11 May 2009
by Stephin News/Online Merge, Social Media, Working on the Newsroom Tags: merging, newsroom, online
I will eat some crow now. I have done a complete about-face on my views about open plan environments for newsrooms. It was my own personal dislike of not having much in the way of privacy that made me so grumble-y about it. But after a week of sitting in view of the City Editor who runs the morning budget meetings, and within shouting distance of every reporter, plus a week of having a website that is refreshed and updated often throughout the day because of my visibility, I can safely say that I’m over it. The benefits far outweigh a little uncomfortableness that’s pretty much all in my head.
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
04 May 2009
by Stephin News/Online Merge, Social Media, Working on the Newsroom Tags: merging
Last Friday was moving day. I came in to find the area I would be moving to completely torn apart while it was rearranged to give the three copy editors and myself some L-shaped desk areas. The copy desk used to be 5-6 people strong but with the dreaded cutbacks, it’s down to three and not likely to change.
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.
24 Apr 2009
by Stephin News/Online Merge, Social Media, Working on the Newsroom Tags: merging
I don’t know what is up with me, but yesterday, my second day at it, I was feeling completely overwhelmed. And I probably will today as well. I am struggling to find the right balance between all my old, regular responsibilities and the new ones.
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.]
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