I sit next to the scanner. Always tuned it out when I sat further away, and I still kind of do, but when something is happening, I catch it faster. I can also sit at my desk and tune into the conversation happening right now between the City Editor and one of the reporters and try and see if it’s something that can go online. Once I got past some initial clumsy hurdles (software story prioritizing system is antiquated and difficult), I find myself slipping into the flow much better now. I’m losing the shyness that keeps me from timidly asking a photog for art to go with a story. Without going into personal detail, shyness is one of the things I worry most about in this new role of mine.

In what’s become something of a routine, the City Editor will come out of the 10am budget meeting with a story for web right away and will email me some other stories that are coming up later in the day for web. It’s working nicely, but I think it will be even better when I can start going to the meetings myself (time conflict presently with our daily morning chat “show”) . I’m hoping to be able to sift through the list myself and be able to choose. I never felt like I could “be the decider” before but I do now.. It’s really weird to me and hard to explain, but I’m totally digging the new digs

Also, really enjoying being able to nag people into tweeting stuff

An unfortunate side effect is that in deciding on the placement of me amongst the awesome copy folk, it meant the displacement of two of them, and I’m a little worried about that. If either of them read this, the blame can be entirely placed on Jack And if Jack reads this, it’s all your fault, yo.

Today (Monday) is my first full day sitting in the fishbowl, and the striking thing is I’m suddenly being drawn into newsroom convos. I suppose I should have realized that would happen because I’m suddenly visible to newsroom folk rather than just a voice behind a wall, but it’s still kind of neat. I’m also much closer to the scanner which should be good for tweeting purposes.

As far as how it’s going with the web updating aspect of my new responsibilities, so far so good. I’ve not been able to attend the morning budget meetings yet because of a conflict with the chat, but hopefully we’ll rework that this summer. But our City Editor has been doing a fantastic job of emailing me web update ideas generated from those meetings which he’d never done before. I am appreciative. I have a feeling that the visibility factor plays a part in him remembering to do that. If I tilt my head and lean to the right a little, I can look him right in the eye now

So I’m learning that the struggles we’ve always had with getting the newsroom to get us updates for the web (and it has been a struggle) may become a thing of the past now that I’ve got a bit of authority to request stories for it, and now that they can see me, it might be helping to keep the web in mind as they work on stuff.

I’m also being a bit of a nag about asking for stories as well, but I have not found a good method for this yet. I need to be in those budget meetings so I can be a part of the whole news flow. As of now, I don’t really know what sort of stories may be embargoed or which ones need to have more info before going live etc.So when I ask for something I might feel would be a good update and get told that it’s not going to work, I feel a bit bad.

I imagine this will get better as I get used to my new digs and my new responsibilities, and I work myself into the newsroom.

I took a few pix during the whole move. I’d been at my previous desk for close to four years. As you can imagine, I’d “nested”, hehe. I do that. I need to look away from my monitor once in a while and be reminded of things I love, so I usually had postcards and photos of places I’ve lived and loved surrounding me to kind of remind me of the big wide world out there whenever work gets me down. Anyway, Friday and today was spend deconstruction and rebuilding.

Because of company policies, we’ve had to switch our story comments to the ‘moderate before going live’ mode, and we just happened to have a really contentious story the other day that is still pulling in comments despite having dropped off the front of the site. So keeping on top of those, as well as learning the World Herald news service so I can pull from the wires, and nagging asking reporters for story updates, managing tweets, (my cat also picked yesterday to develop some serious health issues that freaked me out), and basically, yesterday was stresstastic.

And I’m still having bloody problems with setting priorities for stories in the Town News system and it’s starting to make me feel really stupid. It’s really klunky and old-fashioned software (well, as ‘old-fashioned’ as software can really be) and maybe that’s what’s throwing me. I long the for simple beauty and intuitiveness of a Wordpress back-end.

I’ll probably be feeling a little ‘yikes’ again today as I meet with a website client who wants a bunch of changes (most likely a complete revamp) of his website while I try to do my nag thing with the reporters and read a ton of comments from high school kids who are angry about a story we did on their wrestler who was arrested for dealing drugs.

I’ll get the hang of it soon, I just know it.

[Desk move update: possibly coming in this weekend to take down the things I hung on my walls to remind me of the big wide world out there when I need to look away from the computer for a bit.]

Yeesh.

Yes, I do know how to run the software and how to tweet but man, for some reason I was just nervous as all get out. So stop telling me horro stories people My journos are lovely people who won’t suddenly become evil just because I’m going to ask them for a few more updates

In fact the second reporter I asked for an update was just brilliant when she very kindly explained why she’d prefer we hold off putting it on the web until just before 5pm. I was unfamiliar with the story and didn’t realize it was something she really had to work at to get the information, so she wanted to be sure it was our scoop.

I think the journalists here want every facet of The Independent to be successful, including the web. I feel better now that I have some direction on what I can and can’t do during the morning budget meetings, and I’m excited to finally be able to control our site’s content update frequency. I’m going to rock it. I’m going to remember where the bylines go, that Priority ‘1′ will bugger up the main package story so only use it if I have a story with a photo, and that the reporters who work here are awesome.

Desk update: I can’t shift desks until next week. Darn.

In this first post, I’ll give some background as to what’s going on and how our newsroom is set up.

We’re a small staff: Five Beat reporters, three Sports reporters and four Copy Editors. In Online, we have two videographers (one for ad work and one for news), a web developer, and a web editor – me. There are two “halves” to our building – the front half containing classifieds and circulation folk, and the back half containing News/Online/Graphics/Sales. So essentially we’re in one big room back here. Except Online has some half-walls.

We’ve fought many a battle to keep them too, because while we don’t deny everyone could probably use some semblance of privacy when they need to concentrate, when you’re knee-deep in code trying to get something working on a website that gets over a million pageviews a month (I know, I know but that’s a good number for us) having constant interruptions even from people passing by your desk makes it really difficult to concentrate.

If I sounds snobby, I don’t mean to. I know that same argument can apply to every department here, but we, in Online, were given the walls when they moved us between the ad side and the news side, and they sort of help. And if I sound slightly bitter about losing them during this move, well, I’ll get over it.

I really will get over it, I promise because I’m excited about the changes occurring in my job. We lost a fabulous copy editor and super person to the last round of layoffs, and so I’ll be moved to his old spot and given extra desk space (which I don’t really need – I work online after all ) and I’m also hoping that sitting in that spot is not “unlucky.” Not that I’m superstitious or anything.

Right now, my job entails a little bit of everything. I manage the “people” side of the website, meaning I handle trouble calls, photo orders, moderate story comments, forum comments, Cover it Live chats, build/manage internal and community blogging, and the past year and a half I’ve become the social media person here kind of on my own volition. I also manage a few client websites from the days when we did web design, and I am a backup video producer (meaning I can shoot, edit/produce and upload videos.) So kind of a jack-of-all-trades in Online. I can design websites and graphics but my job has sort of evolved away from that.

When GateHouse took over my paper, the newsroom took control over site content. We’d hoped that this would lead to a more frequently updated site, but we’ve realized that piling that work onto our print editors was not the right way to go. So my new responsibilities now include: updating the site throughout the day, using a combination of our stuff and wire stuff depending on the timing; working with reporters on updates to post (meaning I can ask them to write a couple paragraphs for the web on any story they are working on – in other words I will be their newest annoyance.)

It just seems to make better sense (and a big ‘Duh’) to have a specific person be in charge of harnessing content for the web rather than putting on those in charge of harnessing it for print; I will also continue to explore, employ methods and train everyone on social media techniques, keep abreast of the latest trends and basically do what I do when it comes to this Twitter stuff.

Part of the change is that I now report to the presentation editor instead of my Online Director (though I’m still getting paid out of that budget). This, along with the move, I think, are the biggest changes that will require me to adapt. I’m excited about my new responsibilities but I’m nervous as well. I hope my reporter friends are willing to give this a try and I will try not to be too much of a pest. But my ass is on the line if we do not have a fresh, updated website throughout the day, and well, when my ass is affected, I tend to get a little whip-cracky. Or panicky – whichever

The changes are supposed to start up this week – at least I’m to be moved this week *sniffle* and I will continue to post updates on how it’s going. I will try to stop being such a brat about having to move – it’s nothing to do with my soon-to-be new “roomies” who are all wonderful people, so much as having to move out of my comfort zone. But I’m not going to sugarcoat. If I’m going to document this merge, I’m going to write how I feel about it as well.

Wish us luck!