Archive for the ‘ Working on the Newsroom ’ Category

4
9
Nov

Daily Cover it Live Show: Lessons Learned

After close to nine months of doing am:gi, a daily morning “conversation” with our readers, we ended the show a little over a week ago. Why? Because it’s time to take what we’ve learned from it and evolve the concept a little.

There was some pressure from above to do something with the show. Either change it up or kill it. We decided to do both. We could not seem to grow our viewer numbers. We needed big numbers to show advertisers to sell it and with the format of am:gi, (90 minutes every weekday, occasional guests, too much free-form conversation) we simply couldn’t get enough participants or replays to entice advertisers. The time involved for the two of us who ran the show every morning was another factor.

So we killed it. We killed it a lot.

But there were some awesome things that came out of having a daily conversation and we are now going to take those awesome things and spin them into four separate things that will be so awesome it might just make you explode with, well,  awesomeness.

First thing’s first: We love Cover it Live. We love it so much, we’re using it in all four new ventures. So big giant HURRAY for Cover it Live.

  • Breaking comments. One of the ventures we are implementing right now. As some of you know, we’ve back and forth-ed on commenting for a long time. We simply can’t moderate every single comment as decried by our corporate owners because we simply don’t have the manpower. Also, the commenting system that comes with our software is… antiquated. But we really do want to have some form of commenting available. Our solution? We will embed a Cover it Live ‘chat’ on hot topic stories. The ‘talkers’, if you will. We’ll have one for Breaking stories, of course, but we’ll open up the conversation for severe weather, for example, as well. It will be moderated so we’ll remain in compliance with corporate policies, but we’ll at least be offering some way for our readers to engage and talk about a story.
  • Live Coverage. Another “spinoff” of am:gi will be live coverage. Our highest replays ever came from the day George and I went to Husker Harvest Days. George manned am:gi,  I went roving around, sending pics from HHD to Twitter which fed into the show. We learned that the people, they like this! Hopefully with the help of the Verizon MiFi (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) and Cover it Live, we will continue to be a presence at events such as Black Friday, Expos, and the biggie: the State Fair’s first year in GI next year. The MiFi will let us not have to worry about whether the event has wi-fi and allow us to be pretty flexible. Plus it’s just cool.
  • Newsmaker Interviews. “Newsmakers” will be a spinoff of our guest segments from am:gi. We will do simple interviews and Q&A’s with people in our community who are in the news. We’re shooting for two per week. We will solicit questions from the community ahead of time (using email, a submission page, a Google Voice number to leave question) and during the show. The real value for this is in the replays and in the reverse-publishing.
  • Ask the Independent. Ask us anything. We’ll find the answer for you. Need to know how to contact a City Council member? We’ll get you numbers. Want to know where the money to move the State Fair came from? We’ll get that info for you. We may not be able to help you find your socks, but we can tell you which color looks best with khaki trousers :) This show will be once a week and we’ll take questions via email, our Google Voice line, and a submission page on our website – oh and live during the show, time-permitting.

So those are our four spinoffs. The timesuck and manpower is lessened, but we feel the potential for advertisers is a lot bigger than it ever could have been with am:gi.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved am:gi and we met great people and discovered a little about what our community was talking about. But now it’s time to take those lessons and try the next thing. I’m very excited about these ideas.

8
19
Oct

Frustration level: High

“Who cares what I had for breakfast?”

I swear, if I see that line in one more article about the positives and/or negatives of Twitter, I will scream. It’s a classic example of what makes Twitter so hard to “sell” in my newsroom and my small community.

I attended a meeting recently with several community businessmen and women where I was there to give a ‘Twitter 101′ talk. The first thing they said when I finished touting the real-time benefits, powerful search bonus and the variety of ways it could benefit small businesses, was the oft-quoted cliché above. They couldn’t get beyond it and it almost makes me angry.

Here I am trying to convince my coworkers and folks in the community that Twitter is a good thing, that it will help them in so many unexpected ways. But the only thing many of them come back with is the fact that they believe it is useless and frivolous. No, useless and frivolous is playing Mafia Wars on Facebook on company time. To be fair, several of the journalists in my newsroom have come around and are doing fantastically well with Twitter. But some… aren’t (also, none of them are playing Mafia Wars on company time ;) ).

If you’re a journalist, you can learn a metric ton of information from the hundreds of other journalists using the service. You can crowdsource on a breaking story and provide complete coverage quickly. You can enjoy the benefits of having your community guide you to new stories, resources, tips and ideas.

If you’re a businessperson, the benefits to be explored for you are plentiful. You can find out what your customers are saying about you. You can direct specials and ads at them without the blowback you might get from shoving a banner ad in their face because they *choose* to follow you and see what you have to say. You can publicize events quickly – so many good things.

Have pity on those of us in the trenches trying to get people on board with this new direction. I think we can all agree Twitter isn’t really about what you had for breakfast anymore. Twitter is what you make of it. So can we stop using that tired old cliché now? Pretty please?

5
11
May

News/Online Merge: The first week

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 :)