Challenges of a smaller newspaper

18 Nov 2008 No Comments

by Stephin Tools of the trade Tags: , , ,

The awesome, fantastic, cannot heap enough praise on these guys over at Old Media New Tricks shocked me by asking if I’d do a Q&A with them. Not used to that sort of thing. I’m just some chick, you know?

So, I did it and would love to send the little bit of traffic I get their way, so please check it out and leave them a comment – and look around the whole sit – it’s quickly becoming a must-read for me.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a little site to sort of conglomerate tips, ideas and plans for plugging this social media thing into smaller papers. I read so much great info and wonderful advice on Twitter and on other blogs, but a majority of it seems geared toward larger papers and metros with a different newsroom dynamic. If anyone’s interested in collaborating with me on something like that, let me know.

Election Day Online Coverage Recap

12 Nov 2008 2 Comments

by Stephin Projects Tags: , , ,

So how did it go for a small newspaper like mine? Just peachy, thanks! Here’s a breakdown of what we did for online coverage:

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.

A little disillusioned with video right now

27 Oct 2008 12 Comments

by Stephin Working on the Newsroom Tags: ,

I got to talking about video this weekend with my dad (also in the news biz) and the value of it for newspapers. Two years ago, we were given a chunk of change and allowed to build a studio in an extra room in the basement, near the morgue. Video was all the rage and we needed to put as much on the web as we could. We needed to produce shows, and film interviews and debates in our shiny studio.

We hired three videographers – one who was geared more towards advertising and filming “premercials” (Not fond of that word), one for the evening shift who could really get some great sports video and another during the day to cover news. We produced quality stuff, and everyone pitched in to help. I got a crash course in producing, running the switcher for our three-cam setup in the studio, and editing the final project. I’m grateful for that.

But two years later and we have stopped doing our twice-daily news show because no one had time to script and anchor it, and we weren’t growing viewership. We had to lay off a videographer. We still have our advertiser videographer, whose job has evolved into online banner creation on top of producing a weekly cooking show. And the videographer that’s left is run ragged from having to shoot/produce/edit news AND sports.

I’m looking at our stats. A large majority of our videos are getting maybe 30 or 40 views, whereas a not-very-good 40 second clip I shot outside my front door last week showing the season’s first snow got over 200 views. (I know these numbers aren’t metro paper numbers, but for our market, 200 views is pretty good.) A rather dry press conference video regarding the Nebraska State Fair move to Grand Island has nearly 300 views – because it is a hot-button issue here. (I am discounting any Husker video we do because I think we could put up video of Coach Pelini reading the phone book and Husker fans would watch it.)

Part of our problem is that we don’t embed the video often enough within it’s accompanying story (Thank you @gmarkham for bringing this up to me on Twitter last night. I wasn’t even thinking about that when all this came up.) This is something I’m hoping will change when we switch to new software for the website. It’s a bit of a process to embed YouTube code in our stories presently, and so we rely on latest video showing up in the list on the front page and only embed if it’s a big story.

But we often take the time to shoot and put up video that’s unrelated, or too big to embed. We filmed a recent senatorial debate and had to break it up into about 7 or 8 videos, uploaded over the course of a week. And no one has really watched any of them. It seems like wasted effort to me.

Here is my dream plan:

1. Donate our expensive handhelds that no one is using to area schools with the stipulation that they use it to film videos we can put on our site. This was an idea of our presentation editor and I like it a lot.

2. Buy inexpensive FlipVideo cams for the reporters and show them it’s as easy to download/upload video as it is to pull audio from their recorders. (This is contingent on them actually using the things. It’s a nice idea, but sometimes they are too busy, you know, doing the reporter thing to have time to shoot video as well. At least this is the argument I hear the most.)

3. Study our view stats and try to discover and predict what it is our readers actually want to see. Just looking at the first page of stats, I can already tell they prefer football highlight reels to pressers, and breaking news/hot topic videos to debates.

4. Focus on what the readers want and not what we think they want. I realize this goes against the advice of Rob Curley and Mindy McAdams, who are emphasizing giving the readers what they want alongside the stuff we think they should want – but we aren’t a metro. We’re small potatoes compared to the news sites I constantly see advice like this geared towards. We’re small and regional and are very very lucky to even have a videographer, much less two of them. I just think we sometimes waste their talents on videos that aren’t watched.

5. Get better at embedding video within the stories instead of leaving them as standalone.

6. Stop videoing grip and grins.

We have the ability to produce good stuff but we lack the time and people-power. This dream plan of mine means finding ways to eliminate video we don’t need to be shooting to free up our people to shoot the good stuff.

I don’t know that anyone has the magic formula for newspapers and video, or indeed if there even is one. I’m very much a fan of trying anything and everything and seeing what sticks. We’ve tried daily news shows and they failed. We’ve tried shooting what we think the readers want, and sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Now we need to take what we’ve learned these past two years and figure out what works for us.

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