At the end of 2011, we began working on a transition to Town News’ much improved BLOX system, complete with a fair bit of website revamping (but nothing too drastic that would freak out our readers.) But most of all, it required a fairly big change for the way we publish stories online. The copy desk had to alter their routines quite a bit, and while BLOX is much nicer and definitely more powerful, there’s a learning curve that we’re still traversing.

But gone are the days of having to publish the website every time we update the site. Gone too are the constant re-ordering of priorities to position stories where we want them. We still struggle with the new way of prioritizing, but we’ll catch on and get it flowing smoothly. And because we don’t have to publish the site when we add a story (once a story is added either manually or via .xml, it is live on the website) we now need to change the publish date or set a story as Do Not Publish if it’s not ready for public viewing. Learned that the hard way after some lifestyle stories went up on the site with our internal slug as the headline. Oops

Some of the things I really like:

• Searching for articles, images – anything really in the back-end just became a whole lot easier. Love it.
• The ability to move ‘blocks’ around easily according to our needs is fantastic.
• The incorporation of ‘If you go’ boxes, bio boxes, youtube videos etc into a story is wonderful.
• Not having to publish all the time is a timesaver.
• It just *feels* refreshing, both the back-end and the redesign. I am a fan.

Some things I either don’t like or am still learning:

• Prioritizing for the slider and the subsections is confusing. Still learning.
• The whole caching issue Town News has is, well it’s irritating. I understand the reasons for it, I really do. But waiting anywhere from 1 to 30 to sometimes 60 minutes for a story pushed from InCopy/Falcon and never knowing which it’s going to be is agonizing in the news biz. And even cut & pasting a story manually yet still having to possibly wait 5 minutes before it’s live on the site is agonizing when you’re waiting to tweet the story. I understand they offer a preview function so you can check it before it goes live, but that doesn’t mean anything if you’ve got a breaking story, competition from other news outlets, and no way to send readers to the story as soon as it’s proofed for web. I hope this is something Town News will consider addressing in the future.

Other than that, I’m really pleased with BLOX as a whole. We have had a few readers complain about the new look, but I’ve never heard of a redesign that didn’t have people that simply dislike change. For my part, the transition was fairly smooth, with a few bumps, but I know it was rockier for my boss and the tech manager in my department as they worked with Town news to get everything we want. But I would like to say Town News has a great team and has made this normally painful process easier.

To that end, now that the number of sites I’ve helped with or rebuilt from the ground up has grown, I figured I’d better create a little portfolio of them. So here it is!

Yes, I primarily work with WordPress to power these websites. I do this for a few reasons:

1. I’m a big advocate of Open Source where ever possible to save money for my clients. WordPress is reliable and powerful yet easy to learn.
2. I prefer not to get into website maintenance once I’ve built a client’s website. WordPress allows me to train them to update and maintain their own website without incurring fees to pay me to do it. I know it sounds like I’m gypping myself out of money, but I have enough website maintenance to do at the paper. I don’t want to do it in my spare time as well.
3. WordPress is just awesome.

I also try to work in some social media consulting whenever possible. Even if the business isn’t interested in it, at least I’ve put a bug in their ear for the future.

So it’s safe to say the freelance gigs are the reason I haven’t been very active here lately. Will attempt to rectify!

A couple of days ago, Mark gave us a call from his posh digs in Austin, TX to talk about the giNetwork for his post and I thought it went smashingly. We’ve been working so hard on fine-tuning this program for the past several months and I think we’ve got it down to a science now Over 30 businesses have jumped on board and we’ve only lost one.

The ad reps are able to sell it on their own without needing Jack to join them on the sales call (though of course he always will if he’s needed) and I’m getting faster at all the back-end stuff now that I’ve unwound all of Facebook’s quirks and discovered the best way to work with the businesses is to find out their comfort level with technology, find out whether they’re a cell phone user primarily, or if they are behind the computer most of the time, then recommend the best way to post their deals.

Behind a computer: Facebook is best bet. Cell user: Twitter.

It’s important to find that out because during the setup, you either need to link their fan page to Twitter, or use a Facebook app called ‘Smart Twitter for Pages’ to link their tweets to Facebook. If you turn both on, you get sucked into double-posting hell and you don’t want any part of that.

I’m beginning to ramble. I really just want to say that we’re pleased and excited with giNetwork’s success and while I’ve talked to a few other paper’s about it I’d love to talk to more. I’m sromanski [at] theindependent [dot] com if anyone’s interested in hearing more about this.

Thanks again to Mark Coddington for the wonderful write-up!

The main thing we’ve learned is that we still enjoy it. Very important.

Over the months we have refined how we run it and we have tried several things to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s nice to have that sort of freedom. For instance, we moved our chat time from 9am-10:30 to 9:30am-11am. Yes, we go for a full 90 minutes. This may change over time, but we found that a shorter show sometimes hinders a discussion that’s just getting good.

I was asked recently for advice on how to run a daily CiL show, so here’s how we roll:

• We have two people run it each morning: a host, @georgeayoub, who is our senior columnist and me. I act as the ‘gatekeeper’ although I jump in and promote things, answer questions, provide links to stories we’re discussing, and a bunch of other things.
• We schedule guests as often as we can. We scored a bit of a coup when the mayor of Grand Island agreed to be a bi-weekly guest on the show and she’s been a real firecracker Other guests have included City Council members, educators, various board members, the Governor, a couple of state senators, and our own reporters. This week is Education Week on the show and we kicked it off with our education reporter as Monday’s guests, then we have three teachers for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from different grades and schools, and we’ll end the week with the Mayor.
• When you have a guest, take advantage of Cover it Live’s ‘Queue’ function. We spend the first 30 minutes of the show building up questions in the queue so they will be ready for the guest who arrives at 10am and answers them for 30 minutes. The final 30 minutes we will either carry on the discussion, or resume one that may have started before the guest arrived. We’ve discovered that very often, the guest will stay longer than the allotted 30 minutes and answer more questions. We love when that happens
• Our host will usually ask the guest the first question and ask them to tell us about themselves. Then we allow one question through at a time, allowing the guest time to answer thoughtfully. Sometimes this creates ‘dead air’ if the guest types slowly. But we fill in by letting the readers know some topics of upcoming questions, or reminding them of other things we’re promoting.
• When we don’t have a guest scheduled,  we try to have  a specific newsy topic to go over, but sometimes we do end up with a sort of free-for-all discussion on several topics. But that’s okay. Great discussions and good information can come out of that. So don’t be afraid of free-form days now and then.
• We do our best to keep our readers on topic. We’ve had several readers try to change the topic in mid-discussion by throwing out a ‘How about those Cubs’ type of comment. Of course, I don’t mean they want to talk about the Cubs, but often a reader has many trains of thought leaving the station at the same time and they try and drive all of them into our discussion at once. This is where gate-keeping and private messaging abilities built into Cover it Live comes in handy. Many times I will just send a quick private message to a reader asking them to try and stay on topic or tell them politely that we’ll move on to another topic if time permits.
• What about readers who get… worked up on a hot topic? Well, just put your jackboots on and moderate them. Try and let them know privately that personal attacks etc will get them nowhere, and failing that, simply ignore them. Try to keep your cool – not always easy to do – and be as polite as possible. Use your best judgment if you think a reader is getting out of hand.
• If a topic warrants, run a quick poll. Example: When the awesome John Hughes passed away unexpectedly, it came up in the show. So we ran a ‘name your favourite Hughes film’ poll which generated some nice, nostalgic discussion.
• Finally, archive, archive, archive. So many times we’ve wanted to go back and check something and our archive has been invaluable. Cover it Live offers an enterprise archiving system that you can use, but we had already set up amgishow.com. I just chucked up a WordPress site, used some plugins for the calendar/upcoming guests and I post each day’s show on there. We have learned that people who cannot be with us in the mornings will read the replay almost daily and it is much appreciated.

So what are we doing to generate revenue? Here’s where it gets a bit sticky. We want to have sponsors. Our numbers are better than when we started, and we’ve got street cred, and respect as being a good source of information. Feedback on it as been phenomenal and we are appreciated in the community. But our viewer numbers are slow to grow and I think it’s down to the time of day we’re on. Weekday mornings when most people are working isn’t conducive to growing a large audience. I don’t know how daytime TV does it. So it’s hard to “sell” us for sponsorship. We average over 800 viewers per week and some weeks are better than others.

Right now, we’re running a huge treasure hunt and giving away prizes each morning on the show using trivia and it has produced a spike in our numbers. So I’m wondering if we offer drop-in ads through a show for a lower price than say, a banner ad, and the sponsor also offers a gift card. I wonder if that would fly when the treasure hunt is over… Hard to say.

I think if this format was done in a larger market (and maybe it is, I’m not sure) than viewer numbers would be higher and sponsorships more likely.

People have told me that there is no time to do this sort of thing. An hour and a half out of a reporter’s day can be a lifetime. I don’t know what to say about that. We’re lucky to have someone like George on our staff. He’s well-known in our community, and we’ve got a small Online department that I live in so I can run the technical stuff. It’s a squeeze on our schedules, but somehow, we just made it a part of our day and it works.

So there you go. Next time someone asks me how we do this thang, I will be able to point to this post. Thanks for reading!

They’re incredibly strict about that sort of thing.

So I’m being asked to justify my use of Twitter for the the newspaper, the reporters/photographer’s use of Twitter, and the reason why we need an app like Twhirl installed on company computers to run it.

I’ve given our IT person (who is on our side) my spiel about it and I was as impassioned as I could be. But I want to back it up with media examples, links to articles about Twitter use by reporters, and if anyone can speak to the security of it, or apps like Twhirl, I would greatly appreciate it.

I don’t have much time to put this together. I’m searching what I can but I was hoping the hive mind of Twitter could help me put this together faster so I can get this to the people who need their minds opened by the end of the day today.

Thank you for your help.

UPDATE: Comments are best, but apparently my Spam filter isn’t letting people post links. I’ve changed it, but if it doesn’t work, please email me? Thanks!)

Steph

1. Liveblogged. I opened up a Cover it Live session for readers to come in and talk about the election. Traffic was steady, and naturally, it really picked up when results began coming in. It was also quite a little test for me to work on keeping my mouth shut because as you can imagine, political discussions can get… heated. I never really talk about my personal views anyway, but I do have them. And keeping the conversation flowing was sometimes difficult to do when I couldn’t “weigh in” myself. Thankfully, we had enough people in it throughout the day that this didn’t happen to me too often.

2. We use Zope right now to publish our website and it’s kind of limiting on what you can do to make something the focus on the front page. I’m sorry lovely, talented GateHouse peeps but Zope just sucks. I feel very stifled with it. We needed a way to update election results quickly and because I had to do them manually, I wanted to have one place to put them. I could have continually updated a Zope story, but it’s just too clunky on the back end.

So our presentation editor created a nice graphic for one Zope story to be the featured story. In the subhead area, we put links to the liveblog (which could also be found by clicking into the Zope story), a link to votenebraska08.com (WordPress blog) which is where I put everything election-related I could think of and would also use for posting results, and I put a Twitter widget up for @theindependent so it was visible on the front page as well.

3. Tweeted throughout the day, and when I started in on posting the results, I would tweet the link to new updates on the votenebraska08 blog. I went this route because I couldn’t get any rss feeds or widgets to work with Zope apart from the Twitter widget. Still no idea why.

I used a lot of widgets on the blog like the Twitter election map, and MSNBC’s election widgets as well as Yahoo Pipes to pull in our own local stories as they were posted (the newsroom ‘Zoped’ stories throughout the evening.)

I was pasting results from the state results site, but man, that was tedious, so I just iframed the page into the blog. I know, iframe – but I was doing a lot of this on the fly and in the midst of a flurry of election results coming in.

My goal was to have one place for our readers to come to get results. Sure they could have gone to the county election commissioner’s office and the state websites to check, but that’s a lot of travelling around the web, refreshing pages over and over. I wanted them to come to the votenebraska blog to get everything they needed, and I used the liveblog to get them to tell me what they wanted to see.

For instance, one person came in and complained that we had no results up for other counties. They maybe could have been a little more polite about it, but I did discover that those results were just sitting in agate on our internal newsroom server and no one put them on the web. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t needed to investigate. So I was able to clean them up and post them to the blog and appease this reader.

So that’s it really. We had great traffic (relatively speaking, I mean we’re a mid-size paper) to the blog and in the liveblog and got some wonderful feedback on Twitter:

Liveblog:
Total Unique Readers who pressed ‘Watch Now’: 376
Total Unique Readers who watched for over 1 minute: 289

Published Entries:
Writer Comments Published: 393
Reader Comments Published: 1014

Votenebraska08.com Stats:
1,917 pageviews in less than 24 hours.

Tweetback:
From: @mrbalcom – Thanks for all the hard work today and this evening. We want you to know how appreciated it is! Great job!!

That makes all the craziness worth it.

As of this post:

• Pageviews for Music Madness site: 5, 126 – Average per day: 583 – Today alone: 644
• We’re up to 21 Twitter followers for @gimusicmadness
• The 4th bracket closes tomorrow but all total so far, we’ve had over 1,000 votes in the polls, far exceeding the Movie Madness turnout.
• We had a great turnout last Thursday for the Liveblog with the guys, so much so that they wanted to continue it on Friday (traffic dropped, but I think that’s because we didn’t plan and therefore pimp a second day of chat.) The discovery by our senior columnist that Cover It Live was so powerful and yet so easy to use had him dreaming up other applications we can use it for, so even if the turnout had sucked, that alone would have made it worth it. Anytime I convert someone in the newsroom to new things is a total victory for me.
• We had some server stress the first day, (which was a good thing if you think about it ) but WordPress is holding up magnificently, and handling large volumes of voting really well.
• We sold three sponsors, so yay it’s made a little money!
• The combination of print and online to make this thing work has been seamless thanks to good planning. Daily teasers in the paper, house ads and banners, Twitters, and blog posts – at least three of those options were completely free publicity (I don’t know if I can make that claim about print stuff, Do you count cost of ink and space on A-1?

The final bracket voting ends tomorrow at noon, and then I have a wee break where I’ll be building the polls for Round Two. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the interest level in the tourney, both in-house and from our readers. Six weeks is a long time.

And I can’t believe Van Halen’s “Jump” is moving on. I really hate that song.