to make the tough decision to divorce so that the sick spouse doesn't run down the financials for the well one. Couple that with the tough economy, and this may become an even bigger problem.

7. Men Don't Understand the Cost of Cheating.
If you didn't know about this study, the story about former presidential candidate John Edwards teaches this harsh lesson. Here's a guy with everything, and he chucks it all -- including his chance on the national political stage -- for a younger blond. This study shows you why: Men just don't get what cheating will cost them.

8. Hurricanes, Natural Disasters, Can Cause Divorce
As if the news isn't bad enough these days, here's proof that hurricanes -- or any natural disaster -- can cause such a strain on a marriage that it can put it over the edge. But it doesn't have to end that way. Dr. Gilda Carle, Ph.D., relationship expert and Suddenly Single advice columnist for Match.com, suggests that the outcome depends on the couple, “Sometimes, a crisis or disaster can bring a couple closer together as they recognize what’s really important in life."

9. Many Couples Start New Year with Divorce.
Most people want to lose a few pounds in the new year, but some folks want to get rid of a whole person. Apparently January is a big month for divorce, particularly for couples with youngsters. They make it through the holidays and announce their uncoupling just after the new year.

10. Office Affairs on the Rise.
Apparently men and women working together can cause a number of issues -- including this one, a rise in the number of affairs at the office. "You have a common focus and lots of opportunity to get to know each other ... ,” said Tina Tessina, author of "Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting about the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage (Adams Media 2008)." “You are together, working on something. It has nothing to do with a personal relationship at all. It’s a pseudo intimacy.”

Links to the Marriage Calculator

What's success at an Internet start up company? When something from your site gets written about by lots of folks. If that's the case, the marriage calculator has hit a sweet spot.

Beyond links to a number of smaller blogs and web sites for television stations and newspapers, there are some pretty big dogs in the links.

If you haven't seen it, here are a few of the folks who have written about the calculator, which was put together for us by University of Pennsylvania's Betsey Stevenson, a Wharton assistant professor of business and economic.

Stevenson used statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to help us with the marriage calculator, which can show you how many people who married at your same age with your same education level are now divorced. The widget also uses those figures to project five years from now how many more folks in your group will be divorced.

Here are some of the blogs and stories that have been written about the widget:

The New York Times
The Baltimore Sun
AOL
UPI
Marketwatch

Marriage Calculator, Gannett layoffs and the NY Times

On the same day that Gannett began sending more journalists to the unemployment line, the Marriage Calculator we rolled out at divorce360.com began making the rounds. It was a bittersweet moment for a former newspaper editor who now works at an Internet start up.

As old friends were e-mailing me on facebook about who was being tapped to leave their newsrooms, the Marriage Calculator was pushing traffic on the site through the roof. We were inundated by new signups who wanted to become part of the site's community. One link to the calculator on walletpop.com was later moved to aol.com's welcome page. Another link from the New York Times Freakonomics blog added to the mix.

According to Google's hot trends for the day, marriage calculator, divorce360.com and divorce calculator were the top search terms -- in order of first to third. Those search terms ranked above: "Week 14 NFL power rankings", "Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair Photo", "the Gator Bowl" and "Britney Spears Good Morning America."

Before the day was over, I couldn't tell whether to laugh or cry. I did both. Someday perhaps journalism will see more days like the one we had yesterday on the site and fewer like the one faced by my former newspaper colleagues. I can only hope.

Widget 101: What's a Widget? How Does it Work?

Earlier this week, I updated my facebook status with a note about putting the finishing status on a widget for the web site. A few moments later, a friend e-mailed this question: "What's a widget?"

A widget is a web-based tool that allows you to enter information into a database and get something in return. If you're buying an airline ticket, for instance, you're entering the information parameters -- the time frame in which you want to fly -- into a database, which in turn spits out the tickets that are available in that time frame for the area you want to visit.

We've been working with Betsey Stevenson, an associate professor of business and public policy at Wharton, who used U.S. Census information to put together a database. We call it The Marriage Calculator. The user answers some basic questions: the age they were at the time of their marriage, their education level and -- if you're a woman -- the number of children you have, and the database shares two statistics:

1. The number of people with similar backgrounds who got married and are now divorced.

2. The number of people like you who are likely to be divorced in five years. This uses historical Census data to predict what will happen in the future.

My last year in newspapers, I spent a lot of time managing database projects -- including about property values that got so much traffic it shut us down for a short time. While my boss wasn't exactly happy, I considered that a user success, if not a career-enhancing one.

The point of this widget is similar. Interest, traffic and users who keep coming back.

Six Months Is Too Long to Wait for Newspaper CEOs

Like millions of other people around the country this morning, I got up, made a cup of coffee, turned on my computer and hooked up to the Internet to check the news.

After reading about death threats against President-Elect Barack Obama, his mother-in-law's move to Washington and the most expensive cities to buy groceries, I turned to another topic of interest -- the newspaper industry's struggle to survive in the new media landscape.

I clicked on a story by Editor and Publisher about a summit for newspaper CEOs held by the American Press Institute. (Click here for summary of the event.) The topic of the conference was the saving the newspaper industry.

(Let's forget that the conference was closed -- although someone in the room was twittering about it, God love them. I'll come back to this later.)

Interesting points from the story include:

1. All but one of the public companies at the event "were below the safe range" for bankruptcy, according to James Shein, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

2. The group was told by Steve Miller, the executive chairman of auto-parts maker Delphi Corp, "Cutting staffs will reduce costs, but it won't happen fast enough, and will erode the product."

3. "The biggest hurdles to progress [is] the industry's senior leadership, including some people in this room," Shein said. "I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes."

4. The group plans to meet again in six months to talk about the problems.

So here's my question: If an expert in business turnarounds walked into your office today and told you that your company was in financial trouble and your effort to cut costs by cutting staff was eroding your product's quality and you -- as the top dog -- were part of the problem because you're doing the same old, same old and it isn't working, would you wait six more months to talk about it again?

No, you wouldn't.

But that's what the group of newspaper CEOs plans to do. In all fairness, the executives who attended did get some homework for the next class. The list includes:

1. Act -- and think -- like an entrepreneur.
2. Create new initiatives and kill them quickly if they fail.
3. Don't wait for all the data. Take action.
4. Downsize to achieve larger goals, not as a cost-cutting tool.
5. Leverage core competencies into new areas.
6. Be honest with workers. Get ideas from them.
7. Don't whine. Inspire.
8. Bring in experts with a different view to see if they can help.
9. Leverage your brand.

It's a good list, to be sure. Given the number of journalists who have lost their jobs in the last year, (Journalists whose personal stories I haven't read because no one wants to write about their own industry's toubles), I especially like item number four. As the crisis worsens, companies keep resorting to cutting staff and quality with no real long-term solutions.

In addition, I'm keen on number six, although I must say it's kind of hard to get ideas from the front lines if 1. The meetings are closed. 2. The folks sitting in those meetings are the same ones who failed to see the changing market conditions that have now devastated our newsrooms.

Most importantly, I think a good dose of number eight might heal what ails us. If we can use crowd sourcing to examine how Cape Coral, Fla., financed the expansion of its water and sewer project, (costing $20,000 or more to some of us who lived there) I'm pretty sure we could find experts in other fields who would be interested in helping save The Fourth Estate for our children.

At least I hope we can.

Reporters in a Digital Age

When I got into reporting, all you needed was a pen, a notepad and your curiosity. These days, it's a little more complicated as newspapers try and capture the readers who have migrated to the Internet to get their news. Since leaving the traditional print industry and joining an Internet start-up that produces niche online content, I've had a number of conversations with newspaper editors about what a reporter should be able to do in this new digital landscape.

If I were back in a traditional newsroom, here's what I would consider if I were recreating a reporter's beat. Because every newspaper has one, let's assume the position is a city government beat -- although you can use this framework for any beat from sports to features and get the same result. And for the sake of clarity, let me say, yes, you'll still need to understand the journalism basics -- like how to use a pen and notepad and ask questions that folks sometimes don't want to answer.

But as more people commit citizen journalism, traditionally trained journalists need to become aggregators of content as well as creators of it. Really, each reporter becomes a community editor of sorts. And in the end, they will be more connected to what's happening in the areas they cover -- never a bad thing for a good journalist.

1. Video, audio and more. Just like a pen and notepad was once the basic foundation of a good reporter, knowing how to produce video, audio and photo galleries are now part of the job. Web readers love all of this. And there are lots of folks in your community who are creating it -- so you don't have to rely on only your own work. Use their work as well as your own to share what's happening in the neighborhood you're covering.

2. Set up a social network for your community. Get on facebook, twitter, linkedin and other social networks on the web. Find out who is from your area and hook up to them. Read what they say when they say it. And cull from those networks story ideas, links and other information that may be of interest to the people in your community. This is, in my mind, just another way to develop your network of sources -- possibly with some new voices you might never have had before. All of this can be used when you get to my next point.

3. Start a community blog. Make it accurate. Make it grammatically correct. And make it quick. Use the social network to write about the topics of concern in your community as they happen. You don't have to generate the information. You just have to find it, give it an introduction and link to it. And remember, whatever you write doesn't have to be long and drawn out. Twitter does this in 140 words. You can make yours longer, but they don't have to be.

4. Be a community builder. Your job is to find the folks who care enough to blog about what's going on in their world, cull the best pieces and share them on your blog so others will know about what's happening. You may even link people in your community, simply by finding topics they have in common.

5. Build your own content partnerships. What do I mean? In the Internet world, you connect with others who cover the same topic you do. They produce content, which you can write about and link to. They can link to your work as well, and through that, you build on your own little traffic network. Imagine all the agencies you cover in your community. Imagine their work on your community blog. OK, yes, you should let folks know where the information came from, so they can use their common sense about the bias, if there is one, in the story you are linking to. In exchange, you get more content.

6. Encourage participation. The more you engage in your community, the more they will engage with you. From focus groups to niche web sites, newsrooms have seen that happen time after time. Yes, some of these folks you'll only know online. But so what? It doesn't matter how the conversation is happening, as long as it is. And you can be proud of yourself for helping to build it.

Can Newspapers Make Money Online?

The debate on the table is how newspapers can make money as more and more readers move to online sources to get their news. So far, no one has been able to find the answer to this question. And it's costing the industry, not just financially but in journalistic quality and experience.

If you are still employed in the industry or have recently left it, you probably have been personally touched by the announcements of layoffs at newspaper companies, whether it's my former employer, Gannett, or McClatchy or even family-owned companies like Sun Coast Media Group. So far this year, I know a veteran reporter, a photo editor, an administrative assistant, an assistant sports editor and several other newsroom employees who have been laid off from their jobs. From reporters to assistant metro editors to executive editors, everyone I've talked with lately is concerned about whether their jobs will be around in a year, much less beyond.

And the truth is, very few people -- if any -- are truly safe. Today, I received an e-mail from a former colleague who said 80 people will be laid off at her newspaper. And if you take the volunteer buyout, you'll get three months severance pay. Given the economy and the time of year, whether you volunteer or not, you will be lucky to find a job at all.

Recently, Poynter.org began a discussion about how newspapers can make money online. Here are a few suggestions from a former newspaper editor now working for an Internet start-up company:

1. Take a lesson from bankaholic.
Start a blog. Focus on a specific topic. Keep blogging. And before you know it, a bigger fish will come along and bite. Recently bankrate.com purchased bankaholic for "$12.4 million... with up to an additional $2.5 million earn-out payment available for the attainment of certain performance metrics in the next 12 months."

For the writers still left in the room after the next round of layoffs, this might be a personal project -- if you're not doing it already. For the newspapers searching for ways to make money, I would think a few jobs could be saved if you could find a buyer for niche blogs like this one.

2. Connect the dots with coupons.
Earlier this year, Media General purchased a coupon site called dealtaker.com for "double digits." According to the company's press release in March, the site had 500,000 unique hits a month.

It would be interesting if, beyond continuing to maintain the site separately, the company connected the coupons to its news properties as a way of improving traffic and profits to dealtaker -- which isn't the most user-friendly site by far.

Interestingly, DealTaker.com recently started a site for shoppers searching for Black Friday deals -- deals readers used to come to newspapers to find. It's a solid content partnership, for certain, but to bolster my argument, here's a quote from Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons, Inc. "Newspapers deliver almost 90 percent of the 384 billion coupons distributed each year," Boal said in a Mediapost article in 2007. "As consumers shift their media consumption online, newspapers' sites are the natural place for them to turn for savings." Of course the quote came from a story about newspapers selling an online coupon site to Coupons Inc., a move that made me scratch my head.

3. Find a niche and own it.
Every market I've ever been in has a niche -- one thing it covers like nothing else. Consider the niches in your market and look for a new web idea that appeals to readers beyond your local boundaries. The idea is to use content you already produce in a different way to add to the revenue stream.

What exactly do I mean? Let's take the Baltimore Sun, for example. Its sports folks cover The Preakness like no one else in the United States. Yes, I know -- the race already has a site. But even I can figure out it's in need of a good editor, sport or otherwise. Beyond providing better stories, video and photos, there's something else a niche web site can offer to a user: hotel, restaurant and other related travel information that someone coming to the event will want to know.

What does this kind of niche web site give a newspaper company struggling to survive? A national base for advertisers to reach a particular demographic -- not to mention traffic that you can connect to your news site. And, if you're particularly enterprising, you can even sell event-based coupons that can run online leading up to the event. Or you can repackage some of the content into a print-based souvenir magazine to add to your revenue.

When it's all said and done, you may do more than improve your profits, you may save a few journalism jobs along the way.

What's SEO?

In the last few days, as the newspaper industry continues to implode, I've been invited by a former newspaper colleague to join a facebook group called "Newspaper Escape Plan." The description starts out like this: "Escape from newspapers while you can! At this rate, everyone will be laid off." I think you get the picture.

The backdrop to the invitation has been e-mails, phone conversations and text messages from friends -- some who still work in the industry and others who have been laid off -- who want to know what they need to learn to jump from the print game to the web world.

Note: I'm not an expert. What I've learned, I've learned -- as I did in print -- by doing. Yes, I was in charge of managing online projects and database reports for my last newspaper. But that doesn't make me an online expert by any stretch of the imagination.

At my job as editor at an Internet startup company, they asked me to come up with content for a reference web site, kind of a no-brainer for me. In return, I got a job that allows me to learn as I go, and I've done it by using my journalistic skill for adapting to change. As much as I miss traditional newspapers, this job allows me to do what I've been doing all week -- explaining some aspects of the web to former colleagues who are eager to learn, particularly now.

In the last few weeks, I've had a number of conversations about search engine optimization. They followed after I noted on several social networking sites in my "status" that I'm working on a project to improve seo on our web site, divorce360.com. Most of the conversations began like this: "What's seo?"

If you're going to make the jump to online, it's important to know what it is. So here's the layman (or woman's) version from a former print person.

Search engine optimization involves examining urls and headlines in web content to make certain that the Google bots (robots or spiders) that come to the web site find enough of the right words in all those things to push your content up to the top of the search pages.

So when someone searches on google for a term, let's say...divorce laws... or parental alienation syndrome...the stories on your site that include those words will pop up at the top of the first page of the search engine results.

You can also improve search engine optimization by doing what's called metatagging. It sounds really exciting, but for a journalist, it can feel like watching paint peel. Essentially, it means you pick key words from the story and tag the story with them. The purpose is the same -- so that the bots, which crawl around web sites, can examine your content, decide it's worthy of improved seo and then spit them out closer to the top of the search that a user does. You can do the same thing with key words in the stories.

Why would you do all that? Because if you improve seo, you can improve traffic. Simply put, if your content is higher up on the searches, users are more likely to click on it -- more often.

It's a lengthy process, to be sure. And it's not an exact science. Google has patented the way it calculates search engine optimization. So there's a whole industry of seo specialists who say they know the secret code to seo, but it's really trial and error.

It isn't exactly the kick you get when you're breaking a good news story. But once you publish the seo changes and see your content move up the ranks, it does feel similar to something else we used to do in print -- deliver the news to the readers who want it.

Social Networking Highs

Some months ago, we added a social networking side to the web site, divorce360. You could post comments and upload a graphic image. But given the personal nature of the topic, the profiles were anonymous, unlike many of the other social networking sites on the web.

What we discovered was fascinating. People didn't just want to talk about their relationship struggles with one another. They engaged in lengthy intimate conversations, sharing the details of their lives in a place they felt safe. They commented on each other's blogs, offered advice and answered questions. And their comments were often two or three pages long.

Recently, we added a wall to each of the user's pages. If you use facebook, you know this is one of the easiest way to talk to a friend -- as long as you don't mind sharing your commentary with the world.

On our site, the wall has become an increasingly popular tool -- and an addition to the commentary. What users are doing is posting their comments first for everyone and then talking directly to the other person on their wall. Literally, they're posting twice about the same thing, even though both posts are public.

The theory in the room is that the anonymity on the site's community is allowing people to engage more deeply in conversation than they normally would if their profiles were public. In the meantime, the number of users and the user time is climbing. So there must be something to it.

Interesting Post for Journalists

If you're a newspaper journalist and haven't seen this article "Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obsolete? Not If Journalists Collaborate, you need to read it. Given the state of the industry, it's got some great advice for the new media landscape.

Questions off the News

The joy about having a community on the site is when you ask a question, you'll get a response. I'll be interested to see how this one does: What would you do with $700 billion dollars?

Shameless Plug, D360 and a Link

A shameless plug about getting d360 content on other Web sites. The more the merrier is my philosophy. Here's the latest link. Enjoy.

D360, Rule Breaking and Online Communities

Interesting story about our site today written by Richard Millington, who is a builder of online communities. Millington is from the United Kingdom. Given I drove around Ohio for several years (as a top editor at a newspaper no less) with a license plate that read, "B Unruly," I figured his blog -- about breaking rules to succeed online -- was worth a mention.

OMMA, Reference Web Sites and Good News

What do Babycenter.com, howstuffworks.com and d360 have in common?

Click here and look under finalists -- reference sites...

I have to say we're in great company!

On a Roll with Content Partnerships

Sometimes good stuff slips into our days and goes unnoticed until we wake up, mid-week from editing a bunch of stories and realize, wow, a sweeeet thang happened while I was buried under that pile. As a former print editor turned editor of an Internet startup, my translation of sweeeet thang would be:

1. Two days of having the same story on the msn.com home page.

2. And two days of two different stories on Woman's Day.

I guess it goes to show that some rules don't change, regardless of medium. Simply put, good content works.

Twitter, D360 and networking the news

I admit it. I'm a Twitter fan. It didn't happen overnight. It's been a long, slow courtship.

I know social networking has journalistic applications, but I wasn’t quite certain how this particular site would help. It's taken months and a breaking news story to help me really understand.

Twitter, if you don’t already know, is a social networking site that allows only brief posts – about the size of your average newspaper headline. So having a good editor -- or being one – is helpful to get the best use of the space.

Our marketing vice president at d360, Paula Sirois, twisted my arm into jumping on the Twitter bandwagon after a year of tweet-ing away about our Internet startup. I've been tweeting routinely since she helped me hook up.

A few weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon, ABC announced that former presidential candidate John Edwards had admitted he had a brief affair with a film producer. Given that our site has an archive of stories about the topic of infidelity, I was able to put together a story quickly and post it online within minutes of the annoucement.

Then I posted a quote from the story on Twitter, which is what I normally do for newly published stories. I wondered if I could drum up any interest in our d360 experts and related stories by posting them on Twitter as well. So I tried it.

Shortly after doing so I received a post from a journalist who wanted to congratulate me for being on top of the news and for providing related topics of interest to the main story. The e-mail that followed came from an editor at an online news wire service called All Headline News, who asked if I could provide experts for the Edwards story. Of course, I could – and did.

As a traditional print editor, I never thought about using a social networking site to expand our web site’s reach. But a year after taking this job, I have used Twitter – and other social networking sites – to increase my sourcelist, expand my web contacts and come up with related content to breaking news.

More importantly, I’ve used social networking to connect the content we’ve gathered with media outlets that need it. I guess it goes to show you – it is all about who you know.

D360 Partners with Woman's Day

The Holy Grail of Internet startups -- partnerships with other web sites.

How does it work? You provide content, which they pick up and use on their site. And then they give you links and credit, which drives more traffic to your site.

So far, our content has been featured on msn, AOL, so many newspapers and their web sites that I've long since lost count. And a year after eight months after we launched, we added one more partner to our list: Woman's Day.

Today, Woman's Day relaunched its site with a new design -- and some content from us. Enjoy.

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/7-Ways-to-Move-On-After-a-Divorce.html

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/How-Talking-Helps-Marriage.html

Things that Make You Laugh about Newspapers

On the way to work, I'm listening to an NPR story about CNN taking the mojo-approach to journalism. If you don't know, that's the one-man band, mo(bile) jo(urnalist) who does everything from video to reporting. It's a concept introduced to the media by the newspaper industry, which has been fighting cutbacks and is looking for ways to compete with the immediacy of Internet news. (Here's a note or confession, depending on your perspective: In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for the Gannett editor who created the concept.)

Anyway, a few hours later, I get an e-mail link to a story on wired.com about the same topic. After I read it, I couldn't help but laugh.

The funny of the day: The writer who wrote the story apparently didn't know that Fort Myers, Fla., the home of the original mojo, has only one "e." (IE: Myers, not Meyers.) My e-mail tip of the day for wired? A mojo still needs a good editor.

CNN, Mark Goulston and D360

What makes my day as editor of an Internet startup? When CNN quotes a D360 expert for a follow-up on the Edwards affair.

Men and women both have affairs, but not necessarily for the same reasons, says Mark Goulston, M.D., a marriage expert at Divorce360.com and author of "The Six Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again -- and Stay There." While men often break their marriage vows for reasons that include ego, a need for adulation and sometimes narcissistic behavior, he says, women tend to be tempted for different reasons.

"Women more often fall in love [with someone else] to feel adored and with a promise of protection and to ease pain," Goulston explains.